Wix Invites - Come 'n Get Em!
From CenterNetworks, popular since 2 monthsYesterday we posted an interview with Allon Bloch of Wix. Allon describes Wix as, "Wix is a web-top publishing platform. We believe it could become the platform people use when they want to publish something online, whether it's a business site, a family site, widget, flyer, blog etc."Today we are back with invites to the private beta! If you would like one, just complete the form in the Wix widget below. Free MySpace Comments - Wix.comPartner Links-- Web Jobs-- NY Tech Directory-- CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group-- CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page-- Purchase an Apple iPhone Go to site
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We reviewed photo sharing site Photwo when they launched in January. I said that it was the easiest photo sharing site I've seen at that point. The site is based out of Norway and founder Magnus K S Andersen tells me that their business model was to sell prints and premium features. Check out our review for more analysis on Photwo.The company has shared some stats regarding Photwo usage:Currently the site has 2,477 users and 11,306 photos uploadedPage views/month: 33,425Pagerank 4Uniques/Month: 3,239The site was listed this morning on Sitepoint auctions for sale. The minimum bid is $2,000 and so far there have been no bids. Looks like the auction goes for two more weeks. The auction also includes a Norwegian version of this site.Here's an example gallery:powered by Photwo.comPartner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Next week the Apple iPhone 3G will be released and the lines will be long. I put together the video below to cover two topics: why I am not purchasing an iPhone 3G and why Apple is a brilliant company. Here are just a few notes from the video:I won't be purchasing the iPhone because it's too expensive and because I found it hard to type. The Web browser and mobile applications will be awesome and that I will certainly miss, but my Samsung Ace matches it in all other areas. I found the Ace easier to type on, in fact I can write entire blog posts easily on the Ace whereas I was unable to on the iPhone. The cost difference in a nearly identical comparison is nearly $800 for the year and that's just way too much to consider. My take is that people with the iPhone beta (the current model) will likely upgrade to the iPhone 3G but Apple's ability to draw in new customers will be limited.The other part of the video covers why Apple is such a brilliant company. They have been able to create a new product lifecycle for mobile devices. Most people keep their mobile device at least 2 years which is the typical contract term. Apple has been able to push the iPod cycle into the mobile device world. Next year there will be a new iPhone and current iPhone fans will upgrade to get the new features. And the next year, and the next. I haven't seen any major gadget blogs discussing this topic but it's worth a look. It means that iPhone users will be locked into a contract for life (in Internet years) basically.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
You know Expedia, right? They began life as a Microsoft company. Yesterday they were fired from MSN. Get out, pack your bags and get out! Beginning yesterday, MSN Travel is now hitched with Orbitz. This change affects customers in the U.S. and in the U.K.Kyle Peterson from Forbes notes that a Microsoft spokesman said the company decided to switch to Orbitz because it preferred the travel site's features and customer service.The monthly traffic that will now be diverted in the air to Orbitz is in the range of 3.5 million unique visitors per month. When I check Expedia's status board, all lines say "Delayed". This is a big hit for Expedia.In my opinion Expedia's usability is much better than Orbitz. Was this deal completed for the reasons listed above or really for financial reasons?Last month we took a look at Expedia's traffic using Google Trends. Here's a chart of Expedia vs. Orbitz. Currently Expedia shows 2x more traffic than Orbitz. This MSN Travel deal could easily bring both companies together in terms of site traffic.
