July 29, 2007

CoComment Officially Launches

CoComment, the comments tracking site, has officially launched its service today. There’s a clear focus on coComment becoming more social.

The company has been working on the version 2.0 coComment service for some time now. Read our review of the private beta coComment community here. With its official launch, there are some tweaks and new features worth mentioning. The new user interface is in the form of a sidebar enabling you to browse items that friends have commented on. Users can share in groups, the social web, or with other individuals. There’s also direct access to social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us.

Reports indicate that coComment is gearing up for a Facebook application, and adding an instant messenger service to its suite of offerings.

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Write a Review or just Vote on Middltown Ohio

The Middletown Review website is now live. You can cast your vote on the worth of any Middletown Ohio business or leave a comment letting us all know about your experience. Stop by and try it out anytime and I guarantee it’s the most fun you will ever have on a Review Website for Middletown Ohio. LOL (It’s of course the only review website you will ever find for Middletown)

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TrustedOpinion Funded & Integrating Netflix Direct Recommendations

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TrustedOpinion, the free online community that lets you create a personal recommendation circle of friends, has integrated Netflix queuing into its system.

You can now get Netflix queuing directly from DVD review pages within the Netflix recommendation network. This essentially combines the TrustedIOpinion system with your existing Netflix account. Access the top rated movie and DVD releases based on your circle of friends, figure out which movie you’d like to see next, and add it to your Netflix queue. You can also purchase the movie directly from Amazon as well. This process is similar to the type of personal feed and recommendation options as outlined by the recently launched Engagd, enabling your information to be applied in this manner with other sites.

TrustedOpinion, still in beta, has recently received funding from a Series A round, for an undisclosed amount. The company is currently focused on presonal recommendations for movies and television shows, and has plans to branch out further into other categories. A similar system that has recently been released is Matchmine, which builds a personal recommendation list based on your preferences.

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RockYou Launches Super Wall API, Facebook Ad Network

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UPDATE: Note the addition of information about 3rd parties on the RockYou ad network - they are indeed selling ads for other developers.

Slideshow tool RockYou, previously depend on MySpace for much of its traffic, is attempting to solidify its position as one of the top Facebook apps providers by helping out those with less popular apps. They’ve just unveiled two new tricks: an API for one of their most popular apps, and the ability to buy ads on RockYou’s applications.

Super Wall API

This is very meta: an API for a Facebook application. RockYou is releasing an API for Super Wall, its popular Facebook app that puts videos, audio, pictures and Flash embeds on the Facebook wall. (Facebook may have just rendered the product useless, however - while RockYou replaces your wall with an entirely new one and makes you remove the original in your settings, Facebook just added the ability for developers to put rich media on the original wall itself. File host Divshare has already taken advantage of this.).

Either way, Super Wall is thriving, with 2.5M active users and 100,000 new users per day. That might be to due to the fact that it aggressively tries to invite your friends to use your wall, making it hard to opt out. RockYou described the specifics of the API in an email:

1. Developer adds a “Share with Friends” button (image attached) to their app - this can be placed on the user profile box, the application canvas page, and even outside Facebook
2. The “Share with Friends” button is linked to a RockYou URL with parameters specifying the attached media content, title, description, and url (developers will want this to point back to their application)
3. When users click the “Share with Friends” button they are taken to a “Post to Super Wall” page where they can choose multiple friends to send the post to. They can also leave a personal comment for the post. One important note: users are not required to have either Super Wall or the 3rd party app installed to post content to their friend’s Super Walls.
4. Content is posted to Super Wall with link back to 3rd party application.

You can see a horoscope app with the Share with Friends button in the screenshot below. There’s currently no web page for the API: contact the developers AT rockyou email address for more info.

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Ad Network

Probably even bigger news than an API-within-a-platform: RockYou wants to take on Lookery and fbexchange. RockYou has one thing those companies lack (until they sign up enough app owners, of course) - RockYou apps are already hugely popular on Facebook. Since RockYou can’t monetize its MySpace widgets at all, save for the traffic driven back to RockYou.com, they desperately need to convert this presence to cash.

As a result, they’re now allowing the owners of smaller Facebook apps to advertise on RockYou’s applications: add the aforementioned Super Wall to your Facebook profile, and you may see an offer to install the My Greeting Card app. The ads are sold at the equivalent of a $20 CPM, a massively high rate in the social media space.

Meanwhile, RockYou is also selling ads for 3rd parties, giving developers a 70% share of the ad revenue when ads are bought on their apps. Oodle, MyLot/Interests+, Trendhunter and others have already signed up, they say. Initially, they’ll be focused on Pay Per Install (PPI) - getting paid by advertisers when a user installs that app. They have 200K worth of ad inventory to push out: 60K has already been fulfilled, they say, and they just completed a fulfillment of 15K in 8 hours. Not bad going at all.

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Geezeo Offers Financial Goals Feature for Better Tracking Tools

Geezeo, the site that lets you better track your personal finances within a helpful community, has launched a new feature called Geezeo Financial Goals.

with this feature, you can create a new goal and connect it to a bank account or one of your tags. Since your accounts are updated every night, the progress of you’re reaching your goal is automatically updated as well. This is a great way to associate specific goals with a determined target, and let Geezeo do all the real leg work for you. Set your goal as spending less money on eating out for lunch, and establish an alert for when your food tag goes below a certain amount. The same can be done for accumulating money to save for a large purchase.

The company also tells us that some other additions are on the way; pretty soon you’ll be able to add more types of accounts to Geezeo, including brokerage accounts, mortgage, and loans, to name a few. The addition of these accounts will offer a more complete picture of your personal finances in order to serve you better.

