June, 2006 Archives | Homepage

New Social Network Targets Music Lovers

MOG A new social network called MOG has debuted that unites people based on their tastes in music.
MOG is a new social network that helps people find other people that have similar tastes in music. If you look at some of the random MOG shots on MOG's homepage it shows a photograph of the person and lists a few of their favorite bands. You can learn more about MOG in the faq.
Social networks have been expanding at a quick pace lately. Recently, new networks have launched in specific categories like autos, kids and soccer. Even Martha Stewart's company has a social network in the pipeline.

Posted on June 22, 2006
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Yahoo's MyWeb Gets an Upgrade

Yahoo MyWebYahoo has improved their MyWeb social search tool. The B2Day blog has an interview with Yahoo MyWeb product manager Tom Chi. The interview lists some of the improvements Chi wants to make.
He wants to make shared bookmarks, tagging, and social search more mainstream by simplifying the service and offering more entry points for the average user. For instance, now you can search all publicly bookmarked pages instead of just your contacts' pages. MyWeb will be more open than it has been. You will be able to export your bookmarks to any browser (or import them, as well as from del.icio.us). There is a tag cloud with the most popular tags, as well as an "Interesting Today" feature (akin to Flickr's "Interestingness" sorter) that ranks links by how interesting they are to MyWeb users (as measured by how many times a particular link has been saved over the past 24 hours). The site will have more Ajax hooks (like all of Yahoo these days). It also will identify the most active taggers for any given term and let you add those people as contacts. So you will be able to find experts and, in effect, subscribe to their public attention streams without actually knowing them.
There are many social bookmarking and tagging sites these days so the tools that people coming back to will have to be feature rich. It sounds like Yahoo is moving MyWeb in the right direction by offering more and more features. The most difficult part for any successful link sharing or memedigger type of tool will be filtering out spam.

Posted on June 19, 2006
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Jux2 Adds MSN Search Results

Jux2 is a meta-search engine that allows users to compare search results from three major search engines: Google, MSN Search and Yahoo. Jux2 has added several new search enhancements since being acquired earlier this year by Douglas Baker. Baker says the primary object of Jux2 is to "allow searchers to compare results from the leading search engines, which saves time and ensures that the user is receiving the most relevant search results."

Here is a list of the recent Jux2 enhancements:

  • MSN results have been added to provide a wider breadth of results
  • Toolbar options that will work with both Firefox and Internet Explorer
  • Desktop access using the Jux2 Widget for Yahoo Widget Engine (Mac or PC) or Jack of all Widgets for Apple's Dashboard.

    Posted on June 16, 2006
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    Yahoo Video Relaunches

    Yahoo VideoThe Browser reports that Yahoo has relaunched its Yahoo Video website. The site now includes categories, lists of the most popular videos as well as upload features.
    Yahoo made a break for the front of the Internet video pack last night, launching a retooled version of Yahoo Video, its well-trafficked but heretofore uninspired video-hosting service. The buzz online is that the upgrade is overdue, and may well push Yahoo ahead of current video leaders YouTube and MySpace Videos. The San Jose Mercury News reports that the new Yahoo Video, unlike the old, will allow users to upload their own movies, and goes one "step further by integrating the amateur content with professional videos from the likes of ABC News, CBS's "60 Minutes," the Discovery Channel, and CNN. This, says the Merc, "appears to position the Sunnyvale company for a future in Internet television."
    The Yahoo Video service also has a new blog to go with it. One of the entries discusses some of the videos people have been uploading.

    Posted on June 14, 2006
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    PCWorld's 101 Fabulous Freebies

    101 Fabulous FreebiesPCWorld.com has created a great list of free online tools called 101 Fabulous Freebies.
    There's never been a better time to be a cheapskate. Free utilities? We've got 'em. Want a full-fledged image editor? A few gigabytes of mail storage? How about an entire office software suite? We can top that, easy. Take the whole earth and solar system. Free!

    If you thought that the golden age of free stuff ended when the dot-com bubble burst, guess again. The past few years have seen an explosion of giveaways--both Web-based services and free software--that make the anemic home-page building apps and first-generation Web mail services of the late 1990s pale in comparison.
    Some Web 2.0 list and organizer tools like BackPack, storage tools like Yahoo Briefcase and photo sharing tools like Flickr are among the 101 freebies. The list also includes search tools, browsers, calendars, bookmark tools, blogging services, rss readers and video sharing tools. You can also look at list alphabetically and by category.

    Posted on June 12, 2006
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    TheSwarm Shows You What Websites People are Using

    The SwarmTheSwarm is a new website that offers a graphical map that shows what websites people are visiting.
    Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm and grow larger. Conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center and grow smaller.

    Website traffic is symbolized with thin lines. Each time you see a line appear, it means someone has moved from one site to the other. You can gauge how many people are swarming around based on the number of lines.
    TheSwarm uses Flash but thankfully they also offer a text version which shows you the top visited site over the last six hours.

    Posted on June 6, 2006
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    CNET Launches AllYouCanUpload

    All You Can Upload from CNETCNET has launched a free, user-friendly image hosting website called AllYouCanUpload.com. AllYouCanUpload allows users to upload images to the website. Users can then call up their uploaded images elsewhere -- like on their blog, eBay listings or MySpace profile. See the site's FAQ for more details.
    1. What is allyoucanupload.com?

    Allyoucanupload.com is an online space where you can store (host) images to embed in pages elsewhere on the Internet.

    2. How can I make use of this service?

    Use allyoucanupload.com to add images to your other online spaces, such as online auctions (eBay), blogs (Blogger, TypePad), message boards, online classifieds, and social networking sites (Xanga, MySpace). You upload, we host, you post. It's that simple.
    The site also works with CNET's WebShots, a photo sharing website.

    Posted on June 2, 2006
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