Imagini Friends is an unusual new social network,
that calculates your "VisualDNA" and uses it to find other people that match your
choices. It's an application of Imagini, the
technology - which aims to understand the emotional preferences of consumers, using
VisualDNA. This can be used for marketing and advertising purposes, as well as social
networking.
Imagini Friends reminds me of those personality tests in magazines like Vogue. It's certainly addictive and, a bit like when you read your horoscope, when your profile is created you find yourself nodding your head and going: yeah, that sounds like me. After your profile is finished, you're invited to find other people with similar profiles - and contact them if it's a good match. I looked around the site for some scientific evidence that visual profiling actually works, but the closest thing I found was the use of an old cliche: "a picture paints a thousand words". Hmmmm. However when it comes down to it, the success or otherwise of Imagini will be determined by how compelling it is to use, whether users will return time and again to the service, and whether it has potential for network effects - it's got the first part, but not sure about the second two.
New
Zealand is the first country to experience the worldwide consumer launch of
Windows Vista on 30 January, due to its position on the timeline. New Zealanders
get the opportunity to buy Windows Vista in retail stores a few hours before
Australians, 13 hours before the UK and a day ahead of Americans. The 2007
Microsoft Office system is being launched at the same time.
It's about 1.30am NZ time on 30 January as I write this, so I guess some extra keen kiwi geeks will be ripping off the shrink-wrapping on their Vista OS right about now.
In this week's R/WW poll, we're asking whether you ever fake your Web identity - or even just part of it. Note that this doesn't count times when you are anonymous on the Web (such as almost all snarky blog comments). We're specifically asking about the times when you use an identity - e.g. online dating, peer-to-peer transactions sites such as craigslist or ebay, social networking sites like MySpace and Second Life.
See Jitendra Gupta's post today, Nobody Knows You're A Dog 2.0, for more on this topic.
Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO, and edited by Richard MacManus. The Top 100 is listed at the end of the analysis.
Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100.
But it's not just the sheer number of them that makes them worthy of attention; each one of these search engines has that standard "About Us" link at the bottom of the homepage. I call it the "why we're better than Google" page. And after reading dozens and dozens of these pages, I have come to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, they are right!
In order to address their claims systematically, it helps to group them into categories and then compare them to their Google counterparts. For example, let's look at the first thing that almost everyone sees when they go to search the Internet - the ubiquitous Google homepage. That famously sparse, clean sheet of paper with the colorful Google logo is the most popular Web page in the entire World Wide Web. For millions and millions of Internet users, that Spartan white page IS the Internet.
Google has successfully made their site the front door through which everyone passes in order to access the Internet. But staring at an almost blank sheet of paper has become, well, boring. Take Ms. Dewey for example. While some may object to her sultry demeanor, it's pretty hard to deny that interfacing with her is far more visually appealing than with an inert white screen.
Written by Jitendra Gupta of KarmaWeb and edited by Richard MacManus
On the internet it is easy to pretend to be somebody else.
Don’t like your name, adopt a new one. Don’t like the way you look,
Photoshop your picture. Think you are too young or too old, select a new
age. How is anybody going to find out anyway? As the now classic cartoon goes:
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
With the growing popularity of online dating, more and more people are asking: how do I know you are who you say you are? Also with the popularity of online peer-to-peer transactions, like the ones at Craigslist or eBay, it is more important then ever to establish that both parties are reliable. But how does one establish trust in an environment where it is easy to pretend? One way to do it is to share personal information, that can help the other party establish that you are indeed who you say you are. The problem with such an approach is that the information you give may be abused.
This problem has spawned a number of identity verification services. These services provide a verification-chain framework to both parties, while protecting sensitive information. These services typically work as follows:
These services provide value by acting as a mediator in an identity transaction. They create trust by certifying that the user is indeed the person he/she claims to be, without disclosing sensitive information about the user to the other party.
It's Saturday morning for me, Friday afternoon in Silicon Valley. Before I go off to the horse races this afternoon (because you needed to know that), here's a quick re-cap of the past week on Read/WriteWeb and in the Web world in general. I'll also highlight some of the great comments we got this week from our readers.
