http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/ Online Services for Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 en arnaud@sivas.com 2006-05-13T12:55:01-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/secret_service/ I have been asked to check out a bookmarking service that is still in beta, so I will not reveal it’s name. I will fill in the blanks later. But I thought it would be a good moment to see whether my MicroContent Client checklist would also work for this service. And where any problems would lie in the checklist. I start with checklist version 1.4. Comments on the checklist: Platform - naturally I had to delete the MacOS-specific category. I guess I have to switch to some web browser list. I can imagine things like adherence to standards, lightness of web-pages, Ajax-support, etc. All the things we would like to see; Identity - the user has to login into his personal account at the service. On MacOSX one has to login into one’s account as well; Publishing - a strong feature of a service is, is that one can access the data from any place with a browser. One is freed from the computer. This is unlike local MicroContent clients. This adds a new publishing method to the list (.Mac, FTP, RPC). This allows user to browse bookmarks of other users; Social stuff - the service add some social stuff, such as a list of friends, an inbox. I see these more like other application and not related to the MicroContent Client itself; This service scores only 18 points, which is pretty low. There do not seem to be much features in the service, but that might grow in the future. MicroContent (5/10) - to what degree does the client support MicroContent Items? Structure - YES, the service supports bookmarks with fields such as title, url and description; Multiplicity - NO; Flexibility - NO; MicroWeb - NO; Merged - NO; Pick-list Fields - YES for tags; Title - YES; Description - YES; Tags - YES, hierarchical structure; Rating - NO; Interface (5/10) - does the client have the characteristic layout? View-pane - YES, in a details tab. Hovering over a preview (thumbnail) of the bookmarked page shows the bookmark information as well; View-pane styles - NO; View-pane Window - NO; Items-pane - YES; Items-pane Views - YES, there is a thumbnails and list view; Items-pane Sorting - YES, Items-pane Fields - NO; Lists-pane - NO; Browser-pane - YES, one can browse the tag cloud; Pane layout change - NO; Item functions (4/10) - functions for managing individual Items. View - YES; Create - YES, but only through a bookmarklet; Edit - YES; Mark - NO; Search - NO; Persistence - NO; Access Control - NO; Duplicate Control - NO; Delete - YES; Download - NO; List functions (2/17) Local - NO; Connected - NO; Shared - NO; Remote - YES, all bookmarks reside on the service platform Handpicked - NO; Smart - YES, these are based on tags. Not sure whether I should call this smart lists though; Recommendations - NO; List Metadata - NO; Statistics -NO; Directories - NO; Add - NO; Edit - NO; Show - NO; Backup/revert - NO; Refresh - NO; Remove - NO; Delete - NO; Groups (0/8) - the service does not support groups. Unlimited Depth - NO; Local - NO; Connected - NO; Shared - NO; Remote - NO; Directories - NO; Add - NO; Edit - NO; Delete - NO; Import (1/6) - does the Client allow for importing Items? Classic - NO; Standard - NO; Proprietary - NO; Application - NO; Bookmarklet - YES; Drag&drop - NO; Export (1/14) - does the client allow for exporting Items? Classic - NO; Standard - NO; Proprietary - NO; HTML - NO; Print - NO; Feed - YES, an RSS-feed for your bookmarks is available; Local - NO; Connected - NO; Shared - NO; Remote: .Mac - NO; Remote: FTP - NO; Remote: RPC - NO; Drag&drop - YES, but this is a browser feature; Application - YES, one can email a bookmark to friends; Enabling Services, Tele-Enabler, Publishing arnaud 2006-05-13T12:55:01-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/mystickies/ This service allows a user to place stickies on webpages he visits. A sticky has a very simple structure: just a description and tags. There is however also some hidden information, such as username and website-url. When a user visits a website he can add a sticky by alt-click after having logged in. On the website the user can see an overview of the tags he created next to a thumbnail of the webpage. IT-services, Processes, Application SP arnaud 2006-01-24T08:51:01-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/extratasty/ This service allows users to publish, search, review drink recipes and get recommendations. A user can publish a drink recipe using a title, a fixed ingredient list with amounts, directions and tags. An ingredient is automatically turned into a tag. Users can search recipes through (popular) tags or free search. They can also comment on and rate recipes. A user can define the things he has in his bar and the service gives the correponding recipes. As the service only supports structure, it guess only 1 MicroContent web2.0 rating. Tele-Services, Searching, Free, Predefined, Enabling Services, Tele-Enabler, Publishing arnaud 2006-01-07T12:04:33-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/clipmarks/ This service allows users to create bookmarks, but with an extra twist. In this service a bookmark is called a clipmark. A clipmark consists of a Title, Tags, Remarks, Folder (think category) and some privacy stuff (make clipmark public) and most importantly a Clip. The clip is something copied from the from a website. The user can select a piece of text, an images, etc. to be copied and clipped. With each clip there is a corresponding URL where the clip came from. An interesting feature is