Lots of people love Emily Chang's eHub, a site she describes as "a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on
next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source,
folksonomy, design and digital media sharing."
I find it interesting that it has so many subscribers,
almost 4600, and I imagine it's because people like the human editing of selections. None the less, there are a
lot of services posted there and I thought readers might enjoy an even further narrowing of the week's highlights.
From 39 services listed on eHub this week, my 5 favorite are:
Bizweek's
Steve Hamm has an interesting write up today on the all-too-frequent down time at Salesforce.com. As probably the darling of the Software as a Service set,
Salesforce's woes make an interesting case study for the sector in general. Hamm chronicles the company's
desperate attempts to make downtime less frequent and CEO Marc Benioff's frustration with the situation.
My
thoughts include:
It's nice to see some one so prominent talking about this problem in a major forum.
The web application sector in general has got to get this problem under control and if web 2.0 is largely about
transparency then it would be nice to hear more from other vendors about what they are doing about it.
Salesforce has taken great steps to keep users informed on the status of their services, including near real time
reporting. How many of your vendors don't even have a blog, much less regular communication concerning their
service delivery issues?
The weekly software releases from AJAXrelease.com continue, now with a move into
video editing. Robin Good has
reviews, interviews, demos and a good overview of the whole web-editing of video field.
After much speculation and rumor, it was just announced
on the official Google blog that the web based word processor Writely has been
acquired as part of their strategy to offer a whole host of online services. Writely has a copyright from Google
on the bottom of the page already. Their FAQ
page has a section on it about Google, but it also still says
How much
does Writely cost?
During the beta period, Writely is free.
Yet, check this
out:
Will you start showing Google ads in my documents?
There are currently no plans to add advertising to the site. If that changes, we'll let folks
know.
And if you were wondering like I was, it looks like Writely has added Mac support. They still
aren't taking new users yet, but there's a waiting list.
The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has filed suit against Craigslist, citing the appearance on the site of discriminatory housing ads that
violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Such ads are illegal in newspapers and other print publications, and the housing
group maintains that online publications like Craigslist should be held to the same standards. Craigslist CEO Jim
Buckmaster counters with two arguments: one, that the site is a "user-controlled commons" and as such should
not be treated exactly as if it were a newspaper; two, that mandating a manual screening process for all two million
free housing ads (of unlimited length) submitted per month would be unreasonably burdensome for his company of 19
employees to implement.
His second argument is pretty weak. What about the first one? We're still taking
baby steps in the process of applying legal structures from the offline to the online world, and a case like this could
set legal precedent with far-reaching ramifications for online publications. What happens when the wisdom of crowds
isn't so wise, after all? Who is then responsible? IMHO Craiglist is benefiting from the "wisdom of crowds"
and should in turn bear the responsibility that comes with it. It seems to me they can't have it both ways -- reap the
benefits of the crowd's wisdom, yet turn around and scapegoat the crowd's ignorance. I think the housing group has a
good case, and should they win, we may see the cost of social advertising rise dramatically.
Well, now, isn't this fascinating — Yahoo acquired
del.icio.us. Wonder if this means I'll be able to stop using the combination bookmarklet for del.icio.us and My Web 2.0 at some point and
get one bookmarklet to rule them all. Automagic sync between del.icio.us and My Web 2.0 bookmarks? Or will the services
get merged somehow? Anybody have predictions they want to throw down?
One of the big ticket items of the day was the launch of Yahoo
Answers, which aims to be every bit the community-powered knowledge base that Google Answers isn't. Both allow you
to ask questions, but the latter's queries are answered by pre-screened experts while Yahoo is taking a long-tail,
wisdom of crowds approach — any Yahoo member can answer a question, and user ratings determine the
"best" of the crop. A reputation system will supposedly weed out the experts from the spammers.
I'm all for the experiment and I'm quite curious to see how it turns out. It would be nice to have a general one-stop
shop for this kind of collective Q & A, as opposed to tracking down and poking through various subject-specific
user forums. Also, this service has promise to capture the more ephemeral day-to-day questions that don't really fit
into any of those forums: "What are some good gift ideas for moms?" "How can I learn to
breakdance?" (despite popular opinion, I did not submit that one.)
