Dead 2.0, the critical Web 2.0 site written by an anonymous blogger went offline earlier this week after pulling a Lieberman. A Lieberman being a site that goes offline due to excessive bandwidth use, causing the host to suspend the site like Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman experienced earlier this year in the run-up to the Democratic primary race against Ned Lamont.
Back to Dead 2.0: now the site has been password protected, forcing a login screen on anyone typing in the domain or attempting to visit the site through bookmark or search engine. It looks like “Skeptic” has chosen to disappear from the blogosphere. Will we hear more from the mystery blogger?
For those interested in getting caught up on this story by reading the Dead 2.0 archives, there are ways to do so. In most cases, Archive.org will have this content, but not in this case. But one site that does is Bloglines.
If you happen to know Dead 2.0’s previous RSS feed URL, you could add that to your Bloglines subscriptions, then refresh the feed to show everything Bloglines has on file. It looks like this will take you back all the way to the very first post on dead20.com.
I bring this up not to cause any damage to Skeptic, but to point out that it’s nearly impossible to erase the web’s memory. I happen to mention one tactic that works today, but I’m sure there are plenty more for people with some technical skills and a little motivation.
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“With the Hewlett-Packard scandal now triggering congressional hearings and criminal probes, it seems some of the computer giant’s executives are hesitant to talk about the firm’s extensive hunt for the source of leaks to the media.”
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“Mayer holds an average of 70 meetings a week and serves as the last stop before engineers and project managers get the opportunity to pitch their ideas to Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.”
Greenpeace is putting the pressure on consumer electronics companies to become more green by using less toxic chemicals in their product. One company they’ve chosen to single out in this campaign is Apple Computer who, according to Greenpeace, is very trend-forward with product designs outside of the environmental impact of their manufacturing choices.
“It’s time for Apple to use clean ingredients in all of its products, and to provide a free take-back program to reuse and recycle its products wherever they are sold. That means:
* Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
* Offer and promote free “take-back” for all their products everywhere they are sold.We’re not asking for just “good enough.” We want Apple to do that “amaze us” thing that Steve does at MacWorld: go beyond the minimum and make Apple a green leader.”
Greenpeace has also posed a ranking of the environmental impact of 14 top consumer electronics companies. According to Greenpeace, Nokia, Dell, Sony, and Samsung lead the group, while Apple, Acer, Motorola, and Lenovo are at the bottom.
I imagine there is a fairly strong correlation between people who buy Macs and people who are environmentally conscious. By bringing Apples less-than-stellar environmental record to the attention of Mac lovers through an Apple themed campaign site, Greenpeace may be able to motivate Apple’s consumers to hold the company they love more accountable for their manufacturing choices.
Being green is an in thing right now. If Apple becomes a leader in green computing, loyal consumers will have yet another reason to boast about their products to their friends and family.
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?¢Ç«®?ÏOregon?¢Ç«®Ç—¢s Regional Multiple Listing Service (RMLS?¢Çƒ˚¨¢) Board of Directors recently agreed to expand its database by spring 2007 to include information on energy efficient and green home features, making this region one of the few in the nation where th
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“The latest annoyance has been the self-indulgent claim of web 2.0 bloggers that MySpace has 100,000,000 users. Interestingly, this specific headline says accounts, but the article and subsequent articles all say users.”
This was originally a response to an email question I received from a colleague about social bookmarking sites, but it turned into a blog post. While it covers social bookmarking in general, it focuses primarily on del.icio.us for examples:
The advantages of social bookmarking sites over favorites:
1. Web based, so available from any browser and/or computer with web access.
2. Social bookmarks are “tagged” by bookmarkers with appropriate keywords. They can be navigated by tag or searched, so you run into less bookmarking management issues that you may with a traditional directory structure in a browser.
3. Items favorited by more than one person percolate up in popularity, helping you find interesting things to read on subjects that interest you.
An example of this in action is the online account for Technology Evangelist at del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/technologyevangelist
I bookmark things I find interesting and/or potentially interesting to the Technology Evangelist audience into that account using a button on my toolbar. I grab a relevant paragraph from the page I want to bookmark, click the button, then add a few keywords and I’m done. This makes it easy to find things later since I’ve added both a description and keywords to the bookmark.
