82 billion

IDC estimates that 82 billion emails are sent worldwide every day. AOL estimates that 70% of Internet users also use instant messaging, and 38% of those users send as many instant messages as they do emails each day. Much of that traffic involves collaboration and information gathering in groups.

UGC

@ MidemNet: Content Filters Have To Be Balanced Against Cool Factor

• Posted by Staci D. Kramer
• Sat 20 Jan 2007 07:31 AM PST

[By Robert Andrews] User-generated videos could be a $25 million-a-month industry, according to the CEO of one video sharing network, GoFish. Michael Downing told MidemNet delegates that, for the last couple of years, the growth in the sector had been more effective than in music or social networking alone—with over 120 million people and 10 billion UGC downloads involved per month, according to his company’s research. He projects that will double by fall. “The promotional aspects in this sector are tremendous and the moentization and economic opportunity is a very real one.”
Downing asked the audience to imagine tracking which of those videos had commercial music attached to it—“you’re talking about an economic opportunity in excess of $25 million per month.” He said GoFish wants to track, audit and ultimately pay that content owner: “We’re not there yet but we’re getting closer. The technology is there and the opportunity is there. It’s about who is going to bring these things together.”
Downing and MTV Networks’ global head of digital media Mika Salmi gave advice to other media companies keen to monetize user-generated content:
– Salmi: “The big problem for a public company like Viacom is the pornography aspect to user-generated. Unless you’re screening anything, the danger is that someone will slip some child pornography by. That scares them. So until now, it’s been very managed, in a box.”
– Downing: [If you censor too closely], “you lose your street cred, you’re no longer cool so it’s a balance. If you’re filtering too much, at a certain point you’re going to corrupt the phenomenon.”
– Downing said GoFish recently pulled in 1.3 million visitors and 3.5 million views for videos uploaded in response to a tie-up with the American Idol contestant Taylor Hicks. “If you want to get high CPMs, you must create a space where [advertisers] have safe, comfortable content they can come in to sponsor.”
– Salmi: “You have to set some parameters. It sounds boring, but it makes it so that the output is within the range of acceptability. If there is a prize, they will follow the rules much more. If you just make it an open field, you never know what you’re going to get.”
– Downing: “The promotional aspects in this sector are tremendous and the monetization and economic opportunity is a very real one. It’s a significant opportunity for everyone in the food chain.”

BOYS WILL BE BOYS AND GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

Boys and Girls Use Social Sites Differently

Posted by Sebastien on the 2007/01/15 at 10:54
in Social networks, Local, Socio-Demographics, Yahoo!, MySpace, FaceBook, Xanga, Piczo, Gaia Online, Tagged.com – No Comments »

“Older teenage girls are far more likely than younger girls, or boys of any age, to use social-networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends. “Older boys are much more expansive in their use of the sites,” said Amanda Lenhart, one of the study’s two authors. “I believe that it has a lot to do with socialization. A lot of the media messages about safety tend to be aimed more at girls than boys.”

Other highlights:

• 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
• 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.
• 91% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently, while 82% use the sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.
• 72% of all social networking teens use the sites to make plans with friends; 49% use the sites to make new friends.

• 85% of teens who have created an online profile say the profile they use or update most often is on MySpace, while 7% update a profile on Facebook. Another 1% tend to a primary profile on Xanga. Smaller numbers told us they have profiles at places like Yahoo, Piczo, Gaiaonline and Tagged.com.

Via the New York Times &

Social Media Dead?

Karl over at Experience Curve “tagged me” to weigh in on Steve Rubel’s claim that Social Media is “No Mo”.

From Micro Persuasion:

“Social media, according to Wikipedia, includes “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other.” This includes blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, vlogs and so on. For the last few years this was all considered related to, but separate from mainstream media. That point of differentiation is now gone.”

OK, Karl here is my 2 cents:

No, I don’t think that the lines will blur to the point that the labels of Social Media and Mainstream Media  (MSM) become pointless or moot.  What my visual shows above is a clear separation between the two—however there exists a level of interaction that hasn’t happened before in the past.  They now openly feed off of each other.  Mainstream media seems to no longer be ignoring  the Social Media movement.  They are, in fact  working in tandem with Social Media content generators—getting scoops, watching, reading, subscribing.  I know this because several MSM’ers have subscribed to my blog.

But does this mean that the lines blur and the distinction goes away?  Steve Rubel is a bright guy and he knows this space way better than I do, so he maybe taking a provocative position (or a long term visionary one)—but in my opinion we’ve got a long way to go before MSM and Social Media are indistinguishable.

Here’s a few anecdotal first hand experiences to help illustrate the points I am making.

1. When I watch the news/listen to the radio, I still hear journalists speaking skeptically of Social Media even though they now openly reference it in their stories.  Plus, I’ve worked in Newsrooms in both print and broadcast years ago, many of the same people still remain in power at the top.

