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:
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:
I will be there tonight between 7pm-midnight. Snap will be presenting and giving out schwags.
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:
I find this to be a major improvement following the revamp of the internal introductions system and very well done.
A few days ago Mike Arrington made a post about AOL’s new home page and its similarity to Yahoo’s. Now its Yahoo’s turn to strike back.
Today they released a new web version of their Instant Messenger service built using Flash. I played around with it (although it was difficult for me to find online buddies – they all switched to Skype) and noticed strange similarity to Meebo – The color & gradient background, the layout of the buddy list and even some of the interaction is very much alike the successful web IM aggregation service. Kudos for the meebo team for creating a service that inspires others.
BTW, if you are looking for A/V capabilities you will have to head south toward Santa Monica and look for Mike and company.
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:
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.
Ideacodes (Emily Chang) released a new project called Twitterverse. It lets you explore what people twitter about in a time frame (1, 5, 10, 24 hours) and display a tag cloud of the most interesting words. Once you see the list you could zoom in and see the full context inside the messages and the members who sent them.
Twitter is an amazing social phenomenon. It is also a business that I can not really figure out (how are they planning to make money if they have to buy huge amounts of bulk text messages?).
I find the Twitterverse mashup interesting as it provides a unique point of view on the lives of those who use the service especially on thier language:
I am sure one day someone will make this the topic of his Linguistic thesis.
