*michael parekh on IT*

ON GOING FROM TWITTER TO FLUTTER

FUN & FICTION

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how Twitter's 140-character "micro-blogging" limit was critical to it's overnight success.  Now Slate takes this idea further in a "mockumentary" and introduces us to "Flutter":

Part of what makes this so funny of course is how close it is to something that could very much be real, especially the bit about text streaming across one's glasses.

ON JIGSAW ACCELERATING THE STATUS QUO

GO WITH THE FLOW?

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is upset about a new start-up Jigsaw, that in effect is creating a marketplace for people's business card information.  As he explains:

"Well, just as soon as one company stopped being evil, another one has stepped in to take its place. Jigsaw is a marketplace for contact information, and it is very efficient.  (Author's note:  The other company Michael is referring to is Plaxo, which is the grand-daddy of contact info companies, but works very differently).

It boasts detailed personal contact information for 2.5 million people, and 7,000 new people are added every day. If you want the name, title, email address, direct phone line and/or address of any executive of any company, there is a very good chance Jigsaw will already have it in its database and will sell it to you."

Where Michael gets upset is here:

"Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people. See the demo (and note the other demos on that page as well). Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information.

That’s right, the next time you hand out a business card to someone or otherwise divulge your contact information, you may be handing it out to the entire world."

While at first glance I start to get riled up against Jigsaw reading Michael's post, I tend to calm down upon further reflection.  Why? 

Well, as Michael himself explains above, there is a whole industry focused on garnering business contact information through a wide range of means and selling it both electronically and in printed directories.  In fact, they've been doing this for decades.  And charging an arm and a leg.

It's the bane of salespeoples' existence in many an industry.

What Jigsaw seems to do is accelerate the process of collecting and updating the information, and making it a lot less expensive if not free.  In that context, Jigsaw is collapsing yet another off-line business model much in the way Craig's list has collapsed the paid-classifieds business.

It's taking Plaxo and Linkedin to the next level (and yes I know, Linkedin the "least evil" here in how they operate).

At least Jigsaw doesn't focus on home addresses and contact info, yet.  And if and when they do, they'll be accelerating yet another off-line industry that has been buying and selling home addresses and contact info on hundreds of millions of consumers for decades.

In fact, taking a step back, it just seems that companies like Jigsaw are simply bringing the "efficiency" of the internet (both good and bad), to the direct marketing industry.

As Scott McNealy pithily said a while ago about the loss of privacy in the internet era, "Just get used to it".  You may think I'm being fatalistic, but I choose to look at the glass half full here.

ON SEO'S "WHITE-HAT VS. BLACK-HAT" GAMES AND THE BYPASS BATTLES

YIN AND YANG

(UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has a story that supplements this post)

Newsweek has a brilliantly written article titled "Hotwiring your Search Engine", focusing on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry and the Search industry, written by Brad Stone.  It's brilliant not because of the topic itself, which needs to be grokked more than ever by mainstream audiences, but because how it frames the story in the eternal and universal language of good vs. evil, aka black vs. white. 

It has "good guys" and "bad guys"...those who use "evil", "unsavory" methods to steer internet searches for their nefarious purposes vs., the good guys, who play by the rules, and use SEO tactics to benefit their clients. 

An excerpt:

"Search engines like google, Yahoo and MSN have a conflicted relationship with SEOs. They deplore the so-called black-hat SEOs who use unsavory techniques, like spamming the Web with dummy pages full of links, in an effort to make their sites appear popular.

But they are increasingly tolerant of ethical or "white hat" SEOs like Fishkin, who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site.

Earlier this year Google engineer Matt Cutts started a blog directed at the SEO community, dispensing tips on how to make sites more visible to the automated software "spiders" that catalog the Web. It's good for Google and SEOs: better-organized sites increase the amount of content in Google's index, while improving SEO rankings."

In other words, it's almost Spy vs. Spy. 

It's done so well, that it even got a positive review by Google's Matt Cutts, mentioned above.  It's a fascinating article if you're not familiar with the subject matter.  Recommended.

But this post is NOT about just about SEO being used for good and evil.

To borrow the framework from the Newsweek article, it's about "white-hat" content companies that are emerging to battle the "Bypass Battles" and logjams being created by the Mainstream Media (MSM) industry's fear of the "black-hat" content "usurpers" and "thieves" out there, whether the content is music, books or video.