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Dan Frommer from SAI sat down with NY Times chief technology officer Marc Frons to find out what's going on at the newspaper's digital division. Last week we interviewed NY Times Blogrunner Product Manager Philippe Lourier about where their blog aggregation tool is headed. Frommer gets a good look and more information on the NY Times overall digital strategy.The interview focuses on content syndication, widgets, aggregation (w/Blogrunner), social overlay (w/TimesPeople) and Personalization. They are also planning iPhone apps and APIs so that developers can pull data out of their content repository. I am very excited to see that they are thinking about widgets. Why not get the NY Times content out all over the Web and potentially monetize the widgets or do a revshare with the partner sites. Frommer grabbed a screenshot of what the most popular widget might look like when it launches this summer.I'd like to see more content discovery -- the site is certainly overwhelming in content. What works in print doesn't always translate to the Web. Perhaps they can learn from the Web 2.0 services that are creating strong discovery engines based on your profile and preferences.As I pointed out to Philippe, the NY Times is sitting on a gold mine and they haven't opened the doors yet to share and sell the gold. The online news landscape could change once those doors open up.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
After launching their apps-on-a-plane anywhere software, Etelos is back today with Etelos Share. Etelos Share is cloud storage for private business applications. The idea is that you can move your files and applications into Etelos Share and then access them from anywhere with an Internet connection.The company describes Etelos Share as, "providing online file storage, file backup and file sharing between named users. Etelos Share is not a publishing system, but rather a business file sharing service used to manage corporate digital assets and intellectual property. Accessed as an external drive, Etelos Share is password protected with unique usernames and kept in a secure hosting environment."The real question with this type of service is whether large companies will trust their data to a 3rd party and to a cloud hosting provider. Etelos Share looks appropriate for small to medium-sized businesses. Pricing starts at $5/month for 5GB of storage and is available through the Etelos Marketplace.Update: another new tool out today is CloudFactory - GigaOm has a good review.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Amanda Gravel from Social Honeycomb created a video to ask the Twitter staff, "what are you doing to me?" With the recent events regarding Twitter this week, I thought it would be a great way to end the weekend. Clearly the lack of the reply function has pushed Amanda over the edge - her video is shot backwards.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
At the CN/Drop.io party last week I met Jesse Boyes. Jesse is the co-founder of a relatively new startup in NYC named Outalot. Outalot is a local search engine that's quick in and quick out. There are four content areas within Outalot: food, bars, movies and shops. Outalot is currently available in NYC and in San Francisco.I did some tests on the food section and it found the locations I was thinking of - I tested in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. I found the movie listings to be easy as well. There's a mobile version for finding places while you are on-the-go. You can save places you like as bookmarks within the Outalot service and also see your friend's bookmarks. There is also a new mapplet which you can add to the normal Google Maps which adds an Outalot layer for additional functionality when browsing a local map.This month they added Twitter functionality. If you find a location you plan on visiting, you can send a message to your Twitter friends letting them know where you will be heading to.
I guess what I don't get is why they didn't tie into Yelp or another reviews site for the locations? Also, what about showing the menus for the food establishments? It's great to find a restaurant but without reviews and/or menus, it's only halfway there. If they integrated more content, the site would feel more robust and not just a fancy yellow pages. The usability does seem a bit better than Menupages. What about directions? They are using Google Maps for integration but there's no link to get directions.I want to like the service but there's just so much missing that I don't get why I'd use this over Yelp?Other NY-based local directories include UpNext and Wikipages.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