using the Clip It function in a Firefox extension. This allow the user to moise over items in a webpage, clicking an item and then saving it as clipmark. An user can also view clipmarks created by other users. Structured MicroContent - YES, as shown above; Data Outside - NO; Licenses - NO, although the use can decide whether a clipmark must be private of public; Feeds Galore - YES, one can subscribe to clipmarks from an author; Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of; Desktop Integration - YES, it is just standard blog-format, so any RSS reader can be used; Single Identity - NO; MicroWeb - NO; Wild Structure - NO; Enabling Services, Tele-Enabler, Publishing arnaud 2005-12-27T16:25:21-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/metawishlist/ This service allows a user to publish his wishlist. A wishlist contains products that the creator wants to have, read, listen to, etc. A wishlist is a structured record of the product, consisting of a title, a link to a product page, a link to an image, price, tags, quantity, priority, comments and a list. With a bookmarklet the productlink, image link and price fields are filled in, when one views the corresponding product page. The nice thing of the service is that it creates something independent from specific suppliers. The service allows to import items from the Amazon.com wishlist. Naturally the service also has some social stuff. View who wants an item as well, browse tags, etc. Also easy to copy an item to your own wishlist. Enabling Services, Tele-Enabler, Publishing arnaud 2005-12-09T11:19:42-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/douban/ Yet another service, which allows a user to create a library of books and music. The basic MicroContent type is the review, although a user can limit himself to just bookmark the item. Through a search function the user can find the link for a book or CD. I assume the relevant information is pulled from Amazon. For each item ithe user can set the reading status (has read, reading, want to), a rating (5 levels), tags, a short remark and a review (with spoiler warning if required). It is not possible to link to a single review, no permalink. There is a link to my library. The service is lacking import and output options at the moment (10-dec-05), but it is a very nice start. Enabling Services, Tele-Enabler, Publishing arnaud 2005-12-09T10:39:05-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/librarything/ This service allows a user to manage the books he owns. The user can enter his books through either an ISBN of UPC code. Or he can fill out the various fields for a Book bookmark. This book bookmark has also some personal fields such as tags, comments, a review (url) and a rating. Thus the MicroContent type is like a review. The user has various edit possibilities. Nice are the very extended import facilities. One can for instance point to an Amzon wishlist to import the items there. The service also has a feed with the recently added books. And there are some recommendation functions, which give related books or users. This service can be seen as an online MicroContent client. It has features such as items (the review) and panes (view and items). Structured MicroContent - YES, a review; Data Outside - YES, there are many import possibilites; Licenses - NO; Feeds Galore - NO, just the latest books added. And there is a simple export possibility; Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of; Desktop Integration - NO; Single Identity - NO; MicroWeb - NO; Wild Structure - NO; Enabling Services, Tele-Enabler, Publishing arnaud 2005-11-10T09:45:42-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/rootnet_vault/ This service allows a user to store his attention data (weblog histories) in a central place. The service then does some analysis on the data. The service works in conjunction with Firefox and a special plugin from Attention.org. This allows all history to be copied to that central place. The plugin can be used to set the storage parties, such as Root Vaults or others. The plugin can be set to do no recording for a blacklist, etc. IT-services, Data arnaud 2005-11-10T08:43:23-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/feedster/ TechCrunch reminded me that I never looked at Feedster into much detail. So I had a look to see whether it had something interesting. Feedster’s basic service is searching the blogosphere. It seems pretty good, so I subscribed to the search RSS-feed. It also allows you to find out who is linking to you. The service allows you to locate relevant feeds based on keywords. I get the impression that a keyword is a word that one finds in the descriptions and/or title of a feed. The service allows you to look for job opening based on a job title. It gets these mainly from craigslist.org. Do they have a feed just for jobs? I guess this sounds like a need for the definition of a MicroContent type for job openings. Would be great to have aggregators around this. Feedster also offers a news aggregation service. They have something like feedpapers. This allows you to create a feed based on other feeds. This is a great way of remixing MicroContent Items. It also allows you to create other feeds, such as an ego feed. I think that this is most interesting way an aggregator can go: remixing existing content in an intelligent way to create new feeds. Tele-Services arnaud 2005-08-15T16:32:53-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/scuttle/ Scuttle is an intermediairy site in that has two types of customers: publishers and viewers. The service revolves around bookmarks. The viewers are offered a guided bookmark services: recent