I've already referred to one of the "white-hat" content entities in a previous post on how the NBA is planning to systematically digitise and make available to fans 60 years of video content from it's archives.

Well, the Wall Street Journal has a story this morning about another "white-hat" content company that's taking a "brave" step, this time in the book publishing industry.  Titled "HarperCollins Plans to Control it's Digital Books", the article explains:

"In the latest salvo in the fight over the future of books on the Internet, one of the country's biggest publishers said it intends to produce digital copies of its books and then make them available to search services offered by such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com., while maintaining physical possession of the digital files.

News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers Inc. hopes to head off the prospect of these big Internet companies taking charge of books that it has purchased, edited and published.

Its move to digitize its active backlist of an estimated 20,000 titles and as many as 3,500 new books each year comes at a moment when technology companies and the publishing industry are wrestling over rights and economic models for books online. HarperCollins's effort to make search companies use its digital copies is an aggressive response to anxieties felt by publishers worried that they will lose control over their intellectual property.

Along with a recent initiative by Bertelsmann AG's Random House, the initiative signals a growing desire by publishers to control and participate in some of the new online uses of their books."

On the surface, it seems as positive, proactive step by HarperCollins, that offers a braver compromise with the Googles of the world than previous positions of it's book industry peers.  The mechanics would work as follows:

"Instead of sending copies of its books to various Internet companies for digitizing, as it does now, HarperCollins will create a digital file of books in its own digital warehouse. Search companies such as Google will then be allowed to create an index of each book's content so that when consumers do a search, they'll be pointed to a page view. However, that view will be hosted by a server in the HarperCollins digital warehouse. "The difference is that the digital files will be on our servers," said Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins Publishers. "The search companies will be allowed to come, crawl our Web site, and create an index that they can take away, but not the image of the page."

This would prevent such Internet companies from selling a digital copy of that book unless HarperCollins decided to partner with them as a retailer. "We'll own the file, and we'll control the terms of any sale," he added.

The company hasn't decided on its strategy for selling directly to the consumer."

It's encouraging to see moves such as this from the mainstream media.  Just as in the SEO industry, where the first moves were mostly by the "black-hat" operators and gave way eventually to the emergence of "white-hat" operators working with the industry, it's encouraging to now see some "white-hat" content providers stepping up to the plate, taking some chances, and putting more than just their toes in the waters of a user driven Internet.

Oh, and what's the link between the SEO battles cited above and the on-going Content Bypass battles discussed later in this post?

Well, if you think about it, when content providers (aka MSM) get over their fear of putting their content on line, AFTER having figured out the mechanisms by which they and their constituents will get paid, guess what they're going to do next.

Why, they're going to go into "white, gray AND black-hat" SEO operations for their content in a way that'll make today's SEO battles look like kids playing cowboys and indians...because the ultimate prize is the ATTENTION of users...because that's where the money is and will be ever more.

We're slowly but surely, on our way to Web 3.0.

ON GOOGLE TESTING "CLICK-TO-CALL" ADWORDS & eBAY/SKYPE

"CALL ME, PLEASE"

(UPDATED)

Looks like eBay and it's $4 billion plus acquisition Skype (via memeorandum)may soon have company in testing the emerging "Click-per-Call" market from Google. 

Greg Yardley has a detailed post titled "Google tests out Click-to-Call AdWords" with accompanying screen-shots (click image on left to enlarge).

While it's not unexpected that the "G" in GYMAAAE would potentially compete with the "E" in this market, it is of note that Google is already in test phase with the approach and technology (from an unnamed thid party, according to Search Engine Watch).

Both giants will join a number of start-ups like Ingenio already in this nascent market.  Of course, Ingenio recently teamed up with Yahoo! as Search Engine Roundtable reported a couple of weeks ago, so the "Y" is potentially in the game as well.

(UPDATE 10.24.05:)  And Om Malik has a good post up highlighting Microsoft's recent entry into this market as well.  And Manthan mentions AOL is integrating it with it's Search as well.

Timing for all participants will continue to be important given the obvious appeal of the market and it's potential to be a meaningful business.  As I noted in the post on the eBay/Skype acquisition,

"...(the) opportunities to extract any kind of pricing for voice communications at all, may be fleeting, like a fistful of sand running through one's fingers."

Of course, eBay's monetization of the feature is likely to see paid-search supplemented with  transactions, but it's not clear yet.

