Professional webmaster and wannabe over funded technology uber guru.
August 30, 2007 at 10:42 am · Filed under Internet Applications, Web Development
Whilst reading Hacker News at ycombinator dot com I came across the following piece from an experience Amazon FPS user. I have to say I’m not surprised, and mentioned briefly in a previous blog posting about how Amazon’s success is still in limbo (at least in this category dominated by Auth.net and others)
The requirement of an Amazon account is crazy, talk about a hurdle pre-checkout!
| Just wanted to share (I know this topic is all time popular) about our experinece with Amazon FPS. |
| First of all, we charge a small subscription fee each month. This severely limited our abilities to cherry pick payment processors. Second, we did not want to deal with (store on our servers) sensitive data such as credit card numbers. |
| From a technical point of view FPS is a bit too complicated. Definitely more so than other gateways we looked at. That is because it’s too generic: instead of 2 perties there are always 3. “Build your own PayPal!” is their idea. For people who aren’t building their own paypal it is a bit annoying. |
| Secondly, your users must have Amazon accounts. That may be good and bad, depending on how you look at it. To us it was bad: we did not want people to see “Amazon” stuff during sign up process - we had some unpleasant experience with similar approach taken by PayPal. |
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August 20, 2007 at 8:37 am · Filed under Search Engines
I was just visiting the Mahalo site, specifically the How To Add Mahalo To Your Search Bar page and received an error when I tried to install the search bar functionality to my copy of Firefox.
Here’s a screenshot:
August 17, 2007 at 8:45 am · Filed under Editorials, Social, Startup, Web 2.0
Web 3.0 Startup Checklist:
1. New Take on a Social Network: CHECK
2. Built With Uber Cool Rails: CHECK
3. Investment from Rich Web 1.0 Moguls: CHECK
4. Crazy Ass Business Model: CHECK
The idea for Zivity is good, but the execution is not in line with the market, and I know a little something about the pron market. I mean who doesn’t?
According to VB, they want the photos to be “fine erotica” submitted by hot people where paid subscribers vote and follow these local hotty attention whores.
Hmmm sounds a lot like MySpace … which is free … and prob has 1000 times more local hotties to stalk than Zivity has. Where do I sign up? Oh that’s right I can’t (it’s in private beta)
Pron is free all over the mighty Interweb. There are free social networks, free attention whores, free fine erotica photos and free adult blogs to keep everyone more than satisfied.
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Zivity, an adult social network, raises $1M before launch
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 Zivity, a new adult social network start-up, has raised a $1 million round of seed capital from Silicon Valley investors — as it prepares for launch.
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It’s not a porn site, such as the newer sites Eroshare (pictures) or Pornotube (vidoes). Rather, it likens itself to a mixture of MySpace and Playboy magazine with popularity/voting features thrown in. It says it focuses on pinup-like photography, or so-called “fine art erotica.” It invites regular woman — such as the local Starbucks barista — to submit photo shots.
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It is apparently based on ruby+rails, python, and/or perl, according to its job list.
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| Several former PayPal executives are among the investors. |
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August 17, 2007 at 7:52 am · Filed under Internet Applications, News
Trip Advisor is
reportedly paying $3,000,000 for a free application, that runs on another free application (at the pleasure of the latter app). Are they crazy or does this make business sense?
Hmmm, they now own the #1 and #2 apps in this category on Facebook and are displaying a new trend in tech spending.
| In what is by far the largest Facebook application acquisition to date, travel company TripAdvisor has reportedly acquired Where I’ve Been from Craig Ulliott for $3 million. |
| Update: We are still awaiting comment from TripAdvisor. No official confirmation yet. |
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The acquisition marks the first major successful exit of a Facebook application since the Platform launched just under three months ago.
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 With 2.3 million users, Where I’ve Been established itself as by far the biggest travel application on Facebook, leading #2 Cities I’ve Visited (also TripAdvisor owned) by over 1 million users.
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August 16, 2007 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Editorials, News, Search Engines
No offense Allen but you’re just plain wrong here. Yes Mahalo doesn’t pick up “new” news as quickly as automated bots, again just like Alexa as long as you understand how the data is collected this shouldn’t be a surprise.
The important question here is; Will the Skype outage of Thursday August 16th 2007 really go down as a “newsworthy” topic? One that would warrant a complete page on Mahalo?
The answer is No, of course not, the story barely belongs in Google’s index as I’m sure it’s already been resolved and 99.99998% of the population didn’t even notice.
As far as Mahalo using social news site to promote original articles I don’t really take issue with that, Jason will just need to be careful not to focus too much on that sort of social baiting. As you can see from Digg, most social communities tend to boil down the the least common denominator as the audience exands.
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 As nearly everyone online knows by now, Skype is out of commission. It’s down for the count. I was one of the first people to post about the Skype outage this morning, and since then, hundreds of others have as well. It’s a hot topic on Google Hot Trends (#45), and I am seeing 500 people an hour from my first page Google result.
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But where is the Mahalo page? The Mahalo Skype page has 3 headlines of which 2 are semi-outage related. Otherwise, searching for “Skype down” or “Skype outage” provides no result. Yet Google has indexed my page from 6AM and already shows it as one of the top pages.
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August 16, 2007 at 3:10 pm · Filed under Internet Applications, Startup
Via the *new* Hacker News I found FEEDJIT, a widget sort of thing that displays incoming and outgoing traffic including destination. The more important story here however was that this ‘jit was created in only 10 hours.
