Last month a new travel social network called Tripwolf launched into private beta. The site offers a variety of content, including both professional editorial and user-generated reviews of destinations as well as a Google Maps mashup that layers users' photos onto a world map. Although Tripwolf is yet another travel site in an already extremely crowded niche, they've found some ways to differentiate themselves from the other sites out there. The end result is a good-looking, informative web site that's also a lot of fun to use and explore.
Ameritocracy, which just launched into invite-only public beta, is a new political site that helps people cut through the noise and rate and review political information for credibility and relevance. The site helps users to sort through the sea of information we're pummeled with via the media each day and pull out the more credible and relevant bits, while working together to discredit the information that isn't on the level. 100 ReadWriteWeb readers can get access to the site right now by signing up with the invite code: "readwrite"
Adobe Media Player (AMP) is an AIR application filled with TV shows and videos clips (see our review here). The app, first launched as a beta last September then as version 1.0 in February, includes content from MTV, Comedy Central, Universal Music, PBS, Fine Living, Food Network, CondeNet, and they keep introducing new shows all the time. This week, Adobe added additional programming from CBS and MTV Networks, but the real fun to be had with AMP is in importing your favorite feeds to make AMP your own, personalized AIR app for TV viewing.
According to the Zuula blog, former search king pretender Accoona has finally given up on becoming a major search player. When Accoona was officially launched in December 2004, at a ceremony featuring Bill Clinton, Accoona claimed to have search technology that would be "more efficient than the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN." Accoona was built using "artificial intelligence technology to derive the meaning of words typed into a search." Sadly for them, it fizzed and their expected IPO never happened.
Semantic search engine Hakia today announced a set of APIs that opens up their natural language processing and search platform to developers. Hakia's Syndication Web Services really comes in two parts: search queries, which allow developers to add web search functionality leveraging Hakia's five billion page index, and XML feed calls, which give developers access to Hakia's underlying natural language processing technology. The latter of the two is clearly the more compelling of the offerings.
Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface.
It's a great little idea that could help breath new life into the wiki community. We would love to see the extension become a standard part of Firefox.
While some of our European readers may snicker if I were to complain about having to pay $4.10/gallon to fill up my car's gas tank, the fact is that across the world many people are feeling pressure at the pump. There are some who argue that the environmental benefits of high gas prices, which are changing our energy consumption habits for the better, outweigh the economic problems pricey fuel creates. But one unexpected benefit of rising fuel costs might be felt on the web, where high gas prices may help to drive adoption of web apps, says Google vice president Vinton Cerf, according to the AFP.
Yesterday, the unfortunate but none-too-surprising news about the departure of Flickr's co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield broke out across the web. In light of Yahoo's recent troubles, not to mention the small but notable list of other resigning Yahoo employees, some users who have relied on Flickr's service for years are starting to wonder about its future. Is it time to look for an alternative?
Popular mobile browser provider Opera released a demographic report about their users today that provides some valuable, if sometimes unsurprising, insights into just who is accessing the web on their mobile phones. The two primary take-aways: 88.1% of people using the mobile Web around the world are male and most people using Opera Mini are between the ages of 18-27
Those big conclusions may be relatively unsurprising but the study also includes a number of other tidbits that might be news to you, as they were to us. It's a really interesting snapshot of different cultural contexts and technology use patterns.
Last night at Guardian News & Media's internal Future of Journalism conference, Arianna Huffington revealed that her Huffington Post property is planning to expand into local news. Initially, the site will launch an edited news aggregation site (similar to the main Huffington Post web site) localized for the US metro area around Chicago, Illinois. The site will be managed by a single editor to start. "We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began," Huffington said to the conference attendees.
