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Spokeo.com - RSS meets social networks?

I'm amazed how much time some people I know put into browsing the latest social networks. But when school ends and work begins, priorities change. Young working people are BUSY. We need tools to streamline our online activities so we are not aimlessly bouncing from one myspace profile to the next.

I'll be honest...I signed up for myspace after much reluctance because I needed an establish an online social identity. Friendster has long ago passed out of favor and Facebook was up until very recently a restricted, college network. I had to sign up for McSocial aka myspace to keep my online life relevant.

Just as fast as I was up and running on myspace with 100+ "friends", I was working away as a big bad consultant. I spent my days at clients' offices which means that 1) It's very risky to go on a social networking site and 2) the client has a firewall that returns the friendly message in size 48 red font when trying to visit any of the social networking flavor of the week sites:

THIS WEBSITE IS BLOCKED (TYPE: DATING)

That meant that all my social networking when at work was reduced to IM conversations with people on "the outside" telling me about pictures, blogs, etc which I would ultimately forget to check when I got home hours later. And if I did remember to check, there are too many people to keep track of!

Enter Spokeo. Spokeo has in a way taken Facebook newsfeeds to a global level. It does not give the minuscule details that Facebook does but it does allow me to get the latest and (maybe not) the greatest going on with many of my friends' blogs, social identities, pictures, videos and etc. Just like I use my RSS reader to keep track of the overwhelming amount of news, Spokeo keeps track of the overwhelming amount of irrelevant, ridiculous, why do I waste my time of this kinda crap information in "social news"

So what do I think of Spokeo? I think it is a great idea but it is missing some key pieces.

• Facebook: This network is now open to all and becoming increasingly more relevant. Still my favorite over mycrap...I mean myspace.
• Infinite scrolling: Why do I want to hit next page when I am scrolling through updates? Just like Google Reader has this, Spokeo should too!
• A screencast? This is kinda a new idea and it wouldn't hurt for a little more hand holding.
• More irrelevant information. While there was an uproar about the newsfeeds on Facebook, I like that it gives me a quick summary of what is going on. Provide this feature across all my networks, blogs, etc.
• Global messaging: Allow me to send and receive all my social networks messages from one location. Don't ask me how to do this, that's your problem to figure out!

Spokeo does a lot of things right. It saves time since it aggregates updates on all my online "friends". It is not yet blocked by the firewall at work. And the search function works much better than the search on Wink.

Personally I won't be using this tool all the time until they add support for Facebook and a bit more granular info about what is going on with my networks but I do think Spokeo is the start of social networking feeds. Keep an eye on this one!

Microsoft Photosynth Tech Preview - Photo Sharing 3.0?

Back in the day rich people used to get pictures painted of themselves and their family. Then came photography and that put a lot of painters out of business. Until relatively recently the photo album didn't change much. When people wanted to show off their vacation photos, friends were invited to endure endless hours of slide shows and sticky vinyl pages of photo albums. From now on I will refer to this pre-digital period as Photo Sharing 1.0.

Next came the digital age with cracked LCDs, increasingly awesome picture quality and photosharing (including the most unknown site atpic.com). This is the age we live in currently and it's pretty good. I can upload great photos of my adventures to show my friends and family and they don't have to get off their a$$e$. Or I can send terrible photos from my cellphone for instant gratification at a drunken moments notice. This I will refer to as Photo Sharing 2.0.

Now comes Photosynth Preview from Microsoft. To get it working, you'll need IE and it'll take a couple minutes to load the plug in. Once loaded, the navigation is very fluid. Zoom with the mouse wheel, and click to fly around from photo to photo. Photosynth currently only has sample photos loaded but it greatly differs from all photo sites because the metadata of these photos includes location/position information. What this means to you is that the photos create a 3D world.

Current digital cameras can create panoramic pictures by weaving together multiple shots. This takes it to the next level by recreating the whole location. Today's digital cameras don't include GPS hardware to note the specific location of a photograph, this technology is coming to mobile phones in the US and it is only a matter of time before it is tied into the camera on the phone (which will be pretty decent in the next couple years).