Overall though, it's not just about putting up the little telephone icons next to the paid-search links, nor it is just about the underlying internet telephony infrastructure. 

Those things are important, but of most importance is having the correctly tweaked algorithms to help place and price the ads, along with the massive page views for placement opportunities.

Greg also points to an informative "frequently asked questions or FAQ" page on the Google site regarding the new advertising feature.

What's particularly admirable, and I guess "so NOT evil", is the effort Google goes to make sure the advertiser or any other marketing entities DO NOT get the user's phone number.  As the FAQ explains in the first point,

1. What's the phone icon on Google search results? How does it work?

We're testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.

Here's how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click 'Connect For Free,' Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party. Then, chat away on our dime.

We won't share your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. When you're connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked so the advertiser can't see it. In addition, we'll delete the number from our servers after a short period of time.

This does not work both ways, as the last point  explains:

1. Whose caller ID do I see when connected?

The advertiser's number appears on your caller ID when Google connects you. This way, you can save the merchant's number for future call-backs.

Google of course is using it's Jabber-based internet telephony infrastructure for the underlying voice telephony.  Om Malik recently had a good post on that and possible monetization of VOIP features.

On a separate note, as Oliver Thylmann points out:

"The amount of things Google is doing is starting to get a little bit scary..."

Overall though, this "click-to-call" feature has  potentially great utility for users. 

Anecdotally, I know I don't click on the unobtrusive Google ads a lot (see recent post on this).  But when I do, it's for a specific purpose, like looking for turkey recipes online with the family yesterday.

If there had been a little telephone icon next to the Butterball "Turkey Help" site last night, it sure would have been more convenient than scrolling through a bunch of text while trying to speed-read the turkey recipes.

Of course, some would maintain that it's just as easy for consumers to dial the toll-free number in a paid-search ad if they want to talk to the vendor.  The toll-free feature would be expensive for the vendor, and would preclude smaller and/or local vendors from using the feature.  An internet telephony based feature on a per-call basis would obviously be much less expensive for the vendor than the toll-free line. 

But there's an important benefit from the consumer's perspective to keep in mind as well.

But as VC David Beisel eloquently explains in a worth-reading post titled "Friction is Multiplicative":

"One of the lessons that I’ve learned through my own experience with web-based consumer-facing services is the importance in reducing friction between and before desired actions.

Any element of a service that would cause a user to either hesitate or initiate an extra step in the process before a desired action should have a solid reason why it’s incorporated.

Of course, this rule manifests itself a product strategy level – is there a download to initiate, registration to complete, or new behavior to learn in order to use a service? But this guide also governs granular tactical decisions – how many inputs fields should be included or how is a page laid out?"

Every little detail matters in terms of reducing friction, just as Google initially figured out with it's spartan Search page with the multi-colored logo almost seven years ago.

P.S.

For those interested, Search Engine Watch has an on-going  forum discussion thread on the Google Click-to-Call Advertising.

ON REACHING THE HOLY GRAIL OF THE $100 LAPTOP

HAND-CRANKED INTERNET

Nicholas Negroponte's done it!  MIT, his base of operations, announced the following (via Pocket-lint of the UK):

"MIT has unveiled its $100 hand-cranked laptop computer to the United Nations technology summit in Tunisia and said that it hopes to make millions of the devices to give to the poorest people in the world.

The lime-green machines, which are about the size of a text book, will offer wireless connectivity via a mesh network of their own creation allowing peer-to-peer communication and operate in areas without a reliable electricity supply."

Back in July, in a post titled "On how long to low-cost, non-Microsoft mobile PCs", I outlined the various commercial and charitable initiatives underway to more affordable computers.  Specifically, I noted:

"The current "holy grail" for low-cost computers is highlighted today by both philanthropic efforts like MIT Lab Nicholas Negroponte's drive for the sub $100 laptop for developing countries, and commercial efforts by entrepreneurs in developing countries like China, India and Brazil. 

The screen is the chief impediment here, as are some other components, not the least of which is the cost represented by Microsoft Windows operating system, and applications.  Those software products are typically priced as developed world prices even in the developing world.

Well, it looks like these challenges have been overcome, with these machines likely to be available next year at the earliest.  The specs of the machine are impressive:

"The computers operate at 500 MHz, about half the processor speed of commercial laptops, and will run on Linux rather than Microsoft’s or Apple’s Operating systems as previously hoped by the two companies.

