The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘del.icio.us’

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”

Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.

That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.

You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.

That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

Twones started life as a FriendFeed-type service that aggregated various music services into a single stream, which we dubbed a social music feed when we first caught wind of it.

Problem was, the startup says, since users generally couldn’t play the music on their site and were constantly being directed to third-party websites and apps for streaming, people never really got that FriendFeed experience that would compel them to come back.

The Dutch company figured they needed to do something else, and the result of their overhauled strategy will be going live in alpha mode this morning. The short version: it’s Delicious-type bookmarking meets StumbleUpon-type discovery for online music.

The service will be going live within the next few hours, but here’s what I gathered from the demo they gave me last night.

Essentially, Twones will now focus on what it refers to as the “Music Bar”, a browser add-on / bookmarklet that lets users bookmark music that is being streamed on other websites or MP3 blogs and discover music others have bookmarked in a fun way. The Music Bar will debut as a Firefox extension, but Chrome and Internet Explorer versions are near completion, I’m told.

When installed, you can use Twones to bookmark music on thousands of supported websites, manage your virtual collection in a sidebar that looks a lot like Delicious, and share music with others in Twones or on services like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, any music you stream can be scrobbled to Last.fm so you can keep track of it there.

Finally, there’s an ‘Explore’ button that basically lets people jump to any random track that is in Twones’ database – no need to install the Music Bar even for that. This can be a great way to discover new music, but arguably there is a need for some kind of controller that lets you explore tracks within a certain genre, at least.

The problem with Twones is that, since it revolves almost entirely around music that’s being shared online elsewhere, you’re never quite sure if the songs you’re so carefully bookmarking are going to be there tomorrow, because the source could be gone for whatever reason. The startup says it’s working on ways to downsize that issue.

Twones aims to make money from advertising, affiliate revenues, maybe a premium version down the line, and/or as an analytics service for online music sharing (kind of what Bit.ly does for general links today). They haven’t really figured out which path to take right now, but the startup says the $500k seed funding it raised earlier is enough to buy them time to do so, as they are very ‘cost efficient’ in the sense that there’s no need to store a gigantic amount of music on their servers, seal license deals or run a complex content distribution network.

All in all, I could see myself using Twones for sure, but it feels more like a feature than a solid business to me. We’ll see if the next iterations of the service will make me change my mind.

Social bookmarking service Delicious is kicking the year off with a few enhancements to its service and interface. Delicious, which has made Michael’s favorite products list for the past three years, allows you to store, access and share your bookmarks and links from around the web.

The service has updated its bookmark display options in a more compact interface, combining all of the options to th right of the Tagbar. Tag Options has been reshuffled and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed, which makes sense.

Within the bookmark display menu, you can now filter your bookmarks by Only Private or Only Public. You can also indicate whether you want to show the history of who you’ve sent bookmarks to, giving you the ability to hide who you’ve shared your bookmarks with. And you can open your bookmarks in a new browser tab instead of within the same window.

Delicious has added a new browsing feature that helps save you from the annoyance of bouncing back and forth from Delicious when viewing more than one bookmark in a row. Via the “Browse these Bookmarks” tab, Delicious will open up a small frame at the top of the page, which will allow you to see a visual snapshot of your bookmarks as you browse through the list.

Acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Delicious was one of the pioneers of social bookmarking. The site recently became a little more Twitter-centric, with more emphasis on the realtime web. Unfortunately, Delicious’ founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google), wasn’t such a big fan of the Twitterification of the service. Schacter also revealedhis regrets about selling the startup to Yahoo.

We’re hitting the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress again.

And TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona on Feb 17 for yet another interactive and live-video-streamed session.

We’ll be featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe.

You can get your tickets to the event here.
Here’s the programme for the day so far.

When Apple was demoing its new iBooks application for the iPad today during their keynote address, I just kept thinking to myself: this simply must have been designed by Delicious Monster, the shop behind the brilliant Mac app Delicious Library. I’m not the only one who thought that either. Delicious Monster founder Wil Shipley thought the same thing. The only problem? His shop didn’t make it.

In fact, Shipley was quite vocal on Twitter during the keynote today about the situation. “No, Apple didn’t license iBooks from me. They just copied me. Ah well,” he wrote. Later, he added, “I guess it’s not enough Apple has hired every employee who worked on Delicious Library, they also had to copy my product’s look. Flattery?” While Shipley tries to play it off as not that big of a deal, clearly he’s pretty upset about it. And he should be. I mean, the bookshelf view in iBooks is nearly identical to the main bookshelf view used in Delicious Library. Not only that, but it’s not like this is a little-known app that Apple may have missed: it has won the Apple Design Award twice, and been a runner-up one other time. Apple gives out those awards.

