Merchandise Services

CafePress is a service where you can order your personal merchandise. You can submit artwork, which they will print on any merchandise. In addition you can create a shop, where this merchandise can be bought.

Looks interesting. I saw however a lot of pages with no images. They should set up some quality control. They ship worldwide!

[inspiration Marc Canter]

RSS Marketing

Robin Good created a list of services, where you can submit your RSS-feed (or weblogs). I guess this will be a new kind of marketing service. I guess that we now wait for some aggregator and the related commercial services.

MediaChest

Borrowing and lending books is normally done only between friends. But why not enlarge this circle of friends? Mediachest intends to support this needs. You can list the books, games, dvd’s which you have and which you want to lend and borrow. You can join a group to see the books they have. By adding friends you can enlarge your circle of acquaintances and see what you can borrow.

I think this an interesting application, I do miss some things however: a kind of amazon recommendations (what should I read); people in my geographical neighbourhood, people like me, etc. The biggest drawback is my profile. I have already entered a lot of books and CD’s in Amazon and I do not want to do that again. I rather have an application on my computer in which I can manage all my assets and have export facilities to any Networking Service, which wants a part of my profile. Or I publish it on my website so that any service can access it. Foaf should help here. I guess still a long way to go to have a good solution.

[inspiration Judith @ Social Software Weblog]

TasksPro

This provider has created a web-based task planning application. You can download the software and host the application yourself. The author has not (yet) made an hosting service available. So it does not count as a service, but it looks interesting.

[inspiration Ranchero]

FBI shuts down ISP

On BoingBoing an article described how the ISP shut down an entire ISP (hosting only) in order to find a single hacker.

I am amazed that they are allowed to do that. So many other customers will suffer because of this. I guess there need to be rules of what law agencies are allowed to do and not. Or can they just shut down AT&T, because someone just a phone to plan a terrorist attack. I guess they can not. But why can they do that to an ISP? Where does it begin? and where does it stop?

SMS Interworking

On SmartMobs an entry was posted describing the plans to have Australian SMS-systems to interwork with US-based non-GSM systems. They intend to use InphoMatch for that.

It is about time that this happens. I am surprised that it did not happen yet. But then, I do not know the state of the interworking business. Are all GSM systems interconnected. Anyway fro telephone interworking is a long time standard, as it it is with Internet mail. It used to be a problem to interwork with non-Internet systems, but I guess that those have died. But there are son many SMS users that I would have guessed that interworking would have been solved years ago. Or is it just that the US is behind?

Social Networking - Service or function?

Judith @ The Social Software Weblog describes FindaFreek, a social networking service for Freeks. The service is quite nice, at it allows you to enter (and search for) a complex personal profile.

It made me thinking about this social networking bubble. For me it is just old wine in new bottles. We used to have communities. In these communities people could meet and chat with each other. These communities were groups of people around a central theme. And what has social networking added? Better ways in meeting people (Foaf-like) in very large groups of people (friendster et al.). But why should I? I already hang out on dedicated communities with people whose interests I share. Why add something new? Better ways of connecting to other people is always good and I would like to have it added to any community. But why those general services? Only because it is hyped? Or because older services failed? But why did they? It is not clear to me.

As Soon As Present

Convoq introduced a client for conferencing. It is a collaboration and conferencing tool. The online service part seems to be the setting up of meetings, but also support during the conference. They have a cost per minute scheme for that.

It looks interesting, but unfortunately Windows-only.

[inspiration Marc Canter]

No Generic Connectivity

Telepocalypse muses about WiFi for commuters in trains, buses, etc. He thinks that a problem is the possible price-plans. People are spoiled by a flat-fee all-you-can-eat price-plan and that businesses are not able to introduce other price-plans.

I wonder whether this is a US problem? In France I see an incredible number of price-plans for Internet Access. In fact it gets similar to the Mobile business price-plans. I guess this is all good for business, but confusing for customers. As customers sign up anyway, they will probably lose a bit. But maybe it is good for business progress. I assume a flat-free price-plan gives only very low (or none) profits. And thus innovation will be stalled. Just a thought…

Undercover

Vodaphone has exported its mobile Undercover game from Portugal to Hong Kong. The games can be played wither by SMS or a Java enabled (and supported) phone. The game uses location information as input. The idea of the game is that you bomb players that are close to you. Interesting…

[inspiration SmartMobs]

Subject-based Advertising

John Battelle has a description of the workings of IndustryBrains. IndustryBrains offers a subject-based advertising network. The question s however how you arrive at those subjects. Normally these subjects are taken from the context of a web-page. This is however not accurate enough. IndustryBrains makes this better by assigning the subjects themselves (I guess). The targeting of an ad is therefor much more accurate and has more value.

Scraped Services

Datawhorehouse created a map of the users by scraping pages on Orkut. It is a really neat functionality, which will be part of any social network service.

But it is not legal. Orkut has forbidden scraping. But probably the user does not care. And from a service point of view, it is not important at all how a service is produced. It is all about the resulting service.

[inspiration: John Battelle]

Search @ Yahoo!

Hot news is currently the new search engine that Yahoo put in its search service. The service presents multiple tabs for searching various objects: webpages, images, whitepages, yellow pages, news and products. Chaging a tab will perform a search based on the latest query.

My first experience was OK. It was similar to Google. They seem on par. I was happy how my sites turn up in the results. I keep on experimenting. I miss however their subject tree. Where did it go?

Geographic Blogging

Waveblog is a service that allows you to create a location-bases blog. You can upload text, images and video from your mobile phone to your blog together with a location. Users can search blogs by channel (cafe, friends, traffic, etc.) and by a geographic map. The geographic map shows the latest blog entries on a map. Interesting to get to see location-based information.

Interesting to see how this will develop.

[inspiration Russell Beattie]

Mooter

A search service that clusters the results of a search query.

I was not impressed. The clusters were not very good and the presentation can also be improved.

[inspiration]http://battellemedia.com/archives/000348.php] John Battelle[/url]]