The computer uses a screen from a portable DVD player, which can be switched from colour to black and white to make it easily viewable in bright sunlight, said Mary Lou Jepsen, the project's chief technical officer.

MIT plans to have units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007. Manufacturing will begin when 5 to 10 million machines have been ordered and paid for in advance."

Wouldn't it be interesting if these "non-profit" $100 machines morphed into commercial products through the joint efforts of the same technology sponsors?  Kind of an "open-source" laptop.  Stranger things have happened.

As a side note, there's another place where children's electronic products may produce ideas if not offshoots relevant for the "grown-up" computer market.  David Pogue of the New York Times has an almost inspirational article reviewing the new $100 "pentop computer" called "The Fly" from LeapFrog, the makers of LeapPad.  As David puts it:

"STAGGERING possibilities await a pen that can read software right off the page as it moves, and the Fly package comes with a sparkling sampler. For example, as you tap countries on a world map, the pen pronounces their capitals or plays their national anthems.

On a glossy, fold-out mini-poster of a disc jockey's setup, you can tap buttons to get music samples, or tap turntables to produce record-scratching sounds; then you can record your own compositions or compete, memory-game style, against other players. There's even a sheet of stickers that, when tapped, produce appropriate sound effects. (For my two elementary-schoolers, the belching mouth alone was good for 20 minutes of hilarity.)"

There's undoubtedly a whole number of cool applications something like this could be put to use in the computing market for adults.  And it's a cool gift for kids on your shopping list this Christmas.

In the meantime, I have a suggestion of where MIT, Negroponte, and the UN could get additional funds to pre-pay the order for 10 million machines.  Sell a bunch of them in the industrialized countries at $200 a pop, with the proceeds going towards this worthy cause.  Perhaps offer it in colors other than lime-green. 

Even tie it with some celebrity telethons for good measure.

In fact, borrow a page from Apple's book, and do a Bono-themed laptop and sell it for $300.

I know I'd be in line for some.

 

ON MICROSOFT'S SCOBLE TAKING ON OM MALIK'S "NO-GYM" CHALLENGE FOR 100 POSTS

DO GOOD UNTO OTHERS

Well, Microsoft's Robert Scoble is taking up Om Malik's "No-GYM" challenge of blogging without mentioning the GYM (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft) companies for a hundred posts.

As Om mentions in an update to his post, a number of folks have taken up the "No-GYM" challenge, Scoble is the only one I know of who's set an identifiable goal line:  "No-GYM" blogging for a 100 posts. 

His rationale is pretty commendable:

"So, why do this? Cause I had an entrepreneur last night tell me that when I linked to his company recently his company’s sales doubled.

That reminded me of my time working in marketing for Winnov and I was frustrated by trying to get anyone to pay attention to what our company was doing. I remember what it was like to have all the press pay attention only to Microsoft.

So, let’s see if I can do 100 posts without talking about the big three companies."

Having been "Scobelized" over the weekend myself on my "Foldershare" post, I can attest to the increased traffic flows (Thanks, Robert).

Given his staccato style of blogging through the day, he's already up to number nineteen at the time of this post.

I've already been introduced to some interesting new internet companies and web sites like:

1. Optimal Access (#19), who offers a new Internet browser and RSS reader.
2. Gadgetizer.com (#15), yet another gadget site (one can never have enough, IMHO).
3. A survey of real-time flight tracking services (#12), one of my favorite niche categories (see my recent post on how these are applicable to more useful cell-phone tracking services).

Reading through all the nineteen so far is pretty interesting, given the range of things that Tech blogging "A-listers" are exposed to.  It's almost something that all "A-listers" should be asked to do once a year.  Kind of like a "Blog Community Service" project, in the spirit of giving something back.

Of course, being "GYM-free" for a 100 posts is only a half-marathon.  For a full marathon and follow-up challenge, one could try being GYMAAAE-free for a 100 posts.

Me, being a contrarian and all, might go the other way and blog about nothing BUT GYM for a 100 posts.  Don't panic, I'm just THINKING about it.

ON HOW (NOT) TO USE GOOGLE TO PLAN A MURDER

LIFE IMITATING ART

Late last night I watched a  Tivo'ed CSI  episode titled "Bite Me" where a suspect was nabbed with incriminating videos mailed from a "[email protected]".

