TechScape

Although not strictly Web 2.0, I had to link to this piece at HongKiat.com: Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. There are some obvious Web 2.0 services in there - such as Blinkx and digg - and obviously no Google or Yahoo! How many of these would actually be used on a regular basis is another matter.

TechCrunch reports on Yahoo's Brand Universe service now rolling out. It does appear to be a way of amalgamating content from Yahoo's virtual properties, rather than being unique in itself. "Expect over 100 by the end of the year" is Yahoo's message. Of course, all this auto-pulling could be open to abuse.

Historically, one of the problems of location-based mobile services is that punters haven't been willing to pay for them. Pay your operator 50p to get directions to somewhere? Not likely.

The theory that advertising could solve this problem isn't new, but it's only just being tested in real services. For example, LocatioNet Systems' newly-launched amAze service, which offers free mobile mapping, navigation and local search features in a downloadable Java application.

There's a really interesting article on The Register that kicks off by explaining how the iPhone's Safari browser supports Ajax, so will be Web 2.0-friendly, before moving on to suggest that Nokia could also give mobile Ajax a boost in the next year.

I'd been sitting here thinking Apple was missing a trick by making the iPhone such a closed ecosystem in terms of allowing developers to create applications for the handset (well, NOT allowing them...). Yet if the browser is powerful enough, they won't need to.

Maybe. Well, it's more food for thought while we wait to actually get our hands on the thing, anyway.

Brands are splashing their cash on Web 2.0 tech like blogs, podcasts and user-generated content, but is their investment paying off? And is anyone brave enough to ask that question right now? Neil Morgan from Omniture Revolution is, over on Brand Republic:

"If we are to avoid a second boom and bust, we need to be sure investment in user-generated content has a positive impact on online business. Most companies measure hits to their site or page views, but few measure the impact of web 2.0 applications on business objectives. Are they investing in applications that don't deliver?"

I'm sure many of the Web 2.0 investments are well thought out and carefully monitored, but with so many technovangelists out there, there are sure to be some misfiring campaigns too.

Mashable take a look at Picnik, a Flash-based online photo editor that they say is simpler and more intuitive than most desktop apps:

What the Picnik folks have realized is that an online photo editor needs to integrate with as many photo sharing sites as possible. As a result, you can upload images from your computer or import them from Flickr, any URL, a Yahoo search, a Flickr search or take a webcam snapshot. You can then auto-fix, rotate, crop and sharpen your image, rotate it and adjust variables like the brightness and contrast. Once finished, you can export to Imageshack, Photobucket, Nakama, Flickr, Fotolog and other services.

Some things never change. Remember when Radio 1 DJ Mike Read smashed a copy of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Relax' live on air, outraged at its lyrical content? And how the furore only served to ensure the song shot straight to the top of the charts?

Well, it seems YouTube isn't so different. 'Dirty Folk' comic Jessica Delfino claims to be awash with hits for the video to her song 'My Pussy is Magic', thanks to a denunciation from the Catholic League. It's been whipped off YouTube twice, apparently, but the renamed 'Jessica Delfino Is Magic' version now has over 45,000 views.

Just as I was playing around with a mobile RSS reader called Smaato News this morning, I spotted this opinion piece by IT Week's Kelvyn Taylor, talking about how feature creep is in danger of making RSS too complex at exactly the point it starts to get mainstream users.

"RSS is in total chaos from a user’s point of view. Some sites just give me the headline and a one-line summary, others give a longer extract. Some even give me the entire story, with pictures, web hotlinks and even embedded YouTube videos. There are multimedia RSS feeds that direct your reader to a file rather than a web page, and how these are handled depends on the reader software. And, inevitably, adverts are starting to sneak their way in as well."

It's true, and it's worrying for anyone hoping mobile RSS is going to be big too. Will the current generation of mobile readers be able to cope with these different types of feeds? Will users end up selling their houses to cope with the ensuing data charges?

Taylor's suggestion that the problems could be solved by services asking users what they want and then giving it to them is eminently sensible (i.e. unlikely to happen), but it certainly needs to be sorted if mobile RSS is going to take off in any meaningful way.

