Monthly Archive for February, 2008



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3 Moblogging Tools Reviewd: Twitxr, ShoZu, JuiceCaster

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on February 29, 2008
in Social Web and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

For moblogging, you need to camera phone with e-mail capability. So, I just upgraded to a Motorola W490 specifically for the photo and video features. I was eager to connect it to my Flickr account. Flickr itself does not have this capability built-in, but since it has an open API, they did not have to build it themselves. Here are a couple sites that connect to Flickr and another that could/should.

Twitxr
The brand new player in this space is Twitxr.com. What interested me is the ability to send my mobile phone pics to both my Twitter and Flickr accounts (it will send them to Facebook as well, but I was not as excited about that). I singed up, and found it pretty easy to connect it each of these other profiles. Due to the nature of each of these connecting sites, the registration process was slightly different for each one. I took some pics, and sent it to a special e-mail address generated by Twitxr, and had it appear on my Flickr, with a geo tag (you set your location on Twitxr ahead of time), as well as my Twitxr profile which appears to have its own obligatory social network along with a user landing page and commenting, and RSS feed with a simple URL. Twitxr’s social network seems kind of pointless at first, since I am using it as a utility to send pics to my other social networks. However, the value is that you don’t need to have a profile on these other sites to make use of Twitxr. I don’t feel much like looking for friends on it, especially since FriendFeed has raised the standard for ease of friend-finding. According to TechCrunch, Twitxr is a product of Fon Labs, part of Fon Wireless, a WiFi provider with offices worldwide.

ShoZu
Next, I checked out ShoZu. I found ShoZu on Flickr’s mobile tools page. BarCampLA5 is this weekend, and I wanted to make use of my camera phone there. While twitxr does geotags tags (set it on the site ahead of time) but not regular meta tags, ShoZu does meta tags (set it on the site ahead of time) but not geotags. So, I set the tags ShoZu to BarCampLA5 and some variations on that. ShoZu, being the oldest out of the three sites, supports connections to the widest variety of social networking and blogging platforms that have open APIs: 28 sites including YouTube and Facebook, plus e-mail and ftp. It does not have a social networking feature, or a landing page for your profile like twitxr, but it does provide an RSS feed for my photos like twitxr. ShoZu has a blog and a support forum, and their team looks pretty solid. They are venture funded and their target user demographic is worldwide, and are based in London. I am not sure what their business model is, but they appear to have some corporate partnerships with big media companies.

JuiceCaster
The first site I checked out was actually JuiceCaster since a friend of mine was just hired there. By far, this was the most difficult site to use, and I could not even get it to work. I had to send it from my phone with the text “Profile” to [my phone number] @juicecaster.com. It cleverly sends the pic right back to my phone (I don’t think it is supposed to do this, and I do not see any value in it), but nothing changes on the site. I could not even get a picture to appear. I don’t care if there is some step I skipped or something, it should just work and be idiot-proof.

JuiceCaster lets you host both pictures and videos, lets you embed a Flash widgets on your blog or MySpace, or Facebook, but it does not seem very useful I can get the pictures to appear. The widget takes the TV metaphor a little too far by showing snow, color bars (when there is no content yet), and letting you change the channel to another users. The widget is the only way to view the content, which creates a bit of a usability problem. This means that you don’t have access to the raw jpg files. As a destination for photos and videos, there are no open APIs to allow the connection of something Flickr or YouTube, which in some ways are compititors. There are no RSS feeds so there is no real platform for others to build on. As a user, if you want your videos to get seen by a lot of people, you are far better off using the ShoZu to YouTube application than embedding the JuiceCaster widget. But, it is pretty clear that the main purpose of this platform is for mobile phones themselves (not the web), sharing with specific friends, and immediacy. However, a little web usability can go a long way in helping to build this brand via some mild SEO. They do have a Facebook application, with instructions on installing it here, but strangely, no link to the actual Facebook application on that page, which is here, listing 19 active daily users. There are four different fan groups on Facebook, the most having 26 members. All of this calls their current strategy into question.

One feature that JuiceCaster has that other services do not have is the ability to send photos and videos to your friends’ phones. However, it seems most phones today have this feature built in, and you do not need a 3rd party application. I am not sure what the core competency or business model is for JuiceCaster. In some ways they compete with Slide.com and RockYou.com’s MySpace widgets and Facebook applications. The target user seems to be the MySpace demographic. I suggest they focus more on allowing the content to be spread around the net with more than just Flash widgets, but also with RSS and an open API, and perhaps a blog. According to their about page, they were able to make their mark years ago as a white label solution, back when there was less competition and innovation in the space.

