Local-i

Local-i offers users to search for restaurants. You can find restaurants by keyword search or by guided search using metadata. With keyword search you enter the relevant keywords for your, such as clean and good. This will result in a listing of restaurants. Each result entry contains the name of the restaurant (as link), the restaurant type, the neighbourhood, the rating, the number of expert reviews and the comments. It is possible to sort the results by name, price or rating. The guided search allows the user to select from a cuisine, a neighbourhood, an ambiance, price, rating or feature (award-winning, brunch, catering, etc.). It is possible to narrow (refine) a query using metadata. Clicking on a restaurant title reveals the address, a link to directions and links elsewhere on the web. Each link is presented by a title, a description and the URL. The links are divided in expert reviews and comments from diners.

I call this a geographic metadata search tele-service. It is not clear how the keyword search works, i.e. how the keywords are translated to results.

Web Apps continued

I decided to check out the original post by Olivier Travers. Using the post and comments you get the following breakdown for clients, which use online internet services:
• desktop app - this is an application that runs on your client platform (PC, Mac, whatever). In order to use such an application you need to download the application and install it on your client platform. These applications are without an online services component. An alternative word for this is “standalone app”;
• internet app - this is a desktop app which has an online services element. Scoble calls these “non-browser apps or smart clients”;
• web app - applications that use a web-browser with embedded emulators (Flash, Javascript…) to access online services. No installation of the application is required. The use of these emulators allow for nicer interfaces. The word rich interface applications (RIA) is often used here. For the user this might imply that they have to download the (latest) version of the emulator. It is also argues that a web app might not be available on all platforms due to a lack of emulators on those platforms. Scoble calls these ‘Internet connected apps”. Note that from a user point of view, these applications are just “the web” as they use their Internet browser to access these apps;
• (pure) web app - applications that do not use emulators or interpreters to access online services. I guess that this implies only HTML and CSS. This category only uses protocols and markup which is standardized. One important point Olivier Travers makes is a Flash application does not expose its state to the browser. For him you need to support REST to be a web app. He also says that all content must be visible in order to be a (pure) web app. This implies that each piece of content must have an URL.

I am not sure how this breakdown works for other platforms, such as mobiles. I guess however that it will follow a similar pattern.

Web Apps

Anil Dash discusses Web Apps. He foresees a middle layer of web-apps that are embedded in HTML-pages o.a. What is new here? If I embed the weather, a site statistic or something else in my web-page, I do something similar. But embedding web apps can be done on multiple levels from using a human hand down to somewhere deep in the code. This is what my Enabling category us all about. But it is interesting to note that there are various embed-levels possible.

His discussion on what a web-app is a bit theoretical. There is no right definition and as one commenter says, a web app is indeed not a good name.

[inspiration Marc Canter]

Blog classification

The Corporate Blogging Blog suggested a categorisation of business blogs. And as I am always interested in classifications, I had a look. The main division is into internal and external blogs. And these can be further subdivided into other categories dependent on the purpose of the blog.

This subdivision is neat, but I like subdivisions to be based on some kind of model. A model here could be some kind of business communications model. I would have chosen a standard business process model as the underlying model. Each process in a business needs to communicate internally and externally. And for each communication a blog can be created. One could even create a blog to cover the link between two linked processes (internally) or a blog for the specific link between a specific customer and a company. There is no limit to the number of blogs one could create within a company. I think I find the categorisation of the Corporate Blogging Blog to simple, but one has to start somewhere.

[inspiration: Loic Le Meur]

Dropcash

An interesting little enabling service. It lets you organize a fundraising by creating a specific page for your website. In order to use it you need a Paypal and a Typekey account. So it takes still some organizing before I can try it out.

[inspiration Jason Kottke]

Gibeo

Gibeo is an social networked annotation service. At any website you can select some text, label it (important, wrong, comment) and add your comment to it. Other people can do something similar and you can see their comments and annotation as well. And you can add comments to their annotations. By entering the url of the website you want to comment on and add gibeo.net to it, you have enabled the annotation service.

I think that this is not the first incarnation of such a service. I guess the other did not make it. A problem with such a service is the quality of the comments and the granularity of the labels (starts at 3 letters). It is interesting to know whether people have comments on a certain webpage. But I doubt that this is the way to go. What about a trackback kind of thing? Have a link on a page that shows the trackbacks to that page or site. Then you are referred to the weblog that has the comments. Ordering of trackbacks can then be made by some popularity measure. I find annotation support an interesting service, however we still wait for the right implementation. Gibeo has a lot of interesting ingredients and might provide inspiration for others. I will try to add this entry to Gibeo.

[inspiration: The Social Software weblog]

Pubsub

This service was not clear to me the first time. I would call it a search service. They call themselves a matching service. You formulate a search query and the results are then delivered as a RSS-feed. This implies that when new search results (matches) are found, you will get them as am update to the feed.

[inspiration: Doc Searls]

FareChase

It seems that Yahoo! has bought this company. FareChase specialises in searching travel websites and comparing that information. Their service is only available as an enabling service.

Interesting to see that search is getting more specialised and that there is room for enabling services.

[inspiration: PaidContent.org]

IceRocket

This is a new metasearch engine. The service allow you to search for web-pages, news, images and friends (dating). The find friends query is a metasearch on several dating services.

The service seems pretty good. I get the right answers for my standard queries.

[inspiration: John Battelle]

Startcamera

Startcamera is a service package combing a print-service and a online photo album. You can create an album and upload your images and later have them printed.

This sounds like a reasonable service package. Viewing the homepage however, I get a very commercial feeling. The emphasis seems to lie on printing. Why would you want to put your images here? I would prefer a good publishing enabling service, which I can use for publishing anything. This service does not impress me.

[inspiration eMerce]

NewsIsFree Visualisation

The NewsIsFree service has an interesting visualisation of the news. They categorised the news in eight categories and you can visualise each category separately. The visualisation presents a large rectangle and each news-item has a square. The location in the rectangle. its colour and size of the square is used to analyse the news-item. You can choose your own code based on popularity, age and source. Mousing over a square shows a summary of the article.

It is not the first example of such a visualisation service and I still doubt whether it is useful. I like the possibility to see the news in a single view. I however prefer the news as an order list, possibly with some popularity ranking. If you want to do tracking and want to discover what is new, important or popular, this is a good way to go.

[inspiration Om Malik]

VoIP-tapping

Telepocalypse has a interesting entry on wiretapping in the online services world. The fact that you can not use old service terminoly for new services is an interesting observation. And he gives some insight on how one should go about tapping.

MusicMobs

I have always been interested in finding music that I would probably like. Lately I have been using the recommendations offered by Amazon and I have entered a lot of information. It was however not the first time I did that (remember Firefly?). I really want to have a solution that is based on my personal library. MusicMobs seems to offer this to me. I can upload an iTunes XML-file and no extra editing needed. And most of my interesting music is now on my iPod, although it is getting a bit to small now.  My iPod-list is sorted on the number of plays and does include songs I bought at the iTMS.

The nest step on MusicMobs is to find similar users (do I want to find them?) and to get recommendations (albums). Clicking on an Album-name starts a search in the iTMS, so I can check out the songs. I like that feature, but then the album must be available in iTMS. Matching seems to be based on people with the same albums in their list. Do people with a single album in common interest me? I think this feature has to improve.

I seem to get interesting suggestions, so I will use the service for a while. I guess it needs more users before it becomes even better.

[inspiration: Om Malik broadband’s log]