Are these the top Web 2.0 companies?
By Richard Koman - August 28, 2006
By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher
In today's Chronicle, Dan Fost and Ellen Lee offer snapshots of what they think are the Web 2.0 startups on the move. What strikes most is that most of these apps leave me cold.
The one that perked my interest was popURLs, a competitor to NetVibes, which I looked at here. I guess I'm just a shut-in but I don't see myself spending a lot of time sharing music with friends online or watching their photos go by.
And with so many Web 2.0 offerings, how would you ever get all the people you care about to standardize on one solution? That said, I will try to spend some time with these and other W2 sites in coming days and offer some better perspective. Here's the Chron's top picks (and my comments):
- StumbleUpon - rate and recommend websites as you stumble around the Net. How is it better than delicious?
- Meebo - check all your instant messages without having to run four different clients. Useful, but not exciting.
- imeem - Social networking. Lucaso says its built-in IM makes it great.
- Slide - set photos from any website to slide by your screen all the time.
- Dabble - Kind of delicious/Digg for online video, it makes sense.
- Pandora - This is what Cory Doctorow was talking about eight years ago or so. Collaborative filtering to make an online radio station you really want to listen to. Problem back then was Cory was talking about P2P downloading of MP3s. A non-starter.
- Eyespot - Online video editing.
- Songbird - Play music from many sources
- Twitter - Text message to groups of people's cellphones. No doubt handy for deploying smartmobs.
- Revver - Online video site
By Richard Koman - August 28, 2006 | Permalink | Comment
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Comments (3)
Two points.
StumbleUpon is in essense like del.cio.us, just is done differently is going after a different target audience. del.cio.us is the no-nonse bare bones grand daddy, while stumble is more about identity, avatars and socializing.
Now I have to disagree on Pandora, this is NOT collaborative filtering, quite the opposite. Read about the music genome project and you will see that 40-60 music mavens are busily rating all the music for Pandora. Since I have some background in math and chaos theory I can tell you there are good and bad things about them. The bad one is that tuning the algorithm with 400+ parameters is pretty hard. The good news is that if you get it right it will work :)
Alex
Posted: August 28, 2006 8:34 PM
with all these web2.0 plays the devil is in the detail. Do you have the right combination of product attributes and the right magic in your UI to drive the viral growth?
So del.icio.us and SU might be similar (from the 40000 ft view of a strategy consultant) but they feel very different when you use them.
Chron's list is parochial (once again)... where is last.fm?
Posted: September 4, 2006 6:11 AM
Serious... Pandora is *not* collaborative filtering, they use a room full of staff listening to music to filter it.
I think he meant to list last.fm... a very cool, truly collaborative place for music discovery.
Posted: November 6, 2006 4:16 PM