Del.icio.us also offers a link publishing service that will automatically push latest bookmarks to our blog as a daily digest. Posts in the links category are generated through Del.icio.us:
http://www.technologyevangelist.com/links/
This type of linking seems to be more popular with “professional” networks than “social” networks, so social bookmarking is a misleading term. The most bookmarked items on del.icio.us tend to be “How To” items related to technology, blogging, and programming at this point, but that’s likely to evolve as bookmarking moves beyond it’s techie start. As of today, sharing business insights (well written blog posts on emerging industries, for example) than the latest celebrity news of the day. To get a feel for what people use del.icio.us for, check out their tag cloud of most popular tags here:
Larger font sizes denote categories with more bookmarks.
Social bookmarking fills a unique niche by helping organize truly useful information. It’s a bit different from the news of the day content covered by sites like Digg, although there is some overlap. People tend to bookmark content they found useful enough to consider revisiting at another time. This could be content that’s simply longer than they have time to absorb when first discovered, but it seems to lean toward particularly well written list of tips, tutorials, or essays on a topics that interest them.
Del.icio.us users can also subscribe to other del.icio.us user’s bookmarks. For example, Steve Rubel, an employee of Edelman, blogger at Micropersuasion, and prolific bookmarker on Del.icio.us with over 3000 bookmarks to date, can be found here.
A person could subscribe to his bookmark feed using a program like Bloglines using the RSS link near the bottom of the page.
One limitation of del.icio.us to date is the lack of privacy controls. All bookmarks are visible to everyone else on the system, so this may not be an ideal location to bookmark financial reports of acquisition candidates, the MySpace profiles of prospective employees or other things that may raise an eyebrow. Yahoo has a similar product called MyWeb that does offer the ability to mark bookmarks private, shared with friends, or public, but hasn’t taken off like del.icio.us. Yahoo acquired del.icio.us last December, but hasn’t done much to merge the two services to date as far as I can tell.
Is web based access to bookmarks the main motivation behind the use of del.icio.us? I don’t believe so. I think it’s driven more by a form of implied reciprocation where bookmarkers contribute what they’ve found interesting with the understanding that others will do the same, leading to a community built source of interesting content.
Marshall Kirkpatrick has put together a breakdown of the features offered by eight SMS networking services. I think the key sentence in his post follows (emphasis mine):
Techcrunch ?«¨™ A look at eight multi-person SMS services
“Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company - your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately.”
If it’s my call, here’s the call I’m making: multiperson SMS can be a feature or company. A feature seems more likely to me unless someone can figure out how to many enough money off the feature to legitimately turn it into a company. I’ve written about one of the services profiled - Dodgeball - here before, and think the service is a great way to keep in touch with friends by texting shout-outs of the latest bar (Groveland Tap), restaurant (Costco for pizza over lunch today) or event (Vikings game) one of us is attending. Based on the user-id numbers on Dodgeball.com, it looks like they have around 53,703 registered users, assuming the numbering started at 1 (welcome to Dodgeball, Dirk K.). I’ve never seen an ad on the site or in a text message, which would make me wonder how they were keeping the lights on, except they’re owned by Google. With that many registered users where only a fraction are likely active users, the ad deal opportunities may be somewhat limited at this point. The demographic information gathered by the service is impressive, but the audience remains small.
What’s the future of SMS networking sites? I have a theory based on the following thoughts: The biggest hold-up at this point are cell phone service’s ridiculous pricing for text messages (it’s cheaper to call someone for 3 hours at 9pm than to text, “I Love You!”), and duplication of social networks in more than one service. I know that the former (cell phone plans) is an issue because friends have told me they won’t join Dodgeball because they don’t want to pay for the texts. Plans will likely find some sanity over time, but for now, that’s hard to overcome. Services with additional charges ON TOP of phone charges are going to be fighting a major uphill battle. I can’t even imagine asking a friend to join a service called Moblabber that will cost them $0.30 per message plus their phone charges or Loopt for $2.99/month.
Requiring duplication of social networks is where this game will be won or lost. Why should I have to invite all of my friends to join yet another social networking site just so we can send SMS broadcasts to each other when this could simply be integrated into a social networking site we already use like MySpace or FaceBook? If that’s the case, this is a feature rather than a company. Of course, that feature may come from something that started as a company if billion dollar companies like MySpace and Facebook are too lazy to build out the feature themselves.
