Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

An interesting launch strategy – ask users to leave the page open in browser for hours/days in order to create a large pool of initial users with great hunger to try your new service.

As it currently looks, I think we are a day or two away from the launch of the new Hype Machine. Still, this is a great viral marketing tactic.

 I love popurls. It enables me to get a quick snap shot of the current buzz on the web in one place and in less than 5 minutes.

popurls.tv is a brand new mashup of popurls and Google Maps. It displays real-time traffic of the most viewed stories on popurls.

So what is the problem and why is popurls.tv the dark side of popurls? Because it does the opposite of what popurls is there for – it does not save time. On the contrary, it sucks time since it’s an extremely addictive service…Thomas–Nice work!

BTW, There is plenty of room for improvement, but knowing Thomas, I am sure he is already working on v1.1.

Technorati Tags: Mashups, Google Maps, Popurls, Thomas Marban

Tell a horror story to get people to notice…

Paul Angles, Snap.com Director of Marketing, wanted to help to a friend get rid of a Dell laptop. Using his creative skills, Paul put an ad on ebay and used craigslist to increase traffic to that page. Using this technique, he was able able to get over 1100 visits to the product page and 40 bids, as well as to get the attention of Dell and a senior tech support manager has been personally assigned to grovel.

• The mighty Santa Colomo is behind us and we are looking forward to the next round. I saw the highlights on TV and what impressed me the most were our fans. 15,000 fans in a game like this is a true evidence to the power of this club. I wish I was there.

• Bourne is back. I look forward for his Ultimatum.

• Blog day, initiated by Nir Oren from BlogTV, is coming soon (Aug 31st). Now it’s the time prepare – find five new blogs that you have never read before and share your discoveries with your readers. This great initiative is done in order to give blog readers the opporunity to get to know new blogs they have never read before and to create new waves of traffic in the blogesphere. I prmoise to focus on finding non-webby blogs.

A funny one (Hebrew with English subtitles). BTW, try the “smart player”. It is a unique feature with some powerful capabilities.

Update: The Smart Player was causing script errors whenever the page loads and I had to remove the embedded player. To view the clip, Click here.

Technorati Tags: Viral Marketing, 5min, Venture Capital

A short viral video that Snap.com design & marketing folks created.

Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital) posted a great one on the different approaches Myspace and Facebook have related to Widgets and their role in the new social economy.

Too bad both environments still disallow a great utility such as Snap Shots to be added to users pages.

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)

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.

You could spend over $25K on a Prius or change your home’s lights to Energy Saving Light Bulbs for a few hundreds $. But if you are looking for a free energy saver try out CO2 Saver, a lightweight program that makes it super easy to reduce electricity usage and to save on your electricity and cooling biils.

When your computer is idle CO2 Saver gets into action. It turns off the display, the hard-disk and the CPU. The less electricity produced, the fewer harmful emissions and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) are released into the atmosphere.

One neat feature is the ability to see how much CO2 you’ve saved since installed (I will post from time to time updated stats), and how much everyone saved. If you are part of a ‘green group’ and using a group version (like Earth911 or Oceana) you will see how much CO2 was saved by all group’s members.

Organizations who would like to create a custom version should contact Snap and ask for one.

Check it out.