Colorado based Intense Debate, the sophisticated blog comment system with the silly name, launched its public beta this morning. There are some definite kinks in the service still, but there's also quite a lot to take note of. The service offers a powerful combination of ease of use and feature richness; I'm impressed.
Intense Debate lets users set up good profiles that include easy access to their social networking pages around the web, you can friend or follow comments from particular users, there's some basic stats available to both comment leavers and publishers and threaded comments are available. It's got reputation, it's got lots of RSS, it's got quite a few widgets (like "top commenters on this blog") and it integrates with your blog's CSS. It's nice. I'm testing it out over at my personal blog, marshallk.com and there are a list of other blogs using it on the Intense Debate site. One issue I do see is that the commenting platform takes a moment to pull in its host blog's CSS, that's not ideal. I wonder if a copy of my stylesheet could be cached with Intense Debate. Throughout the site it would also be nice if avatars were larger, visual recognition of faces is huge in tools like this.
The comment plug-in market is a really crowded one, but there are some things about Intense Debate that warrant an extra close look. (Update: Wednesday morning saw a $1m VC investment in a more lightweight competitor, SezWho. TechCrunch coverage is good.
Recently launched Cofundos.org, from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web Research Group at the University of Leipzig in Germany, is a community funding site for open source software. The site allows non-coders to join forces to fund open source programming projects that might otherwise not get made. Software made as a result of these community-funded bounties must be licensed via the Creative Commons CC-BY or an OSI approved license.
The site essentially works like microPledge, which we wrote about in August. After someone posts a project idea, the crowd discusses and refines the idea and contributes to a project fund. Programmers then bid on the contract to make the software and the funders vote on who gets the bid. After completion, the project's funders vote one whether the programmer completed the task satisfactorily, and if so, the programmer is paid. Voting is weighted based on how much that person contributed (money) to the project's bounty.
Document sharing site DocStoc opened to the public today after months of a high-profile private beta. Similar to the already launched and funded Scribd, DocStoc aims to provide a place for you to post and discover professional documents on a wide variety of topics. Think sample contracts, sample press releases, proposals, etc. If DocStoc can keep itself from being overrun by crap, as has happened to Scribd, that itself would be a major accomplishment. Like Scribd, this L.A. based company has its own roster of high profile investors.
These sorts of sites face serious challenges, though. At public launch DocStoc has more than 12,000 documents already uploaded during the private beta. Most of those documents appear relatively well labeled and of high quality. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe this trend will continue.
Despite the valiant intentions of the site, there are almost zero comments or ratings on any of the documents. The company says it hopes that the precedent set by high quality docs at launch will facilitate community policing against low quality docs and spam. I question that; it might work, but the effort required to provide feedback on search results and document quality may be too high.
The fact that the company is giving away an iPod touch to the people who upload the greatest quantity of documents each week doesn't bode well for the quality of search results on the site. The words "Free iPod!" shouldn't appear on a reputable company's website, in my opinion.
I want DocStoc to work, and when looking for sample documents in the future I will give it several tries. Results so far are acceptable. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't be better off paying for a human-selected "best of" list, though.
According to Lee Lorenzen, of Altura Ventures, and AllFacebook, the "Social Ads" advertising service Facebook is supposedly set to launch next week will take Facebook ads outside the social network.
The rumored technology would work like this: Facebook would place a cookie on your computer (the site already requires users to have cookies enabled to log in), every time you visit a third-party site that runs ads utilizing the "Social Ads" product, they would be targeted based on your social networking profile data. So, theoretically, if you've professed your love of Pepsi on your Facebook profile, you might see Pepsi ads while reading the news at MSN.
Ad networks like DoubleClick and aQuantive already use cookies to track user behavior, that could theoretically be used to build a profile of which sites you visit. That ability does not necessarily sit well with privacy advocates who are concerned that these companies have too much information about users. What Facebook is reportedly planning to unveil would go beyond tracking your web browsing behavior and building a profile on what you like based on the sites you visit, however. Instead Facebook would use explicit data about your interests to target ads across the web.
