From the blogging-as-a-service department, here's a tool I think any app development team could use. BetaBait offers a simple proposition: sign up to try new apps on one side, sign up to find beta testers on the other.
It's a free, email-driven service. When you join, you're on the daily email list, which breaks down the apps by category. BetaBait charges $50 for a sponsor slot at the top of the email, so readers see sponsor apps first. That's it. If you've got an app, there's no reason not to use it.
In the words of Nova Spivack, we are approaching The Sharepocalypse. The real-time Web sounded like a great idea, but it has become impossible to manage. The success of social media has proven, ironically, to be its biggest challenge. The services we already use are getting busier, and whole new networks are popping up all the time. Email used to be the only problem. Today, the info streams are legion.
It's hard enough being a normal user, but some have millions of people tweeting at them! How are they supposed to process all those messages? In the Information Age, you'd think more data would be a good thing, but on the social Web, the opposite is true. But the aforementioned Nova Spivack - along with co-founder Dominiek ter Heide - has just unveiled Bottlenose, and it could be the tool that helps us avert The Sharepocalypse in the nick of time.
These days there really is a social network for everything. Formspring.me is centered around asking questions and receiving answers. Quora is focused on exchanging knowledge. Favo.rs is a new social network that hopes to build online community around a single concept: founders and professionals can gather here and offer each other help. It's so simple that it just might work. Serial entrepreneur Adam Rodnitzky co-founded Favo.rs, which is focused on entrepreneurs, small business people and independent workers who don't have the benefit of a large company's built-in network.
An app called Path launched its version 2 do-over yesterday. "The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love," it calls itself now. I ignored this app until today. All I saw from version 1 was emoji spam in my Twitter stream. Let's take it as read that version 1 failed to catch on, hence version 2. How does an app help you "share life with the ones you love?"
The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.
Yesterday, the world got it's umpteen-millionth iPhone app for recommending your favorite things to all your social media friends. This category is so overstuffed that there were probably several such launches yesterday, but I'm referring to Stamped, an NYC-based startup founded by former Googlers and backed by Google Ventures. Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, is an advisor, and so is celebrity chef Mario Batali. It's a high-profile launch, and it shows in the distinctive design of the app.
Do we need another app for recommending cafes and sushi bars to each other? No. But perhaps we should get rid of the older ones and keep Stamped. Its distinguishing feature is the lack of 5-star ratings. If you like something, you just stamp it with approval. Stamped is satisfying to use; there's no guesswork involved. With Google's voracious need for consumer data about local businesses, no wonder Google Ventures backed it.
Trapit, a personalized tool for discovering Web articles, opens to the public today. Trapit crawls roughly 100,000 sites, adding more sources every week, to provide users with the most relevant content from deep within the Web, not just the popular or SEO-spammy results. It's built on the same AI technology as Apple's Siri, which means it learns what interests you and gives you better suggestions over time.
You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.
5 Days of Gimme Bar is what they're calling it: the extended roll-out of a beautiful new service for saving links of interest from around the web. After nearly two years of development, starting today and for the next five days, San Francisco design firm Fictive Kin is letting new users create accounts on Gimme Bar.
What is it? It's a visual bookmarking, text snipping, whole web page archiving, public/private link saving and sharing service with Dropbox integration, a (submitted) iPhone app and a developer platform for integrating Gimme Bar features into other applications. It's pretty remarkable - but is it good enough? The web is full of social bookmarking apps, a lot of people love social bookmarking apps - but not enough of them seem to love it for startups like this to thrive.
Buffer, an app that stacks up your tweets and automatically publishes them at the best times for engagement, just launched its free Android app. The app allows you to add any Web page to your Buffer, which you can then edit, manage and view analytics. It supports multiple accounts, which you can navigate with a swipe.
Buffer analyzes social data and automatically publishes your updates at the times when most of your followers are awake and clicking. This summer, Buffer studied its user data and found that it increases clicks on Twitter links by 200% and doubles the amount of retweets.
If Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers were created brand-new today, in the age of the Internet, what would they look like? Ryan Budke has some ideas: "I will never forget the day I saw Sesame Street do a tour of a crayon factory - then I went to school, held a crayon in my hand and thought 'I know how this was made!'"
Budke thinks that same kind of content, simple video about how things work, can be delivered in new ways thanks to new technology. "Tivo changed how we watch things 15 years ago, but studios still program for TV networks and the theaters," he says, "it's not being made for how we consume content today." Budke's new company Project Comet has raised venture financing and is producing video for the way he believes content is consumed today: across multiple mobile devices, rich with visual learning and by subscription. His first public offering is called Looking Glass. It's a children's iPad app with more than 100 high-production, by-subscription, short videos about how the world works. It's probably not good enough to succeed yet, but the business model is interesting and there's clearly a lot of potential.
MyLife.com, a "people search" engine that searches across social networks, has just launched a new feature called "Personal Relationship Management" (PRM), and it's much cooler than it sounds. It's a browser-based service that lets you view your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds all in one stream and reply, like, retweet and so on as needed.
This PRM stream appears on the 'Home' screen, from which you can launch all kinds of searches for old classmates, colleagues, singles and such, using MyLife's existing people searches, already in use by over 60 million people. It's a 'freemium' site, and the paid features give you more access to features like 'Who's Searching For You,' showing you people with whom you aren't already connected.
