Myspace officially released their desktop IM. The question is does the world really need another major IM network, especially if it takes a walled garden approach?
“Fox estimates that more than 17 million users have installed the service”. Is there a reason they did not report the number of active users? Is it related to the fact that the product is a generation behind the competition and supports only text conversations, without the ability to do video/audio calls or file sharing?
Forget everything you know about digital photography because here comes Microsoft Photosynth.
Jason sent me this video and it blew me away. It was presented earlier this year at the TED conference and it’s one of the most impressive visualization technologies that I have seen for a long time.
One of the features I liked most is the ability to see where pictures where taken and seamlessly change the point of view to be as you were standing where the photographer was. Then seamlessly tilt, zoom in or out or continue to change point of views. The speed this is done is extraordinary considering it can run on a browser installed on a standard PC.
It’s a great example of how social data from people’s collective visual memory (photos) can be linked together to make something that is greater than the sum of its part.
I think that after you will play with it you will find it even more impressive than the video.
You might have noticed that some of the links on my blog that previously displayed a PreviewShot (image of the linked web site) now display RSS information from the linked site. This new capability is called RSS Shot and it’s the latest improvement & enhancement that we added to the Snap Shots product.
This is how it works in plain words:
An Expanded View would show if the link is to a specific article or to a blog post permalink
An Excerpts View would show if the link is to a site that has an RSS feed accosiated with it. Typically you will see 2-4 headlines depends on the size of the bubble
A more detailed & technical description is avlaiable on the Snap blog.
The more I use it I find it more and more useful. In many cases it is faster for me to visit hover over the links on my site’s blogroll and see thier latest headlines than to launch an RSS reader (Netvibes has become really slow for me lately, not sure why). What do you think?
“Are you ready to spend a whole day, today (Tuesday), without using Google?” asks Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web. I am. I hope you are too.
So when you look for an alternative search engine to spend your day with, try Snap, the visual search engine.
We recently added a Classic mode to ease users into the “search with previews” experience. The Classic mode displays a traditional “10 blue links” SERP with Snap Shots, so you get to see what’s behind the link.
When you feel ready for the real thing switch to the Enhanced mode to enjoy large & rich previews, keyboard shortcuts (use up & down arrows to quickly surf thru the list of results) & Keyword suggestions and more.
Just tried out the new Gizmoz that was re-launched today with a nice pinky skin and a new logo. Their technology is pretty cool and the animated avatars that you can create & share are sweet.
It was a bit difficult to find a front face photo that meets their strict guidelines and I wonder if this might harm conversion rates…on the other hand it could create some business to passport photos‘ photographers (also known in Hebrew as ???? ???).
There are some really innovative visualization mashups including Digg Charts, Digg City, Wheel of Upcomingand others. I actually find the ones built using Adobe Appollo (make sure you have it installed) to be less impressive than the pure Flash ones. This is kind of a surprise for me.
I received today an invitation to join Jaiku from Jason. Considering Twitter’s latest outages I though I’d give a try despite the pain in setting up a new online-mobile friends’ network. So, I began the sign up process & immediately liked it:
First, Jaiku comes out of Finland, a pioneer in mobile technologies and services and the homeland of Nokia, my favorite handset manufacture
The UI of the signup process is very clean and minimalist
Super simple account setup process built as a 3 step wizard
But then I received the txt message with the activation code and was surprised to see that it came from the number 011467374940501. I then realized that Jaiku currently offers a short code that works only in Finland (17273). Users from all other countries would have to use an international SMS number (cost would be about $0.20 per message). To me this is a major adoption barrier. True, Jaiku offers a J2ME version for Nokia Series 60 phones that uses data plans and not SMS, but how many users have these types of phones?
Beyond the signup process, the Jaiku web site has a few neat features and overall I find the Jaiku product offering much more complete than Twitter. Two things that I like most:
The ability to add different feeds (RSS feed of your blog, flickr page, video, bookmarks and more) under you account. Once you do that your contacts will automatically receive notification whenever a new item is being posted to any of those feeds, meaning that activity level on the site compared to Twitter is much higher. This feature could get improved if Jaiku would integrate with TinyURL to automatically convert long URLS of any of these feeds to TinyURL ones and send those out. When they will do that this would turn from a good feature to a killer one.
The power of Previews – being able to preview the latest message sent by people just by rolling over their thumbnail. Did someone say Snap Shots!
Bottom line - A good looking product with some strong features but a pricey way to broadcast status from mobile & no built-in ability to use an IM client to broadcast status (to do that I would have to use a 3rd party product like Anothr or IMified).
Until Jaiku would offer a US short code I do not see this becoming my main status notification service (and probably this would prevent them from becoming a serious competitor to Twitter in the north-american market), which means I would still have to keep seeing the cat making thingz better.
Or maybe I should use both and monitor them together using Twitku.
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.
“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.
Previous companies I was involved with include Snap.com (as VP of Products), Spark Networks (parent co of JDate as VP of Products), AOL (as Director of ICQ Mobile).
Some of the topics I am passionate about are social applications, web usability, design, mobile applications, sport and music.
