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 video link

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. ]]> http://www.web20-poker.com/2007/11/08/basecamp-get-your-projects-done/feed/ http://www.web20-poker.com/2007/11/05/nexo-a-home-for-groups/ http://www.web20-poker.com/2007/11/05/nexo-a-home-for-groups/#comments Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:36:23 +0000 Brigitte Liermann http://www.web20-poker.com/2007/11/05/nexo-a-home-for-groups/   Nexo.com allows groups to collaborate, connect and exchange online. The cool thing about it: it has the best usability I have seen so far. Clutter is the exact opposite of this site. It is easy and fun to navigate. Check out this demo to see how Lindsay Lohan could organize her rehab group easily online.

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.

The little gadgets range from music to games and pregnancy calculators. The New York Times offers readers the possibility to add a crossword puzzle to their Google Homepage.

It provides users with the ultimate online personalization experience: They can add widgets to their personalized homepages such as Google, pageflakes, netvibes etc. with exactly the content that they want.

LabPixies also creates gadgets that are essentially ads based on content – something that companies are desperately in need for to get the attention of their customers.

LabPixies is creative, fun and easy to use – it is certainly worth to keep an eye on them and see what’s next in widget world.

The intention of the site is quite similar to many other news aggregators. But the realization is much better. Techmeme’s revenue stream is as simple as it is good. They sell sponsored posts. These posts are integrated in an informationstream and are marked with a grey background. So they are not annoying flashing ads popping up and moving around but rather paid PR with interesting content. This revolutionary sponsoring model is the only revenue stream, but a very efficient one. And it works due to its average 230.000 unique users every day. Founder Gabe Rivera describes the way the sponsored feeds are working:

“The way it works is simple. A sponsor’s blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third).”

For me, Techmeme is a good approach to integrate paid content in a popular news blog. Through the sponsoring model the advertisments get more attention and the way the companies transport their marketing and PR stuff has to be more sophisticated since the sensitive blogosphere does not excuse marketing mistakes. And honestly I also read the sponsored story because I naively still don’t believe that every company is sneaky.

Here are some facts and figures: Current users worldwide: 24 million, 150.000 new sign-ups each day! Market share of visits to Facebook.com increased by 134% from Sept 07 compared to Sept 06.

And I also found a quote by RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan that describes pretty well why facebook is so successful: “Google is all about finding information; Facebook is about communicating that information and sharing it efficiently.” This even more so, since Marc Zuckerberg announced I n May that it will open its APIs for developers. On programmableweb.com you can find mashups that have been created since.

Facebook could easily have 100.000 new applications (says analyst Rohan) by the end of next year which will prevent people from going to other sites and through the hassle of creating a new profile. Looks like a bright future for facebook!

Tim O’Reilly,  the inventor of the term web 2.0 calls it “a milestone in the history of the internet” – read his blog entry about pipes if you want to get into it in more detail.

The latest pipe coup: they created an iPhone interface for pipes. Being mobile you can still access your mashups – provided you own an iPhone. See some cool pictures about the app here.

The neat thing about pipes.yahoo: it is social, too. Users can publish the pipes they created, there are rankings and featured pipes and so on. So even if you do not want to create pipes yourself you might find something there that is useful for you.

Pipes.yahoo.com went live during the first quarter of 2007. It is our 5 of clubs – my guess is that it will be a 10 in the next edition of our poker game.

In just few easy steps you can create an account and your own mobile network regarding your interests or the interests of a group, a club, your company etc. For each sign-up you as the network leader get payed by Sonopia and in addition to that you also ear a small percentage (3-8%) of the monthly fee your subscribers pay.

You can provide your mobile network with content e.g. a co-branded website for subscriber administration and their profiles. Various kinds of social networking features are available and make it to a community like network.

Sonopia uses the Verizon-Network and just passes the conditions on to its users for a fee. You as the head of the wireless connection of your friends can not only earn their money but also pollute them with your senseless pictures and videos. In my opinion a Twitter function in the network would be useful to keep your subscribers updated.

But honestly the approach is new and innovative and has a chance to gain popularity. But as Michael Arrington at Techcrunch and Nada Collar already wrote: customer information is fairly poor and you don’t really get informed in “a few minutes” about what you just did. Sometimes it’s not all about simplicity, at least it should follow the trend of sophisticated simplicity.