SocialText: Opensourcing the whole enchilada!
Rollyo: New customized search engine
Joyent: Web-based outlook clone with microformat support
BunchBall: Hosted platform for building social applications and games with flash
RealTravel: Travel Social networking
Zimbra: Open source web-based outlook killer with incredible plugin support
ZVents: Web-based event search
KnowNow : Receive notification the second your RSS feeds update
Orb : Turn your pc into a media server
Wink : social bookmarking with search
AllPeers : toolkit for building desktop apps that run in firefox
Flock : social internet browser

The good
Yahoo is clearly focusing hard on giving publishers LOTS of control as to what kind of adds appear on their site. They talked about the ability to eliminate particular advertisers, only carry advertisements from certain categories, etc. As a content producer, this is awesome. I hate seeing adds for products that I don’t like or wouldn’t endorse on my blog.
The bad
Yahoo! 360 / YahooMyWeb2.0 are currently a data “roach motel”. Data goes in but it doesn’t go out. Not very web 2.0.
The ugly
How many social networking /tagging applications does yahoo have exactly? It currently seems to be a sprawling mess. Sometimes when you try to use one, you end up using another. It’s time to trim the herd and provide a killer integrated social bookmarking / networking / search application.

The open-source infrastructure workshop was fascinating. Open-source software development is (by now) a fairly well-understood social process. But how do you create infrastructure (servers and bandwidth) that costs real money to run, for the purpose of making a more open and remixable web? This is a business and social problem, not just a technology problem.

Continue reading →

Lots of workshops on offer this morning: I’m in the “Business Case of AJAX” workshop. This is a topic near and dear to my heart: I’ve thought for some time that Macromedia’s excellent value proposition work for RIAs could be repurposed wholesale.

Continue reading →

A query on “subversion” now surfaces links for download, UML, FAQ, and project page as sub-elements of the first result. Nicely done! Google is building more useful data into each results (searches on company names now reveal the current stock price, for example), but this is the first time I’ve seen the most useful subsections of a site called out like that. Click on the image for a larger view.

Given that we were “camping” in a corporate office, it was really more of a geek pajama party than a “camp” (though there WAS a tent). More coverage here and here gives a really good sense of what went down. Some cool things that I saw, in no particular order…

Continue reading →

My recent post on how web 2.0 is very open until you try to make money by remixing got some interesting responses, including an excellent comment by Paulo Eduardo Neves.
They should just put a price tag in it. Something like: if you are making money from this API, you’d have to pay US$0.0001 per access. At least somebody would be able to make a business plan before starting to code.
If Web 2.0 is all about openness, then it’s time we have transparant pricing. Old school players like eBay have transparent pricing. The web 2.0 companies that talk about openness all the time owe us developers a transparent pricing model!
How about it, Technorati? Do you really want us to remix? Let us know the price tag for commercial API access before we start to code!

The BayCHI Web2.0 panel last night (see technorati tag baychi for full coverage) was as good as ever. Everyone on the panel emphasized that openness was very important, that remixing was key to the web. But what came through was that companies like technorati and flickr are very happy to let you leverage their APIs … AS LONG AS YOU DON’T MAKE ANY MONEY.

Continue reading →

Web 2.0 is all about remixing, not about designing. The best metaphor for web 2.0 is the DJ, not the composer. Web 2.0 is a product of remix culture.

Continue reading →