bookmarks, recent tags. The results can be sorted by date, titlke or url. It is also possible to view the bookmarks of a publisher. And on a publishers bookmark-page it is possible to do a free search on that page. As a registered viewer it is also possible to watch bookmarks (although I did not find out what it does). On the publisher side a user can add bookmarks or import them from the desktop or del.icio.us. Structured MicroContent - YES, bookmarks; Data Outside - NO, although it is possible to import; Licenses - NO; Feeds Galore - YES, it is possible to various RSS-feeds; Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of; Desktop Integration - NO; Single Identity - NO; MicroWeb - NO; lc Structure - NO; Tele-Services, Searching, Free, Predefined, Enabling Services, Tele-Enabler, Publishing arnaud 2005-08-15T15:53:00-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/myweb_20_yahoo/ This new service by Yahoo was all over the web last week. One of the services is a bookmark service. Users can add their bookmarks and publish them to their community, to the world or keep them to themselves. This service also allow a user to add tags. It is nice that the service does give tag suggestions based on what a user types. This might keep the typos down. I guess the most interesting service is their new search. I do not yet quite get it, but it seems to search only within the bookmarked pages your own community. I guess that is supposed to give better results. Is this good enough? I do not think so. For one thing they should pool bookmarks with other bookmark hosting services. I am not again going to enter my stuff there. It can import from my del.icio.us feed, but they should subscribe. And what about bookmarks that are no longer in that feed? Nice that it takes the tags as well. Anyway it is a good start. I do not know about the search service yet and whether it will give me better results. The idea has been around longer and is related to the trusted web. I will decide on that later. Again the most important is that something is happening in this space. Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T15:49:45-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/shoebox/ A post by Barb Dybwad points me to Shoebox. I had a bit of trouble defining what this service does, but I will call it an image bookmarks hosting service. The basic idea of the service is to collect and remember URL’s that point to images (image bookmarks). A user can add web-pages from which the service extracts the image URL’s. A user can also add RSS-feeds, such as produced by Flickr. As a RSS-feed is only temporarily, you can add an image from a RSS as permanent. It is also possible to add feeds from webshots itself by specifying a tag or a user. On the output side one can specify one or more images sets and subscribe to the corresponding RSS-feed. It is really mixing and matching sources to create something new. More about my definition of the service. It is all about bookmarks, but only a limited set: images, thus image bookmarks. The service does not seem to store the images themselves, hence we talk about bookmarks. The service keeps a record of the image bookmarks a user puts in, hence the hosting. There are no options for searching, browsing or finding image bookmarks added by other users. So there is no aggregation functionality. They might introduce that later.  Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T15:46:27-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/the_goingon_network/ It seems that Marc Canter’s new idea is out the box. As Marc Canter says that he has a free hand in helping design it, I will attribute it to him. As the service is not yet out we have to look at the comments and pictures to see what it will be. I did see already a lot of MicroContent types (pictures, people, links, events) around. I see output through RSS, but also import from other services, such as del.icio.us. There is Social Networking, communication, etc. Interesting to see how all this mixes and matches. And the interoperability thing will be great. It implies a lot of Web API’s. Looks extremely interesting, I would like to sign up. Context Services arnaud 2005-08-15T15:34:30-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/hotornot_map/ Google Maps Mania pointed me to the HotorNot Google Maps mash-up. Interestingly HotorNot has a Web-API. Yet another application of adding images to a map. I guess that all images on any provider need to incorporate a geographic location. Then one should be able to create a rss-feed of images based on a complex search query, which one could then put up on a map. Guess I have to look into Google Maps to see how easy things are. Tele-Services arnaud 2005-08-15T15:22:07-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/tagzania/ I have been playing a bit with Tagzania. This service allows users to create geotagged posts. The longitude and latitude is the primary key to a post. First you must select a location by means of a Google Map. For each location you can add a title, a description and multiple tags. The interesting thing is that you can subscribe to feeds of locations. So here is my RSS-feed of locations. But you can also subscribe to a tag, or just to a single location (why should I want that?). So RSS-feeds galore. I do not get the impression that you can edit the coordinates of a location. Naturally everything is to seen on a Google Map. This is a great service if you want to create a Google Map, Simple to use. But I do not want anothyer provider, where I can create content. I would like Tagzania to use my geotagged RSS-feeds. Tagzania could become the Technorati for geo-blogs. arnaud 