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friendfeed thread on demise of a Web 2.0 darling

Web Office vendor Zoho continues its rapid pace of product upgrades and new releases, with the next version of Zoho Show - its browser-based presentations software. The app has a brand new user interface and a bunch of new features.

The UI changes focus mainly on improving the editing of presentations, which Zoho says now "matches that of its desktop counterparts" (by which we assume it means Microsoft Powerpoint). Also importing presentations has been upgraded. The video embedded below gives a good overview of the changes.

I'm not a big user of Powerpoint, but in my tests I was impressed by the slickness of the Ajax. I was told that a lot of work went into that, especially for compatibility with VML (IE browser) and SVG (Firefox and others).

What makes Zoho Show different from Powerpoint are features like the version control, sharing, publishing it to be viewable online by anyone, and embedding in a blog or website. These are all common collaboration benefits for Web Office tools. But there's some nice extra touches with this new version of Show - e.g. chat has been integrated, so when you're collaborating with others on a presentation you can discuss it in real time. Zoho Meeting has also been integrated, enabling you to share your whole desktop.

Overall, Zoho Show 2.0 is slick and compares well with Powerpoint; and has added collaboration features. Plus, not for the first time, it's one-upped Google - whose online presentations software is basic by comparison.

As we mentioned in our Web Office 2007 Year in Review post last week, Zoho is arguably the most complete and full-featured Web Office suite on the market. Throughout 2007 the company has announced a steady stream of new products and upgrades. We think Zoho's suite, called Zoho Business, will hold the key for the company going forward - as it continues to integrate its many products and features into a compelling whole.

Disclosure: Zoho is a RWW sponsor

I'm all for anything that gets people to read more. Though I count myself a connoisseur of good film and television, I'm always reading a book (right now it's "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" by Susanna Clarke). I admit, though, I don't quite grasp the concept of BookSwim, which is essentially a Netflix-like rental by mail program for books. Oh, I get how it works: you sign up, choose the books you want, they get mailed, you send them back when you're done and get the next book on your list. But I'm having trouble grasping what makes the service useful to the average reader. It may be, however, that the service isn't useful to the average reader.

New Jersey-based, BookSwim, which sent out its first book last March ("The Richest Man in Babylon" by George S. Clason), has plans starting at $14.99/month, which allow you to take out two books at once. Assuming your library is often out of the books you're into, you'd need to read about three books (trade paperbacks cost about $6-7 each) per month, or at least one higher priced new release hardcover book to justify that cost. How many people actually do that each month? My guess is, sadly, not many -- either for lack of time or lack of interest.

Indeed, BookSwim concedes that the service is not for everybody. BookSwim's Eric Ginsberg told me by email that only about 12% of Americans read one or more books per month -- that means there is likely a relatively small pool of avid readers for whom the library doesn't cut it who might be interested in the BookSwim service. (Ginsberg mentioned that the 12% figure puts their potential customer pool at about 36 million Americans, but if that stat figures in people who read a single book each month -- and I'd guess that would account for a large portion of those 36 million -- then the number of readers who would benefit from the service is actually bound to be lower.)

Image via BookSwim.

Ginsberg defended BookSwim by saying that anyone who buys one average price new release hardcover book per month could save month by using the service's 2-book at a time plan (true, but can't you wait a few months for the paperback?), and by saying that unlike the library, BookSwim doesn't impose late fees and lets you keep books as long as you want (true again, but my library lets me keep books for two weeks, and if I have to read two books in a month to break even, that's how long I have with BookSwim, too). He also noted that renting books is better for the environment than constantly purchasing them (certainly true!).

I also asked Ginsberg about wear and tear, since books generally wear out more quickly then DVDs. "Our subscribers value our quality service," he told me. "Along the lines of 'Do unto others...', no one wants to get a damaged book in the mail, so we rarely if ever have a problem."