If there was a main theme on R/WW this week, it was next generation Web interfaces. On Monday we explored 3D interfaces and asked whether they are useful, or mere novelty. We pointed out that 3D interfaces at their current stage seem best suited to virtual worlds like Second Life - and things that complement that (like 3B's shopping inside SL). But we also noted some innovative use of 3D in product management (NZ's Right Hemisphere) and as a value add for communications and photos. Most people seemed to agree with this. As Art Wells of the company Rejuvenation commented:
"As "mass customization" and "build to order" increase their share of the market place, and more and more manufacturers learn how to allow customers to create their own products, 3d will become more and more critical."
Tony Parisi also agreed the future is bright for 3D, but warned:
"I predict a lot of gaffes along the way in terms of applications and UI design, especially if people fall prey to the conceipt of 3D beign an artificial representation of RL (real world). The "virtual mall" is a case in point."
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus
OpenID, RapLeaf, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Undisposable. All of these services have one thing in common - they make web development more granular. By granular, we mean they are making web development componentized and outsourceable. So as a web developer, you can outsource things like authentication, email check or trust system. This brings 2 main advantages:
Below, we take a closer look at the major granular service providers so that you'll better understand the concept and its advantages:
The Mobile Web isn't just
about the Googles and Yahoos of this world muscling in to the lucrative mobile content
market. The existing mobile network operators and handset manufacturers are also busy
adjusting to the Internet, to defend their turf and just maybe get a jump on their
competitors. On 31 January Vodafone will launch a
new open source community portal, called Betavine. It will be a research and development
space, run by Vodafone Group R&D. It aims to encourage collaboration in the area of
mobile and internet communications, so they will be targeting developers and early
adopter users in the Mobile Web arena.
For example, users will be able to download and test applications, plus comment and contribute on the forums and blogs. Developers can create projects and host applications, plus blog and interact with their users and the Betavine community. Indeed, interaction between developers and testers will be a key part of Betavine - Vodafone hopes it will provide them with a testing ground for the latest Mobile Web concepts and technologies.
Betavine is similar to Nokia's open source community, Maemo, which we recently discussed on Read/WriteWeb. It's good to see the traditional mobile companies 'opening up' a bit more in this era of Mobile Web, at least when it comes to development and new apps. We'll not mention walled garden general content and services for now ;-)
Paul Walsh, who was involved in the portal set-up, has more details over on the Segala blog. Paul can also hook you up with a pre-launch trial of Betavine, so if you're interested contact him.
Amazon
has just released a new Wikipedia clone, called Amapedia.
It's described as "a community for sharing information about the products
you like the most." So far Amapedia has had no promotion from Amazon, but
it was discovered today by
Rogers Cadenhead. Anyone with an Amazon.Com account can edit the site. Regarding the name, Amapedia appears to be a combo of the words Amazon and Wikipedia:
ama[zon][wiki]pedia.
Note that this is a different wiki product than what Alex Iskold was referring to in yesterday's post, on Amazon's use of tags, ajax, blogs and wikis. In that post we were discussing the ProductWiki feature, but it states on Amapedia's homepage that "Amapedia is the next generation of Amazon.com’s ProductWiki feature; all of your previous ProductWiki contributions were preserved and now live here."
The latest Read/WriteWeb poll has highlighted some interesting trends. We asked what type of RSS Reader do you use the most? Here are the results so far, from nearly 900 respondents:
1. Web-based (e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo) 55% (495 votes)
2. Desktop (e.g. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire) 18% (160 votes)
3. Start page (e.g. Netvibes, Pageflakes) 14% (125 votes)
4. Browser (e.g. Firefox Live Bookmarks, IE, Flock) 7% (62 votes)
5. Portal-based (e.g. MyYahoo, ThePortNetwork) 2% (21 votes)
6. Other (please comment) 2% (18 votes)
7. Email-based client (e.g. Thunderbird, Newsgator) 1% (11 votes)
8. I subscribe to emails from individual blogs 0% (3 votes)
Even though desktop RSS Readers are second-most popular, only 18% of the poll respondents use desktop readers as their primary means of accessing RSS feeds - well behind the 55% who use browser-based readers like Bloglines and Google Reader. A quick check of my site's Feedburner stats confirms that desktop readers are in the minority. In case you're wondering, Bloglines and Netvibes are most used by R/WW readers - although note that Google Reader stats are not currently counted by Feedburner and also Rojo has been temporarily removed. So Feedburner is under-counting RSS subscribers currently.