Then, in a mildly surreal experience this morning, I read via Memeorandum this almost "Believe It or Not" story from CRN on how a guy allegedly researched and planned the murder of his wife on Google.  Some choice excerpts:

" Prosecutors claim a Mac specialist on trial in connection with the killing of his wife did a Google search for the words: "neck snap break" and "hold" before she was killed."

"Prosecutors claimed that Petrick, who stands out in his Christian North Carolina community as a self-professed Pagan, left behind a trail of digital evidence including a visit to a site called bloodfest666. Investigators are also focusing e-mails to women they said Petrick was having affairs with and a download of a document entitled "22 ways to kill a man with your bare hands."

"...the Google searches just came up, though the investigation began nearly two years ago. He said that there was a massive amount of information on all of the hard drives."

As John Battelle points out, Google just released a "Personalized Search" product, that presumably make the lives of crime fighters even easier in the future.

Did Larry and Sergey have this in mind all along when they said Google will "Do No Evil"?  Did they also intend for Google to help fight Evil?

I've said it before, but ain't technology grand?

ON PROMISING WEB 2.0 SERVICES THAT THRILL (REBUTTAL TO RUSSELL BEATTIE)

GLASS HALF FULL

Yahoo! wireless maven and uber-blogger Russell Beattie put up a provocative post titled "Where's the Ambition?" a few days ago, ranting about all the dozens of Web 2.0 companies that have been popping up like new rabbits on a rabbit farm. 

Whether he means it, or is just griping to provoke a reaction, it's a post worth reading.  It certainly has generated a fair amount of discussion, given the 60 or so comments on the post to date. 

At the very least, he breaks down the current crop of new companies into eight categories.  And then goes onto to complain about each.  It's very much a "glass half empty" kind of discussion.

I've already posted about interesting Web 2.0 companies by categories of my choosing in the past, which you're welcome to review here.

But as I think about Russell's categories, the glass has barely begun to fill.  It's a very exciting time.  There are already examples of new companies or new services by existing companies that are very useful, and have a promise to really thrill down the road.  Companies that thrill is something I've posted about before.

In each of the categories listed by Russell (in quotes below), I can already name at least one example of a company that is doing some serious lifting, in terms of the complexity and promise of the service being provided.  Each of these companies' service is already eye-opening in terms of it's uniqueness, even though most are in very early beta releases with much more development to come.

I'll likely change the picks in each category as time goes on.  To make it easy to find, I'm tagging this post with the "Russell's Web 2.0 Rant Rebuttal" category.

Let's start off with...

1.  "Scrape Engines - These are the little search sites focusing on one niche or another. They’re not full-on Search Engines that crawl the entire web and add value by allowing us all to make order from the massive chaos that is the web, they rob value from other sites by crawling them to death and stealing most of the vital information, returning very little. I’m sure there’s some sort of justifiable symbioses here for some, but most are just leaches, IMHO."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  While many of companies that do this are guilty as charged, there are a promising new companies that could actually take the readership, economics and circulation of the exploding number of blog (of every type), to a whole new level. 

First, I'll acknowledge the sites that have given this category a bad name.  Do a Google search for splogs and you find dozens of entries explaining how the new form of "spam blogs" (thus "splogs") are the next most evil thing in the world of blogs after spam comments and trackbacks.  As a recent Wikipedia entry explains:

"There is frequent confusion between the terms "Splog" and "Link spam". "Splogs" are blogs where actual articles are spam, whereas "Link Spam" refers to only spam in the comments of a blog article.

"Splog" does not include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, that is "Link spam" or "comment spam". "Link spam" takes advantage of a site's ability to allow visitors to post links. A blog that posts its own spam is a form of Spamdexing that is now called a Splog."

But like viruses in the real world, some strains mutating out of this wild and woolly world of rapidly evolving automated technology to index elements of blogs, re-package them, and then re-present them to the blog-reading audience.

SOME of these new companies are making the morass of blog content far more accessible and readable. 

I'll call these companies "Blog Processors". 

A great example is Memeorandum, unveiled a few weeks ago, and already taking the blog world by storm.  The startup currently focuses on two categories of blogs, politics and technology, crawling them real-time and re-presenting them by the topics that get most blogged about in a day, with a very readable array of blog entries from different blogs.  The whole thing is constantly re-ranked based on the popularity of the topic and the specific entries. 

