Widgets are becoming very popular at the moment, and the latest startup to take advantage of them is Leafletter which allows anyone to make Flash widgets (or "little websites" as they describe them) Joe Anderson at Webby's World describes the service.
Coming soon (apparently) is an online help document generator called Helphee. At present it's pre-launch, and they're collecting email addresses to notify people when they launch (I've seen that before). Their tag line at present is "author and publish help documents online in 5 minutes or less". I don't think anyone will be authoring Vista manuals on this, but it sounds interesting. We'll keep you posted...
Sidekiq is another interestingly-named search engine that will search through a whole range of different types of media and individual engines. It all sounds very promising, though compared to Google it seems over-complicated. Whether it will catch on remains to be seen - search is a very crowded area of the web.
Markus Frind CEO of Plentyoffish.com reports that Venturebeat has recorded some numbers on social networking site Facebook:
- 6 Billion pageviews a month
- $700,000 a month in revenue in December
- $410,000 loss in December.
- 16 million unique users a month.
Zpeech is another chat-about-this-website service. They're a nice touch, but the fact there are a number of these services about means that any interesting commentary gets dispersed. If the original site allows its own comments, it can also be cut out of the loop because 'eternalised' comments made on Zpeech are stored on that service.
And whilst we're on the 'more of the same' vein, Shuzak is a 'social network for geeks' that could already be fulfilled by Digg or even Slashdot (oh, sorry, that's "news for nerds").
Blinkx has branched out again and now has a large collection of sports videos courtesy of its new partnership with online sports broadcaster NBX. Blinkx may not be YouTube in terms of popularity, but it's building a nice service that doesn't seem to be quite so bogged down with "my mate just fell over" videos.