2005-08-15T14:52:19-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/blinksale1/ Techcrunch discussed the service BlinkSale. In short the service allows a user/client to create and send invoices. Visit techcrunch if you want more information on the service itself. I decided to look a bit more into this service as I have only been looking at consumer oriented services and not business oriented services. And MicroContent not only lives in the user realm, but also in the business realm. From a Web 2.0 checklist view: Structured MicroContent - YES: the MicroContent type for this service is an invoice and a customer address; Data Outside - NO: the user must create clients and invoices inside the service. Some vCard import services would help on this point.; Licenses - NO: but this is not required here. Normally an invoice is private to the two parties involved; Feeds Galore - YES: the user can subscribe to an RSS-feed of the invoices created. And very interestingly the user can also integrated the iCal on a Mac. Thus one can see when an invoice has been created and when it is due; Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of; Desktop Integration - YES: although there is integration with a RSS- and iCal-client, there is no integration with an invoice client. But I gave it a point thanks to the iCal-integration, it shows that MicroContent is not just RSS; Single Identity - NO: again I had to create something new; MicroWeb - NO: there is no integration with other services; Wild MicroContent - NO: one can not change the invoice fields; Although the service gets only 3/10 Web 2.0 points, I think it is very interesting. It is possible to add more Web 2.0 things to it. The service uses Ajax and Ruby by the way, which improve the user experience here and there. A minor gripe is that the service is still US oriented in it’s address format. International customer should be able to define where the address fields appear and more importantly the address country should be added to the invoice. Some more flexibility is needed. Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T14:41:16-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/linktracker_icerocket/ Techcrunch notices the LinkTracker service @ IceRocket. It is a piece of code a user has to put after each blog item. Using it will transfer the user to IceRocket and show the blog items that cite that item. I think that this is an interesting service. It gives another way to recreate the (broken) comment by showing the links between blog posts. I guess the implementation should be enhanced, so that really the threads between blog posts are seen. And LinkTracker supports the DataLibre idea of staying the owner of what you write. Everything stays on your blog, even comments. Tele-Services arnaud 2005-08-15T14:37:08-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/http_collabrankwebcseunsweduau/ Collaborative Rank is an experimental service based on Del.icio.us. It allows to see the ranking of users (I an at 5168). I am not sure how the ranking is determined. It seems to be that the first one to bookmark something, which is subsequently followed by others gets a higher ranking. Also interesting is that an area of expertise is determined bases on tags used. For me it is the tags: tags, tagging, bookmarks, web2.0 and social. Sounds a bit strange collection to me. If you search for a tag, you can see the corresponding bookmarks and the tagging sequences, i.e. the users that tagged that bookmark in sequence. Tele-Services arnaud 2005-08-15T14:18:07-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/dinnerbuzz/ This service allows users to enter reviews of restaurants. This is the hosting service. Users can search or browse for restaurants based on location (cities), tags, rating or authors. The user also sees restaurants closeby. Tele-Services, Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:24:42-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/newsgator/ The service offers an online client for reading RSS-feeds. Import through OPML. Tele-Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:23:28-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/digg/ Tele-Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:20:17-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/gigablast/ A search service specialised on blogs. It did no see my blog, so I am not impressed. Tele-Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:18:53-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/feed_burner/ I am not quite sure what to make of this service. It seems a syndication service to me, i.e. you can republish your feed through them. That might keep the load on your hosting service low. And the people can sign up through feedburner. Then you can get all kind of statistics on your feed usage. Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:16:30-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/zoto/ Zoto is a image hosting service. I was drawn to this service, as they support geotags. So I subscribed and uploaded my geotagged photos. The interesting thing is that they use Google Maps to draw positions of the photo’s I made. Quite nice. I get the impression though that I have to check the locations, which I took from maps. Zoto allows a user to add tags to an image. I am not sure about the interface for tags. It is easy to add an existing tag, but cumbersome to add new tags. The user can browse his images by tag. It is possible to add your blog to Zoto. I am not sure what this does, as it does not work for my blog-system. It seems that Zoto can work as blog client. A user can upload photos either by pointing to a photo on the