Written on May 8, 2008 – 8:32 pm
David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom
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Pownce, the “Send stuff to your friends” application and web service, announced some new features late yesterday, and most of the world has woken up to these today.
The official blog announcement from Pownce is brief, and says little more than “Tonight we launched the new feature of sharing files to the public… In addition, we’re happy to announce that we’ve increased the base file size limit for all Powncers from 10MB to 100MB!”
So you can share files not just with your fans and friends, but with everyone - and you can upload 100Mb of files - room enough for a few videos and audio files, and Pro members have a tidy 250Mb of space. Nice. And I think Pownce have simplified the thrust of their offering by saying “we let you share stuff with your friends”. (more…)
Written on May 4, 2008 – 1:29 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
It’s Sunday afternoon, why wouldn’t I cover another Twitter application? Especially since this one actually seems pretty useful. It’s called Bkkeepr and helps you to keep track of the books you read. Although statistics show that the number of people reading books is falling drastically, web professionals generally like to read a book or two. This blog even has a monthly Booklist 2.0 series by Martin Kloos.
Tracking the books you read has always been a popular activity. Amazon has some tools for it and Blippr partly revolves around updating your digital bookshelf. First of all, you probably like to show off a bit with your amazing list of classical masterpieces. Moreover, your book collection says something about you.
So it’s good news that somebody has created a simple way of tracking the books you’ve read. For now, it’s in some sort of stealth beta but after a while, it’s just a matter of sending the ISBN number to @bkkeepr. Also, you can post status updates about the page number you’ve reached and ‘bookmark’ your favorite parts in the book. So long for dog ears…
Bkkeepr is a project of booktwo.org. A blog by James Bridle that exists to “report, catalogue, investigate, stimulate and debate the future of literature”.
Oh and for the showing off part? Bkkeepr offers a widget too…
Written on May 2, 2008 – 1:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Sometimes you just need a break. So do I. Then I either persuade a colleague to play some soccer in the hallway, or press the Stumble button. This afternoon I chose the latter and ended up at TwittEarth, a rather smashing visualization of the Twitter public timeline.
It’s a mash-up by Digitas France SA, who created this Twittearth for fun. Although I don’t question their motives, creating a Twitter mash-up seems like the perfect free publicity PR tool these days.
Just ask somebody to develop a 3D engine (Papervision), use an API for the geolocalization service (Yahoo!) and find some fancy icons (Fasticon). The result? Some heavy coverage on world’s largest tech blogs:
Keep that in mind, all you web design agencies out there. Don’t spend your money on ads, just go creative with Twitter and let the blogosphere do the rest.
Written on April 29, 2008 – 9:47 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Boris with Rolf Skyberg in San Francisco
Rolf Skyberg is a ‘Disruptive Innovator’ at eBay.com. Last week I asked him about his opinion on what the future of eBay looks like, what he thought about the rumors that eBay might sell Skype and about his vision for the future of eBay in general.
Rolf pointed me to a blog post he wrote earlier this month titled “is your brand keeping you back?“. Although the post isn’t about eBay specifically it does give us an idea of what Rolf is thinking about at eBay. He told me he would hate to see Skype go and thinks that eBay could easily become more than the marketplace it is right now. If you see eBay simply and only as a marketplace then it is hard to see the added value of eBay. But if you see eBay as a service that provides rich interaction between people then things suddenly look very different.
eBay = exchange of goods
PayPal = exchange of money
Skype = exchange of conversations
PayPal is not JUST the money exchange engine that enables easy transactions for eBay but yet another product that enables interaction between people. eBay’s businesses aren’t just about the *exchange*, but specifically to enable and empower people to do things together. It enables the type of interaction that would be impossible to accomplish alone.
Skype would just be a third pillar for the eBay empire. If you look at eBay this way you could suddenly see them acquiring Twitter.com to enable the exchange of short messags and it making perfect sense.
Read the post at Rolf’s blog and exchange ‘McDonals’ with ‘eBay’ for an entertaining inside look into the future of eBay.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 8:58 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.
During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.
Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.
Some people even use email to browse the web:
Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.
Any other ideas for using email as an interface?