Still, as Shipley notes, iBooks is only for eBooks while Delicious Monster is for all types of media, and has much more functionality. But if Apple really did hire much of Shipley’s team then just re-create the look, that’s a little shady. We’ve reached out to Shipley to confirm those hires and will update if we hear back.

Back in July, you may recall that Shipley had to kill the Delicious Library iPhone app because of a change to Amazon’s APIs for pulling product data.

You may wonder why Apple didn’t just hire Shipley if they poached his whole team? “They couldn’t afford to hire me,” he writes.

Update: Shipley has responded with some lengthy comments.

Notably, he says, “[Delcious Monster co-founder] Mike Matas was a UI designer on the iPad, [former employee] Lucas Newman is an iPhone / iPad engineer, and [former employee] Tim Omernick was an iPhone / iPad engineer but left a while ago to work on games independently.”

“But the thing about iBooks is, it’s a book-reader. So, of course they looked around, found the best interface for displaying books (Delicious Library’s shelves), and said: yup, this is what we’re doing,” he went on to say. “Although Delicious Library was the first to do it, we didn’t try to copyright the idea of wooden shelves, or of showing books photo-realistically. ‘Look and feel’ is kind of an outmoded concept, I think.”

“Now, of course Apple couldn’t contact me ahead of time and say, ‘Hey, we’re taking your idea, thanks.’ Their lawyers would worry they’d open themselves to a huge lawsuit, for one, and they’d also be leaking a secret. Nor could they write me a check. Even a token one would be an admission (in their lawyers’ eyes) that they were copying something. They are a public company — they can’t write someone a check unless they got some value in return. And if they got value, the lawyers would ask, how much was it? How was it determined?,” he continues

“So their official policy has to be, ‘No, of course it’s a crazy coincidence that these shelves look almost entirely like Delicious Library’s shelves.‘,” he concludes

But this goes even deeper for Shipley:

“As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple, or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It’s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.”

“But your children aren’t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.’”

While Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have just begun to tap into the realtime web, a few startups, such as OneRiot and Collecta, have been innovating around realtime search for some time. Today, Collecta is launching a widget builder to help spread its realtime search results around the web.

Users can easily create a widget by entering the desired search terms in Collecta’s widget creator. You can then grab the code and embed it on any site or blog. The widget will provide realtime streaming content on the search terms, collecting content from a network of more than 10 million social media and news sites, including Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, The Associated Press, CNN, Reuters, and more. Collecta also allows users to customize the header, control the scroll rate, and link to an external style sheet to integrate the widget with their website’s look and feel.

Collecta is already using its widget technology to power realtime results for MySpace’s breaking news page focused on Haiti. MySpace and Collecta recently partnered to launch a realtime search platform using the MySpace real-time stream API to indexes the collection of public comments, photos, links, and videos that are shared throughout the social network.

The widget offering is compelling and should certainly help the search engine extend the reach of its technology and results. Of course, some of the results aren’t necessarily relevant but that seems to be the only downside. Twitter also offers its own realtime search widget, that continuously updates with new results from the query you set.

Collecta.com’s standalone search engine aggregates content from Twitter,MySpace, news sites, blogs and more and lets you share the content on Facebook, Stumbleopen, Delicious and other social media sites. Launched last June, Collecta has raised $1.85 million in funding from True Ventures and Campbell were the investors. The company was co-founded by Jack Moffitt, Brian Zisk, and Patrick Mahoney.

Last July, we took a look at Pinboard, a no-frills bookmarking service that focuses on, you know, bookmarking. Unlike Yahoo’s popular delicious, which is weighed down by feature bloat, Pinboard looks to keep things simple, fast, and elegant. Last week, Pinboard’s creator Maciej Ceglowski posted a recap of the site’s growth over the last six months, giving some honest insight into the progress of a small-but-growing startup.

Perhaps the biggest news is that Pinboard is now Ceglowski’s full-time job. The former Yahoo Brickhouse developer started the site as a side project, but since the rollout of a new premium archiving feature (which runs $25 a year), he can apparently make enough from Pinboard to make a living.  He’s also got help from his friend Peter Gadjokov, who also happens to be one of delicious’s founders.

Ceglowski takes some jabs at delicious, which has made quite a few frustrating decisions since its acquisition by Yahoo:

There have been two big surprises in the past six months. The first was discovering that a minimalist paid bookmarking site can effectively compete against delicious, a free service that has all the resources of Yahoo at its disposal, a five year headstart, and until the recent layoffs employed some thirty people. Yahoo management single-handedly created our market with a series of terrible product decisions, and has continued to push the yoke forward and keep the nose pointed straight at the ground. As happy as I am to see Pinboard succeed, I wish it weren’t due to so much squandered effort by people I like and respect on the delicious development team.