2. Most of the people I work with are vaguely familiar with my blog (some not at all) and usually only perk up when they hear about the BusinessWeek/Boston Globe mentions.  In fact, even though this blog has moved very quickly in a short amount of time, my actual work responsibilities haven’t changed much since before I started the blog.

3. Many mainstream media outlets have their own versions of blogs, podcats etc. but this isn’t Social Media—it’s the MSM using technologies such as Podcasting, personal publishing or RSS to distribute content in new ways.  They are using the techology to innovate how their content is shared or even interacted with.

4. Whether we like it or not, us content creators are still fighting for credibility.  It’s getting better—but we don’t have the clout of a New York Times/WSJ piece etc.  There’s a distinction there.  Sorry.  And lots of bloggers are in the midst of writing good old-fashioned books (Godin, Jaffe, Shel) etc.  Why?  Credibility—and exposure to those who still aren’t participating (or even consuming user generated content).  Yes, for some if it’s not in a book—it’s not real.

So if I were to make a prediction for the next year or two, it wouldn’t be that the line between the two would dissolve and that Social Media as we know it dies (or the MSM for that matter) however,  I think a more probable scenario is that Social Media steadily begins to establish more mainstream credibility.  The MSM continues to be more open about leveraging their Social Media sources—we see more Vincent Ferarri’s taking on AOL’s and more video taping of Comcasts etc.

And here’s a sign of the times.  Lately on the evening news I have noticed a new phenomina.   Many of the video clips that are being featured are pulled straight off of YouTube.  You see the logo and everything.  Is that blurring of the lines?  Well, it’s getting closer to it—but it’s not.  When we see Amanda Congden replace Katie Couric—well then MAYBE the lines have completely blurred.

OK, that was an exaggeration everyone. 

What are kidds doing online beside browsing!

• Posted by Jimmy Guterman

Turns out the “You” in TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” might be less of us than we thought. Even those who maintained that the overheated cover story overstated “our” involvement in various social networking services allowed that our kids were using MySpace, etc., all the time. Turns out that researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project actually asked around 1,000 teens what they were doing online. What they found and reported in “Social Networking Websites and Teens” (press release, full PDF) doesn’t necessarily confirm the conventional wisdom.
According to the report, only 55 percent of online teens use social networks. That’s a lot, to be sure, but it’s not everyone. “There is a widespread notion that every American teenager is using social networks, and that they’re plastering personal information over their profiles for anyone and everyone to read,” said researcher Amanda Lenhart. “These findings add nuance to that story – not every teenager is using a social networking website, and of those that do, more than half of them have in some way restricted access to their profile.”
That last note is particularly interesting, suggesting that those teens using these services are rather savvy. The survey found that 66 percent of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all. Parents of teenage girls might be happiest about this data point, as the findings suggest that “older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.” Pew reports that 70 percent of girls 15-17 have used an online social network compared to 54 percent of boys the same ages.
Finally, according to the survey, “Just 17% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to flirt.” That’s right: five-sixths of the respondents say they’re not flirting. Back when I was sweating through grad-school statistics, this is what we were taught was called “underreporting.”

User-Generated Content: Recap of 2006 and What to Expect in 2007

This article by Bambi Francisco in MarketWatch recaps 2006 and sets the stage for 2007 in terms of the impact of user-generated content:

“Given our obsession with users, and ourselves, I’ve highlighted what will be in demand or wanted in 2007 as the audience is increasingly relied upon as the voice, the experts, the supporting actors and/or virtual stars of tomorrow. These bottoms-up celebrities combined with traditional top-down stars will increasingly dominate the new media landscape of 2007.

Wanted: Your contribution

The concept of a wiki — a site that essentially enables egalitarian editing and collaboration of everyone from experts to novices — has been around for many years. The best-known example is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Today, Wikipedia has 725 million page views per month, up more than 400% from last year, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. And, the beauty of Wikipedia is that it has about 6 employees. This year, the wiki model exploded to the point that now a book is being written in wiki style. Barry Libert is spearheading the first book project to be written in such a manner. (…)

Wanted: Your expertise

“Everyone is an expert [in something],” according to Richard Rosenblatt, who was the former chairman of MySpace and who sold the social network to News Corp last year for $580 million. Today, Rosenblatt is heading up Demand Media, which he calls a new media site. Demand Media is looking for professional, expert content on any topic since the core of its strategy is to start with trusted, professional content and then provide the tools to let people contribute related content or opinions. Some of Demand Media’s sites that use expert commentary include eHow, trails.com, gardenguides.com and golflink.com.

Yahoo Answers is probably the most popular of services that rely on volunteer experts to give people answers to their questions. (…) Yahoo Answers, which now has 60 million users and 160 million answers, marked its one-year anniversary in early December. Those answers helped drive Yahoo Answers traffic from practically zero in November 2005 to 14.5 million this November, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. In a survey conducted by Yahoo Answers and Harris Interactive, a third of online adults have used a Q&A site. (…)

Wanted: Your opinions and comments

About 30% of online news site Topix.net comes from user-generated or reader comments. That’s expected to jump to about 50% next year, Topix.net’s CEO Rich Skrenta tells me. Take a look across the blogosphere and you’ll note that comments make up a large part of the content.