The Associated Press is reporting that ICANN may consider shutting down the Whois system, which lets Internet users search for domain name registration information, because of disagreements over how it works. Privacy advocates in favor of shutting down the database feel that individuals should not be forced to give out private information -- which is then potentially available to spammers or scam artists -- in order to register a domain name on the Internet. Those who want to keep the Whois database operational, feel that it is a valuable tool for doing business and making sure you know who you are dealing with.
As the AP writes, the Whois database has many uses, "Law-enforcement officials and Internet service providers use it to fight fraud and hacking. Lawyers depend on it to chase trademark and copyright violators. Journalists rely on it to reach Web site owners. And spammers mine it to send junk mailings for Web site hosting and other services." There have also been reports that some registrars use Whois search data to register domains that could be lucrative in the domain aftermarket, a practice the New York Times likens to insider trading.
Steve Rubel has written a post bemoaning the lack of innovative Web products these days:
"...I miss the days of 2004 when the class that includes Flickr, del.icio.us and others started. They really were about changing the web, not making a quick buck (they did so only because they added value). There are companies still out there like them. Twitter is one I believe takes this approach. Automattic (the company behind Wordpress) appears to be another. Dave Winer also shares this spirt. He creates services like NYTimes River because it's fun and he thinks it will add value to our lives (and he is right).
However, most of the rest of today's net startups are only after the almighty dollar and while that's capitalism, it saddens me because it has done little but breed hubris."
Emphasis ours
It'd be easy to agree with Steve on this. Indeed in my wrapup of the recent Web 2.0 Summit, I said it was 'steady as she goes' and lacking in innovative startups. Other than the semantic apps that presented at the Summit, there was little evidence of disruptive technologies. It was still a well-organized and enjoyable conference, but the cutting edge was absent.
We've written before about PlentyOfFish, a leading online dating site that is run by a single person and is raking in money. Markus Frind is the singular force behind PlentyOfFish. At the time of our last review, June 2006, PlentyOfFish was earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense (around $3.5 M per annum).
I caught up with Markus today via email and asked how the business is doing now. He didn't want to get specific about earnings, but he said that POF will earn $10 Million + next year (which puts it at around $30k per day). So just in earnings, POF has grown rapidly over the past year or so. As well as Adsense, income now comes from banner ads and affiliate marketing. A May Wall St Journal article has a good general profile of Markus and his company.
There is one former fact about PlentyOfFish that has just become a myth - Markus hired his first employee a few weeks ago! This person is doing customer service, a task previously done by Markus and his girlfriend. So technically POF is a two-person company now, but that doesn't make quite as good a headline ;-)
Image credit: Newsweek
A Newsweek article makes the case for an alternative search engine to usurp Google and become the dominant 3rd generation search engine. Our own Charles Knight, from R/WW Network blog AltSearchEngines, features prominently in the article:
"If Google has been able to crush its search competition, it's not because it has perfected the art and science of Web searching. Far from it. Google is what the industry calls a "second-generation" search engine. First-generation engines like AltaVista found Web pages containing words that matched the user's search words. Google's innovation was to further rank a Web page by the other pages that link to it, on the somewhat shaky assumption that if a page is much-linked-to, it must be useful. Charles Knight, an analyst who runs the AltSearchEngines Web site, notes there's a plethora of good ideas for what a third-generation engine might bring to the party, and no shortage of companies trying to prove those ideas. "Each has shown they can do some aspect of a search better than Google can," says Knight."
Brijit is an interesting new service that supplies magazine abstracts for those of us too busy to read through every print publication we're subscribed to. If you don't subscribe to print periodicals anymore, you might want to skip this review. I subscribe to quite a few and really like what Brijit aims to do. The service says it "aggregates the world's best long-form content and abstracts it in 100 words or less." The company got a nice long write-up in the Washington Post today, but I'm sure potential users would rather read my shorter take on it here.
YourStreet is relaunching this week as a local news aggregator and mapping service. It's simple but really well executed; getting to review nice, smart little apps like this one is a big part of what I like about my job here.
The site originally launched this spring as a neighborhood-based social networking site but this news service probably has a lot more potential. The company was founded by an impressive group of executives with backgrounds at CNET, Sony Music Connect and elsewhere. That's going to go a long way in an otherwise crowded local news search market.
There's no shortage of local news sites, but the big differentiators here are two: the discovery process and the quality of the site's execution.
