Last week Hart Woolery a lead developer at YourMinis created a new mashup using Snap Shots & Digg’s new API and submitted it to Digg API Visualization Contest.
Jason who works with me at Snap posted the story on the Snap blog and in a few days his story reached Digg’s home page.
This a very cool mashup and great product recognition for the Snap Shots product.
Just came accorss this mashup on John Montgomery’s blog. We have seen similar mashups created using Google Maps but this one demonstrates some of Popfly capabilities. I wish there were settings to define initial load state (location, timeframe of twitter messeages etc). But this is very cool.
Update: I had to remove the mashup from this post since it prevented the side bar from loading. If you are interested to see it, visit John’s blog.
Great post on Mashable:
“From navigating the Web in entirely new ways to seeing where in the world twitters are coming from, data visualization tools are changing the way we view content. We found the following 16 apps both visually stunning and delightfully useful”
Too bad Snap was not included under the search category where we should be. We at Snap believe visualization is the way to find information faster on the web whether you are searching or surfing the web looking for a cool video clip.
Twiistupwas fun! Nice gathering of SoCal geeks. Met old friends and some new ones. According to some folks Snap had the best demo.
Too bad I could not put my hand on a swagbag…The Twiistup cocktail was good though, anyone knows the recipe?
Photo by Mike Macadaan
Following the improvement made to the My Connection page, LinkedIn came out with two new features:
- Premium Featured Members
- Who’s Viewed My Profile (full story here)
Both features have been around for a long time on Online Dating sites and serve as baits for non-paying members to buy premium memberships. I think this is a smart move that will probably have strong impact on the number of new premium members.
Now all LinkedIn has to do is add the ability to upload photos and potentially an Instant Message and become the elite online dating site for professionals.
LinkedIn also came out recently with better ways to find people who are not necessarily in your connection list. On the search results page, just above the list of names, a new section was added with suggested searches:
- Current employees of a company
- Execs at a company will list all Partners, Chiefs, VPs, and Directors in a company. I am sure that personal financial advisers & life insurance agents would love this new tool.
- “Similar Searches” is very interesting. I am still not clear on the relevance algo and how they come up with those suggestions (search routes of the masses?), but the results can certainly help someone who is interested in finding leads into companies who operate in the same category/industry.
I will be there tonight between 7pm-midnight. Snap will be presenting and giving out schwags.
http://www.twiistup.com
Another chapter in the rip-off series: First it was the Homepage, then the Web Messenger and now it’s time for a Slideshow.
Yahoo did it again. The old Flickr slideshow had a very unique design. The updated version Flickr released earlier today is much simplified (influenced by Yahoo’s mainstream approach?) and oddly enough looks very much like PicasaWeb’s slideshow.
I wonder who is going to be the next copycat.
What seems to be THE fastest growing services in the history of the internet is now (only) one of the fastest growing services.
Another source posted a very interesting graph with # of daily Twitter messages. I wonder if these numbers are accurate, and if so what led to yesterday’s spike? I have a feeling it is related to Paris (option A, option B)
As my LinkedIn network have grown I found it more and more difficult to search for a particular contact. The browse functionality was very limited and was implemented using first letters of groups of names that were buried at the bottom of the page. This made it very difficult to quickly “browse” the list and I hardly did that. Instead I used the generic Search box (by name and company) in order to find a specific contact.
Today I discovered that LinkedIn completely redid the “My Connection” page and improved the usability of the browse functionality significantly.
The new features include:
- A scroll bar – it’s just amazing how a basic & trivial design/interaction element can improve usability and ‘speed to satisfaction’ so dramatically
- Rolodex style tabs with first letters to quickly jump to a particular location within the list
- Advanced filtering options ( Ajax based) such as “by location”, “by industry”, and the very cool “show only contacts with new connections”
I find this to be a major improvement following the revamp of the internal introductions system and very well done.
Lijit is a a blog search engine that uses people, content and connections to influence on relevance of results.
They used data their spiders collect when visited over 8000 blogs to analyze the Widgetsphere and released thier findings a few days ago.
Below are a few highlights:
- Snap is leading the Search category with almost 50%! The Snap Shotsstrategy pays off (Bloggers get free utility that enhances their site’s user experience, Users get a tool that saves them time while surfing the web, Snap gets search traffic and brand exposure).
- Beyond Snap, bloggers also love Google Analytics & even more they love Google Adsense (I am sure Google also loves the data collected from blogs in order to optimize the Adsense algos). One question that I ask myself is what do bloggers do based on their site analytics findings? Are they using the two services in conjunction? How many apply site optimization techniques and change the design in order to improve Google Adsense CTR? How many change their writing style to make thier posts shorter in order to keep information above the fold (when people read in detailed post mode, not just excerpts)?
- Although it is considered one of the most popular Web2.0 web sites, Digg badgets are available on only 1.5% of the blogs. I assume most of Digg’s traffic comes from other sources of information such as stories on large publications
- Twitteris in a similar position – lots of noise but only on about 2.5% of the blogs. On the other hand they are the 3rd leading content widget (after MyBlogLog and Flickr).
- 14 companies operate in the analytics category. Many are free of charge and not a clear plan for monetization. I am sure there will be some consolidation soon.
- I was a bit surprised to see meebome only at the 48th position. It might be related to the demographic of the sample site.
Last crazy idea – As this industry grows, and more and more companies enter the Widget space (check out the latest from Ebay), a financial institutation should create a Widget Companies/Categories ETF. This would be a nice interaction between the financial world & the blogesphere, and potentially another way to make money out of blogs.
