Ajax start pages are easy-to-use, customizable webpages, allowing you to keep up with the latest news and add interactive content. You can add new RSS feeds and widgets, and move your content around the page. In some ways start pages are the successors to the portals of the 90's. They have yet to break into the mainstream, however the promotion of iGoogle and the presence of MyYahoo are facilitating the transition. Let's explore some of the top players - and also some you may not have been aware of.
For in-depth analysis on start pages, check out Read/WriteWeb's The Future of Personalized Start Pages and Business Models For Start Pages.
Back in January we reviewed a promising new online video startup out of China, called Mojiti. While there
are many so-called YouTube clones fighting it out on the Chinese web 2.0
battleground, Mojiti.com - which launched in November 2006 - caught our attention because it offered a fresh user experience. It wasn't just a YouTube clone, in other words. In Mojiti, videos are not just available to watch and
share - you
can annotate them too. With Mojiti you can add text and graphics
to existing videos.
The desire to network is as old as humanity and online social networking sites do seem to solve
a need that is different from simply using email, chat and blogging tools separately. However the idea that there will be one big social network platform is the purest form of baloney. The Internet is the platform. Period, end of story. The Facebook social graph platform pitch looks like a classic end of hype cycle attempt to inflate valuation, but as they say, that's another story!
It is an interesting exercise to attempt to theorize how online social networking is likely to evolve once we get past the hype cycle. The best way to start is by looking at the different types of human networks and the motivations that drive them. I see two distinct types of motivation. One is, "I want to communicate better with the people that I already know and trust". The other is, "I want to increase my visibility so that I can connect with more people".
Somerville, Massachusetts-based Firstgiving makes it simple for anyone to raise money for any accredited charity in the US. By providing donation and awareness tools to organizers, anyone can set up a fund drive in the name of their favorite charity. One of the most popular uses of Firstgiving is to use the site to raise money as part of a sporting event, such as a walk-a-thon.
For example, say you're planning to walk barefoot across the state of Wisconsin to raise money for cancer research. With Firstgiving, you could set up a page that would let people donate directly to the American Cancer Society using a secure form, which might make it easier to convince people to give you money -- since you never handle any of it and they can be certain of exactly where their money is going. Firstgiving makes it easy to raise money on your own as part of an organized event, or set up a page for an event/cause you come up with on your own.
The New York Times takes a step into the social networking realm today by launching a Facebook application called the New York Times News Quiz. The simple application presents users with a daily (Monday-Friday) 5 question, multiple choice quiz about the top news stories as determined by the New York Times editorial staff.
Users are assigned a "Times IQ," which is a numerical representation of how up-to-date they are on the current goings on in the world. Users of the Times app also get to compare their news knowledge with their friends and the rest of Facebook.
Brad Fitzpatrick recently
wrote an elegant and important post about the Social Graph, a term used by Facebook to describe their social network.
In his post, Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". He went on to outline the problems with it, as well as a broad set of goals going forward.
One problem is that currently you need to have different logins for different social networks. Another issue is portability and ownership of an individual's information, explicitly and implicitly revealed while using social networks. As was recently asserted in the Social Bill Of Rights and as has been advocated for a while by Attention Trust Principles, users want to own their personal information - including their chunk of the Social Graph.
Here are some of the highlights from the Read/WriteWeb Network over the past few days:
AltSearchEngine's List of Charity Search Engines: Charles has compiled a very useful list of charity search engines. He concluded that while none of the search engines on the list rated a perfect 5 star rating, several were ‚Äúvery good‚Ä? - namely GoodTree, GoodSearch, CharityCafe, and EveryClick (U.K. only). Also, with just one exception (SearchGive), they all use a Major search engine to power their results, so you should get good search results.
last100's Internet streaming: five U.S. television networks compared explores how major U.S. television networks continue to embrace Internet technology and put their shows on the Web for online viewing. However - writes last100's Daniel Langendorf - their online offerings remain sporadic and their Internet strategies feel like ‚Äúwe have to‚Ä? rather than ‚Äúwe want to‚Ä?.
Amid all the hoopla over social networks Facebook and MySpace, both major social networks have prominant sections for non-profit activity. Facebook's is called Causes and MySpace's is Impact. In this post we'll take a closer look at how Facebook and MySpace cater to non-profits. Incidentally, lest you think we're only focused on the big networks, in a follow-up post we'll look at the smaller non-profit enterprises on the Web. We got some great suggestions along those lines in the comments of our opening post in Non-Profits Week.
Facebook Causes lets users create online communities to advocate for various issues, charities and political candidates. A recent WSJ article noted that Causes was begun in May 2007, launched by a social-action start-up called Project Agape. WSJ also wrote that MySpace launched its Impact awards late last year, "honoring individuals and nonprofit groups that have successfully used the site to make a difference." MySpace members vote on the winners, who get $10,000. Also of course both Facebook and MySpace already host thousands of nonprofits' profiles.
MOSH (MObilize and SHare) is a new content sharing network from Nokia. It's a cellphone agnostic place to create and share games, applications, photos, video, ringtones and more. USA Today reports that MOSH is taking off in India, Russia, Vietnam and China - where most of the nascent service's traffic is coming from. MOSH hasn't yet officially launched in the US, so it's been relatively under the radar until now. Nokia spokesman CJ Martinez told USA Today that since its launch early last month, MOSH page views have surpassed 6.5 million and downloads have topped the 1 million mark.
Have you ever wondered what PostSecret would look like if all the confessions were written on toilet paper? Yeah, I never have either. But someone did, and that's why yesterday saw the launch of Artinimity, a collaborative photo blog "where people from all horizons express what they are thinking about... while sitting alone in a toilet." What that means is notes, confessions, and doodles scrawled on pieces of toilet paper.
I don't profess to understand this type of collaborative blog, but many of them are very creative and have struck a real nerve with people.