Written on April 23, 2008 – 10:49 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During the “Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia” Web 2.0 Expo session, attendees were able to ask questions by sending a Twitter message to @micromedia2. As you can imagine, updates like “the man next to me smells a bit” and “Thank god Scoble isn’t in the room..” appeared on the two screens. Yet some folks of the audience managed to influence the topics Gregarious Narain (Blue Whale Labs), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd and Brian Solis discussed. They asked for some business insights, and they got it. So gentlemen, how CAN we use Twitter for business?
Brian Solis praised Dell. The computer company follows the Twitter conversations by using Tweetscan and reacts when (potential) customers ask questions or complain about the Dell products. Forrester research does the same thing. “We listen to what people are saying and usually engage in the conversation when we notice one. Other companies like Jetblue, Marketingprofs, Zappos and Comcast do the same thing”, Owyang said. “That’s the immediate benefit”, Boyd said, “Yet the big picture here is that streaming services like Twitter are potentially very big for enterprises. People can follow projects or other companies by having things streamed to them. They don’t have to look it up anymore”.
But what if companies don’t keep an eye on Twittter, like the majority does now. What will they loose? Solis: “The conversations will take place anyway. With or without you. And hopefully, the Twitter conversations might become even more more substantial. When you ignore questions then, especially the one full of hate, you leave the answers to other people.”
Stowe Boyd pitched a pitch concept of his own: TwitPitch. The amount of emails from start-ups who wanted his attention drove Boyd mad, so he came up with a short ‘n’ sweet Twitter format. Now start-ups can pitch to Boyd with one update. That saves him time, and he actually noticed some good ones which he then retweets. “It’s very interesting, the whole pitching process is now in the open discourse. Followers are getting to see the pitches, it’s more of a performance now. We took pitching out of the smoky black room that is email”.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 4:51 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
Today the Twitter founders and the Twitter team from Digital Garage announced via a live streamed press conference that it is launching its Japanese language version of Twitter. Digital Garage have been working on the Japanese market introduction of Twitter to develop a Japanese language version of the popular microblogging platform. This is the first time that Twitter will be available in a language other than English.
Japan has taken to Twitter at a ferocious rate, with Tokyo being the largest origin city for Tweets in the world (twice that of second placed San Fransisco and New York) using the previous English-only version. The number of Japanese users is growing at an accelerated rate already within the tech savvy community and it is expected that the Japanese version will give an additional boost as it can now support mainstream users. The local language distribution of online platforms has traditionally been a key point to growing larger sites in the Japanese market, with services such as Yahoo and Google blossoming only after they offered the Japanese verison.
The fear however is that Twitter is popular because it is foreign and users feel they are cutting edge because they are using a product that is cutting edge enough to not have been translated yet.
The Japanese Twitter will also have another first. It will be the first time that Twitter displays advertising within the Twitter page. When you switch to Japanese language, you will see an ad panel above your sidebar.
Initial reaction in the Japanese Twitter community is a lot of chatter but a lukewarm response to the advertising and a good dose of criticism about the quality of the translation.
This is a first release though, so I will reserve judgment. What will be telling is how fast the Japanese user base grows from here.
Written on April 21, 2008 – 8:39 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Our white suits work. Alex Pachikov walked up to me a few minutes ago, asking what the overdressing was about. I’m glad he did, as he’s the director of Evernote, a promising start-up that made me enthusiastic the second Alex showed it on my Mac. The uber-stylish and modern design expresses what the service is about: creating a visual notebook to memorize anything you stumbled on.
Alex Pachikov from Evernote.com
You can do that by downloading their desktop and mobile app. Make a picture or a screenshot and sync it with the website - where you can look up the notebook. You can then use it as one big library of things to remember, but I think Evernote also functions perfectly as some sort of mood board. I used to have an ‘Inspiration’ album in iPhoto, yet Evernote will definitely replace this. Especially as your notebook is available off line as well.
Also digging the idea already? It’s getting better. Since we’re at an altsearchengines meeting, there must be some link with searching here. Well, there is, and not just a mediocre one. You can search within the notebooks as it recognizes text in images. Even handwriting! For example, when I search for San Francisco in my notebook, Evernote finds a screenshot of a Google map I’ve made and highlights the terms:
They don’t offer any syncing with other services like Twitter yet, but Alex told me they will soon start working on some API magic. Although he did tell me that Evernote isn’t that much about sharing and more like a personal service: “It’s your second memory”, he said.
Well here’s some good news for you: we have fifty private beta invites for your memory! Digg this post, leave a comment and I’ll personally email you a link to the sign-up page of Evernote.
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