For practically the last work week, the "replies" tab in Twitter has been out of service. People in the know began to push users over to the Summize service to see the replies. What I don't understand is why Twitter doesn't change the link on the replies tab to point to Summize - wouldn't that (at least in the interim) alleviate some of the negative press?Many people have hopped on the bus to FriendFeed'ville (initially driven by the likes of Robert Scoble and Louis Gray). If you are a regular CN reader, you already know my thoughts on FriendFeed. Corvida explains why you can't leave Twitter. Others wonder why everyone is bitching.So come up close because I am going to tell you a little secret... it's about the traffic Twitter was driving. How many people really give a crap that you just went surfing, that your dog peed on the floor or that you just went to Ikea. Sure there are a few, everyone has some fans. But the majority of Twitter users are bloggers. And from that perspective everyone is trying to milk Twitter for the traffic. Let's get real here folks.I have about 3,000 followers on Twitter and when I posted a link early on, I would see anywhere from 10-200 visits to CN from the link. Of course if others "retweeted", that is to copy a twitter message into another content stream, the traffic was even higher. Lately though, the traffic has dropped significantly. From my studies using a variety of proprietary algorithms, I have seen a decline of 60-70% of inbound Twitter traffic.So I have 3,000 followers, what about those people with more? A couple of power users include: Jason Calacanis with 30,000 followers, Techcrunch with 20,000, Mashable with 8,000, ReadWriteWeb with 2,000 and Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang with 9,000. What kind of traffic are they seeing when they post a link? Techcrunch uses twitterfeed so every crunchpost goes directly to the 20,000. Jason promotes Mahalo several times a day - how many of the 30,000 are visiting from the links? No matter how many, it's good traffic I believe.Since I don't know the traffic from other large follower users, the only thing I can go by is when Jason demands that his fans go comment on a photo (typically of his dogs). Within minutes there are usually 30+ comments. This means the actual links are much higher than that.I've asked before for Twitter analytics but I guess first we need to get the service stable. :)Now here's another secret for you at no cost because it's happy hour. Let's take this traffic concept a step further. I might subscribe to a blog that uses Twitter but what's the likelyhood that I will actually visit the site? Rarely for advanced users. But with Twitter, you always visit because when you click the link, and henceforth have just driven at least one monetizable pageview to that blog (this one included). Now for CN it doesn't matter much - but if you have 10k+ Twitter subs and are using Twitterfeed, that could start to amount to something over time. Side note, I don't use Twitterfeed for CN - I try to only post what I think are the top CN posts into my Twitter feed.No matter whether the blogs that push links on Twitter are generating revenue or not doesn't matter - they are still getting eyes to their content which is great.The issue is what happens now that a core part of the Twitter audience might be packing their bags for other locations? I believe this is part of the concern of everyone who is writing about the service. It's like wondering what would happen to a few blogs if Digg died tomorrow.I don't believe Twitter is going to die, be killed or go for a suicide. Twitter is easy to understand and use. It's perfect for the mainstream. FriendFeed isn't. FriendFeed will do very well also for the set of users currently using it. I am not sold that there's mainstream appeal coming for FriendFeed.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Nokia's Jan Chipchase has provided a Nokia study on mobile interaction and carrying styles. Ever wonder where a man carries his phone versus a woman? The most telling stat from the report is that 30% of pocket carriers and 50% of handbag carriers sometimes or always miss incoming calls. Here are some other interesting points from the report: 55% of men carry their phones in their trousers56% of women carry their phones in their handbag10% of men in Los Angeles carry their mobile on their belt (I am not a fan of the toolbelt look)31% of men in Mumbai carry their mobile in their chest shirt pocket20% of men in Tokyo carry their mobile in their bag80% of women in Milan carry their mobile in their bag8% of people in Los Angeles use protective cases for their phonesIf you are interested, I always carry my Samsung Ace in my pants pocket - never in my bag because I don't want it to get scratched as it shuffles around in the bag. It's also easier to grab when that major acquisition email comes in. Where do you carry your mobile? Here are the slides from Nokia and the full research is also available for download. 