PC or by using a uploading client. There are limited possibilities to look for images uploaded by other users. There are categories for featured, most popular, newest, top rated and geottaged images. Also the most active and newest users can be seen. Tele-Services, Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:14:01-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/judys_book/ I had a look at this service from a MicroContent point of view. See for another review TechCrunch. Basically this service is about creating reviews for products or services. Judy’s Book forces the user into a product hierarchy for selecting a category. Then it helps the user to find the product from a list. I am not sure where this list comes from, but it helps to normalise the reviews. Then the user can add his review consisting of a rating, a title, a description, a price/value indicator, the pros and the cons of the product. This is a fairly standard review, although four fields have been added. The service does not seem very web 2.0 compliant. I did not see any RSS-feed possibilities, no export facilities, no API’s. I guess I will start to give web 2.0 compliancy ratings. This one gets 1 star: it allows the user to delete his reviews. Tele-Services, Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:12:53-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/shadows/ At first glance this looks like another bookmark service. Through bookmarklets users can add new a new bookmark or one can upload one’s bookmarks from del.icio.us. But the basic idea is to add comments on bookmarks.  And you can browse the comments (title+description) for each user, each tag or each bookmark. It is also possible to rate a bookmark. And there is a possibility to add standard tags to a bookmark, such as hilarious, gadget, cool, tip, etc. The site is not very web 2.0. It not possible to edit standard tags or ratings. Any MicroContent created by the user is locked in. There are no output facilities. It is possible to subscribe to a user. There are no inward RSS-feeds. And no web API’s. In fact I have no idea why I should use this service. There are now in beta phase, I hope they will add something extra in the future. Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:10:20-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/rsscontact/ This service allows a user to create and host his personal and business address cards. The user can then notify relations, which in turn can subscribe to the address card. I get the impression that for each contact a specific RSS-feed is created, depending on what you want to show to that relation. The Item of the feed contains links to a Google Map (US only), a link to the weather (US only) and the vCard as enclosure. I like the idea of publishing your contact information as RSS. And even more the idea of publishing specific feeds for specific people. However I do not like the idea of using a service provider for this. I rather have my AddressBook client to generate RSS-feeds, which I can then publish on my own hosting provider. But this is more the personal approach that I am following: self-publishing. And as an extension I would like to be able to subscribe to a card in my AddressBook client. A problem of the service is however that I can not delete my account on RSScontact. I remember another service (name eludes me) that did this, but they never seem to got traction. Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:09:39-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/notezar/ This service hosts notes created by users using the corresponding MacOS-X widget. The notes are only available to the user and can also be accessed through a web-interface. IT-services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:07:45-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/tagsurf/ I had a look at the tagsurf-service. I had the corresponding window open in my browser for a few days, as I did not see the original thing of it. On the one side the service allows the user to create blog-posts. The format of a blog-post is pretty common with fields such as title, message (think description), tags&links (why in a single field?), license (creative commons) and language. On the other side the service detects threads based on trackbacks (or just reply to a post) and sorts them based on common tags. And that is the original thing. WHy creating all kinds of subject hierarchies (such as in Usenet), when you can just use the tags? And the service has added the possibility to follow a tag by RSS. It is a bit early to see whether this approach works well. More posts are needed. And I do no see why Technorati or one of the others can not copy this quickly. Tele-Services, Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:04:36-05:00 http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/services/commontimes/ Techcrunch notes this service. They call it a news bookmarking services. Any news item that you think is relevant can be bookmarked here. Just note a title, the URL to the news item, some comments, check a category and add some tags. Users can browse news by category, user, user groups, etc. Web 2.0 compliancy: Structured MicroContent - YES, as shown above; Data Outside - NO, although the news is outside, the user generated content is inside and not controlled; Licenses - NO; Feeds Galore - YES, there are a lot of feed possibilities; Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of; Desktop Integration - YES, it is just standard blog-format, so any RSS reader can be used; Single Identity - NO; MicroWeb - NO; lc Structure - NO; Tele-Services, Enabling Services arnaud 2005-08-15T12:01:37-05:00