Wanted: Your history

User-generated content can come in the form of a users’ history. As long as people can know your history, it can help form recommendations that drive sales of products, movie rentals, or news articles. In the past, roughly 5% of Amazon’s book sales came from recommendations, as estimated by analysts. According to Netflix members select approximately 60 percent of their movies based on movie recommendations tailored to their individual tastes.

Wanted: Your reviews, ratings

It all started with ePinions back in the late ’90s. It was a site that thrived on users giving their opinions about sundry topics. Now, reviews and ratings are not only everywhere, they’re essential in influencing what we buy, where we eat, and what we read. They’ve become a great filtering process. They’re the reason sellers are trusted on eBay. They’re the reason local restaurants which are reviewed by users on Yelp.com get new clients. They’re the reason we read certain articles from across the Web, thanks to Digg.com, which relies on users to vote for articles they like by submitting it.

Wanted: Your profiles and journals

We live in an age where what we do, and who we are, is the news. That became clearer to me after Facebook decided to make any update on a users’ profile become a news feed. While the service wasn’t very popular when announced, I think the millennial generation will get used to it. Profiles of every day people make up the social network sites — the fastest-growing sites — on the Web. News Corp’s MySpace, with 115 million members creating the content with their own profiles, saw page views and unique visitors more than double in November. Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, which has 70 million members creating profiles, also saw its unique visitors and page views more than double last month.

Wanted: Your video creations

NBC is integrating user-submitted videos, such as favorite pets and wedding woes. They’ll be videos that are family-oriented, said Mark Moore, founder and CEO of One True Media, the technology company hosting the user-submitted videos. Mixing user-submitted video and traditional content will become a bigger deal in 2007.

What it means: this is a great summary of the major pillars of user-generated content. Still looking for a good New Year’s resolution? Make sure you open the conversation with your users. They want to tell you something!

Fatigue of Social network?

January 03, 2007

some thoughts on 2007 (advertising, bullying, and mobile)

I love the idea of “social network fatigue.” I can see the Prozac ad now:

Are you tired of your friends? Does reciprocity get you down? Do you dream of blockmodels? Are you afraid of the big bad structural holes? Don’t worry… we can help!

OK… i admit, that was far more for my own entertainment than for yours. But seriously, the concept of “social network fatigue” boggles my mind. I realize that the prediction is really “Users will tire of large-scale, portal-style social network sites like MySpace and Facebook in 2007″ but the framing of it as “social network fatigue” reveals the inherent problem in this prediction. Users aren’t going to tire of their friends but they will tire of problematic social spaces that make hanging out with friends difficult.

Now, i’m not one to enjoy spouting predictions (notice discomfort in recent press interview) but i have to say that i agree with 80% of Fred Stutzman’s predictions. Social network sites as we know it are not the end-all-be-all. They will fade and other services will recognize the value in adding social features to their site. Social network structures will become as ubiquitous as search or profiles. They will be a given, either explicitly (“are you my friend?”) or implicitly (your phone contact list). That said, i think there are going to be some blood baths next year and i’m not looking forward to them.

For me, the question is: “are teenagers tiring of the highly-visible social network sites?” and the answer is both yes and no. The level of emotional enthusiasm i hear has dramatically faded over the last six months. It’s taken for granted that it’s the way to reach people, but folks have seen the pros and cons and are no longer slurping it up without thinking. The perceived presence of people who hold power over teens (parents, teachers, etc.) and those who want to prey on them (marketers, pedophiles, etc.) has done unbelievable damage in general teen perception. I’m astounded by how many teens i’m running into who are “scared” to go on MySpace because they’ve been told horror stories by everyone. It doesn’t matter that the stories they repeat back to me are inaccurate – it’s clear that mainstream news coverage had a huge role in shaping social network sites in 2006. I want to scream every time a teen tells me the story of the two alexes or about how Dateline “proved” that predators are going to stalk them. (Instead, i listen patiently and politely.)

More significantly, MySpace has turned into a massive zit full of marketing puss. Most teens don’t mind advertising but when things look more like spam than advertising, you’re in deep shit. Every PR organization and marketing arm is leeching onto MySpace like a blood thirsty vampire. Problem is that vampires kill their prey. Teens who wanna hang with friends are mostly protecting themselves by privatizing their profile (more cuz of the marketing predators than the sexual ones) but this quickly loses the luster, particularly when it’s fundamentally hard to do what you want to communicate with your friends. (Simple things like friend management and better messaging tools would go a long way.) I’m very worried about how, unregulated, spamming and over-advertising will kill even the coolest social hangouts. I keep wondering what the regulation solution will have to be. (Is it law or code cuz it ain’t gonna be market or social norms?)

