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Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue.com. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

Pandora, the wonderful service that strives to help you answer the question “Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?” has recently made some updates which make a good thing even better. They have brought in some of the best aspects of social networking to give you new effective ways to find the tunes you never knew but that soon become your favorites. Here are the highlights:

Listener Profiles - I’ve always felt that a good way to know a person is to understand his or her musical tastes, and now with profile pages you can do just that. This is the place to describe yourself and the music you enjoy to the world at large.

Artist “Fans” - Want to find someone who shares your fascination with New Zealand alternative rock band Evermore? Now you can browse the profiles of listeners of every band Pandora plays. From there you can connect with other people, find out what else they like, listen to their stations, and leave them comments.

There are more features that help listeners connect and discover new things in the best spirit of Web 2.0. It is encouraging to see a leader like Pandora deliver such a useful and thoughtful update, and judging by user comments, I am not the only one that thinks so.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

CozmoTV is a website that offers users personalized filters to sort through the massive amount of video content available on sites like YouTube to find what is most interesting and relevant. As the amount of video online continues to grow, this service becomes more and more compelling.

First lets look at how the personalization works. As you watch shows through their network, you are able to assign ratings (1-5 stars). The more shows you rate, the better the site gets at deciding what to show you next. Alex Rowland describes this as being similar to a Pandora for videos, but to me it seems more like a Netflix or Amazon recommendation engine. This is not a bad thing.

Next, CozmoTV offers you the ability to create and share your own custom channels, and add any video to a channel with the click of a button. The site makes it clear to me how to create these channels, but I am a little fuzzy on why I would want to. Maybe that is just me.

As CozmoTV gets off the ground, I suspect they will live or die based on how well their personalization engine will work, which is directly related to how many videos a given user rates. From what I’ve seen so far though, I think they are off to good start, and are doing savvy things to grow the community, such as giving away 80 Wii’s to the first 80 people who rate enough shows to get their confidence score up to 80% (how they found 80 Wii’s is another question). Certainly the problem they are trying to solve is a valid one, and in that respect, I wish them the best.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

Music videos have come a long way since they killed the radio star back in the 1980’s. Yahoo’s launch of a new music video player (beta) is the latest evolution of music video distribution.

So what does the new player have to offer to fans, groupies, and music aficionados? First, they have improved the quality of the videos, which is very nice. As for new features, the top feature is now you can create your own custom video lineup which lets you “arrange and reorganize videos, monitor upcoming selections, and create your own session playlist.” This should come in handy for would-be VJ’s. In addition, the new player offers some enhancements to searching and browsing, along with a new design. It is also Mac compatible.

Am I wrong to not be too excited by this? Sure, it is nice that Yahoo! is making some improvements, especially with regards to video quality, but I would like to have seen something with a little more zing. Maybe I should not expect zing from Yahoo!, but instead look to the smaller guys like MusicPlusTV.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

Viddler is a new video sharing web site, currently in private beta, that is expected to launch this week. Anytime I hear of another video sharing site, my first question is “Do they have a ’secret sauce’ that will set them apart from youtube, metacafe, and the other established names in this space?” It looks like viddler just might.

The most interesting feature they offer is timed tags. This allows users to tag particular moments in a longer video. Viewers can hover over the video’s timeline to see the respective tag. These tags are searchable, helping people find more precisely what they are looking for. The end result is similar to what pluggd offers for podcasts, but with more control for the poster. This is a great innovation that is both useful and cool.

Beyond timed tags, there are several other features that should help viddler stand out. For one, viddler allows users to share a video starting at a point other than the beginning. Comments can also be associated with given moments in the video. Videos of various formats (.mov .avi .wmv .mpeg) can be uploaded in parallel, and the file size limit is a generous 500 Mb - 5 times the limit of youtube. The longer videos this will allow should make all the timing features even more useful. Rounding out the differentiating features is the ability to upload directly from a webcam. I expect this last feature will help us to appreciate the value of editing.

Viddler has the features to become a real player in this crowded yet lucrative space. It remains to be seen if they can build the community, which will be key, since even the best features won’t matter if the videos are not worth watching.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

Compete.com is has just posted their list of the top 20 busiest websites for October 2006, based on unique visitors.

So what are we to learn from this information?