Not sure about Smaato News yet, by the way. It's installed on my Vario II, but seems to be having some kind of connectivity problem sucking the feeds down. I'm persevering though. Any recommendations on other mobile RSS readers would be more than welcome too, while I'm at it.

Oh yes. Widgets are taking over the Web 2.0 world, as any fule kno, so what better than a website cataloguing every single widget available: including those for your desktop and web browser?

Widgipedia is that site – I like what they've done with the name there – and it's already a comprehensive database of widgety goodness, along with developer forums and technical info if you're actually making widgets yourself, rather than just filling up your computer with them.

No mobile stuff in there yet, although hopefully Nokia's WidSets will make it in sooner rather than later.

Aren't athletes too busy taking undetectable super-drugs and roasting glamour models to get into online social networking?

Maybe that's just the professional ones. SportsGist, a new site, says it's encouraging athletes to get in touch with each other via videos, photos and blogs.

The site's aimed at athletes of all levels, and has apparently been signing up around 3,000 new members a week since going live late last year. That said, the niche service faces plenty of sporty competition.

It's early days, but I can't help thinking that every website that gets a redesign in 2007 will work 'Web 2.0' into the subsequent press release – even if this just means the inclusion of, say, user comments.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on the revamped Times Online website in this respect, but the story reporting it on Brand Republic does promise "a number of enhanced Web 2.0 multimedia functions", while in an interview on the site itself, designers Tomaso Capuano and Jon Warden explain what influenced the relaunch.

"On the first day, we sat in a very large room in Docklands, with lots of creative types, and looked at the web," says Warden. "We discussed everything from YouTube to blogs to Amazon to the BBC to Google News."

Castrol is the latest brand to leap onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon, with plans to launch a website for the Euro 2008 soccerball tournament in April this year.

OgilvyOne is creating the site, and apparently giving it a Web 2.0 sheen which will let fans upload their own "user generated content" and create their own "personalised football blogs".

It's weird, I was just wishing for this the other day (while late for an appointment with no idea what street number the building was). GooSync is a mobile application that synchronises with your Google Calendar, including all-day and recurring appointments in the free version.

There's also an Advanced option that lets you tweak the synchonisation settings and sync multiple calendars, which costs £19.99 for a year. There's a big range of supported mobiles on the site too, it's not just smartphones.

It sounds great, although I've got a sneaking suspicion that sooner rather than later Google will launch a Yahoo Go-style application combining Gmail, Calendar, search and maybe access to your Google Docs. Whether GooSync will still appeal then remains to be seen.
(via the::unwired)

More mobile Googlejoy, except unlike the earlier GooSync story, this time it's Google itself doing the mobilising. The company's mobile Google Maps application is now available for Windows Mobile smartphones, and very spiffing it looks too.

Downloaded by pointing your mobile browser to www.google.com/gmm, the application includes directions, integrated search results, scrolling maps and satellite imagery.

Sorry, didn't write this up on Friday. Emap Consumer Media has bought mobile firm Yospace for £8.7 million, plus up to a further £5.7 million depending on Yospace's operating performance in the next three years.

Yospace is the company behind 3 UK's See Me TV service, which lets users upload video clips from their cameraphones, and then get paid when other users download them. Emap hasn't said much about its plans for the company, other than it'll sit within its Emap Performance division.

Mashable takes a look at Blogwerk Sentinel, a beta service that's supposed to scour the web to check whether anyone is scraping off the content from your blog (splogging): "Perhaps due to the DEMO rush, the site seems incomplete - the interface doesn’t work yet, and all you can really do is sign up. Nonetheless, here’s what Sentinel does in theory: you enter the URL of your blog feed, and the service crawls the web for unauthorized copies of your content. In other words, Sentinel tracks down splogs."

TechCrunch reports on Cuts, an online video editing service that allows users to cut up and mix video from various other online services. It's entering private beta.