I believe that teenagers are the reason that mobile will happen sooner than we think. I don’t believe that the first explosion will be US-based. I am very hopeful about Blyk because i think that they stand a very decent chance of getting cluster effects working. (Note: the anti-corporate voice in me screams in horror at the idea of a free mobile service built on ads but there’s no one i trust more in mobile than Marko Ahtisaari. I have much respect for the whole team and i think that a free phone will be extremely popular so long as they get a few things right.) I think that mobile social network-driven systems will look very different than web-based ones but the fundamentals of “friends” and “messages” and some form of presence-conveying “profile” will be core to the system.

What worries me most is that my gut says that 2007 will involve far too many hyper-visible examples of bad-teen-behavior. You think Nicole and Paris’ fight is public? Wait until every teen in America videotapes their cat-scratching, hair-pulling, nut-kicking, all-out brawls and uploads them to YouTube. Those who hold power over teens are primed to obsessively stalk their behaviors and i don’t think it’s gonna be pretty. Forget dirty laundry, we’re talking a full inversion of the house. (Personally, i can’t wait until kids start videotaping their parents’ fights or otherwise disrupting the power dynamics – that’s going to make things super messy. ::shudder::)

I think 2007 is going to be spent working through issues of public life and privacy mixed together complicated power dynamics between generations and between producers and consumers. We’re going to see legal battles, big corporate power plays (a.k.a. “bullying”), and media panic coverage meant to distract us from Iraq. We’re going to see a disgusting increase in consumer advertising that will aim to saturate everything possible. (This is what you get for getting “old media” and “old business” online finally.) Personally, when i turn up the futurism dial, i wanna hide under a rock in 2007. Of course, it shall be interesting and i won’t be able to resist peeking.

future of media according to Mc Kinsey

McKinsey Quarterly (registration required):Summary:

“McKinsey research finds that bottlenecks in supply could limit the pace of online ad growth and raise prices over the next 24 months. The study also suggests that a dearth of ad agencies that can manage both traditional and digital campaigns could further slow the shift in spending to online ads. ”

Here are the best excerpts:

Video Ads:

“According to many of the video suppliers we interviewed, very little unsold advertising capacity remains today. Assuming that marketers don’t increase the number of ads they place in each video stream, the maximum supply of video ads is currently about $600 million a year—far less than future demand, which we expect to reach $1.4 billion to $3.2 billion in 2007.”

Paid Search:

“The situation is similar for paid search. Annual growth in the overall number of searches is slowing, from 30 percent in 2004 to 20 percent in 2005. Without significant changes in consumer click-through rates or in the prices advertisers are willing to pay, we estimate that the maximum current value of paid-search advertising is about $7 billion. Meanwhile, our analysis (…) suggests that advertisers will want to spend $9 billion to $12 billion on paid search in 2007, up from around $5 billion in 2005.”

Banner Ads:

“Although the inventory of banner ads—$4 billion to $8 billion—appears more than sufficient to accommodate the likely demand of $2.5 billion, advertisers probably won’t be interested in much of what’s available. The complex task of spreading media spending across thousands of small Web sites, many with different ad formats, means that advertisers tend to return to heavily trafficked sites, where supply is at a premium. Even on the big portals, marketers are leery of having their ads placed near consumer-generated content that might be objectionable. In fact, advertisers currently direct 96 percent of their spending for online display ads to pages that represent just 30 percent of overall Web traffic. ”

Additional findings:

• “Most advertisers expressed frustration at the small number of ad agencies with the skills to manage both traditional and digital campaigns. Many advertisers have no choice but to employ separate agencies and to coordinate cross-media efforts themselves, which makes it more challenging to manage—and evolve—their marketing mix.”
• “The absence of a widely accepted independent metric for digital media (such as the NielsenTV ratings) makes it difficult to compare the results of online campaigns and to measure their impact—an uncomfortable fact for marketers considering major spending reallocations.”

What it means:

1) This analysis supports the need of traditional media to capture more traffic within their network of sites in order to fulfill the growing appetite of advertisers.

2) It also shows us the opportunity in video ads. It seems like there’s a massive gap between supply and demand in that ad format (not surprising given the popularity of TV advertising).

3) It also shows us the opportunity in the Long Tail of advertising, which might explain the rise of blog ad networks like Federated Media and B5 Media.

4) As the study says, “audiences and vehicles are highly fragmented” I wonder if fragmentation and lack of inventory in local online ads prevented the segment from growing as fast as people expected in 2006?

Top 100 web 2.0 sites

Thanks to Web 2.0 sites for the original list

Here you are version 2.0 of the top 100 web 2.0 sites

thanks for your comments. By commenting on this post you will help enhancing the listing and ordering .

Video

1. YouTube: YouTube is a popular free video sharing Web site which lets users upload, view, and share video clips.

2. Meta Cafe: Metacafe – Get the best internet videos – Funny videos, Amazing clips, Rare movies

3. Vimeo: Share your video clips. Upload video that you shoot with your digital camera, mobile phone, or camcorder. Share video by linking to Vimeo.

4. Daily Motion Publish, tag, organize and share your video clips.

5. Imeem: imeem is a social media service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. In one sense, imeem is a media-centric social network service, and in another sense, it is also a user participation service for online content.

