Entries Tagged 'Web 2.0' ↓

My buddy Ryan and I spend a lot of time discussing music. In fact, I tend to spend a lot of time discussing music with everyone I know. Unfortunately, I don’t really have as much time as I would like to figure out what to listen to anymore. My friends who had college radio shows have all moved on to real jobs, and no one really has time to explore all of the new stuff coming out. So one day I sat down with my friend Ryan and we asked ourselves, “how can we figure out what music to listen to?”

The obvious answer, of course, was the magic of the internet. Surely, somewhere on the internet there must be something that can help us figure out what to listen to.

Nope. Nothing. At least nothing good enough for us.

So today we’ve rolled out an open alpha of our music site Squishr, the first thing out of our little company, Ten Ton Labs. It picks up music reviews from all over the web and aggregates them together to try to figure out an overall score for the music. Then it lets people add their own reviews if they don’t like what the professional reviewers are saying about things. Plus it gives you all sorts of other data about the music and artists, links back to wikipedia about things, and all sorts of other little features that we’re throwing in as we go. It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but we tend to like it quite a bit so far. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

I see that several more blog search engines have launched over the last few days, so I just did a quick survey of people at the coffee shop and over IM asking, “have you ever used a blog search engine to search for something?”

The answer I got from every single person? “No.”

I’m not exactly in a little coffee house in the middle of nowhere either. This place should be filled with people right at the core of who should be using blog search engines.

I think that the real problem is that no one ever says “I really want to search for something, but I only want results about it from blogs.” It’s just not a compelling vertical.

Been working hard trying to get an alpha release of Squishr out the door this week. Back to blogging soon, assuming all goes well.

How I just wasted 5 minutes:

1. Saw that Riya Beta is now open to everyone.

2. Went to the Riya site and signed up.

3. Was told that I needed Windows XP.

4. Realized that it wasn’t open to me.

5. Closed browser window.

Seriously, what new web company doesn’t launch with Macintosh compatibility in mind. How hard is it to write an uploader? What would it take? Two, maybe three days of a developer’s time?

Or better yet, just implement a clone of the Flickr API and be done with it.

Unless the uploader is doing a bunch of preprocessing of the photos on the desktop beforehand, I can’t really see any good reason for not offering a Mac client.

So AjaxWrite is out today with a ton of coverage surrounding it. It’s another Word clone written in Javascript, which I don’t find entirely exciting, especially when compared to some of the competition.

The demo document when you open AjaxWrite does include the following sentence though:

Also, sign up on AjaxLaunch to get priority notice of a new AJAX program launching every Wednesday!

Wow, a new AJAX program every Wednesday!

Well, that’s exciting. There are 5 mystery question mark boxes at the top of the AjaxWrite page, so let’s guess what they’re going to be:

• AjaxSheet
• AjaxPoint
• AjaxMessenger
• AjaxDB
• AjaxDraw

Perhaps we should set up a little contest to see who can guess the most correct AjaxWednesday apps. The winner gets an AjaxPrize.

I’m confused about the all of the hype around EdgeIO today. Sure it’s an awesome idea, but if it catches on then what’s stopping eBay or Craigslist from:

1. Buying or building a blog search engine.
2. Crawling for the “listing” tag and adding the entries to their listings.
3. Profit.

If I was an eBay exec I would already have a team of people building this into the platform, just in case it catches on.

I like the idea of EdgeIO, and I haven’t had a demo, so I’m not sure what they offer that eBay doesn’t, but I can’t help but feel like they’re going to be another classic example of a company with a great idea that gets killed by the second-movers in the market.

The last few days have served as a good reminder that, even with all of our cool new Agile programming toys, if you’re trying to do something super cool that no one else has ever done before, sometimes this shit is still just hard.

In a blog entry yesterday, William Grosso stated:

When I look at the valley, I see a lot of innovation. But it’s surface innovation instead of deep innovation. To dramatically overstate the case: we’re focusing on building better event calendars and better blog aggregators. And on bringing the same functionality, slightly tailored, to all the nooks and crannies of the long tail.

I’m not sure that I totally agree with him, but I do agree that the valley needs to get their shit together before Microsoft come through and changes the rules of the game once again.

It’s easy to forget about Microsoft while surrounded by a bunch of people banging away on their Powerbooks at a coffee shop in SF, but lest we forget, Microsoft will grab all of the innovations coming out of the valley, package them up, and deliver them to people who have no clue what a tag or a social bookmark is.

Embrace and extend is alive and well, my friends. Just imagine if IE 7 comes with a default setting to post bookmarks to “Live! Bookmarks” or some such service that they come up with. The entire social bookmarking field changes overnight. And Microsoft wins.

I sure hope that Yahoo and friends are taking all of the innovative people that they acquired and figuring out a way to mash their apps together in a way that even my mom can use. Because if they aren’t then Microsoft surely will.

Apparently the TechCrunch BBQ is the hottest thing going these days in the Valley. It took all of 45 minutes last night for the all of the spots to fill up for the next one, and now numerous people (including myself) are upset that they missed out.

If the appetite is so big for something like this, would it be worth organizing something else on the same night for everyone who didn’t get in? It could be like a consolation prize for everyone who missed out. Perhaps we could grab a space somewhere, hack Scoble’s e-mail to replace the directions to the TechCrunch house, and hijack the entire party. Anybody want to sponsor that?

If anyone has any good ideas for something, drop them in the comments.

I just saw the traffic numbers for MySpace on Read/WriteWeb and quite frankly, I find them astounding. (47.3 million members?!?) Who would have thought, a few years ago, that the secret to getting huge web traffic would be:

1. Give teenagers generic profile webpages
2. Let them mark them up to look like total shit (almost all of the pages I’ve seen on MySpace look like garbage)
3. Profit!

I have to wonder though, at what point is the popularity of MySpace is going to become its own worst enemy. If there’s one thing that teens can’t stand, it’s when everyone they know is in on the secret. I have to assume that, very soon, the time will come when a “cooler” site will jump in and sweep up a big chunk of that traffic, and MySpace will begin its slow but inevitable decline.