Rev2.org

So, you thought the Internet was free, and every video uploadable was available to anyone, anywhere, right? Not so — if you’re familiar with the ‘real’ world, you would know that there is actually a lot of high-quality, premium stuff out there that people actually to pay for — “How to Learn Yoga” videos and what not. And MindBites wants to bring this content on the web and sell it.

If you’re familiar with the iStockPhoto business model, where you top up your account with credits and where one stock photo is worth one credit, etc. Mindset works in a similar way. There is of course some free content, but that’s like looking for apples in a gold basket. Mainly, Mindbites has videos ranging from arts and crafts to digital video and tech, and even health, hobbies, and music, and for each, you get to watch a free preview and if you like it, purchase it with a credit (1 credit = $1.99, cheaper if you buy more).

What’s interesting about Mindbites is that its concept goes right in the face of most content sites out there. While the popular model has always been to enable “user-generated” content to reach as many as possible for free, MindBites is about enabling premium, high quality, professional content to reach those have a need for it and will pay for it — and most equal the cost of a TV show on iTunes!

So, is there an audience here? Are people going to accept this model, or flock to John Doe from St. Paul, Minnesota to teach them how to play guiter? To be honest, while I think for the “must-have”/”get-nowhere-else” content there will be some who would be willing to pay a premium price, a lot of people are going to find that books and free videos on sites like YouTube and Google Video and 5min is enough to fulfill their needs.

Additionally, I think the price is way too high. For a good, professional instructional video, the most I’d expect to pay for it would be $0.50: anything more, and I either want a TV show or movie rental from iTunes or half a cup of a white chocolate mocha from Starbucks topped with cream.

When Wikia Search, a search play by wiki-communities site Wikia first launched, it pretty sucked. Even Jimmy Wales himself, founder, admitted to TechCrunch that “it has not been usable on a day to day basis.” Well, they’ve relaunched recently, and they have four keywords going for them: Transparency, Community, Quality, Privacy. And that pretty much defines their take on search — Google with a focus on their keywords. So, does it still suck? You tell me.

But here’s what I can say: their results are far, far, far more better, and their new features — not to mention the focus put on transparency, community, quality, and privacy — adds greatly to their product, undoubtedly making it a “usable” search alternative and one with a potential future.

With a 30 million-page index, the service has relaunched with a bunch of feature, specifically ones that — like Wikipedia — put the power of quality into the hands of the user. Users can now edit search results, annotate right on the pages, spotlight/highlight them, comment on them, and even delete them. A recent history log is presented in the sidebar with a list of recent changes made and the IP address of the contributor.

In short, Wikia Search is basically looking to be the Wikipedia of Google. What Jimmy Wales did with the world’s encyclopedic information — putting the editorial into the hands of everyone — he’s now doing with web search. This is an alternative approach to Google, which relies on its machines to present the best search results, and Mahalo, which relies on a group of actual editors making search results for the top terms In a way, it’s a mix of both, but instead of relying on machines or actual humans it relies on everybody, which is kind of funny since Mahalo seeks to be a mix of Google and Wikipedia and most top results on Google are of Wikipedia. See the triangle of life? As for its relevancy, I’ll admit it’s good but no way near great, and they have some way to go, but who knows if it could do to search what Wikipedia did to encyclopedias.

As if Google’s UI couldn’t get any simpler and barebones, there’s Goosh.org. What is it? Well, a “UNIX-like command-line interface for Google” would be the best way to describe it, but you should really check it out for yourself, because when I say “UNIX-like command-line”, I mean it.

If you’ve used a UNIX command-line interface before, I think you’ll find Goosh familiar. The font, the welcoming message, the text-pointer, and even the help command (help or h) are presented in the same, bare-bones UNIX style.

There are number of types of searches you can conduct with Goosh, among which:

• “web [search]” - Google
• “images [search]” - Google Images
• “blog [search]” - Google (Blogs)
• “feed [search]” - Google (Feeds)
• “video [search]” - Google Video
• “place [search]” - Google Maps
• “wiki [search]” - Wikipedia

Additionally, there are a number of cool things you can do with it as well, like:

• “lucky [search]” - Redirects to the first result (I’m Feeling Lucky)
• “read [RSS URL]” - Reads an RSS feed
• “addengine” - Adds Goosh to the Firefox search bar

Unlike some command-line interfaces which redirect you to the actual search page, what I love about Goosh is that it’s 100% command-line. The results themselves are presented in Goosh and in a very appropriate format. While Google will probably do the trick for most people and Goosh may just be one of those “cool things,” I actually think there’s an actual target audience for Goosh. A lot of UNIX geeks I know who have mastered the interface would love a bare-bones interface that gives snappy search results like Goosh, and let’s not forget: it saves clicks.

The way I like to think of Twitter is like a ‘command line for the web and your community.’ But with this command line, you can do special things like ask questions and receive real-time answers — something never possible before with the web. I know what you’re thinking: if you have 50,000 followers, that’s great, but what if you only have 5? @Answerme looks to streamline Q&A on Twitter.