6. ClipShack: ClipShack is a community for videophiles; a destination where people can post their video for general public viewing and comment, share clips with friends and family, post video to blogs, share…

7. vSocial: The fastest, easiest way to upload, watch and share your favorite video clips.

8. Jumpcut: The best place to create, remix and share movies and slideshows online. There’s nothing else like it. Jumpcut Makes Movies, Simple.

9. Video Bomb: Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the internet: people submit links to the ‘Incoming!’ page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front…

10. eyeSpot: Shoot, Mix, and Share your Video. Use the eyespot Mixer to edit and combine your videos, music and photos online! Share your video and mixes with the world for Free

11. revver : Upload, share videos

12. Avidbeauty: Avid Beauty is an entertainment community for iPod users. We offer iPod downloads which are available in playlists known as Podcasts. We also offer Flickr photo, YouTube video and LiveJournal integration into your member profile.

 

Music

1. last.fm: Generate custom streaming music stations with Last.fm by searching for and tagging your favorite artists. Build your own library and search the libraries of others to find who likes the same music as you

2. Musicovery: Discover new music based on your mood, this free webradio let you browse music styles and epochs

3. read.io :Read.io converts RSS feeds into podcasts via TextToSpeech. Many languages supported.

4. MusicStrands: Search MusicStrands to discover new music. Listen to samples, then tag good tracks and exile the ones you don’t like to get clear recommendations, either on site or with an optional iTunes plugin. Then purchase music from a variety of vendors.

5. PODZINGER: PODZINGER – the world’s premiere audio and video search engine

6. Upto11: Using tags and rankings, Upto11 suggests new music for you. Create and share your recommendations, tags, and playlists via a personal user page.

7. Pandora: Pandora is the music discovery service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites

Chat

1. Meebo: meebo, the web messenger that lets you access IM from absolutely anywhere. meebo supports msn, yahoo, aol/aim, google talk (gtalk), jabber and icq

2. Joopz: Allows users to send text messages from the Web to both individuals and groups, while enabling recipients to respond directly to the originating PC or Mac. Joopz web texts can be sent from any web-enabled device worldwide to any U.S. or Canadian mobile phone.

3. campfire: Simple, Web-based group chat for businesses, Campfire allows real-time sharing, editing, and collaboration for team members in a secure, password-protected chat.

4. Goowy: is a web based application offering free web and flash email service that enables you instant messaging, email, chat and much more

5. Gizmo: Gizmo Project uses your internet connection (broadband or dial-up) to make calls to other computers. With the click of a mouse, you’re connected to friends, family, and colleagues anywhere on earth. It’s just that simple. You talk clearly. For as long as you want. For free.

6. eBuddy: web based messaging for everyone, everywhere. e-Messenger is a web application that enables you to chat with your MSN, AOL and Yahoo buddies without having to install any program or Java applet.

7. e-messenger: Online messaging from eBuddy is a web messenger application which supports MSN, Yahoo and AIM (AOL). When your school or office has blocked IM you can use the web version of eBuddy with any standard JavaScript enabled browser, even behind a firewall.

8. ILOVEIM: eBuddy is a web messenger application which supports MSN, Yahoo and AIM (AOL). When your school or office has blocked IM you can use the web version of eBuddy with any standard JavaScript enabled browser, even behind a firewall.

Images & Photos

1. Flickr: The best way to stor, search, sort and share your photos

2. Zooomr:Universally the best way to share, search, store and sort your photos online.

3. Slide:

4. zoto

5. 23HQ:Are your photos stuck on your hard drive, instead of being shared with the people who matter to you?

6. Mybloop: MyBloop – sharing pictures, audio, and video for free, whithout storage limits and additional software to install

Blogs

1. Blogger: your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more

2. Weblogs, Inc: Creating trade weblogs across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.

3. BlogCode: BlogCode.com is a fast, easy and intuitive source of blog recommendations based on the StoryCode.com model. It allows you to start with your favourite weblog (or perhaps even your own) and find…

4. blo.gs: lets you keep an eye on your favorite weblogs via the web and email. you can even put the list on your site: a blogroll that knows what is new!

5. BlogLines: a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.

Bookmarking

1. Digg: Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that’s important to you!

2. del.icio.us: A social bookmarks manager. Using bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them

3. Reddit: Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular online. reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or submit your own!

4. StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon uses thumbs up and down ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like–minded stumblers have liked

5. Blinklist: Real people with shared interests list the websites they care about. Rate sites you like or save them for later.

6. Blummy: A free tool for quick access to your favorite web services via your bookmark toolbar, Blummy lets you add and customize widgets that do practically anything: add pictures to Flickr, submit sites to del.icio.us, look up text in WIkipedia. Choose from hundreds of custom “blummlets” or create your own.

7. Techcrunch: TechCrunch is a blog about Web 2.0 products & companies, many of the posts written by Michael Arrington. The blog’s first post was on June 11, 2005

8. Furl: Make your favorite web bookmarks accessible from anywhere with Furl’s lightweight bookmarklet. Furl allows you to easily save, take notes on and share the links you’ve stored, or browse others’ most popular bookmarks to find new and interesting things.