The site is already changing the habits of this blog reader and many other bloggers, relying on it more everyday.  I'm aware of a few more startups that are focusing on the same opportunity, taking the enormous amount of "peer produced" content on the web and making it more discoverable by a broader, more mainstream audience.  So stay tuned for more of these "Blog Processors".

Onto the next category...

2.  "Mashed Ups - Yes, it’s so neat you can add a free map to your database of geo-data. Good for you. Thank Google for giving god-knows-how-much money to Navteq for you every time you query their data and render a map. Even the GOOG can only throw so much money out the window for so long, so I wouldn’t plan on that lasting very long. If you’re doing the Mash-up for fun, that’s cool. But be honest, you’re not really creating much value are you? Yes, sometimes the sum of parts can be greater than the whole, but that’s really not the case here."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  The company I'd nominate here is "Trulia", a real estate site that's does mashup Google Maps, and combines it with real estate listings from across the web.  Using an approach similar to other P2P vertical search companies like Indeed (in the Jobs category), the utility of Trulia is evident on the first search you do with your zip code.

The results provide listings in your area culled from real estate sites across the web, with far more ability to screen the data than any site I've seen to date.  For example, besides providing the usual sorting by number of bedrooms, the site also lets you cull the results by the square feet of the house you're looking for.

It also provides recent transactions in the area, and average comparison ratios on various metrics for the market you're interested in.

The site is young and only has data for the west coast to start, with more states to be added soon.  One can easily see this site as being a "must-go-to" site on real estate queries.

Next Russell category...

3.  "Web Trapps - AJAXy, Tagged and Shared: Calendaring, To Do Lists, Email, Notes, Word Processors, Project Management, Databases, and anything to do with Getting Things Done. Have fun with all that, but 99.9% of the people out there will still be using Microsoft Office and Yahoo! (Yes, my employer, but I’d say that anyways.) Really. Look, I don’t *trust* your site to keep my personal (and definitely not my professional) data safe, okay, and I’m not going to change my daily habits to include a site that may disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow. And I could participate in the whole collective intelligence part, but then I’ll just abandon you if you “go commercial” then as well."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  The ones to watch here are JotSpot, 37Folders and Socialtext, with many more in the wings.  But each of the above already offer intriguing functionality. 

4.  "Social Anything - Look, you’re not going to be another del.icio.us alright? And News Corp is the last company to ever pay that much money for a Social Networking site. Ever. (Yes, that includes you too, FaceBook). And you know how I’ll find that podcast, song, movie or other digital content I’m looking for? I’ll probably just ask a friend, search for a reviews, browse iTunes, or buy whatever is marketed at me like everyone else."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  This category is way too new...no one despite their head start has a "lock" on the entrenched leader spot, MySpace and Delicious notwithstanding.  I'd already point to Flock as the one to watch here, even though the first almost alpha "beta" version being less than thrilling to date.  On the tagging front, I've posted about Yahoo!'s "My Web" service as already being very useful, along with Delicious as well.

5.  "Phile Sharing - Oh my god! Stop with the photo sharing sites already! An honestly, if you describe your site like, “It’s like Flickr, but with [insert file type here]” then you’ve got serious problems. No, really. No, no, really."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  For an "out of the box" approach to P2P file sharing utility, check out Foldershare.  It allows you to constantly keeps files synchronized amongst multiple computers, anywhere in the world, regardless of operating system.  And it's still an early release!  It's already become one of the first five applications I install on any new computer I get.

If it's photo related thrill you want, check out Riya.com.  An out-of-the-box approach to organizing and sharing photos.  Again, an early beta.

6.  "Content Management Saturation - There shall only be one Wikipedia, and it’s free. There’s about as many blog and wiki software platforms as there needs to be. Generally, I think at this point, the world does not need another CMS solution. Maybe in a few years, but right now we really have what we need."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  Check out Answers.com if you haven't already...it's been around a while, but getting better everyday.

If it's a non-profit thriller you seek, check out Kiva.org, a whole new take on micro-giving.