• As usual, it is good to be Yahoo, Google, or AOL
• In case the $1.7 Billion was not enough to make YouTube feel good, they also get a nice spot on the list. All in all, a good month for YouTube.
• 4 of the top 10 sites have domains with 4 characters or less, and no one in the top 20 has a name of 10 characters or more. Coincidence, or does (name) size matter?
• Microsoft has 4 sites on the list (msn, live, microsoft, and passport). If you add any 3 of these together, Microsoft would be number 1

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

The fine folks at Ask.Com launched a new local search service on Monday called AskCity. “We’re raising the bar for local search by introducing a product that seamlessly combines the best content, technology and tools in one place.” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. The idea is that you don’t just find something, but you also then connect with it. For example, you can find a movie theater nearby playing a given movie, then you can easily buy tickets for that movie.

When I read about this, my first question was: what does this really offer me beyond what I can already do in other applications? For a comparison, I tried to do the following task with AskCity and with Google: “Find out where in Las Vegas the Blue Man Group is playing this weekend and get tickets”

In AskCity, this was very easy, which is not a surprise since this is the exact type of use case for which it was designed. I expanded the Events section in the left side pane, entered “Blue Man” as the artist, “Las Vegas” as the location, and “3 days” as the date. Clicking “Search Events” quickly brought up a list of 3 places where the Blue Man Group is playing in Vegas in the center pane, with each pointed out on a map in the right side pane. For each of these I had a links to Pin It · Directions · Email · Search Nearby · Send to Phone · Find tickets at Ticketmaster. Very slick.

With Google I searched for “blue man las vegas” in Google Maps. I was quickly shown a map with 2 locations in Las Vegas highlighted. Each of these provided me links to blueman.com and Get directions: To here - From here - Search nearby - Send to phone. What was missing was the link to find tickets. The link to blueman.com was nearly as good though, since it was an easy matter to go to their site and get tickets.

AskCity provides a logical progression in making search results actionable. It has the power of sister company CitySearch behind it, which can be utilized to significant advantage. You certainly could cobble together the same results you can get from AskCity from some combination of other sites, but it is nice that you don’t have to.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

Anderson’s Note: As you may have noticed, this site had some hiccups in the last day or two. Sid was able to log in from points unknown and bring it back to life, and now I am catching up with the posts. Thanks for your patience.

Let’s say you used planjam to plan the perfect date, and it went well. Really well. So well in fact, that five years later you want to plan the perfect family vacation for you, your spouse, and the three short people who now share your home. WeJustGotBack.com might be just the site you need. They say their mission is to “help parents plan family vacations.” The spin is that their information is for parents, by parents, without any of the hype and marketing hyperbole one might find on a typical travel site.

I was not exploring this site for long before being told that I must complete a free registration to keep going. Despite their assurances, I am always hesitant to give out my e-mail, so instead I gave them Sid’s. Just kidding, Sid. I signed up with my own address. They also asked for other info that made sense (number and age of kids) and some info that didn’t (household income?). I was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

The site offers information about only 23 destinations. That is not a typo. The information includes a review from the WeJustGotBack editorial staff along with comments from users. I checked out Smuggler’s Notch, just because it had a cool name, and besides a decent review of this Vermont ski resort, there were 2 users comments. I was now wishing I really had used Sid’s e-mail.

So, aside from a clever yet wordy name, there is not much to see at WeJustGotBack.com. Maybe they’ve not had time to add more features and destinations since they did, in fact, just get back from somewhere. Until they make some improvements, I’d say you can safely pass on this site, unless you really want to learn more about Smuggler’s Notch.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

One question that gets asked across the world everyday is “What do you want to do tonight?”. Enter planjam, a site that offers you fun and romantic date ideas via an e-Commerce interface and AJAX web technology. The site, which was just relaunched, offers users the ability to plan dates and outings, rate and review locations, and obtain driving directions.

I gave it a try by planning an evening in New York (note to my wife: this is a hypothetical date - no need to get excited). I started by selecting New York on the home page and pushing the “plan a date” button. I then could select which activities I wanted to do on this date. The navigation, split between a panel on the left page and a tabbed box on the upper right, was a bit confusing. For example, I wanted to start the night with drinks, so to find a bar I had to click on the Nightlife “date theme” on the left, then the “bars/lounges” tab on the right. This was after searching unsuccessfully under the “places to eat” and “sweets and beverages” categories. I did similar wandering to add a theater and a tea house for after.

Once I found each venue, I dragged it to a little box. Planjam gave me an estimate on how much time this date would take, and how much money it would set me back. I then pushed the “finish planning” button and was able to get driving directions. I could e-mail these directions, but I did not see any way to save this outing.

Planjam offers an interesting spin on the date planning scene. I found their site a bit quirky and non-intuitive, but I was able to make my way through it with some trial and error. I’d like to see them add new features such as a suggestion service that is based on what I’ve currently selected, my own personal history and reviews, and other users experiences and reviews. Doing this could help planjam stand out a bit from similar sites.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

Though smaller than that other photo sharing service whose name is also missing an “e”, Zooomr has dreams to change the world. Zooomr was started last October by Kristopher Tate and since that time has delivered a solid service with some innovative features and a loyal community. You can read previous coverage of Zooomr here.

For many 18 year olds, that would be enough, but not for Kristopher. In the upcoming Mark 3 release, Kristopher’s goal is for Zooomr “…to become the photo sharing website and social community for the entire world.” When I was 18 my goal was to save enough money from my fast food job to score tickets to a Yes concert, but I digress. Kristopher’s bold statement leaves me pondering just what features could he and the crew be working on that could possibly make Zooomr fulfill this goal.

With marketing savvy in the finest tradition of Steve Jobs, Kristopher is keeping his cards close to his chest, but has let slip a few hints about Mark 3 on the Zooomr blog:

• Faster
• New Social Features
• ETA December, maybe January

Nothing Earth shattering by any means. What else could they deliver that would help them become the photo sharing website for the world? To do this, I think the key will be for Zooomr to offer something to reach the Web 1.0 crowd, and give them some compelling reason to share photos as a part of a community, rather than just uploading their snapshots so that Aunt Bessie can create a mug with the cat’s face on it. To me that means helping people discover and utilize photos that can have a real impact on their life and experience - photos created and shared by people they’ve never met.

Can Zooomr really do this? Even though I made it to that Yes concert, my cynical side says young men’s big dreams and lofty ambitions usually fade with time. Seeing what Kristopher and the team have accomplished so far though, I am at least hopeful, and certainly curious to see what they will deliver.

Sid’s Note: This post was written by Anderson Parker of AdaptiveBlue.com. Thanks a ton to Anderson for filling in for me while I’m away on a holiday.

As the holiday shopping season kicks into full gear, shoppers are looking for ways to get the most for their shopping dollars. While there are plenty of sites to help you find coupons and bargains on one particular item, ugenie helps you find the best total price on a set of items, or as they call it, a bundle. From their site:

The magic of ugenie’s bundles is the freedom to pick out any combination of items you want, then find the cheapest way to buy the whole bundle. Ugenie cherry-picks the best deals from hundreds of merchant sites, factoring in discounts and additional charges, finding you the lowest bottom-line price. You place your order directly from the merchants we find for you, and ugenie never charges you a penny.

Being the thrifty guy that I am, I decided to give this a try. I set out to find the best total price for Battlestar Galactica Season 2.0 and 2.5 DVD’s. Ugenie offers a very discoverable interface which made it very easy for me to figure out what to do. I entered “battlestar galactica” into the search field at the top of the page, selected “movies” from the drop-down, and pushed the big orange “search” button. Very quickly, 10 results were displayed. For each item a price range was displayed along with two buttons: “compare prices” and “add to shopping list”. I pressed the latter for the two DVD sets in which I was interested. I was then taken to a screen where I could bundle the items, and let the ugenie out of the lamp to find me a deal.

The search took about 10 seconds, at which time I was presented with the best deal: a bottom line price of $61.66 by buying 1 set used from half.com and the other set used from amazon marketplace. Fearing scratches, I didn’t want to buy used DVD’s. Luckily, it was easy to refine my search to only include New DVD’s. 10 seconds later, I was presented with my new best deal: a bottom line price of $64.42 from overstock.com.

This was very easy to do, and the results were very quick, but the real question is how good a deal is this? $64.42 for these DVD’s is not a bad price, but I wondered if I could do better on my own. Remembering a promotion I came across about using Google checkout at buy.com, I headed over there and added the two DVD sets to my cart. With free shipping the total came to $73.97, before the discount. After taking $20 off for orders over $50, the new total was $53.97 - over $10 cheaper then the ugenie deal. Keep in mind that this is just one bundle, and the results may not be indicative of the service overall, but what’s the deal, ugenie?

This particular instance aside, I think ugenie has a chance to become the site I wish that it could be. They’ve nailed the interface, and have other powerful features such as importing wishlists from amazon and easy posting of bundles to del.icio.us, digg, and reddit. They were also able to find me a good deal, albeit not the best deal. For many people, be they casual web users or the extremely time pressed, the convenience and time savings ugenie offers will out weigh the few extra dollars they could otherwise save with a lot more effort. Ugenie has only been open for less than a month, so I expect they will continue to improve their engine, and the deals will get even better as they do.