I take it you’ve probably understood the service already, but for those who haven’t: you Twitter a question prepending “@answerme” (thereby directing the question to Twitter user @answerme), and your question lands on the @Answerme homepage. Your followers and @Answerme homepage visitors can then reply to your question with a response to both you and @answerme (i.e. @answerme @sidyadav The meaning of life is the number 42.) @Answerme then connects this answer with the question in its service and displays it as such (i.e. “1 answer” below the question.

The service really looks to streamline a concept grown out of the Twitter community of asking questions to your followers, only, it enables strangers to see and answer them and makes it more of a ’service to the world,’ as opposed to only the questioner being able to see and gain from the answers.

Hat-tip to Muhammad Saleem from ReadWriteWeb for bringing the two month-old site to the surface. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m a sucker to helpful Twitter addons, so this wasn’t any exception.

If Twitter was all about “what are you doing?”, Plurk is more about “what are you doing, loving, liking, hating, sharing, wanting, wishing willing, thinking…? (and it goes on)”. It’s the blog-o-buzz at the moment, and for once, it’s a service that deserves it because it’s well made and actually fits a purpose.

With a social network in the backend (friends and followers and the usual ya-da), Plurk is about two things: seeing, visually on a timeline, what you’re friends are doing, loving, liking… and sharing with your friends, either by text, a photo (URL), or video (URL), what you’re doing, loving, liking… with the same if not more brevity at some of the microblogging services.

In a sense, it’s Twitter 2.0. Let me explain. With Twitter, you get the stale, simple view of the timeline — something your eyeballs themselves have to decipher to taking in the context of time and situation. And as for posting, you’re limited to 140 characters, and the beauty or the curse of the service is that that 140 characters is really a blank canvas: while it’s asking you “What are you doing?,” your answer could really be anything, which has made the service evolve into something more while defying it’s original purpose.

With Plurk of course, you have leeway, but not in the blank canvas way. Basically, you’re asked to complete this: “It’s [time] and [username] is/loves/likes/shares/gives/hates/wants/wishes/has/will/asks/was/feels/thinks/says”. The result is, a product-directed community as opposed to a community that directs itself, and a particular purpose fullfilled in really knowing and sharing what you and friends have going on in their lives. Will it replace Twitter? No, it serves a slightly different purpose. Will it gain a community? I sure hope so.

Dave Sifry, Technorati founder and chairman, seems to have moved on from his blogging baby, and this time he’s taking on the travel guides industry. Launched over the weekend in a private beta, Offbeat Guides is basically a super simple and awesome way to personalize a travel guide for your destination — all customized to your name and dates and with all the information you’ll ever need — and have it delivered to you in print or digitally through PDF.

The service asks you for five pieces of data: your destination city, your current city, your name, your travel dates, and the place where you’re staying. Once you’ve entered these, you have an option to customize your travel guide — checking and unchecking the types of information you want and don’t want. From the information, you can customize basically everything from a basic overview of suburbs to things to see, do, buy, and eat. This information is gathered from various places — Wikipedia being one for the general overview, AccuWeather for the weather, etc., all among their multiple partners and free/creative commons information-distributors.

Once you’ve made your selection, you can proceed to check out and select if you want a PDF, a printed booklet version, or both. The PDF is $9.99 while the print edition is $24.99, the former being available in 10 minutes and the latter being posted to your house within 4 days (currently shipping to U.S. only).

Fortunate enough to be supplied with a coupon code, I purchased a guide on a remote location where I might be travelling to within the next six months. Was I impressed? You bet. On the cover were super-helpful tidbits like the exchange rate and the weather in the near future, along with my name imprinted in various places and personalized statements like ‘The travel guide made just for Sid Yadav.’ My location — and all suburbs thereof — were outlined in good detail, along with helpful pointers to the best restaurants and hotels throughout and even the events that would be taking place on my travel dates.

Overall, Offbeat Guides is a super helpful service and the $24.99 is a nominal price for any serious traveller who wants to carry around the kind of information Offbeat Guides gives you. Does it replace the Lonely Planet? You bet.

Reviews are scattered all over the web. When movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes launched a few years ago, that basically ended my multiple visits to the NY Times, LA Times, and [insert newspaper site here] whenever a new movie came out. Now, Notches is planning to do the same for everything, by being a free, universal, and open platform for reviews.

The service takes in review data from multiple partners, applications, tools, and even users, aggregates it on a centralized scale, and outputs it in several different ways. By signing up on the notch.es service, users can then browse through this data in multiple ways — by items, categories, users, and products, among other ways.

Other than gathering, the other part of Notches is, of course, outputting. For this, it has an API that lets developers obtain a developer key, and based on the documentation, leverage their database by having full access to it. A lot of web apps can make use of this, and if they do, enrich the platform in the process.