7.  "RSS Holes - RSS is a pretty great technology, but really, how many more startups munging RSS feeds do we need? Google and Yahoo! are already doing RSS Search, so there’s probably better ways to spend your efforts on that front. And if your service is described like, “We take the RSS feeds and do [insert cool sounding agent/filtering/analysis technology here]” you’re in trouble. Yet, though Bloglines has barely touched their feature set in over a year, no one seems to be able to come up with a decent competitor in terms of functionality and usefulness (and ability to read via mobile) - that I don’t get."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  For all the complaints about Bloglines (mine included), I still think it's a pretty amazing service.  It remains one of my "must install" applications for over a year now.  More innovation is inevitable here though, from Bloglines and/or others.

8.  "Firefoxing - Umm, I like FireFox as much as the next geek. But if you’re creating enhancements to a browser with a 7% marketshare, god knows what you or your investors are thinking."

POTENTIAL THRILLER:  You've got to think beyond the browser Russell...there are examples of must have browser enhancements regardless of the browser used.  My "must have" service here is the "oldie but still thrilling goodie", "My Yahoo! toolbar".  It's the one Batman would pick as his "Bat-toolbar".

There it is...my utterly subjective list of potential thrillers in each of these categories.  The picks will change as time goes on, but they already make these categories more than a passing fad.  Check them out if you haven't.

If you have other suggestions for any of these categories, please do let me know in the comments.

ON TYPEPAD'S TRAFFIC PROBLEMS AND BEST PRODUCT/SERVICE FEATURE

SHARING THE PAIN

Regular readers have seen me take Typepad, the host for this blog, to task in recent weeks for posting problems.  These posts were written both in a frustrated frame of mind (here), and an understanding one (here).

I've generally been an admirer of the service, one of the fastest growing Web 2.0  businesses, despite the occasional, but REAL frustrations  (Most current gripe:  fix the ability to issue trackbacks...I've not been able to issue proper trackbacks for a couple of weeks). 

Most recently I complimented them on their attitude towards helping their users reap the rewards of posting their content (here).

But today I saw a letter to Typepad users posted by Typepad founders Mena and Ben Trott, that needs to be highlighted.

The letter starts off with a comment by Mena:

"As many of you have noticed, during the last couple of weeks TypePad performance has not been what we aspire to and you pay for. While I am as displeased as you, at the current time I can do nothing more than apologize -- a weak sentiment without action to back it up.

Ben has been in the midst of understanding and fixing the problems so I have asked him to write an update on the situation and tell you what we are doing to get back to the great service you have come to expect."

And goes on to Ben providing relevant and informative technical details* (see excerpt at end of post) on the challenges faced by the company in moving the service to bigger and better infrastructure that would address the high-class problem of hyper-growth.

But they had me at "As many of you have noticed..."

It reminded me again how this young start-up has gotten a key part of early DNA right.  It's reflected in an attentive group of folks at Typepad/SixApart that seems to listen to rants in the blog wilderness, as when Anil Dash from the company responded to a separate Typepad venting post  from me a few weeks ago.

Facing hyper-growth is not a new problem...as I noted in the earlier post:

"This is a rite of passage for great technology businesses...lots of  companies have had to go through it, aka as Crossing the Chasm...Dell in the eighties, AOL in the nineties, eBay in Web 1.0 (late nineties), and now Typepad in Web 2.0. 

It's always the toughest when the ramp affects your core product and/or service as experienced by your customers."

And Ben's technical explanation* is a reminder that each company's ramping problems are uniquely different. 

• Dell needed to ramp up a customer service organization in an era when PCs were new and uppity (I know the latter still hasn't changed). 
• AOL had to ramp up a nation-wide bank of dial-up modems. 
• And eBay had to ramp up a consumer service that needed to provide real-time auction status on tens of millions of transactions to millions of buyers and sellers around the world.

In many of these situations, as with Typepad today, the technical problems being surmounted have not been faced by anyone before, pushing the technologies being used and the vendors being asked to respond, to the limit.

As Web 2.0 goes onto 3.0 and beyond (think audio, video, IP TV, wireless, etc.), many more companies will encounter similarly unique ramping challenges.

But the most important feature they all need to build in from the beginning is:  USER COMMUNICATION.   Communicate with your users early, with candor, directness, and frequency.

And of course, FIX the dang problem.

* Ben's explanation of Typepad's unique technical difficulties, excerpted here for reader convenience:

"TypePad-hosted blogs are, to say the least, incredibly popular, and growing at an incredible rate. We're currently pushing about 250mbps of traffic through our multiple network pipes, and that's growing by 10-20% each month. (If you're more familiar with bandwidth stated in terms of transfer allowances, that's a transfer rate of almost 3TB (terabytes!) per day.) And because TypePad customers are so invested in their blogs, we see activity on the service-both reading & writing-that equals services with 100 times the number of users on TypePad.