I could roll a startup out in less time than that, but it would have to include less functionality, maybe a mod of something in the can.
| Live traffic feed |
 � Loudon, New Hampshire arrived via markmaunder.com |
| � Babson Park, Massachusetts arrived via markmaunder.com |
 � Calgary, Alberta arrived via markmaunder.com |
| � Sterling Heights, Michigan arrived via markmaunder.com |
| � Sterling Heights, Michigan arrived via markmaunder.com |
| � Sterling Heights, Michigan left via cnn.com |
 � New Delhi, Delhi arrived via markmaunder.com |
| � Groveland, Massachusetts arrived via markmaunder.com |
| � New York, New York arrived via markmaunder.com |
| � New York, New York arrived via markmaunder.com |
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FEEDJIT shows arrivals and departures on any page on your website.
It does this by tracking referrers and clicks on external links.
FEEDJIT won’t slow down your site because it draws itself after
your page has loaded.
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FEEDJIT is free, we don’t need you to register with us, and it’s secure so no one can steal your widget code and display your
arrivals and departures.
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August 15, 2007 at 8:53 am · Filed under Internet Applications, News, Social
I tend to think Steve isn’t going out on a limb much here in predicting that Facebook will overtake both MySpace and Bebo to take the UK Social Networking crown.
Bebo (design wise) looks very much like YouTube, and not knowing the history here I can’t comment as to why.
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Comscore data for July reveals that Bebo is now the number one visited social networking site in the UK, overtaking MySpace. Sitting in third place is Facebook. According to the statistics, Bebo registered a total of 10.7m unique users ahead of MySpace which has 10.1m and Facebook with 7.6m.
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Bebo is also ranked as the second most engaging website in the UK with 8.7b page views - only just behind Google which received 8.8b.
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However, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction. Based on anecdotal evidence amongst my friends and colleagues here in London, give it six months or less, and Facebook’s UK figures could look very different. I suspect they’ll be a lot closer to the other two — within the thousands not millions — and could eventually overtake them both.
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August 15, 2007 at 8:45 am · Filed under Internet Applications, Web 2.0
I’ve always like Shopify’s business model, and their product (although I’ve never used it). Mashable has the info on their new marketplace which I think is genius.
Genius mostly because it’s a similar idea I’ve had for one of the projects I’m currently working on. It’s not a shopping cart product but a similar model with a hosted application that I think is perfect for a marketplace add on.
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Shopify, one of a number of services for creating niche online stores, has launched the Shopify Marketplace, a venue to search all items on Shopify stores, browse by tag, vendor and product type and use the slick interface to view the featured stores of the day. The site was announced to users today.
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Shopify claims to have more than 20,000 stores running on the platform, with pricing between free and $299/month. Rivals include Zlio and Amazon aStores.
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August 14, 2007 at 11:00 am · Filed under Editorials, Google
I have to object with Arrington’s analysis of Alexa and scold him for yet another blog article about how Alexa is inaccurate and needs a “re-work”.
Alexa is just a tool, no more no less. We all know HOW Alexa gathers data, and we all know the flaws. It should be used along with Compete and Comscore to gain an overall picture of where a website ranks in comparison to other sites in it’s field. Just like your FICO score is calculated from 3 credit reporting agencies, your overall website rank is the summation of different traffic and influence measurements.
I can find flaws in any web service. How easy it is to show a bad rank order in Google? How easy is it to spot inaccuracies with the Technorati Top 100? Singling out tools and highlighting how inaccurate they are when you fully understand how it collects data is foolish. It also means that you can’t discount a tool completely just because it isn’t perfect. Will I post a blog article about how Google is useless because it could give me a good result set for “car insurance”? Of course not, I’ll just use another tool in my virtual “tool belt”.
Posting’s like this one are useless and contribute nothing to the discussion. Have I learned anything besides TC pointing out that more Alexa users visit YouTube than Google? No, I could have gone to Alexa and seen for myself. The content of this posting is just blogosphere flame bait spewed out by anyone who wants to make a name for themselves or attract the largest crowd (in this case the latter).
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We’ve gotten a few “tips” that YouTube has actually grown larger than Google in terms of page views according to Alexa .
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This is, of course, complete fiction. And it shows just how useless Alexa has become as a method for measuring web traffic and reach. Comscore tells a much different (and more accurate) story - Google is nearing 100 billion monthly page views; YouTube sees around 16 billion.
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Even newcomer Compete, which measures traffic in a similar way as Alexa, seems to be getting it right. Alexa needs an overhaul. It’s long since become less than useful.
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August 14, 2007 at 8:02 am · Filed under Business Tech, Social, Web 2.0
Mashable is offering a free listing on their (somewhat bare) marketplace for the next 48 hours. Expect things to get crowded, but currently there are only 4 listings, so depending on the first update you could get some good exposure from this highly ranked blog.
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This week we’re soft-launching something that I think fills a big need: a single place to buy, sell and trade modern websites, services and more. What’s more, everyone who lists within the next 48 hours gets a week’s free listing. It’s called, at least for now, the Web 2.0 Marketplace.
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Increasingly, companies are listing themselves on eBay and other marketplaces, but telling us they got more leads from Mashable. Pligg, for example, told us about the sale before anyone else. Or folks are trying to sell their Facebook applications, provide development services for Facebook applications and MySpace widgets, looking for suitable job candidates, looking to advertise their events and so on. Clearly, there needs to be a single point for all this activity. So here are some of the things you can list on the Web 2.0 Marketplace:
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