But, as an experiment, it faces
many of the same challenges those user forums have faced (and many failed) before. Greg Linden notes (via Pete Cashmore) that
popularity voting does not truth make. Gary Price notes that spam, scams, infomercials and troublemakers
are all very likely outcomes for the user community to police on its own, as Yahoo currently has no plans to maintain
the knowledgebase. I suppose we'll know if the service becomes successful when Andrew Orlowski starts writing scathing invectives about it.
Alright, so I'm fascinated with lists lately (which is timely as OPML seems to be the Flickr of document standards
these days). I'm also curious to know what social services folks are actually using the most, beyond whatever
is the latest hot company we're talking about on the blawgs. So, in light of both of these things, I'm kicking off an
informal poll: what are your top five favorite social software services currently in use? I'll start:
My Web 2.0 — I tend to store everything in My Web 2.0 and only a
subset of things to del.icio.us, but I use both frequently to find cool stuff.
Memeorandum — when I need news fast, which is all the time,
this is what I use.
YouTube is emerging as
a new favorite. I like that I can so easily embed video on my own blogs.
A nice solid
honorable mention goes to last.fm which is dutifully logging what my media server is
playing even when I'm not hanging out on the site finding new music.
Aight, peeps, I'm passing the mic
— what are your top 5 faves?
We had done a successful "How
would you change…" feature series over on Engadget that TUAW also recently took up with the "You're in
charge…" series. The idea is, pick a gadget/application/web service and create a massively multiplayer
wishlist for that thing. Seems like this could work well in SocialSoftwareLandia, so let's see how it goes — How
would you change Flickr? I'll start with a few, then please throw your
wishlist into the comments…
Local interestingness — see the most interesting photos only
from my contacts / friends / family.
Interestingness reverse lookup — when viewing
one of my photos, I want a way to find out how "interesting" it is — is it in my top 200? Is it
#437? How interesting (or not…) is it for this day on Flickr?
I often wish I could
collect other people's photos into sets.
Some more elegant way to keep track of the 290
groups I'm in… maybe some sort of dashboard page I could drop a few groups into at a time and just monitor
several at any one time.
The Grand Poobahs of Snark over at Supr.c.ilio.us have done us a favor by
rounding up the spoofs, fake "services" and Web 2.0 jokes in the Great Web 2.0 Joke List. Head on over when
in danger of taking the hype too seriously, or when in need of a good laugh…
Wayfaring is a service that allows you to create your own customized and annotated
Google Map and share it. Or, just browse the maps others have created — from the Philadelphia Marathon route to LA gay bars to best
places to snorkel on Maui. You can leave comments on each map or contact the mapmaker directly with questions. This
is cool on a large scale to share points of interest with a wide audience, or on a small scale to set up a map of your
family's recent road trip to share with your friends, e.g. — I like that it works on both levels. The keys will
be getting people to come contribute to another data silo, and making sure folks can easily find something interesting
when they're browsing/searching.
Want to get the best of digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular all in one place? You're in luck! Check out diggdot.us for this particular blend of social news mashup.
Haven't seen
any confirmation or anything other than the standard "we can't comment" since the rumours of Google flirting with Riya started flying. Riya (nee Ojos) uses face recognition technology to help
autotag your photo collection. I got a demo of Riya from the uber-fun Tara
Hunt at Tagcamp and was pretty impressed — you train the software simply by tagging a few photos of someone, and
it then automagically finds other photos of that person and autotags them. It's not perfect yet, but it did make an
impressive number of correct matches, even identifying photos where the person's face was turned or in shadow, etc.
Of course I'm going to complain that it's Windows-only (and IE6 only, even, blech!)... which makes it a
perfect candidate for the Goog, who loves to stick it to Mac users. ;) Riya plans Firefox
and Mac support in the future, so I'm complaining now while the complaining is good. Anywho — you know how
rumours are, and we may still not know anything even after Riya's launch party tonight at TechCrunch central.