After months of speculation – one rumour suggested MySpace was demanding a seven-figure upfront fee from mobile operators to partner with it – the social networking site has signed an exclusive deal with Vodafone in Europe.

It involves a MySpace Mobile app being preloaded on the operator's handsets (you'll be able to download it over the air too), giving access to profiles, friends, blogs and messaging. It's launching first in the UK.

But hang on. Without wishing to be rude, what's this exclusivity about? A globally popular social networking community, available online to all internet users regardless of their ISP, is now only going to be available on mobile in Europe to Vodafone subscribers? Surely that's a rubbish idea? Even if it does follow MySpace's strategy in the US, where it kicked off with Helio.
Maybe Vodafone paid MySpace a ton of cash to make it worth their while, and it's unclear how long this exclusivity period lasts. But the idea of restricting any social networking service to a single operator just seems counterproductive.

Not everyone's happy that Yahoo is planning to migrate all its old-skool Flickr users over to Yahoo logins. "When it becomes mandatory to sign up to Yahoo, I will have to delete all my pics and close my account down and join with one of the other similar services on the net," writes one.

I've got an original Flickr login too, and got the email the other day explaining the shift. I have to admit, I didn't think much of it. Is there really kudos among the Flickr community if you're old-skool, rather than nu-skool? I think that's how it's spelt, by the way...

Can user-generated content work on the telly? Facebook hopes so. The social network has teamed up with video-sharing service Ziddio to allow its users to upload, view, share and rate videos about their own lives.

The vids will then be used as material for a TV show called Facebook Diaries, which is being produced by R.J. Cutler, who's scooped Oscar nominations and Emmy awards in the past. It'll have 10 half-hour episodes which will air on Comcast's network (it owns Ziddio).

Will this content work on the small screen? Well, given the choice between most new British sitcoms, or a bunch of user-generated videos, I'm with Facebook. The contest kicks off in March.

Photography firm Schneider Kreuznach has surveyed 1,000 users in Germany, China, India and the US about their usage patterns for digital cameras and mobile phones.
One in four people said that in future they'll only use their mobile to take photos, as long as it's up to the quality of today's six-megapixel digital cameras. However, in India and China, this rose to 79% of respondants. If you're still tempted to laugh at the thought of mobile blogging, think what might happen in those markets.

Jossip reports on a new Web 2.0 service from one of the big boys. Conde Nast has launched flip, an online flipbook:

Flip.com provides teens with an innovative way to express themselves and connect with each other online. More than just another social network, Flip offers its users powerful but easy-to-use interactive tools, inspiration from experts and editors to spark their imagination, and a stage on which to showcase their talents.

At the heart of Flip are Flipbooks -- customizable, multimedia scrapbooks/zines/journals that Flip members make and share. Users can upload their own photos, songs, and videos as well as choose from a large collection of stickers, wallpaper, animations, and music provided on the
site. Flip members can draw, write, add a sound track, rotate and size elements, add pages, and even choose page transitions. The result is a more powerful and personal way for girls to express themselves than anything else currently online.

Snipperoo reports on Disney's poor use of widgets:

However, unlike YourMinis or any other similar platform, you can't add your own content. Oddly enough you can do this on My ESPN, also a Disney site. They let you add the RSS feed of your choice.

What's worse, there's no way to take the Disney widgets and embed them in your own site. Just think of how many millions of citizen marketers would be thrilled to do so! I realize this site is targeted for the younger ones, but some of the TV and movie content is for teens. And many pre-teens and teens have their own blogs and MySpace pages.

The Shiny boys’ tuxes are back from the dry cleaners, while the girls are fending off calls from major Italian fashion houses.

Yep the awards season is on its way. And up there with the Globes, the Oscars and the south Suffolk Marrow growers' Vegathon is the annual Shiny awards.

Each year Team Shiny, in conjunction with a crack possee of gadget know-it-alls from The Sun, Guardian, Q etc get together to vote for the best and worst gadgets of the year.

Among the categories are serious stuff like Green Gadget, Best Smartphone and Web 2.0 innovation as well as a few more entertaining contests which we’ll let you know about very soon.