That's not to say there won't be people who will find utility BookSwim's service and catalog of over 185,000 titles. Judging from the user feedback they have printed all over their site, they already have a good number of satisfied customers. There are certainly avid readers out there that would benefit from BookSwim. It seems especially well suited to fast-based book discussion groups (the type that meet weekly or bi-weekly to discuss a new book). Suggestion: add some social features to allow people to form book discussion groups and talk about titles online.

What do you think? Would a Netflix for books be a useful addition to your life?

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Mixx_a_Gorgeous_Digg_Competitor_Gets_in_Bed_With_LA_Times'; digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff'; digg_skin = 'compact'; Social news site Digg is a love-it or hate-it phenomenon. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love Digg, but I've got to admit that new competitor Mixx is worth a real close look. Mixx announced today that it's taken a strategic investment (meaning a small one with a bunch of influence anyway) from the giant newspaper the LA Times. It's just the latest in a series of deals that the little company has signed with outfits including USA Today, Reuters.com and The Weather Channel. This deal is a strange one though, because in addition to Mixx functionality being live on the Times site, LA Times stories will now be favored in the Mixx search results. That's the first thing I don't think I like about Mixx, but there's a lot that I like about it very much.

Mixx was clearly built by people paying attention to user demands at Digg. Its popularity algorithm is said to be a simple one, according to Matt Marshall's coverage of the LA Times deal today, but there's a lot that's interesting about the site.

Here's my list of favorite features that you'll find at this very compelling site...

• There's OpenID login, something Digg said it was going to do over a year ago.
• There's a bookmarklet to submit a link from off-site. I cannot imagine why Digg hasn't offered one of these yet.
• There's extensive personalization of the home page, including drag and drop ordering like an AJAX startpage. It's nice.
• There's been a photos section from the very beginning and there's video too.
• Your location or the location of the event you are linking to is important throughout throughout the site.
• There's extensive use of tagging, which is nice for site navigation and story skimming.
• There's private groups, something people are often disappointed to find not available in Digg or Del.icio.us. Maybe your group alone would like to use a social news service internally and this is reason enough to use the site.
• Content filtering through a 3rd party service attempts to keep out spam, that's a great idea. Can you imagine if Digg did this kind of thing at the point of link submission? The upcoming stories page would be vastly improved, more people would use it and the whole experience would change.
• You can see what people voted against any item and what people have voted for or against. This has been a big complaint about Digg - that there's an anonymous 'Bury Brigade' who vote down anything they don't like based on politics or brand. On Digg there's no way to know who voted against something, it just dies and there's no accountability. Not the case on Mixx, every story displays both up and down voters in the sidebar.
• The site encourages users to upload oversized avatar images. That's great, avatars are a tactile medium and all about facial recognition - so bigger is better and it really is important.
• You can change your mind in Mixx. Vote things up, down, then up and then down again. It's great.

We'll see if this combination of post-Digg smarts and Reddit marketing strategy works well for Mixx. AOL's Propeller is reported to be growing surprisingly fast - I think there's some real potential outside the Digg niche for Digg-type sites to thrive. I hope they'll reconsider selling the integrity of their search to investors, though.

In the end, the Digg algorithm is a smart one and the number of people there (20m unique visitors a month) won't be beat by a site with cool features...at least probably not. Who knows? I like the new Digg images section a lot, but I really like the Mixx user experience.

When Definr calls itself an "incredibly fast dictionary," they're not kidding. Definr is a single page, simple-as-possible dictionary lookup tool that delivers results to queries almost instantly (without reloading the page) and suggests words as you type. According to the site, the average lookup time is 14ms and even stayed fast when it was slammed by Digg traffic last weekend. And their server status page said that while I was on the site just now, the average lookup time was under 1ms -- now that's fast.

The Ruby on Rails-powered site works by caching at least 10,000 definitions in memory (as I write this, that number stands at about 25,000 -- it fluctuates based on load), so that results are delivered nearly instantly. The word completion algorithm, meanwhile, searches about 200,000 words. So to keep that speedy, Definr uses a C module written for Ruby and runs it on its own server. The result, once the Ruby layer is factored in, is that Definr can do 10,000 completions per second without catching its breath.

The site also keeps a list of the top 50 words search on the site -- which for some reason is "weapon" right now. And they offer a Firefox search engine extension.

So why use Definr over more established dictionary sites like Dictionary.com or Merriam Webster? To be honest, you might not. Definr's speed, though impressive, is really more of a gimmick than anything else, and their Firefox search option doesn't work any faster than the Dictionary.com one I already have installed -- and their definitions, based on Princeton's WordNet 2.0, are more barebones. However, their blazing fast word completions do come in handy if you're using the dictionary to check the spelling of a word (which is something I do -- though in the age of spellcheck, I'm not sure how many people use that method).

Useful or not, though, Definr is worth checking out just to marvel at its speed.

Recently launched Ask500People is an interesting new polling experiment that endeavors to ask questions of 500 people around the world and report the results in real-time. Ask500People is not a polling widget that you can use to run questions on your site (though they have formed partnerships with some high traffic sites to occasionally run polls), but rather it is a way for people to gain access to a large crowd to ask pressing questions.

The site works by first soliciting questions from users, which are voted on Digg-style. If a question gets enough votes in 24 hours, it is added to the queue and eventually asked. When a question is asked, users can vote on site or via a polling widget that anyone can embed on their blog or social networking profile (assuming it supports JavaScript-based widgets), and the results are reported in real-time on a continuously updated Google Maps mashup. After the question is complete (after 500 people have answered it), the site pauses to catch its breath for a few minutes, then moves on to the next question. It's very addicting to watch answers unfold from around the globe, and to participate in debates in the comments section of the site.

Anyone can vote in polls, but only registered users can submit questions. The majority of questions seem to be yes/no structured, but multiple choices are possible.

Right now, the site is only polling 100 people per question, because current traffic levels allow for 100 person queries to be completed in about 15 minutes -- as traffic increases, the site hopes to expand to the full 500. Results for each question are archived and broken down my country and voter type (those on the site vs. those voting via widget). Surprisingly, it seems that the majority (over 80%) of people are voting via Ask500People widgets spread around the web.

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Indian company InstaColl today formally launched Live Documents, a mini-office suite of products similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Live Documents has already received plenty of press coverage, mainly because it was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia - the man who famously sold web mail service Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998.

Live Documents was built using RIA technologies including Flash and Flex, which the company claims gives it a "user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications." In its launch announcement, Live Documents is being heavily positioned as a Microsoft Office competitor - and complement. On the latter, the company says that "Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications." There is also offline access.

It's also clear that Live Documents is leveraging the Microsoft brand - from the "Live" brand name, to the claim that it has a “Services plus Software” approach (Microsoft's calls this "software plus services").

Continuing the 'embrace and extend' Microsoft theme, InstaColl CTO Adarsh Kini claims that Live Documents "break's Microsoft's proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office". He also says their service "matches features found only in the latest version of Office (Office 2007)", so giving users a reason to avoid upgrading their MS Office software.

It's clever marketing all round (or a "a shameless rip-off of the MS brand", depending on your pov!) and, as Nick Carr pointed out, India alone is a potentially huge market for Live Documents to take on Microsoft Office. Dan Farber also has a good post, giving context on the Web Office space in general - which is very crowded. But the problem is that nobody has yet seen the software in action, so it's difficult to say how Live Documents compares with the likes of Google D&S, Zoho, and ThinkFree.

Live Documents first surfaced in Sept 2006, and its current incarnation seems high on hyperbole and low on beta product action. So all we can do, like everyone else, is sign up to the invite beta and wait and see if the PR bluster will be backed up by the actual product.

There was a time before Facebook when social networking on the Internet was about making anonymous connections with people you'd never met before rather than a way to keep an eye on the people you already know. Some of my closest friends today began as anonymous online acquaintances ten years ago -- people who I shared a common experience with and didn't exchange personal information with until I was good and ready. With some of the newer breed of social networks, such as Facebook, which requires that you use your real name, that sort of anonymity is impossible.

The Experience Project (EP), which launched a public beta about a year ago, is built specifically around the concept of remaining anonymous while socializing. The site has grown to 250,000 members, almost 60% of those added in the past three months, and is backed by an impressive line up of angel investors including Ron Conway, Kathryn Gould, and Steve Blank.

According to EP, by emphasizing and encouraging anonymous interaction, the site allows people to open up more than they do on other social networking sites. One member gushes, "this is the most real representation of myself anywhere -- friends, family or online. I've never felt so accepted nor had more fun anywhere online."

Users create profiles on EP based around experiences, which are immediately transformed into groups where other members experiencing the same thing can share stories and feelings about that issue. These can range from the serious, such as medical conditions, battles with addiction, or marital problems, to the whimsical, such as being in love, or having seen the latest episode of Dancing With the Stars. You can also form groups around goals, such as the desire to lose weight.

EP supports all the other basic social networking features we've come to expect from this type of site: friending, private messaging, blogs, moods (status), activity streams, virtual gifts, message walls, and a few that are less common like a dream journal and confessions page. But all of this is surrounded by a site that has taken great pains to keep everything anonymous (should the user desire). EP can even blur pictures you upload to the site to make sure no one deciphers you secret identity, and unlike many social networks, deleting your account from the Experience Project is a painless process that can be done from the account settings page.

Where EP really shows potential, though, is not in the whimsical stuff, like talking about Halloween costumes (though that sort of thing has a place and helps keep users entertained), but rather in the site's ability to set up virtual, anonymous support groups for a range of serious issues. The I Experienced Racism group, for example, has 136 people talking about racism, sharing stories, and discussing how to deal with it. This is powerful stuff and I suspect that the promise of anonymity makes a lot of people feel more comfortable about opening up regarding these serious and potentially sensitive issues.

Conclusion

In the end, EP won't replace the socializing you do on sites like MySpace or Facebook, but it might be a good alternative for people who want or need to discuss issues that they don't want broadcast to all their friends. Or it might be a fun way to meet people who genuinely share the same interests as you in a safe and anonymous environment.

Our friends from Polldaddy, the online polling service we use here at RWW, have launched a new version of their site. The new features:

• New online survey tool;
• Addition of pro account for $20 per month - gives users more access to the site and allows removal of the link to PollDaddy in their polls;
• New indepth reporting on voters, voter location and IP analysis for fraud detection;
• Many other new little features for the polls tool, such as hiding results from voters once they have voted and ability to change the system text in the poll into foreign languages.

Co-founder David Lenehan [disclosure: David is an occasional writer for RWW] told me that "the main thing about this launch is what it allows us to do in the future". The original PollDaddy, according to David, was an experiment - so the code for the original site was not built to scale. With the new version, they've re-written the entire application from the ground up. So PollDaddy version 2 is, said David, "a starting point to launch PollDaddy as a full blown professional application."

So what can we expect in the future from Polldaddy? Surveys are the first new feature, and in the coming months Polldaddy will build a platform for "collecting data from the web" - which means services such as forms, quizzes, and other user-requested services. David told me that Polldaddy hopes "to build a system eventually that will ask our users what kind of data they want to collect and provide them with a selection of ways to do it."

Polldaddy has 2 full time developers, including David. Their polls are registering 70 million impression per month and they seem to be the biggest online poll provider (but please let us know in the comments if you know of bigger poll services). Polldaddy has around 70,000 registered users at present.

In terms of Polldaddy's integration within social networks, David said they are working on integrating with Google's OpenSocial "before Christmas." Apparently 20% of their polls are used on social network profiles. The other 80% are made up of blogs and websites, such as RWW.

YouMonitor.Us is a distributed peer-to-peer monitoring service that puts your web site to work monitoring other sites for downtime, while other sites keep an eye on yours. The service is free, provided that you volunteer some CPU cycles and bandwidth from your server to monitor other sites, and YMU provides detailed downtime reports and instant notification of outages via SMS or email.

The way it works is fairly simple. Once you've signed up, you're prompted to install a script on your web server (they offer it in PHP, JSP, ASP and Perl). The script receives monitoring tasks from the YMU Control Center, and pings other web sites about 10 times per minute. Other web sites in the network will ping your site up to 5 times per minute. If anything is amiss on your site, a text message or email will be dispatched, and you'll also get regular reports about your site's activity over time.

The resource consumption by the script is very a low, according to YMU - approximately equal to 10 page views per minute. According to their site, running the script 100 times per minute would result in a modest CPU usage of 2-3%, memory usage of 8.5-9.5 MB, and bandwidth of 200 B/s for HTTP monitoring and 2 KB/s for HTTP transaction.

For now, the site is free to use as long as you agree to participate in the monitoring network by offering up your server to monitor other web sites. In the future, the site plans to offer a paid subscription model that would allow people to receive monitoring but not dish it out. The current planned pricing model is $9.99/month for 60 checks per hour; $29.99/month for 300 checks per hour; $4.99 for every 60 additional checks per hour, though that could change.

YMU is a pretty interesting concept. I haven't seen any other sites doing P2P web site monitoring, but it makes sense. Because all the service's clients are also providing the computers that are doing the monitoring, you get pinged from all over the global Internet. YouMonitor.Us currently has network computers operating on every continent (save Antarctica), and their coverage should grow as the service grows. As long as the resource consumption from running the script is negligible, as the company claims, and the script is secure -- which they also claim -- this could be a popular, cost effective, and useful service for webmasters.

Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you'll want to keep an eye on. It is a real testimony to the potential of the new web that anyone would even try to create something like this company has. Currently in private beta, I hope the company will fix its usability issues and launch soon. Send an email to beta@lifestrea.ms if you want on the list for an account.

Lifestreaming aggregates all your inbound and outbound activity online, see Tumblr or FriendFeed for other examples. For more on Lifestreaming check out our recent interview of David Karp, CEO of Tumblr, over at Read/WriteTalk.

If everything under the covers at Lifestrea.ms can be made as good as the front page of the site, then we'll be in great shape. That page alone is a marvel to witness. I've been on the other side of login, though, and don't want to go back until some things have changed.

An Open Aggregator, or Standards Based Nerve Center

Leveraging every open data standard and API I've ever heard of, Lifestrea.ms wants to serve as your dashboard for all your reading, writing and discovery online.

They've got OpenID, they've got APML, hCard, XFN, OPML - you name it. It ought to be an opportunity to make all of these protocols easy to use for everyday users. OAuth would make the service even more powerful but they say they've got some proprietary methods of interacting with other services too. If it sounds like alphabet soup over there, wait till you see the mess it serves up. Usability is a disaster, unfortunately.

How It Works

Identify yourself at registration and Lifestrea.ms will assemble a list of feeds it thinks may be of interest to you. You tell it which of the feeds are correct and your profile is built accordingly. This proccess could use some more thought put into it. Why offer me just the feed del.icio.us/rss/Marshall+Kirkpatrick, for example, when there are any number of other permutations of that URL that are more likely to be of interest? (Like rss/marshallkirkpatrick.)

Once you've got all kinds of inbound feeds coming into your dashboard, you can discover other content and contacts - essentially using the product like an RSS reader and social network rolled into one. Furthermore, you can publish from inside Lifestrea.ms to the 3 big microblogging platforms, WordPress, Upcoming.org, Facebook, YouTube and more. It automatically synchs with Del.icio.us and says OPML export is "coming soon."