A recent launch, I’ll admit it’s a cool and much needed idea. There are many different reviews sites out there, but they’re all locked into a walled garden, and the standard — rather than the aggregate — has become aligned with the popularity of the site. Notches gives the power back to the reviewer — everyone — and provides the aggregate to anyone who wants to leverage it.

CenterNetworks had some exclusive coverage on the site.

Mobaganda launched their service today — the first practical, usable application I’ve seen built on Google’s App Engine. Essentially, it’s a dead simple and minimal version of Evite — allowing you to create an event and have people RSVP on it. Here’s our fictitious event.

The service is so simple, barely any explanation is needed. Invitees go to the site, and with no registration or login process to go through, create an event giving it a name, date/time, and location. Once it’s created, a simple page is presented with the basic details and a way for anyone who comes to the page to RSVP by entering their name and e-mail.

A couple of features makes Mobaganda really useful and practical. First, the service allows people to RSVP by simply sending an e-mail, which is creates for your event. For example, for the ficticious event I created, e-mailing rev2party@mobaganda.com would do the trick. Second, Mobaganda has RSS feeds for the event, allowing already RSVP’d guests or anyone who wants to to keep track as guests RSVP. Here’s our RSS feed.

The service is a rather interesting, and I think, competitive alternative to most other events organizing services out there. Rather than entering 1,000 things on Facebook’s Events app or spending a day registering for Evite, if all you want in the end of the day is to have a simple party and for invitees to know the time and the location, Mobaganda does the trick. For future (real) Rev2 parties — it’ll be our service of choice.

Update: Facebook confirmed the initiative, named ‘fbOpen’.

TechCrunch is reporting on multiple sources that are saying Facebook will open source its Platform sometime this week. Basically, this will mean that any social network will be able to join its Platform, play with its code, and carry its apps — coming as direct competition to Google’s OpenSocial initiative.

As a part of the announcement (if there is to be one), four parts of Facebook’s developer strategy will be available to the public and for any social network to incorporate: FBML (Facebook Markup Language), FQL (Facebook Query Language), FJS (Facebook Javascript library) and the Facebook API,

Since Google’s launch of OpenSocial, there have been a lot of discussions on what Facebook’s initial response is going to be. Some have argued joining OpenSocial, or more unlikely so merging both platforms, but the most anticipated solution has been exactly this: bring other social networks into its platform, chase dominance, and pose with a direct eye-to-eye to OpenSocial.

Both ways, it seems like it is Facebook’s game to win. By keeping their platform exclusive, they ensure full control over their developers, the platform, and its limitations, and by making it open, they can open up the walled garden, fight over being a dominant platform on the web (a la the OS war), and have their apps reach more eyeballs. Since most developers will develop for both platforms anyway, the question comes down to the strategy that will best support them for the future.

More on this as an official announcement follows.

Since its conception, Gmail has evolved re-invented web-mail. It turned what used to be stale, crappy corporate ‘if I have to use it’ systems to the default, usable, and standard way to use e-mail for a lot of people, with complete IM integration, every feature you could desire, and more web space you will use in your life time. But why should the ‘complete webmail’ concept be limited to just Gmail? Orgoo takes this idea of awesome integrated e-mail and IM and brings it to all e-mail and IM providers on the web.

The service, which is currently in private beta (first 6 comments get an invite!), is one of the first of its kind I’ve seen — while there have been multi-IM and multi-email web services in the past. Users simply have to sign up and add their e-mail and IM accounts. The service currently supports Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail (plus), Hotmail (plus), .Mac, and any IMAP/POP provider for e-mail. As for IM, nearly if not all the services are support — AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gtalk, and ICQ.

Once that is done, access Orgoo is like accessing Gmail with all your accounts in one place. The inbox, along with folders and trash, allows you to access your e-mail accounts individually, along with your orgoo e-mail account that it creates for you. For some reason, when I tried to access Gmail, it gave a “IMAP fetching is already in progress” message and failed to load — though presumably that is temporary.

In the right side, a la Google Chat and Meebo, is a bar with all your e-mail accounts and contacts. Clicking on a contact opens up an IM window, while clicking on an offline one opens up e-mail. The feature is flexible and I didn’t have any problems using it. The fact that everything is presented in tabs also makes it extremely easy to switch between e-mail and IM windows.

Something unique about Orgoo is its support for video chat. You can create a room, make it public or private, and invite people to join it. When they enter, they can broadcast their webcam and join the video chat. Up to four users are supported at a time.

Unlike a lot of services of its kind, I found Orgoo (apart from its Gmail-fetching problem) ot be usable, practical, and a viable solution. The service is in no ways “clunky” and works like it should. In a lot of ways, it resembles the new Yahoo! Mail, which is based on the acquisition of Oddpost a couple years ago — though that could just the frontend. A great offering, especially for someone who isn’t a Gmail or Yahoo! Mail user and has multiple IM accounts.