Well, it's not strictly a startup. Viadeo started life in France, as a social networking service for businesses, but it's only recently opened a dedicated UK office to drive membership over here.

The obvious comparisons are with LinkedIn and Xing, although as UK country manager Peter Cunningham told me, Viadeo thinks there's more to its service than a pure address book and recruiting tool. It's certainly grown fast.

"It started off as a private online business tool for 200 French companies, and just mushroomed from there," he says. "Since they made it public and open two years ago, it's grown to over one million members, with 50 staff working to run it."

First the Sunday Times, now the Mirror has revamped its website, with claims of new Web 2.0 features. Except in this case, it meets more of your expectations from that phrase.

The site, which went live today, has more video, a higher priority for user-generated content, plus forums and blogs around entertainment, fashion, science and technology, and the environment.

TechCrunch reports on Movers 2.0, "a simple website for tracking 'Web 2.0' traffic trends. The website uses Alexa data."

Also Mosoto, an application that works on top of Facebook and allows chat and file sharing.

TechCrunch also write about Yahoo! Pipes, a service that lets you combine and 'pipe' data from different sources such as RSS feeds, Yahoo, Google Base, and web pages. Sounds like an application with a lot of potential: "The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes."

It's been quite a week for Vodafone, which is making a strong play to show 3 that more than one operator can play this Mobile 2.0 game. Having signed deals with MySpace and eBay earlier in the week, now it's announced a deal to launch YouTube Mobile.

Full unmediated access to the video-sharing site? Not quite. The press release carefully describes it as "a YouTube experience" that lets customers access "a version of the popular YouTube service directly from Vodafone live!".

Seeing as one of the main subjects for Techscape is Web 2.0 going mobile, we were bound to prick up our ears at LaNetro Zed's announcement that, yes, it's taking Web 2.0 mobile.

The company runs the Club Zed mobile subscription service here in the UK, which has traditionally involved users paying £3 a week for unlimited games, ringtone and wallpaper downloads. However, LaNetro Zed has now introduced user generated content, social networking and communication features into the mix.

I caught up with president and CEO Javier Perez Dolset to find out more. "We're trying to fully integrate the mobile device as a new machine to have full access to the internet, and everything Web 2.0 can offer," he says.

Next week, I'll be sprinting around the 3GSM show in Barcelona, catching up with the latest mobile innovations. Some press releases are already dribbling out before the show gets underway, including one from Enquire.
The technology sounds good though. Enquire will be showing off a suite of 'participation products' at 3GSM, which all use video-calling for some entertaining user generated content applications, including karaoke and dating.

It was only a matter of time before someone came out with a working model of mobile mash-ups of some description.

Mobio Networks did it at the DEMO 07 show, and there's a good video online showing how its platform pulls in different widgets and mashes them up with maps and data. It's not embeddable, so click the link below to have a gander.

Mobio DEMO 07 presentation

You can’t swing a cat at 3GSM this year without hitting 17 mobile social networking companies, all claiming to be the next MySpace, and all claiming to be unique. Time will tell. Cerkle is one of the more interesting examples however, offering a social networking service that works from your PC and your mobile phone.

“Our belief is that social networking is evolving, and people are resolving themselves down into smaller groups,” says Paul Cox of Roundpoint, the company behind Cerkle.

“If you look at the statistics, most people use social networking more to contact people they already know and arrange to do things. They’re not going out and looking for new friends. So we’re not really trying to do the MySpace thing, as we don’t think that’s what people want in the mobile environment. And besides, you can’t deal with 700 friends on your mobile. You can deal with 10...”

Mobile blogging isn't going to be about text. Instead, it’s going to be about photos and video that you upload semi-automatically from your phone as you take them, with the bare minimum of words required. Of course, you might go in later and write some proper captions from your PC, but for the most part, moblogging will be visual. Which answers those questions about why anyone would blog from their phone.

That was certainly the message on the Motorola stand, where the company was showing off its mobile blogging application which basically makes it quick and easy to post pics and videos to a range of online file-sharing services. It’s nothing that the ShoZu application doesn’t do already, but since it’ll be on Motorola handsets out of the box, it’ll find a wide audience.