See also: 40+ Resources for Managing Your Money Online

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Profile Builder Launching Centralized & Portable Info Page

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Profile Builder
is a new tool that lets you create an online profile and provide access to it pretty much anywhere on the web.

The profiles you create with this service combine all of the pertinent info about you. There’s an about me section, a place for your blog, other sections for your photos and videos, a Jukebox music player, and a page for contact information, which unfortunately doesn’t look like it can be used as a profile aggregator. Once you’ve created your profile, you can insert your Profile Builder icon on your personal website or blog, or in existing social networks including MySpace, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn. Anyone that clicks on the icon will get a pop up window that displays all of your information neatly in this centralized tool.

There are several actions that viewers can take while checking out your profile. They can send you coffee by purchasing a Starbuck’s gift card, or send cash through PayPal. They can also send your profile to a friend, print the current screen, perform a Google web search for you, or add to your favorites. This portable profile is a handy little tool that helps you control your personal online presence, and enables you to provide the necessary information to anybody, just about anywhere on the web.

From what I can see, it doesn’t look as though you’ll be able to add more than one blog to the blog section, and I’m curious to see what kind of importing tools Profile Builder will support to enable automatic photo and video updates from sites like Flickr and YouTube. As Profile Builder will display if a user is online, I’m also anxious to see what options you’ll have for other users’ whose profiles you’ve added to your own favorites list in terms of updates and contact options.

[via]

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GTD NINJA: 50+ Websites For the Kickass Control Freak

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We admit it: we’re control freaks. We wanna control every single aspect of our lives…and with the latest Web 2.0 tools, we already can. Here are my picks for the 50 or so best new tools to Get Things Done: also check out James Mowery’s recent guide to personal productivity. (more…)

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Wikia Acquires SETI-like Crawler from LookSmart

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Wikia, the Wikipedia founder’s for-profit wiki service, has acquired Grub, a distributed crawler system developed by LookSmart. Grub is distributed in the sense that the crawl (roaming the web and indexing the pages) is done by a network of personal computers around the world, SETI-style.

So Jimmy Wales is essentially trying to create a community effort around his new social search engine (this was originally rumored to be called Wikiasari, but that isn’t the case). That may depend on goodwill from users, something that’s harder to achieve if Wikia Search is for-profit.

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RSS Mixer could be Twitter without the Social Network

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RSS Mixer is a new service that will combine all of your feeds into one. A feed aggregator, if you will.

Take your favorite feeds and combine them into one. RSS Mixer will provide you a URL with your master feed, along with downloadable widget options and formats, including one for your iPhone, one for your personal website or blog, a regular RSS feed, and an Apple dashboard widget. There are a couple badge options as well, if you’d like others to grab your feed. The main feed page shows a list of these options for others, as well as a running list of the feeds included.

This service sort of boils down to Jaiku or Twitter without the social network, if you’ve ever used one of these micro-blogging tools to show your blog updates automatically. The service is very simple to use, and could be a great fit for a service like Profile Builder, and profile aggregating services such as Tabber.

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When NOT to offshore ?

Recently i have started realizing the side effects of offshoring. I have already worked with off shoring projects for many years and and i was pretty convinced with this model. Its been almost from past 10 months that i am seeing some (more) challenging topics in this model.

Probably let me explain with the current model that we have. Its a product development company, we have engineering, product management, sales and QA teams wide spread across continents. Engineering team it self is spread out. Now… this product has a LOT of innovation, few resources, lot of accountability and responsibility on each team member. I am sure many of us do have this kind of scenario….but i want to publish my own observations.

Vision : Off shoring team does not share the same vision as ABC Company. The future technology direction, how to move swiftly in the competitive market, what does the sales team need, what does the end customer/user needs, etc.. are different kind of questions that basically makes our thought process to go in a single direction. When these kind of questions and answers are not visualized in individuals mind, its very difficult to drive everyone for a common goal.

Communication : As the company is very small the decisions are very fast and some time its very very difficult to communicate each and every decision taken. When decisions are taken and communicated, we are very notorious in just mentioning What you need ?. And now for the people sitting across 10,000 distance, it difficult to comprehend the cause-effect scenarios and especially Why you need something ?. Because of the geographical and cultural barriers, we tend to get offended to lot of mail communication. We are too good at arguing and sending some nasty mail chains till some one puts an end to it.

Innovation : First things first. Innovation needs motivation. People need to understand that even to work within their 8 hours/day contract also needs motivation. The very common aspect of the offshore team to be inert is that they tend to think that other guys (customer/coordinator) is sitting in a beautiful country, Why should i break my head for him. When you do not have motivation, you dont care about anything. You are least bothered about the innovation, you are good at repeating the same job again and agin and thats it.

Incremental development : Oh man….never ever do this. I mean Incremental development spread across the geo graphies on the same module. You would see night mares. It might be OK, for initial few months, but once you get a initial shape to the product/module then you will start realizing many things. The module coherence, coding styles, redundancy in code, fix the bugs, revert again, etc… If you can , have the complete modules distributed across. But dont distribute a single module. Some time with these kind of decisions you can ruin your product delivery dates.

Estimation and Scheduling : Do not ever estimate and schedule for a team in teh offshore. That would be like keep a time bomb in your shoe. Understand that the offshore team is with a different mindset, different culture, diffeent personal problems and priorities. Let them estimate and decide when they want to do and just ask them a delivery date. Of course you can always influence and negotiate the deadlines. On that level i feel, its better to kind of macro manage on the estimates and scheduling on the tasks and do a micro management on the delivery dates.

In the end, if you are a Director, Program/Project Manager, VP involved in off shoring, you know what i have written, but the only thing i want to highlight is that you need to take the offshoring decisions consciously. You need to keep in mind all the effects and side-effects of it. Its better to be informed about effects of decisions rather repent the decisions.

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