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SmugMug founder Don MacAskill has announced a new service from SmugMug. Named SmugVault, it's basically a place to store anything. The storage is actually held on Amazon's S3 service and the pricing is listed below.The idea is simple and could be a great way to boost SmugMug even further up the charts. How many times do you upload a jpg file but have a raw file as well. What about videos that you compress for uploading but want to store the uncompressed raw files somewhere. This is what SmugVault is all about. Any file type can be stored on SmugVault including document files. They have created a Web interface for browsing the files stored in the SmugVault.Pricing for SmugVault is as follows:Storage costs 22 cents per gigabyte per month. If you upload the contents of a 2 GB memory card, you'll be out 44 cents/month for storage. There is a $1/month recurring charge. Data transfer in is 30 cents per gigabyte. Data transfer out is 51 cents per gigabyte. Monthly addition to your home electrical bill: Zero. This is something Flickr should have been offering for a long time - it's another reason why Flickr and Yahoo haven't been integrated together past the basic login information.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
RSSmeme creator Benjamin Golub has announced this morning that the service is now supporting the following services: Delicious, Digg, Diigo, FriendFeed, Google Shared Stuff, Magnolia, Mister Wong, Mixx, Netvibes and StumbleUpon.The new services come via the FriendFeed API and as long as your FriendFeed account is public, the shares will be counted. Of course you have to subscribe to the services above via FriendFeed to make it beneficial. For example, I don't have Digg, Magnolia, Mixx, or StumbleUpon linked in FriendFeed so those shares won't count. Unlike FriendFeed, there's also de-duping so shares only count once no matter how many services you share/link/vote on.Scribkin has more details on the new RSSmeme listed sites.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Movie news and reviews site Movies.com has been acquired by Fandango. Fandango is owned by Comcast and Movies.com was owned by the Walt Disney Internet Group. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.Nielsen/Netratings reports that for May 2008, Fandango reached 6.3 million monthly unique visitors, while Movies.com served 1.9 million monthly unique visitors. There was apparently very little overlap in the users.Rafat Ali at PaidContent notes that Fandango's ad team will sell advertising on both sites. He also spoke with Disney who said that a dozen of its Disney Internet Group employees will be reassigned because of the Movies.com sale and no layoffs are expected.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Compete just revised UP Yahoo’s market share number significantly - by 5.3 percentage points. To put this number in perspective — combined market share of AOL and ASK.com = 4.1%On Monday we released our May Search Share numbers. As a result of some conversations we were having with Danny Sullivan in parallel we sent over our “rules” we use to mine the search data. Danny threw these up on his post reviewing our data and one savvy reader very quickly identified an issue with our rules. So, long story short, we have fixed our Yahoo! rules (and also reevaluated all the other engine rules in the process). Here’s the updated data based on adjusted rules.According to the revised market share numbers, a MSFT/Yahoo Search combination would yield:Yahoo+MSN/Live = 28.5% combined market share (revised)Yahoo+MSN/Live = 23.9% (old)However, as Jeremy points out in his post, trend wise not much has changed. Yahoo Search market share is still trending downwards.I’m sure folks at Microsoft (and Wall Street) have been watching these numbers closely (along with those from comScore, Hitwise, etc). This revision certainly makes Yahoo worth more, but is it enough for Microsoft to change its mind? Only time will tell.CORRECTED STATS:
OLD STATS:
Jay Meattle leads all things "Product" at Lookery, an online advertising and user-targeting network. Before Lookery, Jay was the Product Manager of Compete.com, where he managed the overall development and growth of the award winning competitive web intelligence service. You can find him at http://www.hepguru.com/blog.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Back during my corporate days, we subscribed to the competitive analysis Web services that Hitwise offers. Basically you can see data about your site, upstream and downstream traffic, industry traffic, etc. If I remember, each category was $5k/year (might have been more not 100% sure). The data was great (though it wasn't always accurate) and I enjoyed studying the reports.Today Google's Trends application has added Websites to their free offering. You can now enter a Web site into Google Trends and it gives you back information on unique visitors from Google searches (only a relative graph, no actual numbers), location information, "also visited" and "also searched for". Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has an in-depth review which every Internet marketer must read.Note that if you sign-in on Google Trends, you see more detailed information including numbers on the graph.Now to be fair, this is only for search traffic so it won't kill Hitwise's product offering, just injure them slightly. Theis new Google offering sure does provide a massive amount of free data. You can see what your competitors are doing in search and where their site visitors are heading to. It's also something to consider for organic SEO purposes.Here's the CenterNetworks chart:
