Rev2.org

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a timeline, a sort of online diary of your life from beginning to present?  To record all of your hopes, dreams, accomplishments, failures, etc. in one place?  Many people have their “secret diary,” photo albums, or even memoirs.  Others are a little more…digital.

LIFEmee.com aims for that latter group.  The ones who want to build an online life history depot for the connected.  It includes everything from daily updates and journal entries to a summarized past history and even a spot to put things you don’t want released until your death, such as a Will or other things.

LIFEmee takes all of this information about you and creates a timeline to “visualize” it, that is to visualize your life, beginning to end.  You can keep this information private or share it with friends or the whole world–anyone who wants to look.

Of course, some obvious caveats and problems are immediately obvious when you hear that part, but since it’s your data, it’s your choice what you do with it.

Based in Tokyo, LIFEmee is a startup hoping to attract a huge audience of users who’re willing to use their app to record their lives.  The app is currently in alpha release and boasts several thousand users already.

Those who have a profile can compare it to other public profiles to see and compare assets, incomes, and goal setting/completion.  Sort of a Web 2.0 version of competing with the Jones’ I guess.  In fact, through that MyAssets system, you can register and share everything from your latest cell phone and gadget to your house and car.

While the idea is pretty basic and comparing themselves to others will probably be a big attraction for some people, I really don’t see this site as anything more than a fantasyland playground.  Or a place for identity thieves and marketing trolls to hunt for new material.

I can also see a lot of self-important types making a short-lived attempt at doing a diary of their lives on LIFEmee and losing interest once they find out they don’t get any feedback.

Basically, I can see a few people using this site seriously.  Most will probably play around with it,  put in a few diary entries or wishful-thinking assets and then forget LIFEmee exists.  Those who want to leave their history for posterity will probably choose more traditional venues for doing so.

Movies do it, television does it, even print advertisers do it.  Product placement is one of the quieter, but more common and popular advertising methods out there.  All of the big companies do it.  You’ll see Nike in television sportscasts, Coca-Cola cans in movies, etc.  So why not in social media too?

Udorse.com is a startup based in New York and funded by the Founders Fund that thinks we should be able to do just that.

If you’re social network profile on, say, Facebook or Myspace has a photo section with pictures that include products, Udorse wants you to be able to tag those with corporate sponsors who appear in them and make money every time someone views the pic.

Sounds like a good idea to me.  The new wave of online marketing appears to be focused on social media.  With good reason, since sites like Facebook are now rivaling Google in number of visits per day.  In fact, recent surveys show that most people who connect online regularly do so through social networking portals like Twitter and Facebook than they do through any other medium.

The site is still in beta.  Using a basic affiliate marketing backbone, Udorse currently works only with Facebook, but is a great concept.   Advertisers/companies sign up to make affiliate sales or PPC advertisements through Udorse.  The rest of us sign up for Udorse, look at who’s advertising, and then tag appropriate photos with the affiliate links.

This would also, obviously, encourage people to find out who’s advertising and then create photos featuring that company’s products or logo so they can make the tag.

In the end, I don’t see the average Joe Facebook user making much money off of this, but I do see advertisers really getting somewhere with this idea.  Udorse is very new, of course, and don’t be surprised if it isn’t bought up by one of the large affiliate marketing firms like Commission Junction and integrated with their services.

In order to try Udorse, you’ll need a private beta invite code, which you can request from their site directly.

Well, you’ve no doubt heard of Software as a Service (SaaS) as a platform for software delivery.  Now, a new startup called CrowdFlower.com is offering Labor as a Service (LaaS) on the same model.  Rather than purchasing software rights on a by-use or calendar-use model, you can now purchase temporary labor on the same model.

Think of it as a temporary employment agency that’s online.

The initial angel investment round for the startup got some interesting backing from groups like K9 Ventures, Founder’s Fund, and others into the LaaS idea.  So there must be something going on with this idea.  Personally, I kind of like it.

CrowdFlower taps into the employment pools of several agencies around the world (over 80 countries in all), gaining access to over 100,000 available temps-for-hire.  This is a sort of “human platform for cloud computing,” as the CrowdFlower site itself dubs it.

This scalable workforce is billed by the amount of effort per unit of work, similar to cloud computing, and the payment and channel for the work are set.  Once the work is complete, CrowdFlower does a QA on it, gives a report card to the performer(s) of the task, which boosts their ratings on the site, and all is complete.

For virtual labor, this is a great idea.  Say you have 100 pages of scanned documents you need input into a WordPress page, but the quality of the scan is too poor to give a good OCR result.  So you’ll need a transcriber instead.  But you need it done by the weekend.  So you’ll need a couple of dozen transcribers working on a couple of pages each.  Well, it could be LaaS to the rescue.

The sits is fairly easy to use and CrowdFlower has a large pool of workers with various skills and talents and, browsing through the virtual resume’s, they have some nice history with the site as well.

Created by Dolores Labs, CrowdFlower underwent some interesting crowd labor experiments (featured on the DoloresLabs.com site).  These involved graphics and feedback surveys.  Dolores Labs is headquartered in San Francisco, California and specializes in statistical quality control technology.  CrowdFlower is their latest extension of that tech.

Applications for using Twitter, Facebook, and such on your desktop or iPhone are not new.  There are hundreds of them, in fact.  When you want to use Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, AIM, GoogleTalk, and others all at once, though, the field of candidate apps gets much smaller.  In fact, if you’re looking for all of those plus imeem and Yahoo! and others, your field is narrowed to only one: Xumii.com.

Xumii started out as a somewhat innovative, but largely unnoticed app for accessing a handful of social networks on mobile platforms.  Still basically anonymous, it grew quickly as more and more social networks and communications platforms were added to its repertoire.

Then in mid-September, the latest version of the iPhone app for Xumii was released and the mobile giant Myriad Group purchased the company in an asset-acquisition deal worth an undisclosed amount.

Xumii uses a cloud computing architecture to integrate mobile phone contacts with social networks and IM services as one phone book.  This makes sharing photos, status messages, and more across several social networks simultaneously possible from your mobile device.

Up to the point of acquisition, Xumii had raised about $5.5 million in capital and had 17 employees in both California and Australia.  The buyout by Myriad did not change those employees, which are now employed by Myriad, but will allow the startup’s idea to be more easily spread across the estimated 2 billion devices that Myriad already has technology on.

The Xumii iPhone app is free to download from the App Store on iTunes and is also available from their website for BlackBerry and several common mobile models.

The following video demonstrates how the iPhone app works, which is how most of the Xumii apps work on different platforms as well: