This so called Identity 2.0 issue should be necessarily considered when comes to how to handle all the rising web2.0 application your are registered at.

OpenID has been invented by Brad Fitzgerald founder of LiveJournal. But although it has been acquired by SixApart it still count as an open spource project. And it striving as you can see that many Web companies like AOL, Verisign, Microsoft, Digg, the Firefox Foundation and many others sustain the service and will help the identity service to become the leading standard.

But how does it realy work? I found a very informing video on go2web2 blog which completely explains how OpdenID works. Have a look at it:


YouTube

Seeing the video OpenID sounds very useful and also safe to me. But the fact that I don’t know anyone who uses it combined with the fact that I have to allow many webservices to use my registered data. But if I can´t handle all my logins anymore I m sure I will switch to the service just out of the distress.

Music lovers just enter his/her favourite music artists and Pandora plays the chosen and similar music. The similarity to other bands/artists is generated with a complex mathematical algorithm analyzing the structure and tonality of each song in the database. With this genius feature, I discovered a bunch of new bands/artists for adding to my favourites. It also learns if you dislike some songs and over time it tends to play exactly what you are looking for.

Earlier this year Pandora expanded its communication channels by announcing a partnership with Sprint, offering Pandora service on diverse mobiles. Moreover, they also started cooperating with Sonos for bringing Pandora service into the home sound systems.

And now, Pandora improved its successful service integrating four new features:

• Now Playing: tells you all about the song, album, and artist you’re hearing, recommends other similar songs and bands, and points you to other Pandora listeners that are fans.
• Friends: helps you keep tabs on all your friends that use Pandora so you can learn from their music discoveries. Find all your friends with a few clicks by importing your web mail address book.
• Genre Stations: lets you explore unfamiliar parts of the music universe by sampling over 100 genre stations.
• Pandora Presents…: features our new series of Pandora-produced podcasts and videos.

This brings Pandora much closer to Last.fm, which embedded distinctive social networking features to connect listeners with similar music tastes. I agree with Michael Arrington from Techcrunch because I hope Pandora will keep to its core competence, providing excellent music experiences for its listeners. For that purpose the two newly introduced features “artist information and recommendation” and “genre stations” are suited well enhancing and simplifying to good music.

In contrast to that are fresh rumours Pandora wants to add music videos. Anyway, there is now doubt that Pandora will change the radio media landscape and how people listen and interact with music in the near future.

The primary features of Basecamp include to-do lists, writeboards (web-based text documents), milestone management, messaging system, file sharing, Campfire integration and time tracking.

Basecamp offers its users some additional tools. You can find APIs and Widgets under "Extras" directly on Basecamp. This time there is not an uncountable amount of extensions to find, but I´m sure other interessting things will follow. The more user there are, the more developer it attracts. And under approximately 250.000 User are surely some nifty developer hands.

So all in all Basecamp is appreciatet for its simple and easy to use style. The text in the right collumn displays you help and useful fetaures all the time. The design is fully scalable due to your browsersize and the whole prjectplan can be branded with your logo and your color scheme via CSS.

But Basecanp is not the only project management tool on air.  Manyothers try more or less succesfull to gain marketshare of the very interessting enterprise 2.0 software market. Active Collab is an alike designed open source tool witch runs on your own server instead of browser based. The advantage you just need to buy the software and don’t have the monthly cost like at Basecamp. In deed Basecamp offers a free account but, honestly no one can run an real project on such a small base except you pay a monthly fee between 12 and 99 US$.

But not all of reviewers rate this tool as a good possibility to manage your work. David Armano from the logic + emotion listed the top ten reasons why Basecamp sux. I don’t want deny it to you:

1. 37 Signals seems to be more interested in offering lots of fancy color schemes than in meeting its customer’s needs
2. 37 Signals rolls out changes without any external customer feedback and without notifying anyone. And if you don’t like them, you don’t get configurability, you just get told your voice doesn’t count because 37 Signals likes them, thank you very much.
3. Jason Fried has his own ideas about what to do with BaseCamp, customers needs be damned.
4. No GANTT Charts: No visual respresentations whatsoever. No not ever.
5. Jason Fried’s favorite response to practically every feature request is "No. sorry. (end of discussion)"
6. Many of the Basecamp users on the forums treat Basecamp as their cult and Jason Fried as their leader. Don’t make a suggestion that Jason doesn’t like or you’ll be heckled by all of Jason’s disciples.
7. The tiny team at 37 Signals keeps launching other services: Backpack, Tada List, Writeboard, and three more before the end of 2005 instead of focusing on meeting BaseCamp customer needs.
8. Roapmap?  What roadmap?
9. 10Mb File Attachment Limit.
10. You can’t split or merge projects, so be extra careful that you don’t make a mistake in how you organize your Basecamp projects…
11. Three words. NO PROJECT TEMPLATES!!!  Enter everything manually.
12. And the worst one is, they hold your hostage data!  You can’t even export it, contrary to their FAQ "Can I get my data out if I want to discontinue using Basecamp?" that implies you can. BEWARE: Once you get in, you can’t get out!!!

All in one it is a application that polarizes and is worth to dicuss. Concluding I would say Basecamp convinces with its easy intuitive usability. Therefore we included it in our card deck of top 52 web2.0 companies. When it comes to real big projects the one or other would miss some essential functionalitis.

Nexo can be used to organize and collaborate within a corporate, leisure or family context. It provides a website, e-mail account, real-time updates and social networking features all free of charge facilitating collaboration or just keeping in touch.

Nexo was funded by angel investors and the business model works like this: You can use Nexo for free, but it is advertising supported. If you don’t like ads popping up while using Nexo you can pay for the premium service, which is $ 14,95 per month. Additional storage space (5 gigabytes) is $ 9,95 per month.

Demo put Nexo to the ultimate test: “a) would a 72-year-old mother want to use it, and b) could she figure it out? Nexo passes both tests with flying colors.”

While competitors offer comparatively crude information about popular pages of a website, entry pages or visit length, Crazyegg shows what users actually do on the site. Hence, it provides much more complex information. Crazyegg can be purchased in four different packages which differ according to the criteria of “visits you can track per month” and “pages you can track at once”. All packages include several advanced features (e.g. live reporting updates, report sharing).

The above mentioned overlay function which is included in all Crazyegg packages clusters and combines user clicks into markers which then are colored according to the number of clicks. Thus, this function visualizes the click compartment instantly.

Customers and experts summarize this unique advantage of Crazyegg in a quite laconic way on read/write web:

“CrazyEgg’s approach lets you understand the difference between where you want your users to click and where they are actually clicking.”

Although several products of competitors are scrimmaging on the market (e.g. StatCounter or Google analytics), Crazyegg is probably a very precious tool for the advised purpose, and especially web marketing specialists will love it. But to speak frankly, I do not appreciate such tools … they remind me of some “big brother watching me”, and finally this removes some of the web´s freedom ambience.