As expected, U.S. is first in search traffic to CN. I would have expected Germany to be second but they are eigth and India ranks second in inbound search traffic. The charts at the bottom seem like recent traffic only whereas the graph at the top is all-time. The also-visited shows popular social media blogger louisgray first, then techmeme, scobleizer, inquisitr and gigaom rounding out the top 5.For comparison purposes, here's Techcrunch's chart:
With their pagerank 8, they have significantly more search traffic volume than CN. Here we see U.S. first, then Japan followed by India. I am guessing that Techcrunch Japan plays a role there. As for the also visited, it makes sense that crunchbase is first, many of the outbound links on TC point to their tech directory. It's interesting that Friendfeed ranks fourth, I rarely see them speak about FriendFeed. Other top blogs readwriteweb, gigaom and venturebeat round out the top sites. They have data in the also searched for field which is dominated by youtube terms.Again, if you are a social media consultant, an analyst, search engine optimizer, or work as an Internet marketer, you should be reviewing this data on your site(s), your competitors and your industry as a whole. I don't see any feeds available but I am sure someone will hack that up soon. A widget of the data would be excellent as well.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
It's been a few weeks since the last blinkx release and I was getting a bit worried about the company. But today they are out with a new partnership, this time with MEN7. MEN7 describes themselves as delivering on-demand, high definition, dynamic television programming to men ages 25 to 54.blinkx will use their video search technology to place relevant advertising next to the videos served on the MEN7 network and will share revenue with MEN7. Other financial terms of the deal were not released.blinkx now reports 350 partners and 26 million hours of indexed video and audio content. Their latest partnerships include Revision3 and Kiplinger.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Last week we published a list of the top 10 Web applications in Russia. Today, Australia is out with their list by Ross Dawson of Future Exploration Network. Here are the key takeaways from the report:A much larger scene this year than lastMany major success storiesMany ideas start but many fail as well - Russ says the most promising path to success is through failure.Overseas action - many companies who gain ground in Australia either move completely overseas to the U.S. (mostly Silicon Valley) or move for a temporary period. Russ notes that there's also movement to East Asia, India and Europe.Lots of clonesHere are the top 10 - check out the full list:mig33 Confluence Red Bubble 3eep Engagd MyVirtualHome Booking Angel Gnoos.com.au Scouta RetailMeNot You should check out the list - lots of great Web applications. I hope more bloggers in countries outside the U.S. will create lists like this. It's awesome to see more innovation and thought from outside the valley.
Back in May, Microsoft launched their "live search cashback" which basically helps you earn rewards (paid via PayPal) for items you buy when you enter the merchant's site via Microsoft. While most believed that it would help Microsoft gain important search market share and also get people to convert from Google to Microsoft for general searching. I believed that while it might help with the market share, the bottom line is that deal hunters would be the only ones to really take advantage of the service and that it would generate more of a financial loss overall.You see, us deal hunters are a special bunch. We will pick at that chicken bone until there's nothing left, then sell the bone using a discount code. Over the years I've joked with friends about my "deal hunter levels" and have promoted friends to different levels depending on the deals they find. Not all of us can afford to pay market prices.So what's happened with Live Search Cashback recently? Well, the deal hunters have found a way to get 35% rewards on purchases on eBay. By doing certain searches on the Live Cashback search engine, there are links in the sponsored area for 35% off purchases at eBay. There's even a step-by-step walkthrough of how to get the 35%. It gets even more interesting because now people are setting up auctions for cash, selling for over the face value of the cash, just to get the maximum 35% cashback.The thread on Fatwallet has nearly 2,000 replies in the last 24 hours and SlickDeals' thread has almost 3,000 replies and 250,000 pageviews.The net result is I can pretty much guarantee the search numbers for June for Microsoft will be massive. Alone, I've completed over 150 searches over the past 24 hours alone looking for the goodies. Let's see how Microsoft spins this boost in searches when the industry reports surface.Here's where it gets tricky - many of the forum posts are related to the terms and conditions related to the cashback search. I sure hope that Microsoft makes good on all of these rebates through this eBay deal. Trust me, you don't want to piss off the deal hunters.
