Yahoo launched Shoposphere two days ago, an interesting platform where everyone can build picklists of items. I made my first picklist with things I own and like. Maybe I’m gonna build a wishlist next. Many popular picklists are about gadget stuff, for example Techie Gadget Essentials, Gadget Dude’s Gadget Mania or Best iPod Accessoires.
Right now, Web 2.0 companies with funny names and interesting tech sprout out of the ground like it’s 1999. Time to start your own? Got no idea? This site is here to help: It creates a name for your new company and even tells you what service you are about to offer.
So my company will be named »Tripelihub« and will deliver social podcasts via flash. Whatever.
[via Forever Geek]
Andy Wibbels has created a nice screencast, which explains how to use Google’s new RSS reader. I guess it is mainly targeted to less tech savy users and explains how to find and subscribe to a feed in very plain words. If you’re new to RSS or have not tried the Google Reader before, you should check this one out. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Xyrox RSS Feed while you’re at it 
[via Micro Persuation]
I was asked by the Community Manager of blinklist.com to link to a survey on social bookmarking services they are currently running. Obviously they are looking for ideas to improve their service. I could not really help here, because if I had a killer idea on how to improve social bookmarking, I would most likely try to implement that one by myself. Anyway, you might think otherwise, so the link to the survey goes here.
Shadows is a new service which recently popped up on the social bookmarking scene. In addtion to the tagging of URLs, which is supported by a lot of services now, it adds the possibility to rate and discuss the quality of a web site.
Each site a user bookmars gets a so called Shadow Page. On this you find the tags given to that page, as well as discussion threads and a ranking option. You can see the Shadow Page for XyroX here. Notice the ugly screenshot of a design long gone in the top left.
Each Shadows user also gets a Shadow Page on his own (My Shadow Page). This is some kind of profile page, showing the user’s tags and bookmarks and also allows other people to rank the person the page belongs to. Shadow users can also blog to their profile page.
As far as I know this service is new, and I think it has quite some potential. You can import your browser bookmarks or del.icio.us tags for a quick start there. I think I’ll keep my eyes on this one. What they should improve on is the user interface, I had a hard time finding my way around the site at first.
Ta-da Lists has been one of the most succesful web applications this year, so it would be just a matter of time until somebody would try to do it even better. With Remember The Milk, there is now another serious contender in the web based task management arena.
The applictation follows a simple Web 2.0 design rule: Do only one thing, and do it really good. With a modern and very intuitive, Ajax powered user interface, an intelligent deadline system, the option to make both public and private lists as well as some neat reminder options (E-Mail, SMS, ICQ, etc.), this one is sure to make a serious impact on the web.
With all the hacks floating around and the PSP’s networking capabilities, I guess it was just a matter of time until someone would release it: These people report running a web server on a PSP. The actuall PSP hosted site can not be reached right now, the blog says they are having bandwith problems at their ISP.
According to Matt McAlister, IT magazine Infoworld is using del.icio.us to tag their articles and to provide links to related stuff by polling the del.icio.us RSS feeds for the chosen tags. As of now, they are only using tags of their own though, so the social component of the del.icio.us system is not really used.
The social networking service Multiply just announced the launch of their social search application, allowing the user to search for content that has been published by people connected to the user.
This is an interesting approach to search. Traditional search engines have to deal with a great ammount of spam. Pagerank once was actually introduced to score a site based on the number of other pages linking to it. While this worked quite well for some time, it is by now subject to a lot of manipulation. The Multiply approach tries to take into account who is responsible for some web ressource, and how much reason there is for the person searching to trust the publisher, i.e. if that pubisher is part of the searchers social network. I wonder if Google is ever going to move Orkut in some similar direction.
By the way, I do have a Multiply Page for some time now, but never made much use of this. Maybe I should investigate this further.
Press Release
First there were social networking communities, which made for a lot of hype and buzz. Then social bookmark sites appeared, and those are doing very well. Next we had social photo sharing and social webcasts. And now we even got social wishlists. Of course they are taggable. If they prove worthy these will make for some huge traffic come christmas time!