As you carry out all this in-and-out with information, your APML profile is assembled and can be exported at any time. Soon you'll be able to take that profile back and forth between services like Lifestrea.ms and Bloglines, Newsgator, Magnolia and more for instannt recommendations when joining one platform based on your interests expressed on the others. See Michael Pick's intro to APML today for more on this standard.

Beyond usability, the other thing Lifestrea.ms needs is a desktop or Rich Internet Application client. Something in Adobe AIR would be great so it can be cross platform. If there's one thing I've learned from Twitter (and there's a lot of things, actually) it's that no web page interface is sticky enough to keep me interacting with a service all day long - I need a dedicated app that sits above the other apps I'm navigating through. If somehow we could combine the code freaks at Lifestrea.ms with the design of Tumblr and the interface/usability bliss of Snitter - that company could take over the world.

Lifestrea.ms is currently in private beta status but hopefully the team behind it will make it usable and ship it soon. The vision is awesome - but the implementation has some important work ahead of it before it's ready for the public.

VibeAgent is a just-launched hotel search site based in Charlottesville, Virginia. There's a number of things worth noting about this startup; travel search may be a crowded space but the web is young and the game is not over yet.

Another Travel Site?

Think no one you know will join one more random travel website? The Silicon Valley buzz around still-private beta travel site Dopplr should quiet cynics. There's plenty of room for innovation and no market lead is safe.

Do you wonder how a web 2.0 site from Virginia can gain enough traction to do anything meaningful? Check out the success story of Webmail.us, another Virginia based startup that charged users a subscription fee and saw huge growth before being acquired by Rackspace this fall.

Immediate Value

VibeAgent says it's got 120,000 hotels in its index, which it claims is bigger than Expedia's. Its use of social search to go through that index is interesting; both members of any group you've joined and people whose characteristics are similar to yours effect your search results disproportionately.

Fortunately, VibeAgent is a good example of a social site that offers value even before reaching network-effect numbers of users. Search is already good and the site just launched.

Striking UI

The UI offers some model elements. Specifically, large avatars and point-and-click search refining. Big avatars lead to face recognition, an empathy-based sense of community and the opposite of squinting. You might think that large avatars are no big deal, but if so you'd be wrong.

VibeAgent's attractive advanced search UI, which lets you click on big buttons to add traits you desire in your search results or double click on those buttons to exclude those traits from your results, is very nice as well.

VibeAgent may feel overly social and the scrolling sidebars you'll see on the site may feel like a bit much - but on its first day open to the public, I think this site looks strong.

Israeli digital crafts social network eSnips launched a new feature tonight that could change the social networking game. Called Social DNA, it's essentially a collection of personality quizzes that can serve to connect like minded users and create incredibly accurate targeting for the site's advertisements. Never heard of eSnips? The site sees more than 14 million unique visitors monthly - that's almost 3/4 of Digg's 20 million monthly uniques.

While Digg users fall primarily into the cliche 15 to 35 year old male market demographic - the fact is that they don't click on very many ads. They also don't come to the site to shop. Quite the opposite is true for eSnips users. They may be made up of the "unwashed international types" that US advertisers are said to look down on (70% of the audience is international), but they also come to the site with a willingness to buy and are a less tech savvy audience than Digg users. The less savvy people are, the more likely they are to click on ads.

More importantly, the new Social DNA feature should carry individual and aggregate eyeballs right into the hands of the eSnips ad sales team, ready to place them directly into the gaping maws of just the right advertisers. I wrote earlier today about the way that people give up their valuable personal info to MyBlogLog in exchange for a chance to see the faces of their blog's readers. Similarly, eSnips is using peoples' desire to connect with interesting strangers to access info about their users as well.

The questions asked by the quizzes are not particularly enlightening, they range from humorous to insipid, but the self-categorization they enable is good and the potential is large.

Given the size of the audience, the availability of user profiling info and the commercial-friendly atmosphere on the site - if eSnips doesn't monetize better than Digg then something is wrong with eSnips.