Category: Web 2.0

A great article on a cool IM start-up called Meetro. “…Meetro is six guys and an Internet startup crammed into a three-bedroom walk-up.” What a way to start a business! Meetro is actually pretty cool. IM with built-in location awareness. Find people within five miles, 100 miles, and so on. Neat stuff.

read more | digg story

Apparently, my post on knowledge effectively killed all feedback, so today I’m posting just a few quick news items worth noting. I’ll pickup my soapbox tomorrow.

Google has release a great update to Google Talk that incorporates file transfers and voice mail. Yahoo! Messenger 8 for Windows is officially released. The plug-in system is fantastic. And Skype calls to phone lines in Japan are free this Saturday and Sunday. If only I had someone to call!

Finally, if you haven’t already checked it out, be sure to give BigBlueBall IM Podcast #9 a listen. Please, share your feedback in the show notes, or even better, post a review at iTunes.

technorati tags: BigBlueBall, IM, instant messaging, google talk, yahoo messenger, skype, podcast

All of these mega properties have had recent outages. Where they differ is how they handled those outages and communicated to their community.

Digg’s outage, which I mentioned last week, was brief. They did a decent job of communicating to visitors, explaining that the site was down and that they were working on it, and giving them some lighthearted alternatives to check out while they waited.

MySpace was down twice, ostensibly due to a power outage at their data center in southern California. Hard to imagine an operation that size doesn’t have redundant data centers for just this sort of situation, but hey, it’s the web. They eventually posted a message on their login page informing the millions of angst-ridden MySpacers. Mashable has the details.

Yahoo! Messenger was the other recent outage, down for nine hours on Saturday. What set’s Yahoo apart is that there was no official communication to the millions of affected Yahoo! Messenger users. No acknowledgement of downtime at all. In an age where instant messaging has become a communication lifeline for many, such an outage is difficult. But to neglect to say anything? That’s inexcusable.

Hopefully, Yahoo is listening to its users and learning from this experience.

A team from Google Research has developed a prototype system that uses a home computer’s internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information, services and shopping contextual to each program being watched.

The Google Research blog entry is innocuously titled ‘Interactive TV: Conference and Best Paper.’ When you read the actual paper submitted at the conference, you’ll find that it’s not a joke, and it is indeed scary.

I quote from the paper:

“The viewer’s acoustic privacy is maintained by the irreversibility of the mapping from audio to summary statistics. Unlike the speech-enabled proactive agent by Hong et al. (2001), our approach will not “overhear” conversations. Furthermore, no one receiving (or intercepting) these statistics is able to eavesdrop, on such conversations, since the original audio does not leave the viewer’s computer and the summary statistics are insufficient for reconstruction. Further, the system can easily be designed to use an explicit ‘mute/un-mute’ button, to give the viewer full control of when acoustic statistics are collected for transmission.”

Technically, they would be “listening” to the audio you’re consuming. “Trust us, we do no evil.” Maybe, but the power to do evil does seem to be growing.

read more | Google Research Blog | digg story

byoms.com has created a service that lets you create your own IM search bots. Help me test it! The following button should add an IM search bot buddy to your AIM contact list that will let you search BigBlueBall.com.

Why would you bother? Well, this gives you a lightweight method for searching very specific sites via IM, useful even using a mobile phone. Try it and share your comments.

Here’s a screenshot of my BigBlueBall search bot in action:

There is no help that I could find. You type a message, and it searches based on your text. There are options to configure the number of results returned and the kind of links displayed. I’m using the “short” style in the screenshot above. As you can see, the results were not perfect, but pretty close.

As a side note, you’ll also see that I’m running the latest AIM Triton beta, which includes inline advertising in the chat window. Sigh.

Redhat has unveiled an open-source project called Mugshot that some bloggers are labeling a MySpace-style open-source social network product. The development team has supposedly gleaned all the best bits from the various social networking websites currently out there, mixed them together with some Web 2.0-goodness and created Mugshot.

The Mugshot team disagrees. In a post on the developers blog, they argue that Mugshot is not designed to replace MySpace, Orkut, et. al. at all. Instead, Mugshot complements these, and other, web services.

So what is Mugshot?

Mugshot consists of two parts; a client app and a server component. From the user’s perspective, it’s a glorified contact list, with some nifty extras that integrate with other sites. For example, to sign-in, you can use your AIM screenname. And with Mugshot, you could automatically publish your iTunes playlist history to your MySpace profile. Or you could share links, and comment on them — like Digg. The goal here is not necessarily to displace or replace the existing web services you already use, but to work with them and enhance them. This is true with links, music, IM and eventually other services such as Flickr.

While I agree that this approach is not an “open source MySpace” as some have sensationally hawked it, but it is a social networking tool. In fact, I’d argue that Mugshot ismore of a social networking tool than MySpace, in the purest sense of the phrase. Mugshot won’t get you thousands of so-called friends that you don’t really know. It leverages your real friends, and their friends.

Of course, being from Redhat it’ll run on Linux, but at least there will also be a compatible client for Windows.

The Mugshot beta is closed, but you can sign-up and they’ll notify you when they ready for more testers. Or if you’re the kind who likes to muck around in the code, visit the Mugshot Developers Wiki.

technorati tags: mugshot, redhat, social networking, myspace

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch reports that the Seattle-based real estate website Redfin is expanding into California, beginning with San Francisco but expanding soon into Los Angeles, San Diego and eventually nationwide. Arrington writes:

They have an intruiging and aggressive business model. Instead of providing useful real estate information to consumers and then pointing them to real estate professionals like competitors Trulia and Zillow, Redfin is doing their best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers from at least half of a home sale.

Redfin combines MLS listing information (homes for sale) with historical sales data (homes already sold) into a single map. If you find a home you like and want to place an offer, Redfin will represent you in the buying process (they have a call center with licensed real estate professioinals to guide you). Here’s the good part: They reimburse you 2/3 of the buy-side real estate fee directly on closing. The average amount reimbursed to the buyer is $11,402 (and that is based on relatively low Seattle home prices).

I agree with Arrington’s assessment of the real estate business. The real estate market is a model of inefficiency. This represents a huge opportunity, but with an even bigger challenge. Things that should be fairly simple, like MLS databases, vary from state to state.

Maybe we should just start over and build a whole new market in Second Life.