It seems they definitely want to be a platform, but the other two competitors mentioned in this post, which are simply tools to enable the use of larger platforms, seem to be ahead of them in functionality, flexibility, and momentum. I would love to see them get it together. JuiceCaster is based out of Los Angeles, Ca. They appear to have investors but do not list any of them, but they are listed here at the TechCrunch CrunchBase

I tried to embed the Flash widget, but it messed up the layout of this page to much, so here is a screen shot instead.

Mashable took a less in-depth look at around 30 of the competitors in this space last year.

Update:
If my friend is able to help me fix the problems with JuiceCaster, I’ll update it here.

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Free e-books

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on February 11, 2008
in DRM Rant, Disruptive Business Models in Content and New Marketing
. 0 Comments

Mike at Techdirt points to some half-hearted efforts at free e-books. The books will only be available for a limited time, and they cannot be printed. It is all posturing by the book publishers who still believe that completely free pdfs will cannibalize physical book sales when authors like Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig have proved otherwise.

The new definition of “free” is DRM-free as well as free-as-in-beer. The restrictions on printing and the books’ availability for a limited time are just other forms of DRM.

It is true that it is cheaper to buy books than it is to print them. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine is a free to download/print/read book I was looking into printing at Kinkos, but it is going to cost $43 when the book will probably cost $25 in stores and $20 from Amazon when it comes out (thanks to someone who linked to it in the comments on Techdirt.com from a post a couple of months ago).

Also newly available to to freely download/print/read is The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson.

And finally, Neil Gaiman is deciding which of his books he should release as a free download.

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You can buy technology, but not culture

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on February 8, 2008
in Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

Arik Hesseldahl at Business Week has some great points for Steve Ballmer: don’t try to be all things to all people. Then you spread yourself too thin, you know, like peanut butter.

If and when this Yahoo-Microsoft deal happens, who, out of all of the talented engineers and managers in both companies are going to stick around for the pain and FUD of the merger? Not Many. “Screw this, I do not have to deal with this. I am going to Google/Facebook/start my own company/cash in my stock.”

Yahoo is made of people. Yahoo’s advantage over Microsoft is that Yahoo has a more open-minded culture. Not the “not invented here” mentality (even though it thinks it wants what Yahoo has), which has helped it to snatch up some of the best web companies in the last couple of years. The Microsoft culture would kill this. Yahoo without its best people is a liability to Microsoft. It would be a big, empty machine that would need to be run the Microsoft way. Is it worth the risk for the most talented employees and most passionate users to defect? Without these, Yahoo is nothing.

Ballmer’s ego and the unnecessary need for fast growth are in the way of Microsoft’s success in new markets. If Microsoft would just change its corporate culture from the inside, it would not feel the need to acquire Yahoo. Ballmer’s management style is, design-by-committee, old-hat, industrial age, last century. And this is perfectly clear when you compare Steve Ballmer with the Steve Jobs (ok he has an ego as well but somehow it does not get in his way), Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Jason Fried, or Jerry Yang.

One is a big, sweaty monster, making the others appear as Zen masters.

Update
And so the exodus begins.
6/20/08 Josh Schachter.
6/19/08 Qi Lu, Brad Garlinghouse, Vish Makhijani.
6/17/08 Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield.
6/12/08 Usama Fayyad and Jeremy Zawodny.
6/12/08 Jeff Weiner.



352 views

An analysis of Google’s Social Graph API

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on February 4, 2008
in Social Web and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

Despite the valid concerns that some have with Google’s Social Graph API, I thought I would talk about the technical possibilities. My social graph may be of particular interest becuase I had used my Wordpress blog’s XFN feature to mark up the blogs I read as “muse” and my profile on at least 10 social networks as “me.” Using the Google’s Social Graph API demo you can see my extensive list of FOAF and XFN URLs. There is also a machine readable format that could be fed into a new social network to find friends on that network. (click for a larger version)
I have illustrated what the data means, and how it was derived from these other sites.

I accidentally listed PaidContent.org as another site of mine (I have it in my blogroll, I intended to mark it as “muse”, not “me”, I am not affiliated with them),  so it then goes on to show links to colleagues and acquaintances of PaidContent.org that it attributes back to me. I have fixed this in my blog roll, but the Google cache has not updated yet.

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