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With Yahoo losing people left and right and nearly every media outfit calling them dead, I started to wonder about my data. The Flickr founders left earlier this week and tonight we've learned that delicious founder Joshua Schachter has also tendered his resignation (via Dave Sifry).Now let me be clear that I don't think Yahoo is closing shop by any stretch of the imagination but the question is a good one for any Web application or company to which we put data into. Certainly has made me think about the Web services I use from both big companies and startups and how often I need to backup the data. This is not about data portability, I am only discussing my data (photos, videos, text) not how other users interact with the data (comments, etc.).There's three main services I use on Yahoo: delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Mail. delicious offers an export function which I found easy to use. With regards to Flickr and Yahoo Mail, I was unable to find anyway to save out my entire collection of photos or mail. I've got nearly 3,700 photos on Flickr - no way I am saving these out one-by-one. And I was one of the first Yahoo Mail members and it's still one of my primary email accounts even today. Please let me know if there are ways to export this data in batch form. If you are building a Web service, have you considered offering an export function from the beginning? If not, why?I think today we've learned another great lesson. How many horror stories have we heard from people who lost an entire hard drive filled with data. We've learned to backup our hard drives to external drives for safety. Perhaps we need to do a better job of backing up our Web services for safety as well. One has no idea when a Web service might not be there the next time you attempt to access it.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
NY-based Hakia is announcing the launch of their white-label semantic Web search (they call it Syndication Web Services) today. The idea is simple - you can now add Hakia's services to your site offering more intense search functionality for your visitors.The business model is welcoming; offer 30,000 searches per day free of charge and free of advertising then they will discuss a relationship with you past the 30,000. What this means is that small social networks may never pay anything for using the Hakia service but provide a great benefit for their users.The Syndication Web Services include Web search, News search, Vertical search, Summarizer, Categorizer, Characterizer and Text Meaning Representation. The services provide an XML feed, and options to customize the feed. The first company using the new service is Berggi. Berggi has created a worldwide mobile search application.This month Hakia added PubMed to their search index and also checkout our comparison of Hakia and Powerset.Partner Links-- Free Online Budgeting Software
Social news aggregator Reddit is making a big announcement today. They have decided to open source the Reddit code. I spoke with Steve Huffman to learn more about the announcement and grab some of the latest stats from Reddit. The open source license matches the one Facebook is now using for some of their code.He says that open sourcing the Reddit code is the next step in the transparency of media that Reddit strives for. It's also a way for Reddit to give back to the open source community. Steve noted that they are the only one of their peers offering their code under an open source license. He also said that Digg struggles with transparency.I immediately asked if the "secret sauce" would be part of the code. The idea we can review the code and figure out how to hit the Reddit front page seemed possible. Steve explained that certain key parts of the secret sauce won't be released.I also asked about developer manuals and guides - something that is important when reviewing another's code. At this point there are guides but they are a work in progress.As for the latest stats, Steve shared the following on our call: 4+ million unique visitors a month 120 million pageviews a month 2,200 user-created reddits (including the custom tech reddit run by some of the top tech bloggers) 23% of registrations are coming from the user-generated reddits politics and technology are the strongest categories entertainment is the fastest growing category I also asked for U.S./non-U.S. traffic on Reddit and Steve shared that nearly 45% of traffic on Reddit comes from outside the U.S.Will this announcement today help Reddit gain more marketshare against Digg and potentially against newcomer Yahoo Buzz? It should certainly get the developer crowd talking and hacking. Reddit needs to make sure they promote this to all of the applicable sites in the Conde Nast portfolio. Whether it will drive more traffic and users to Reddit, we will need to wait and see.
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