TechCrunch reports that Aniboom, a "cartoons meets YouTube" site, has raised $4.5m of funding.

Mashable writes about Who's On My Page, a MySpace tracker that will log other users' visits to a page. They claim that they can circumvent MySpace's attempts to block their code by instead using a Firefox plugin.

Yospace could be described as the poster child for the mobile user-generated-content brigade. The company's video-sharing services for 3 (See Me TV) and O2 (Look At Me) have been hugely successful, while recently Yospace was bought by Emap as part of a strategy to work UGC around its magazine and radio brands. More of that later.

But as a firm that's been doing mobile video-sharing for a while now, Yospace has a good perspective on the implications of YouTube's mobile deal with Vodafone, which was announced last week. I asked Yospace CTO David Springall for his views at 3GSM.

"The trouble with the big internet players is they don't understand mobile very well," he says. "It's considered simply as a technical issue of getting content onto the phone, but it's far more than that. Also, these big guys have a different view on what the business model is for mobile, as opposed to the operators."

Many people know Hands-On Mobile for its mobile games - the company has sold millions of downloads of its World Poker Tour game, and has also released a stream of games based on Marvel superhero characters.

However, the company is now diversifying into mobile user-generated content and social networking, with two new services announced at 3GSM this week. The first is a distribution deal for an existing service called FunkySexyCool, which started in Australia, and bills itself as a “mobile nightclub community”.

“It’s a bit like a game in many ways,” Hands-On Mobile’s Eric Hobson told me at 3GSM. “In essence it’s a flirting service where you vote on people online, and have to work your way to the top in terms of votes. And then there’s lots of ‘money can’t buy...’ prizes on offer too. It’s been really big in Australia, they’ve got 200,000 members there now.”

A Nokia venture called Nokia Ad Service indicates that Nokia believes it has a big role to play in the mobile advertising market. It is apparently "bringing to market a solution that connects global advertising with mobile publishers".

It's hard to be sure, but I don't think this has been reported before. I heard about it during an interview with mobile firm Clicmobile at 3GSM this week, as they're creating an online/mobile social networking community for Nokia Ad Service.

I'd never heard of it, so I Googled, and got absolutely nothing. So I tried 'Nokia Advertising Service' and got one result: a LinkedIn profile for Minh Tran. And he has a public LinkedIn profile (i.e. one that non-members can read), which provided the quote above.

When 3 launched its X-Series service, the buzz was all about putting the big Web 2.0 sites on your phone. Conspicuous by their absence were any deals with social networking providers however.

That's starting to change, indirectly. 3 has signed a deal with Intercasting, a social networking "gateway provider", to make it easier for the operator's subscribers to access social networking sites including LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and BlackPlanet.

A single interface will provide access to all the sites, to make it easy for users. It's good, but it's still not MySpace, Bebo, Facebook...

Another firm I was pleased to catch up with at 3GSM was Clicmobile. The company builds cross-platform communities with social networking and user-generated content elements for clients.

As an example, Clicmobile powers Yootribe, a French social networking service aimed at a “young and playful” audience.

The online part includes profiles, videos, music and links to friends, but from day one it’s also had mobile elements, including text alerts and invitations, and location-based features letting users track friends who are nearby.

It's not even close to being massmarket yet, but geotagging is one of the technologies I'm personally most interested in, especially if it gets automated enough that the people using it don't even need to know what geotagging is to make use of it.

ShoZu's announcement this week that it's including geotagging in its Share-It mobile application is a step on the road. Users with GPS-enabled phones will be able to automatically attach location information to photos and videos when they're captured, and then have this uploaded along with the content to whatever sharing service they're using.

Currently supported are Flickr and YouTube, along with Buzznet, Pikeo, Dada.net, moblogUK and Textamerica. For Flickr, images will automatically be added to the user's Flickr map.

Now all I have to do is get myself a GPS phone. Anyone got any Nokia N95s going spare? ;o)