This is a preview, so you can't do anything except play around right now with the preloaded photos. However if this is what photo sharing is going to be in the future then it is going to be the shiznit!

Like.com - "I want it NOW"

Like.com has to be the beginnings of the perfect tool for the Veruca Salt of shoppers. I had to do some research this morning using defacto standard search and I found "about 344,000" results returned. While these results would be great if I could get some click monkeys to take some time to look at actual search results, it is not the case.

Like helps narrow down the search for someone with aesthetics in mind first, then features. Months ago I uploaded my photo collection into Like's parent company's, Riya.com, facial recognition photosharing site. The results were impressive for an AI (and equal to asking my 2 year old niece to sort my photos).

This time around in my nonscientific test, the image recognition has improved to help shoppers, but not to the level of helpfulness as the attractive sales lady at Nordstrom. This is Like's initial target audience (jewelry, handbags, shoes and watches....not me!)

Like has done some things here that I have yet to see matched anywhere on the web, such as being able to hone in on specific attributes of a picture and find other similar items. This is how to bring shopping to more visual, less tech savvy people. This is the first shopping search engine I can see my mom using (she agreed to the first "bondi blue" iMac because it matched the wallpaper).

While a tag cloud may make perfect sense to the Web 2.0 crowd, it's meaningless to the masses and it really seems like a stopgap for true visual search. Like.com did seem a bit sluggish on my midrange computer but it is definitely usable and I would recommend it to all compulsive shoppers. Watch these guys closely, I think they'll be making more splashes in the search pool but it may only be a matter of time before the G makes a similar feature.

Yourminis adds some Flash to your start page

The AJAX start page is old news....pageflakes, netvibes, Google IG, live.com....it's been done. Yourminis.com is the first Flash startpage I've run across and it's really cool...but I'll never use it (edit: In the current form).

Yourminis.com (from the Goowy.com team) takes fractionally longer to load in my completely nonscientific method of looking at the counter in Winamp. Once loaded the first thing I noticed was the color and the motion. I feel like I stumped into the state fair after a few drinks. There is a lot going on the here. Just like any startpage, you can add tabs across the top to sort your "minis" which can be picked from the left column.

There are plenty of video minis to feed you the latest from youtube and the likes, as well as rss, webmail, flickr, podcasts and etc. The whole things comes together very well and allows you to view some external content inside the Yourminis site, which isn't an entirely new thing but a nice implementation regardless.

Overall the whole interface is very fluid, but I just don't feel "hooked". Maybe flash is overkill for a startpage or just that I don't see anything "new" here to take me away from my trusty old AJAX startpage. Call me old fashion, but I need a little foreplay before getting into all the crazy web 2.0 action.

Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D - Not So Much...

For my first post I broke my own rules. I woke up today to the news that Microsoft unleashed the me too of 3D mapping software. I was impressed with the bird's eyeview of Virtual Earth, so I was curious to see how things would go over. My initial plan for this site was to not invest more than a couple minutes into any product review, since that is how first impressions are formed.

I navigated to local.live.com to get a pleasant message that I can leave my Firefox at the door. Repeat again with IE6.0 and I am downloading... A few minutes into my "3D" experience, I was watching an exciting progress bar progress excitingly slowly. Not only did I get to experience the 3D painfully slow progress bar, I got 2 for the price of 1 with my .NET 2.0 installation!

Fastforward 12 minutes later and I am back to local.live.com and ready for some hardcore 3D action of my apartment in San Francisco. Unlike Google's offering, VE3D lives in IE ( I should mention that the link provided by clicking the logo in the top left of live.com does not work at the time of my test).

After a little configuration, I was flying around. The image quality is excellent (much better than Google Earth) and the controls are easy...but the performance is pretty dismal. Granted I don't have the best machine, but then again neither do most people. MS VE3D has not convinced me to buy a quad-core computer. I'll stick with gEarth.