9. Spurl: Never lose track of a web site again with Spurl’s free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. Spurl stores addresses quickly for easy access with a one-click bookmarklet and provides recommendations for new content based on your preferences

10. Trailfire: Bookmaking sharing software.

VOIP

1. Jajah: jah is a VoIP (Voice over IP) provider, founded by Austrians Roman Scharf and Daniel Mattes in 2005[1]. The Jajah headquarters are located in Mountain View, CA, USA, and Luxembourg. Jajah maintains a development centre in Israel.

2. skype: It’s free to download and free to call other people on Skype. Skype the number one voice over ip software

3. Private Phone: a free local phone number with voicemail and messages you can check online or from any phone.

Games & Sketching

1. Trendio: Trendio.com is an online prediction market. Users, instead of buying stock in companies with real money, buy stock in certain news subjects with fake money. Words available include those from the world of politics, sport, and entertainment. The more the word appears in the news, the higher the value of the stock. Currently, the site uses about 3,000 online internet sources to gauge the value of each word.

2. GameSnips: online games list, digg style. voting for each game, sort lists by latest or by votes

3. Pictaps: Roxik Pictaps – Draw a Character and Watch It Dance in 3D

4. Broadcast Game: The objective of the Broadcast game is to connect all of the terminals and cables on the grid to the central hub by fixing their orientations. All you need to do is click and rotate the cables, the terminals, or the hub.

5. Pikipimp.com : Ever wanted to add bling to your iomages? Pikpimp is a relly cool ajax application that allows you to drop and drag objects on your image. Save the image and add to your site!

6. Mainada: How aobut Comic Sketch (thanks Tiago)

Wikis

1. Wikipedia: The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over two million articles and still growing.

2. LittleWiki: LittleWiki is a Web site where you can create public and private wiki pages. A Wiki is a Web site where anyone can enter and edit content. That means you can post and edit information about virtually anything you wish, and you can read what others have posted too.

3. Wetpaint: Wetpaint powers websites that tap the power of collaborative thinking. The heart of the Wetpaint advantage is its ability to allow anyone — especially those without technical skill — to create and contribute to websites written for and by those who share a passion or interest. To do this, Wetpaint combines the best aspects of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks so anyone can click and type on the web.

4. JotSpot: Create and share wiki pages with a WYSIWYG editor via Jotspot’s secure wiki hosting. Install various “applications” to refine your wiki content – project manager, company directory, blog, forum, poll, calendar, and more – then invite others to contribute

5. PBWiki: Make a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich. Easily upload HTML, link files to your pages, integrate RSS, and more.

 

Office Tools

1. Zoho Office Suite: Online Word Processor

2. Google Docs & Spreadsheets: With Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you can: * Use our online editor to format documents, spell-check and more. * Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text. * Download…

3. Num Sum: Easy, Sharable Web Spreadsheets

4. Dictinary : Online dictionary

5. notifyr.org: Be ahead of the rest with notifyr.org. Notifyr is an easy to use tool which lets anybody easily receive instant updates on any web page around the world. Notifyr.org is ideal for those who want instant information on new stock, or new product release information. Best of all it’s free – and always will be

6. ThinkFree Office: Have you ever wanted to edit an Excel spreadsheet on a Linux system? Have you ever wanted to show your colleagues a presentation on a computer not equipped with Powerpoint? Would you like to be able…

7. Numly: Numly is a web 2.0 startup offering next generation copyright and DRM licensing services for all things digital.

8. gOffice: Free online word processor, outpput can be pdf or html letters, allows personalization in letter templates..

 

RSS

1. FeedBurner: FeedBurner helps bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers get more value from the content they create. Our advanced feed management technology deftly delivers subscription services for…

2. Feed Digest: Feed Digest is a parser, regenerator, and syndicator for, and of, RSS and Atom feeds. It lets you do things like put the content of RSS or Atom feeds on your own site(s).

3. Attensa: Attensa, Inc. is a venture backed software company developing RSS readers, online RSS aggregators, enterprise RSS servers and RSS infrastructure software that automatically and intelligently delivers…

4. Tiny Tiny RSS: Tiny Tiny RSS is a web-based news feed aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.

5. Feed43: This free online service converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.

6. Feed Mailer: feeds direct to your email. (thanks John)

 

Emails

1. Gmail: Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want.

2. 30 Gigs: 30Gigs.com is invite-only web-based email that offers, you guessed it, 30 gigabytes of space.

3. Zookoda: is an email marketing application designed specifically for bloggers. Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your visitors inbox.

4. Sprout: osted email management for your sales and support email. No IT department required. Mailroom can organize your email and suggest replies to save you time and keep you better in touch with your customers. There is nothing to setup and it takes only a minute to get started

5. Gawab: Offers a web mail service with a number of features. Supports POP/SMTP.

News

1. NewsGator: Read all of your favorite news, websites and blogs all in one place.

2. newsvine.com: Keep track of breaking news with Newsvine: read “The Wire” for a direct stream of articles from the AP and ESPN, and read “The Vine” for Newsvine user submitted content and columns. Interact with other Newsvine readers by voting for and commenting on news, and write/maintain your own Newsvine column.