Because of the growth of the service, we've been increasing our capacity steadily, but a few months ago the data center we are in ran out of space and power, limiting the amount of equipment we could add. After some shopping, we found a great new data center and have been building it out for over a month. We're currently in the middle of that move, and that's when the trouble started.

While a data center move generally tends to add some risk to running a service day-to-day, we could never have anticipated anything like the last couple of weeks."

ON THE UTILITY OF YUBNUB

THE WHOLE WORLD ONE LETTER AT A TIME

I've been using a new web service called Yubnub for the past few weeks, and wanted to recommend it enthusiastically to power web users everywhere.

Sometimes technology like most other things in life goes around in full circles.  The whole computing thing started for most people, power users or not, with the command line interface.  The command line was around for years before the MSDOS driven Microsoft/IBM/Intel PC made it the universal way to interact with personal computers.

Most mainstream users have forgotten the command line interface, especially if they started using computers around the year 2000, when Microsoft stopped publishing DOS, relying fully on the Windows based user interface.

We've especially not had any use for command lines in the web era, where browsers (of any flavor) have become amongst the most widely used application by PC users anywhere.

Even in the world of tabbed browsers like Firefox (which I've raved about of late), users have to do some serious amount of mousing and windowing around.

Well, Jonathan Aquino executed a brilliant idea back in June in response to a programming contest.  Done in 24 hours, he submitted a project called Yubnub, a (social) command line for the web.

Since it's launch, the thing has taken off amongst geeks, especially due to the "social" part.

For the idea behind yubnub is:  allow users to create short commands that they can type into Yubnub and/or into their browser address line (after adding a "y" to activate yubnub as shown here), and quickly do almost anything on the web that they normally do, without having to point and click at a bunch of links and windows.

So, what does that mean?

Well, if you go to Yubnub, and type in "wiki" "command line interface", you can search the open-source Wikipedia encyclopedia for "command line interface" without having to launch that site in a separate browser window, and typing in the search query.

Or you can type in "weather" and your zip code to get the local weather.

Now, some of you may say, hey what's new about this?  I can do the same thing on Google, along with a whole bunch of other types of searches using a command line type of structure.

True, but two differences:

1. Those only work on Google, not across the whole web.
2. Google determines which command line commands to introduce and when.

As an aside, if you like the idea of command line usage but don't want to do the "social" stuff like sharing your commands with others and using commands invented by others, check out the standalone application called Activewords, which is an application that lets you do some of this stuff in your own environment.

On the other hand, Yubnub is your very own erector set for commands to get at web stuff that you can both share and benefit from others sharing their commands with the world. 

If you want to get see a list of the most used commands, take a peek here.

If you like that, and what do see some fancier stuff, take a look here, courtesy Jeremy Hussell.

For much more in the way geeky commands by the geek for the geek, check this out.

To keep up on all things Yubnub, take a look at the Yubnub Blog.

Now this is the kind of web 2.0 I'm talkin' about.

Recommended.

P.S.

The site is young and is somewhere between a "proof of concept" and "a full-fledged service".

One of the biggest issues with it is precisely the open nature of the site, where anyone can create a command and point it to relatively nichey sites.  This is eminently "fixable".

The issues is eloquently discussed here in this Slashdot comment discussion back in June:

<<

Re:Interesting Concept, but needs moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
by AKAImBatman (238306) * on Monday June 20, @02:06PM (#12865075)
(http://akaimbatman.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday July 29, @08:48AM) What I mean by this is that the social concept of letting people add their own commands is the biggest draw, but the biggest flaw. Doing a quick ls on the site reveals such choice commands on the first page:

The solution to this should be obvious: namespaces.

i.e. Have a basic set of commands. These are available to all users. Then allow users to register accounts on the system. Each account comes with its own namespace. New commands can be created and shared with the world under your namespace, then can be promoted to the basic set when they become popular enough.

For example, if I created a command that searched the web for the best pepperjack cheese, I could share it as:

batman:pepperjack

When it gets promoted to the basic set, then I can type:

pepperjack

See? Easy.

>>

It worked for the tagging services like Del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy et al, and it should work for Yubnub.