shyftr
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Shyftr made the news last year about their feed reader service which, while similar to Google Reader, triggered alarms about content theft. Since backing off from that idea, it has been working hard on a new product called the Shyftr Filter that also deals with RSS feeds, but in a completely different way. The new service centers around being able to refine just the content you want from RSS feeds by using a flexible set of search tools.
Announced yesterday (with early coverage from Louis Gray), the initial alpha has a public filter that lets anyone test the technology on a group of a few dozen feeds, and a registration-only Publisher area that allows users to add up to 5 of their own feeds to use with Shyfter Filter.
Flock has been getting a lot of flack from certain quarters. Mostly they're being (unfairly) tagged as a kind of symbol of the so-called Web 2.0 bubble. I've been dismayed by some of the venom that's been directed at Flock - some of it has been downright spiteful. I'm a bit saddened to see it's apparently prompted an outright ban of the phrase 'Web 2.0' in Flock's office. FactoryJoe wrote recently:
"WeÔøΩre viewed as a Web 2.0 poster child (and subsequently pegged for representing many of the things broken about it). Following OÔøΩReillyÔøΩs Web2.0 Conference it seemed that the phrase became a dirty word ÔøΩ as a catch-phrase, once it caught on with a wider audience it seemed to lose all relevance or meaning whatsoever.. Not like it makes much difference, but weÔøΩve had a ban on the phrase in our office stemming from around the same time."
Nice monitor! Photo by foolswisdom
I'm quite happy for Flock to go back to their Open Source roots and shun the Web 2.0 hype machine. No use going the Kurt Cobain route and letting the meatheads and metalheads get you down. But don't hide behind your Mac monitors too much, guys - the Web 2.0 community still loves you! :-)
UPDATE: Ben Barren tried to shield my eyes from this horrid picture, bless him, but I couldn't resist peeking...
Noooooooo....
This week: Microsoft Live, Flash Maps and the Mechanical Turk, Web 2.0 meet-ups all over the world, 2.0 Blog of the Week - Supr.c.ilio.us.
Microsoft Live wrap-up
The big news of the week was Microsoft's announcement of Windows Live and Office Live. My post entitled Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0 summarized all the news and my thoughts. Here are some extras and links, to wrap everything up for the week:
- On ZDNet, I compared the 'personalized start pages' of Microsoft, Google, Netvibes - and concluded that Netvibes can teach the other two a few lessons. Microsoft's live.com site in particular needs a lot of work.
- Mini-Microsoft was
uncharacteristically generous in his/her praise: "To me, we're filling the Alpha Geek
void for Microsoft technology. We're providing an alpha-geek portal and set of services
for them to build new, interesting results on-top of our services and gadgets and all
that other cool stuff."
Markoff at NY Times echoed my own views: "... [Live is] an important step in
extending Microsoft's reach beyond the desktop PC to smart phones and other
Internet-connected devices."- Om Malik
mapped Microsoft's competition and his post
MS to Macys is also worth a read. - A lot of designer folks rather unkindly
Gates presentation style to Steve Jobs (no contest, of course - and that's the way it
should be). - Finally a big thanks to Mike Arrington
and Dan Farber for the
excellent real-time notes at Microsoft's announcement, also
annotated photos of the event (I borrowed some
too).
Flash Maps and the Mechanical Turk
No that's not the sequel to the Jude Law movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It refers to the two other talking points of the week - Yahoo's new Flash-powered Maps product and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. TechCrunch had the scoop on Yahoo Maps and also covered the Turk. Mike's been on top of his blogging game these past couple of weeks!
Mechanical Turk is an Amazon.com web service that enables users to "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers [and] get paid for it." It took me by surprise because a) it was the first new thing we'd seen out of Amazon for some time; and b) what an innovative thing it is too!
Amazon was one of the first 'Web 2.0' big companies to emerge, in the mid-90's - if not the first. They were ahead of the curve in rolling out large-scale user-generated content systems, affiliate services, and APIs. So the Mechanical Turk may well represent the next generation of Web as Platform systems. We won't know for sure until we see if people actually use it, but I'm pleased to see that Amazon still has the developer edge to try new things.
Web 2.0 meet-ups all over the world
Gerald Bauer emailed me to advise of a free monthly Web 2.0 event series over in Canada (Vancouver, BC) organized by the Vancouver Web 2.0 Forum. Here are the details.
