Soflow

This service uses a new twist to social networking: use companies as a target. This works two ways. They use a company as a group structure, which makes it more easy for people to find people working at the same company. And they target companies as a customer group. The latter allows them to sell their service to enable a Social Network within the company.

This is a good idea, although it will come close to many knowledge management solutions available. And I got the impression that Soflow is insufficient for this. Luckily enough you can still use Soflow as a normal Networking solution, so I signed up.

[inspiration Social Networking Software Weblog]

TIM Mobile TV

It was announced that STET Hellas, the Greek mobile operator, will start to transmit several television channels over their mobile network. The channels are subject to a 30 second delay (why?). The service is only available to user of specific clients, mainly Nokia phones. The service will cost 30 Eurocents per minute.

I wonder whether such a service will take off on mobiles. I can imagine you want to watch video, but then mainly on demand. You do not want to spend watching commercials or waiting for a program to start at 30 cents per minute.

[inspiration MocoNews]

Mixing categories

David Hornik published an opinion piece in Cnet on blogging and social software. The piece is mainly on social software and not so much on blogging. I am not sure why both service categories have been put together. I would rather see them discussed separately, although I admit that there are interesting relationships.

I see blogs and its derivatives mainly as enabling services, which allow anyone to publish content. The emphasis lies on the ease of publishing and publish formats.

What happens next is aggregation and networking. Putting all this separate content together in a single service and creating something new. David Hornik defines Social Software as Broadly speaking, social software is just software that facilitates the communications among people, which is a good definition. As he says, it is nothing new. Go back to Usenet and you have the first roots. I believe the value is in aggregation and not in networking, but it is a question of definitions. I rather have a better definition, then we will also have a better grasp of what is happening.

[inspiration Marc Canter]

Service Language

In the last week there were several posts on Orkut. The average user seems to come from Brazil (have a look at Iran!). This in itself is no problem and it shows that the Internet is a global medium. What is however more troublesome is that the language is changing from English to Portuguese. And the two do not seem to get along.

It shows that language is an important parameter of an online service and that they can not mix. Especially for services that have user generated content this is troublesome. I guess that the language spoken in an online service will be enforced in the future, otherwise the service falls apart.

[inspiration: Social Software Weblog]

Interactive Billboard Marketing

Ford has introduced an interesting marketing campaign (created by Ogilvy) using billboards and SMS. The user can participate by sending an introductory address to a number and will then receive a SMS with a question that has to be answered. If the answer is right the use participates in a lottery where a Ford Fiesta can be won. The billboard reacts to your answers. From their website I get the impression that the billboard does not play a functional role in this and that it is possible to play without seeing the billboard.

[inspiration Marc Canter]

Spurl

The Social Software Networking weblog also introduces the service category ‘archiving tools’. I am not sure what that is supposed to mean, so I checked one of the example services, Spurl, out. To be it seems like just a bookmarking service. You can save your bookmarks through a popup bookmarklet. And on a page you see all bookmarks you have created and visited through this webpage. The service offers two aggregator functions: latest bookmarks entered and hottest bookmarks. Nice that you can filter bookmarks by language and safe/unsafe. There is supposed to be an archiving tool, but I did not see it. I did not find out how the categories work either. It is interesting to see that there is an integration with the del.ico.us service.

Social Publishing

The Social Software weblog has a nice entry on services that support social publishing. Interestingly the bookmarking service del.icio.us is also a social service. I guess this is mainly due to the aggregating services of this service. These services shows the latest uploads and the archives per category. Personally I do not find these services very useful as there are just to many links that are shown.

Publishing a list with bookmarks is for me very similar to a (simple) weblog. Any weblog-provider could offer a specialist weblog just for the bookmarks. I’ll try to experiment with pMachine in order to do this. The aggregator service are however something different. Maybe this is something for Marc Canter: OpenBookmarks. Then an aggregator can pickup my bookmark xml-file and do the social things with it. A link to any OpenFeed could be part of a FOAF-file.

Online Games

An interesting story on Wired on the field of online games. Many providers seem to be struggling with these services. However Microsoft and Sony seem to be pretty successful. The difference seems to be that these two are aggregators, i.e. they have created a structure which supports many gaming worlds, whereas those that struggle support only a single environment. It also seems that online games do not work well.

Habbo Hotel

Habbo Hotel is a service where you can meet other Habbo Hotel inhabitants and chat with them. The service provides an Hotel with private and common rooms as chat setting. Before entering this ‘world’ the user has to create it’s avatar, a Habbo. The user can dress his Habbo as he likes. Each user can create one or multiple rooms. The user has to buy his furniture with credits. Through a SMS-service the user can buy credits. Each private room can act as a two-person chat room, whereas the common rooms act as groups chats. By moving his cursor over the room the user can be move, sit next to someone, go to the next room etc. The user has some gestures (wave, dance) and can exchange items.

It reminds me of a 2D-world some 6 years ago. I think it was called Alphaworld. At the moment this seems to be a very general chat environment with few dedicated topic, which you see in the chats that evolve.

Oddpost

This service provider was just in the news thanks to the fact that it was taken over by Yahoo!. Alas I can not try it out, due to the fact that it has closed all new account request. So I have to read the documentation. It says it is a web-based email application with built-in news- and RSS-reader. The interesting thing is here the word web-based. When you look at the user interface, it just looks like a normal (Windows-)application, but it is still called web-based. And that is because they use DHTML within a normal application. It still sounds like a normal email application. It does sound line an interesting innovation. Amazed that such an innovation is still possible in email-space. Marc Canter calls this a Rich Internet App (RIA), maybe it should be called a Internet Enabled Application, which uses Web-Services.

Amplify

This service allows a user to create and publish scrapbook-pages. In order to create such a page the user must first download a toolbar. This toolbar can then be used to select part of webpages and add them to a webpage. This webpage can be published on their own hosting service.

I see this as a more advanced bookmarkspage. You can also save and publish what you found interesting. The way the scrapbook is published seemed to be a bit limited. I am not able to test it (WIndows-only). The idea to save and publish part of the web does look interesting however.

[inspiration: PaidContent.org]