If I had to pick a future winner in this space as of today, I’d go with Facebook. Why? Because Facebook:
1. Is already are dabbling in this space with Mobile Alerts.
2. Has a large social network in place, thus avoiding social network duplication
3. Would build additional demographic information Facebook could use for local advertising.
4. Would give Facebook users an even more addicting social networking experience on their mobile phones.
The only way I can imagine a SMS networking feature to succeed as a company is if it listens to Leslie Orchard and provides a painless way to sync social networking contacts between services like this. But in the case of SMS networking, I think this will still fall short of what Facebook could do in this space.
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“For those participating in the “Guess How Many Jellybeans in Today’s FeedCount Chicklet” contest, you may have noticed that TechCrunch recently surpassed the 100k subscriber mark. Given this major milestone, we asked Michael if he’d be willing to open th
Ross Mayfield writes at WebProNews about maxing out his Gmail account and what a terrible mess he’s in due to Gmail’s limited tools for finding the huge file attachments that are clogging his inbox. Mayfield mentions that he’d much rather lay out some cash than get into an inbox management game, but that’s not an option at this point.
“While there are some good tactics for reducing Gmail volume, the solutions I want are not available to me:
* I want to whip out my credit card and buy more storage.* I want to not only search to find deletable emails, but sort. I can make a massive list of emails with attachments, but I can’t sort to eliminate the top 20 files that are undoubtedly hogs.
* I want to keep my user pattern of being a piler, not a filer, and relying on search for recall
* I don’t want to have to offload my archive onto my client and end up having two seperate places to search
Unfortunately, for now, I’m back to the user experience I’ve had with webmail. Constantly tending to an inbox at the limit instead of actually getting work done.”
Google trained him to not throw anything away with this message on Gmail’s homepage:
Lots of space
Over 2769.027130 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.
…but that turned out to be bad advice for this email power user.
What would you do in Max’s position?
Frank Gruber, AOL’s latest fresh, new, and exciting employee posted about the launch of AOL’s new Pictures service:
AOL Pictures Launches With New Features : Somewhat Frank
AOL Pictures also offers an Ajax interface an has introduced tags, comments and subscriptions, which are standard web 2.0 features but may be new to AOL users. AOL Pictures allows you to edit photos inline which I found extremely helpful as I currently have to use Preloadr to edit my Flickr photos outside of Flickr site itself.
While Frank mentions the inline photo editing (very cool) and touches on the AJAX interface that allows for easy sorting of photos, he left out what seems like the most impressive feature to me: AOL Pictures has no upload limits, no storage limits, doesn’t resize or compress your images, and is totally free. Or, as AOL puts it: “Free, unlimited storage of your photos in original resolution.”
That’s an impressive offer.
Additional features that stand out to me include Private Albums which seem to allow users to create groups of photos that have limited sharing to friends you choose. This is something sorely missing from Flickr that currently only allows privacy levels of private, family, friends, or public for each photo, so there is no way to allow only SOME of your friends to view a given photo.
Integration of AOL Pictures with AOL Mail is a nice touch. I imagine Yahoo will eventually do this with Flickr and Google with Picasa. Both have ways of doing this today, but not from within the mail platform as far as I can tell.
While AOL won’t get me to ditch Flickr based on the features outlined above, I could see this being very popular with typical AOL users. The mail integration, inline photo editing, and free unlimited storage of uncompressed or resized images is one heck of a great offer for AOL’s core audience.
Thank you to Rick Klau for writing a follow-up post about Bill Tancer’s analyis of “homes for sale” searches and their correlation with actual home sales. A month ago, Tancer publised a post on his Hitwise blog describing a correlation between those two variables. I wrote about it here, calling the conclusion into question (yes, I’m quoting myself):
Do Searches for “Homes for Sale” Correlate with Sold Homes?
“Intuitively, does that make any sense? People can’t make a decision about which iPod they want to buy in two weeks to a month, much less a home. And this doesn’t account for the time between an accepted offer and the actual closing. While there likely is a correlation between the two sets of data presented above, the time line must be considerably longer than Tancer suggests.”
So, a month has passed, a new month’s data on home purchases is available, and what does it say? That Tancer’s prediction was correct.