3. Gabbr :Gabbr is a community-based social news and blogging network which allows users to save and share their favorite top news headlines and blog posts.

4. wired: News site and magazine, covering technology, culture, business and politics.

5. Clipmarks: Bite-size hiligh-lights on the web.

File Sharing

1. Box.Net: Free online file storage and sharing from Box.net! Our internet storage service enables you to save, browse, share, & retrieve files, photos, and documents …

2. AllPeers:Unleash your online experience and discover unlimited private sharing. Share private photos worry-free. No passwords to remember, no public access. Share your videos without uploading – save on hosting costs while saving time.No cumbersome interface. No sharing restriction. Private and secure. No spyware, no adware, no annoying advertisements.

3. MailBigFile internet application for file sharing

Others

1. Live: Microsoft web 2.0 portal

2. LinkedIn: is like Facebook for business professionals: Build yourself a business network to give you credibility in job searches and hiring, or use LinkedIn to reconnect or keep in touch with important business connections.

3. BaseCamp: Simple project management with to-do lists, milestones, time tracking, file sharing, calendars, and more. Basecamp is a solution for taking charge of communication, collaboration, and organization for projects big and small.

4. Side Job Track: A job tracking application for independent contractors, Sidejobtrack creates and manages invoices for goods, services, and time, then produces monetary reports to track payments and income.

5. Kayak.com searches hundreds of travel sites to give you the widest possible choice of flights and prices. It costs nothing to search and not a cent to book because we’re not a travel agency.

6. TravBuddy is a site for people who love to explore. You don’t have to be traveling across the world to use this site. Maybe you just want to share advice about a local restaurant you enjoy, or perhaps last weekend you discovered an amazing new place to watch the sunset, right in your hometown. Whether you are exploring at home or exploring abroad, the art and joy of discovery is still the same. Something that is familiar to you might be amazing and new to someone who is visiting.

7. Wayfaring is an interesting new site that lets you tag and create your own routes and places on Google maps

8. Omnidrive: As the world’s first complete storage aggregator, Omnidrive allows you to bring all your files and content together from your desktop, devices and the web onto a single space that’s easily accessible from any platform.

9. ma.gnolia: Build your web site and build community online

10. Ajaxian: Ajax related blog

11. Web 2.0 Sites: web 2.0 sites directory, for all web 2.0 related services.

Posted by Hazem Torab at 6:09 PM

the Importance of your homepage by Anne Zelenka.

Top Ajax Start Pages Reviewed

The ideal start page for web work would let you see the status of your workday at a glance–what emails have come in, what’s on your to do list, what articles from RSS feeds you need to read, what your contacts are up to, and what’s on your calendar.

The ideal start page would show all this in an integrated and information-rich way such that even graphical guru Edward Tufte couldn’t criticize it.

The ideal start page would let you act immediately. You could shoot out an email, send an instant message, or update your twitter account (”looking at my Ajax start page”) right from the start page itself, instead of navigating elsewhere.

Does the current generation of web-based start pages (a.k.a. personalized home pages) come at all close to ideal? Let’s review five of them–four Ajax and one Flash–and see.

Google’s Personalized Home Page

You’d think that Google’s start page would be a great choice for dedicated users of Google services like Gmail and Docs and Spreadsheets. But the Google home page integration with its own services is mostly inadequate.

You can’t send an email through Gmail right from the start page. You can look at a list of your Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but you can’t see a preview of individual documents right there. The Google Calendar module is nice, with its list-based agenda view and quick add capability. The Google Notebook module enables two-way integration and editing, but a bug kept me from adding new notebooks.

Google’s offering isn’t integrated with Google Reader in even the most minimal way. From an RSS feed in the home page, you should be able to click into Google Reader, where you could star or share articles. Instead, clicking an article link takes you to the original article. Since RSS feeds are the key way of displaying data in a start page, this lack of integration is a near-fatal flaw for the Google start page.

The most precious real estate at the top of the page is dominated by the Google logo and search box. That could easily be relegated to just another rectangle on the grid of modules. The use of a large typeface for both headings and content means that information density is low–check out the difference between typeface size on Google Reader versus Google personalized home page–you get much more information in Reader.

Pro: Nice integration with Google Calendar. Clean and uncluttered interface similar in feeling to Gmail and Google Reader. Lots of modules to choose from–hard to tell exactly how many as there’s no count given in Google’s Homepage Content Directory.

Con: Minimal integration with Google apps and services: no integration with Google Reader, no Google Talk module, and no way to send an email through Gmail right from the page. No keyboard shortcuts. Poor use of screen real estate and low density of information. No summary statistics showing number of unread articles from various feeds.