Over in the Valley, there's an upcoming BrainJams event called Making Web 2.0 Relevant. It's on 3 December at SRI in Menlo Park and the theme is translating human needs into web 2.0. These are the folks who brought you Web 2.1 in SF and they're sponsored by TechCrunch and Zazzle amongst others. I hope there'll be some serious podcasting going on, so I can listen in!
Closer to home, my cousins in Australia are getting into the Web 2.0 BBQ spirit. Ben Barren advises of a Melbourne BBQ on 11 November, as part of the Long Tail Camp. Paul Montgomery discusses the beer etiquette involved in this event:
"The most popular beer at the event will be a key metric for the eventual fate of Web 2.0 in Australia. VB: not good, a sign of it being dull and low key. Stella: not the best either, indicates too many dilettantes. Heineken: cripes mate, stick to Aussie beers ya galah. Foster's: stop pandering to American stereotypes of Australia, no one drinks Foster's here. Carlton Draught, Cooper's Pale Ale or Cascade Premium: now you're talking, champ... dot com 2.0 millions await!"
Strewth mate, I drink Stella Artois! I guess that makes me a dilettante. Oh well, put another shrimp on the barbie and save a place for me at a BBQ soon. Melbourne is where Web 2.0 is at in Australia, plus I've been there before and it's a great city. So I hope to visit again in the near future.
2.0 Blog of the Week
I'm going to do something a bit different this week. Usually I do a Post of the Week, but how about a Blog of the Week? This week I want to highlight Supr.c.ilio.us: The Blog. In a phrase, these guys are Snark 2.0. They keep us Web 2.0 pundits honest and make sure we don't take ourselves too seriously.
I first noticed Supr.c.ilio.us a few weeks ago in one of my vanity feeds, when they made some snarky remarks about me. So of course I had to subscribe. And I've since become addicted to their fine brand of snark. Here's one of their recent posts, a definition:
"user created content
Abbreviation. Refers to users that do not receive health benefits, steady paycheck or attend the company’s x-mas party, yet are able to use a networked computer. Tracing back to the days of AOL, the term has been made derogatory (wikipedia? that’s user created content!), only to be revived recently (we scale by aggregating user created content globally and presenting it locally). Often found on CL, social networks, and splogs."
Also check out their meta tagging site, Supr.c.ilio.us. Keep up the great work guys.
That's a wrap for another week!
Interesting NY Times article about Yahoo!. Some key quotes:
"The idea that human judgment can improve a search engine's automatic findings is hardly new. From the dawn of the Web's history - that is, over the last 15 years - companies have invented tools to help users assess the quality and relevance of information, often by relying on others' opinions. Examples include Amazon's user reviews, eBay's feedback ratings and "trusted networks" created on many sites.
What is different is Yahoo's systematic plan to build "community intelligence" into nearly all aspects of its operation - and in turn, to entice users to spend more and more of their time on Yahoo sites, where they can see Yahoo ads. The clearest example, of many I heard about, can be seen at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com, the beta version of a new search site."
(emphasis mine) Also a couple of great soundbites from Yahoo! staff:
"We're really about getting the average consumer to move their lives online."
"The value of the system is in the aggregate."
The word "system" was mentioned 8 times in the article - not sure if that was the NY Times reporter's particular obsession, or the word was used frequently by the Yahoo! people he interviewed.
What is Amazon Mechanical Turk? It's a web service that enables you to "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it."
Amazon describes it thusly: "...when we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?"
So here's my list of Web 2.0 things I want done, that people could do for me better than computers could:
10. Get an A-Lister to link to me every day (probably can be solved by someone doing various small favours for them, on my behalf).
9. Manually filter my Rojo account at least daily - especially removing the duplicates from my topic feeds.
8. Translate all the best Asian Web 2.0 blogs into English (seriously, I want someone to do that!)
7. Insert Technorati tags and all that other microformat crap into my posts.
6. Enter my blog details into the Ping-o-matic page whenever I post something - and while you're at it, submit my posts to Digg and Slashdot.
5. Click on my Google ads from time to time.
4. Listen to all the podcasts that I never have time to listen to - and report back to me with a summary of what they said.
3. Cook me some spicy noodles, the way Jing Jing in Palo Alto makes them.
2. Turn up to the TechCrunch BBQs on my behalf and constantly remind people that I'm the Father of Web 2.0.
1. Convince a Silicon Valley company to sponsor my US work visa.
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