Ceglowski writes that Pinboard has grown to 1,200 active users, who have shared nearly 2 million bookmarks. The site has also added a number of features, including a mobile version, an API, integration with Twitter and Instapaper, and more. He notes that there’s “even a version of the site for the five Pinboard users who prefer to browse their bookmarks in Spanish.”

Ceglowski also writes that the site’s innovative signup fee has helped keep spammers at bay, which can be a serious problem with link sharing and bookmarking sites. Since launching last summer, Pinboard has charged new users a small fee that increases by a tenth of a cent with each new user (it’s currently up to $5.79).

If you’re interested in the more technical side of Pinboard, Ceglowski has written details on the site’s technical underpinnings here.

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With its new geolocation API, Twitter has the potential to delve into the realm of messages that are relevant based on location. But right now, most geotagged tweets are simply regular tweets that are being tagged with location, and really don’t have much specifically to do with it. Enter BlockChalk, a new service built around the idea of leaving simple messages directly tied to a specific location.

The service, created by Stephen Hood, the former product team lead for Delicious, and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, works because they keep it simple. You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks.

And you can do a bit more with these Chalks. With the service’s new iPhone app, if you use the syntax “[here],” BlockChalk will put in your exact location. You can also attach a link to a location on a map by inserting an actual address in those same brackets. If you don’t do either of these, BlockChalk will hide your exact location, and keep your message pinned to the general area instead.

Once you drill down to a specific Chalk, you can choose to “Chalkback” (respond publicly to a message), “Reply Privately” (respond just to the user who left the Chalk), “Bury,” or “Share,” the chalk.

While I noted the service’s new iPhone app (which you can find in the App Store here as a free download), it’s already available on a number of other platforms thanks to some more advanced web technology. For example, you can use it on Android phones (or the mobile web of the iPhone, for that matter) because the web-based version of BlockChalk uses HTML5 to access location through the browser, Hood tells us. Obviously, that’s a vital part of the app. There is also a webOS BlockChalk app already that will work on the Palm Pre or Pixi. Hood notes that they are currently working on native apps for Android and BlackBerry as we speak.

Thanks to this mobile web usage, BlockChalk is already available in some 93 countries, 6751 cities and 10910 neighborhoods. And while the obvious integration with Twitter’s new location feature is pretty loose right now, Hood tells us that in the next release, it will be much tighter.

The company is in the process of raising a seed round of funding. And while obviously they’ve declined to say how much they’re looking to raise, we hear Hood’s old Delicious counterpart Joshua Schachter is interested. That shouldn’t be surprising given his recent location-based investments.

Learn more in the video below:

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When Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in June of last year, he probably thought he was done with the place. Apparently, he’s not.

As he noticed today, Yahoo is apparently buying ad space from Schachter’s current employer, Google, to promote its own jobs when you do a search for “Joshua Schacter.” As he puts it in the tweet, “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.”

And he’s apparently not the only one. Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP who left Yahoo last month, noticed the same thing. Classy indeed, Yahoo.

Or maybe Yahoo is just trying to woo these guys (who clearly do regular vanity searches like the rest of us) back, just like they did with Daniel Raffel earlier this year. Regardless, Yahoo might also consider placing some ads there to beef up its latest business plan: A cycling team.

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Realtime news stream startup Mozzler, which launched at our November Realtime CrunchUp, is bringing more of a news reader feel to its stream search. Mozzler lets you search Twitter, Facebook, and Digg for breaking news. Today it is launching a new way to consume realtime news in private beta which brings the experience back full circle to the look and feel of a typical RSS reader—except that you are not reading RSS feeds directly, you are reading your Twitter and Facebook streams.

The new private beta takes any stories Tweeted out by the people or Lists you follow and expands the into headlines with inline photos and descriptions, much like Brizzly does. It lets you sign in with both your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and merges the two streams. Mozzler founder Chris Were will send invites for the private beta to first 50 people who retweet this post and include the hashtag “#mozzlerbeta.” You can also watch this video demo to find out more.

Mozzler is moving from a realtime news search to more of a stream reader, and enhancing that news stream with photos, headlines and other details it can pull from the underlying links being passed around. When there is no link, the micro-message remains on its own. While this is a better experience for reading news without having to click all over the Web, it does reduce the scanability of just having a list of short Tweets to go through. Stream readers such as Mozzler’s and Brizzly’s are a twist on the traditional RSS readers in that they borrow from their UI, but instead of subscribing to publications, you generally subscribe to people instead and let them share what they are reading no matter what the source.

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