Netvibes

This Ajax-based start page excels with its integrated feed reading capabilities. Netvibes is one of the favorite feed readers of WWD readers, second only to Google Reader in our hit counts. When you click through on an RSS item on Netvibes, you go directly to the feed reading view, which provides a powerful interface for browsing all the items in the feed.

Unlike Google’s personalized home page, Netvibes provides a dense view of information, with a relatively small typeface and more reasonable allocation of screen real estate. Unfortunately, you can’t eliminate the page tabs even if you only have one page and the title of your page takes up too much space at the top.

Netvibes’ modules don’t always behave as you might want. The POP3 mail module shows a count of items in your inbox but provides no way to mark items as read. The red number indicating “unread items” is therefore inaccurate and worse, it sums up into the overall unread items statistic at the top of the page. That’d be a nice touch if only it could be believed. Instead, it just becomes noise for the brain.

Netvibes has been successful in creating a dynamic ecosystem of add-on modules. One look at their ecosystem home page and you know they’re serious about growing a developer community–that page is as nicely designed as the start page itself. Mashup service provider Dapper even provides a way to make non-syndicated content into a Netvibes module by doing basic HTML screen scraping.

Pro: Excellent integration of power feed reading capabilities with an information-rich start page display. Thriving ecosystem of module developers. Well funded, which matters for its longevity. Offers keyboard shortcuts, but you need to turn them on if you want to use them.

Con: The POP mail module is virtually unusable with its inability to mark items as read. Showing a total of unread items at the top based on inaccurate numbers in the mail modules is just pure noise to the brain. Needs a quick email send capability. The feed reader itself isn’t as information-dense or as easy to navigate by keyboard as Google Reader.

Pageflakes

Pageflakes may become an also-ran relative to Netvibes, though it did garner the reader’s choice in Mashable’s vote on start pages. It has one very nice feature lacking in Netvibes: a quick email send capability.

Pageflakes hasn’t attracted as many developers as Netvibes: it shows 136 “flakes” in its gallery compared to the 563 modules listed for Netvibes.

The interface of Pageflakes is information-dense and attractive, and uses screen real estate well. The logo, page tabs, and navigation at the top of the page take only a small amount of space. The typeface is suitably small.

RSS feed flakes show accurate unread item counts, but offer no easy way to mark items read without browsing them. However, clicking through on an RSS item opens it in a preview-style subpage trapped within the confines of the Pageflakes homepage… this may not be everyone’s favorite way to browse. There is no integration with powerful feed-reading capabilities.

Pro: Email compose/send capability. Nice use of screen real estate. Attractive interface with accurate read/unread item counts for mail and RSS feeds.

Con: No integrated advanced feed reading as with a dedicated news reader. Difficult browsing of feed items. Module development community appears less active than that of Netvibes.

Protopage

With the rounded corners on its widgets and configurable color schemes, Protopage feels almost like a Flash-based service, although it is built with Ajax. Protopage’s Widget Showcase shows 275 widgets.

Protopage uses screen real estate efficiently, although the default configuration with seven tabs feels too cluttered. The tabs’ operation can be confusing.

Protopage V3, released in November of 2006, introduced an integrated RSS feed reading capability for feeds that publish only excerpts. This works similarly to Pageflakes feed reading, in that it displays the original page in a contained display.

Pro: Integrated feed reading for feeds that only publish excerpts. A rich gallery of widgets. Fully customizable color schemes.

Con: The rounded corners on the widgets feel dated–this is a web app, not a desktop dashboard–and they take up more space than necessary. The integrated feed reader may be too limited for people who read large numbers of feeds.

yourminis

This Flash-based entrant grew out of the goowy webtop, a virtual web suite that includes email, integrated IM, and calendaring. It’s a bit confusing–I started out trying “goowy minis” and was surprised when I couldn’t add any email “minis” (modules) to the page. You have to go to yourminis.com for the next-generation dashboard.

yourminis has a Flashy look to it, with lots of icons, fades, and rounded corners on the minis. Sure, you can do that with Ajax, but most start pages don’t bother. Some of the minis use nonstandard and nonconfigurable typefaces; you can’t change the to do list or notepad from its default casual font. The animations are distracting: my yourminis page had a flashing clock and pulsing icons at the top and bottom.

The RSS feed mini can be difficult to use. It shows which items have been read–meaning you’ve clicked through on it or marked all items in that feed as read–but I couldn’t seem to mark something as read individually without clicking through. You can configure how long of an excerpt to view, but you can’t see an entire article right there, which might be nice.

Pro: Polished desktop-like look and feel. Nice text editor mini.

Con: The colors and graphic effects draw attention away from what’s really important: the information on the page. Though yourminis is intended to be an open platform, it doesn’t appear to have attracted as much attention from developers as the Ajax-based start pages.

We’re Not There Yet

What did this review of Ajax start pages (and one Flash start page) tell us? That they have a ways to go before they provide the informational richness and immediate action that this web worker needs.

For now, my web start page is Firefox with one tab for email, one for my calendar, and one for my RSS reader. What’s yours?