My NZ 2.0 buddy Ben Nolan
is selling one of his web apps, bubbletwo, on eBay.
There he is pictured on the
left, pretending he's zooming down the Silicon Valley highways in a Ferarri (which
may yet happen if he sells his mapping startup zoomin.co.nz).
Ben whipped up bubbletwo recently and he describes it as a "Web 2.0 Instant Blogging Site". He's currently taking bids on eBay for sole rights to the app. He wrote on eBay:
"I'm selling bubbletwo.com. You will get full ownership of the domain name, the ruby on rails application that powers bubbletwo, all html, css and the database.
The site was released yesterday and has been visited by just under 200 users. Bubbletwo lets people create an instant blog. Its kind of similair to Shorttext or Writeboard.
If you win the auction (the reserve is just enough for me to buy a macbook pro and a 24" Dell monitor) I'll send you an agreement to transfer over the IP. I will also help you move bubbletwo over to your own colocated server (I use layeredtech.com for my hosting). After that - you're on your own.
I expect that with a decent amount of promotion and a little luck - you could earn back the reserve price within a year using Google Ads."
Now in the interests of full disclosure I have to admit I have something to gain if Ben is successful. If he manages to sell his app on eBay, then I get his old Mac mini :-) I'm easily bribed, as you can see :-) But also I like promoting my fellow Wellingtonians. Go Ben!
I've long been suspicious of some of the stats that certain companies and bloggers push. We all know by now that industry stats tool alexa.com must be taken with a grain of salt, but until today I hadn't realised the extent of how a site's own measured traffic can be exaggerated.
You see recently I've been using Urchin (owned by Google) web stats as part of my MediaTemple web hosting arrangement, along with statcounter.com which I've used for years. I've been noticing that Urchin page view stats are MUCH higher than statcounter.com - in fact 5 times higher! This difference has been bugging me and I wanted to find out why. Today I came across this interesting thread which explains all:
"At the raw, basic level, Urchin counts pretty much the same numbers as any web server log analysis program will do (much prettier). Every page read by a browser is counted as a page view; different IP addresses signify the individual visitors. That's not very accurate because robots and crawlers 'read' pages, too, and show up in the count (visitors and pages) by different web server log analysis programs, including Urchin. Robots and crawlers don't read Javascript."
(emphasis mine)
Products like statcounter.com, by comparison, only count page views from browsers with JavaScript enabled - which gets rid of the robots and crawler hits.
So in a nutshell, Urchin stats can be highly misleading. Although it must be pointed out there is an advanced version of Urchin that uses something called UTM, which is Urchin's version of a Javascript enabled count. From the above thread Urchin with UTM means:
"...visitors are cookied, tagged, etc. Then, both log data and JS data are combined in Urchin's reports. Without UTM, Urchin is just counting server log stats."
I wanted to bring this up because I've always used statcounter.com when I tell people my page views - when I'm looking for advertising, or trying to get into a network, etc. But I have a feeling other people may use Urchin or similar log stats when they're promoting themselves. Which would mean my stats don't compare well to theirs.
I've certainly heard some bloggers quote extraordinary stats in my time - and have been skeptical without quite knowing why. Well now I know and I think others should too: sometimes people promote their sites with stats that are grossly exaggerated. If you want REAL stats, you need to get their statcounter.com stats or the advanced Urchin with UTM ones. There, now I have that off my chest ;-)
Google has acquired what I chose as the 'best of breed' Web-based word processing app in my recent ZDNet post Web Office Suite [news via TechCrunch] The Writely blog is rightly chuffed:
"...everyone told us it was crazy to try and give people a way to access their documents from anywhere -- not to mention share documents instantly, or collaborate online within their browsers. But that's exactly what we did. And since we launched the Writely beta in August 2005, many thousands of people have registered, and all of them came through word of mouth (and blog)."
So with the best of breed email and word processing services now in Google's upcoming Web Office Suite (it's undeniable now), and the Calendar looking good and ready to launch, that only leaves spreadsheet and presentation tools to come. Om Malik thinks Google Base is the Access killer. Hmmm, interesting times. Game on Microsoft! Office Live in its present form just won't cut it very soon...
Today I spoke to JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus about their latest
product release, pre-packaged "wiki applications". We also discussed the Web Office,
which I will post about separately on
ZDNet. JotSpot's latest product is a prebuilt wiki. Basically it's a wiki with set
templates and functionality, making it easy for people to use 'out of the box' for
specific uses. These so-called "wiki applications" will also have web app-like
functionality such as mashups, calendars, blogging systems, etc. So they are more than
simply wiki pages, they are full-fledged web applications.
The first two products out the door are Class Reunion Planner and Bug Reporter, but Kraus told me they are planning 30-50 such products this year alone. Plus JotSpot will be enabling third parties to create custom wiki applications - and onsell them. It's quite the wiki app ecosystem that JotSpot is planning...
JotSpot Class Reunion Planner
JotSpot's company strategy is to be "a platform for building collaborative web applications". Currently their reputation is as a hosted wiki company, because the wiki was the first application they rolled out.
During 2005, says Joe, they discovered that people used their wikis for a lot of different uses. On a personal level they used them for planning class reunions, family reunions, planning a wedding, making associations, organizing their sports teams. While on the work level, people used JotSpot wikis in 2005 for things like project management, building an intranet, tracking bugs, running a recruiting process, as an event calendar, etc. However JotSpot found that people had problems adapting their wikis for each specific purpose.
So the theory behind the new pre-packaged wiki applications, is to enable people to utilize wiki technology for the kinds of use cases Joe outlined above.
