Archive for April 22nd, 2008
- In: All | Collaboration | One Place | Tools
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There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well.
Grou.ps is trying to fix that integration problem. They’ve created a service that lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, more listed in the image below). Each module adds a new tab to your navigation bar where users can access the module’s features. Here’s an example group for Chemists worldwide.
While today marks their Beta launch in the US, the company already has over 150K members and 10K groups internationally (Chile and Turkey are most popular). Grou.ps is backed by Golden Horn Ventures.
There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well.
Grou.ps is trying to fix that integration problem. They’ve created a service that lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, more listed in the image below). Each module adds a new tab to your navigation bar where users can access the module’s features. Here’s an example group for Chemists worldwide.
While today marks their Beta launch in the US, the company already has over 150K members and 10K groups internationally (Chile and Turkey are most popular). Grou.ps is backed by Golden Horn Ventures.
We used to speculate that Twitter’s persistent downtime and overall poor service quality could result in a Friendster-type nose dive. But after a three day weekend outage I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occured: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.
So while Robert Scoble speculates that FriendFeed is the big winner when Twitter goes down, and Dave Winer hacks together contingency plans for the next outage that remind me of stockpiling candles and bottled water for the next big storm, I just shake my head at how wonderfully we’ve all be had.
Some will argue, as does Robert Scoble, that Twitter’s open API allows other services to suck off their users and eventually supplant them if the service outages continue. But as more services use the Twitter API, the value of the core message transmission engine behind the service increases. All Twitter has to be is the pipes to win. And, since they clearly are the pipes, they’ve already won.
I’ve Twittered this post to my followers. But since they’re having an outage affecting popular users, no one can see it. Ah well.
| Website: | twitter.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | March 1, 2006 |
| Funding: | $5.4M |
Founded in March of 2006, Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message…. Learn More
Comedy, Funded By Warner Bros
Posted on: April 22, 2008
- In: Comedy | Funded | Studio 2.0 | Warner Bros | Warner Brother’s | YouTube
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New series Viralcom takes Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s theory of viral video one step further into a fully fledged viral video machine.
The series comes from Warner Brother’s Studio 2.0 and takes a look behind the scenes at the web’s hottest “User Generated Content” studio for an exclusive look at the “real” viral video industry: a digital Hollywood where the A-listers are celebs (Chris Crocker and the Chocolate Rain guy make an appearance), and where favorite YouTube classics are professionally produced.
Promo above and the first two episodes below the fold for those interested.
- In: Consumer | Crunchbase | graphics chips | Hand | hardware | Intel | Mashups | motherboards | network cards
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Intel is releasing into public beta today a new “experimental” product from its labs called Mash Maker
. It’s a browser plugin – most functional with Firefox but also available for Internet Explorer – that lets end user create their own mashups on top of existing websites.
The idea of a mashup, while very central to the movement we call Web 2.0, has always struck me as an overly techie concept. And Intel’s Mash Maker doesn’t do much to change that, even though it tries to bring mashups more mainstream.
What’s a mashup? Simply a combination of data from disparate sources into one presentation. Web 2.0 sites mash up data all the time without asking their users to do much. Problems only seem to arise when when users are required to link data together in manual, custom ways.
There are other places on the web where Intel likes to highlight its mashups, such as Expedia where a “leg room” mashup will show you how much estimated leg room you’d have on each search results flight. You can also pull up Yelp reviews when flipping through Craigslist.
But much of the web is like the Wild West and there are no premade mashups yet. That’s where presumably you are expected to come up with your own. And Intel has provided all the options you need to make a mashup from right within the browser extension. But honestly, the vast majority of users are going to have no clue or desire to learn how to make mashups with it. This is where the idea of an end user mashup program falls short, and it’s same the reason you’ll never hear your (normal) friends mention how they stayed up all night playing with Yahoo Pipes.
| Website: | www.intel.com |
Intel is best known for producing the microprocessors found in many personal computers. The company also makes a range of other hardware including network cards, motherboards, and graphics chips. Learn More
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