JotSpot Bug Reporter
The Bug Reporter is a fully-functional bug tracking application, in the form of a wiki. It'll cost $49.95 per month. The JotSpot Class Reunion Planner (cost: $39.95 per year) seems aimed at the post-Facebook.com crowd, potentially a lucrative business. As well as enabling the usual wiki functionaility of reading and writing a webpage, JotSpot's product has links to online maps, blogging tools, and other information from the Web - such as popular songs and movies from your graduation year (coincidentally the demo Joe showed me was for 1989, my graduation year from high school -- Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli were big back then... um, apparently...).
Tomorrow I'll post the second half of my interview with Joe Kraus, in which we discussed the Web Office.
Yahoo has announced four new APIs for its Developer Network: Photos, Calendar, MyWeb and Shopping. The Shopping 2.0 API is available now, while the Photos, Calendar and MyWeb read/write APIs will be available soon [updated - thanks Jeffrey]. While they'll be free to use for non commercial purposes, Ash Patel (Yahoo chief product officer) tells us there are commercial offerings coming soon.
Yahoo's new Application Gallery
I remember speaking with ex-YPN chief Toni Schneider about this last year and I was impressed by his vision for a commercial platform for APIs. I'm expecting Yahoo to really the ante with Google and Microsoft in terms of mashup ecosystems. Don't count out AOL and eBay either. [...]
The Register investigates. [via]
I knew Google was up to something big. It's always the quiet ones you need to watch...
Live.com, Microsoft's personalized start page, has just been upgraded with some impressive new features. Live.com program manager Sanaz Ahari sent me details of the release this evening. It was good timing, because earlier today I'd been using the old Live.com and having trouble! The new features are:
New-look Live.com - note the pages
Live.com program manager Sanaz Ahari told me the team has put a lot of effort into improving the "first run experience" of users. Live.com is being seen by Microsoft as the starting page of Windows Live as a whole, as well as being a great customizable homepage with the user at the center of their experience. Also this release sees the integration of the new Windows Live Search, which is another sign of the importance Live.com is assuming for Microsoft.
Windows Live search - with the infinite scroll bar
Sanaz noted there has been a lot of work done under the hood - on the infrastructure. live.com was built on the start.com incubation infrastructure and with this launch, said Sanaz, "we’ve deployed a scaleable, geofederatable, higher performance backend which we’re looking forward to growing in to."
New gadgets
There are also a host of new gadgets that have been introduced into Live.com. According to Sanaz they are:
All in all, this is a big improvement by Live.com. It's game on to the other personalized homepages out there!
TechCrunch has obtained screenshots of the as yet unreleased Google Calendar, called CL2. The leak came via Google's closed beta of about 200 participants. Apparently CL2 is a long way away from launch, but there are some meaty details in Mike's post.
CL2 looks to be a very strong product from Google (which has by no means been a given over the past year). Plus it seems to me that Google's much-anticipated Web Office Suite is well on the way to becoming a reality!
Microsoft has just released (or is about to) a series of new products: Windows Live Search Beta, Windows Live Toolbar Beta and the next version of Live.com. Details on my ZDNet blog.
One thing of personal interest to me is that a former Read/WriteWeb sponsor, web research product Onfolio, has been acquired by Microsoft and integrated into the Windows Live Toolbar. Congrats Onfolio!
I'll be testing out the new version of Live.com asap. I've actually been struggling with it half the day today, along with PageFlakes and Google Personalized Homepage. They are all unwieldy to use currently. For example half the Live.com gadgets I downloaded didn't work properly. It's early days for these products, but the user experience for all of them leaves a bit to be desired. So I'm keen to see what improvements Live.com has made...
ETech 2006 has started and it's the one conference this year which people kept telling me I should be at (but oddly, no one offered to pay my airfare...). Oh well, luckily I have my finger on the blogosphere pulse and so I'm going to post updates of my virtual findings over the next few days.
-
The
welcome: ("Attenuation is the next aggregator," predicted Dornfest. "I think there are some great businesses to be built on giving you less."
-- this precisely fits my
main techie theme this year: 2006 is The Year of the Filter...)
- Ray Ozzie’s clipboard for the web (Dave Winer has the details and see also Ozzie's blog post entitled Wiring the Web)
- New APIs from Yahoo and browser-based authentication (Dan Farber has the details: "At Etech, Yahoo is announcing APIs that hook into Yahoo Photos, Calendar, MyWeb and Shopping, as well as browser-based authentication.")
- From Coder to Co-Founder (Marc Hedlund tells techies how to become entrepreneurs -- "Momentum builds on itself -- make a prototype. Build something. Get things rolling.")
- Musical Myware (co-founder of last.fm talks about musical myware and 'attention')
- eTech 2006 Update via OPML (for the seriously geeky, TechNewsRadio is regularly updating his ETech notes in an OPML file)
Flickr pic by Laughing Squid, who has many more great photos on his site.
Updates
- Session transcriptions from O'Reilly Radar (nice work Nat)
- Witty photo captions by Valleywag (see also Nick's take on Tim O'Reilly's "fuck-you-up mustache"...)
- New Windows Live releases (some of the things I saw at Search Champs are being released now -- also note the news of Onfolio acquisition)
- Phil Windley has a lot of excellent ETech write-ups (the microformats one is of great interest to me currently)
- Kareem Mayan also has a couple of great ETech posts (the Attention: The *Real* Aphrodisiac session and one on Second Life)
- Ambient Findability ("Morville wonders in a world of more and more and bigger and bigger haystacks, how are we going to make our needles bigger?" -- okaaaay...)
