Rev2.org

With the limitation of desktop software, annotations — or “notes on documents” — hasn’t really taken of, let alone be useful in a practical way. A.nnotate, a web app which lets you upload documents, annotate, and share them, looks to change that.

The tool requires no sign ups, and by simply choosing a document from your computer and uploading it (with the upload box on their homepage), you can get annotating very quickly. A Flash-based view of the document, which can be either a .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls, or OpenOffice file, is presented, and highlighting any text brings an annotate box which lets you enter notes, colour code, and tag.

Once annotated, the note stays on display on top of the document view. You can then export, or download the document as a .PDF or .DOC file, or share it with a simple e-mail by clicking on “send.” The e-mail sends a link to the web version of the document with the annotations, which the receiver can choose to add more notes to if they have an account.

While the service doesn’t require registration upto this point, if you find it useful, you can enter your e-mail address at the top which sends you activation info and sets you up with an account. Just by signing up, you’re equipped with 270 credits, and at a rate of around 5 credits per page per document you edit, that means you can edit around 54 pages. You’re given 150 credits per month on top, but if you find that you’re using the service more than that, you can get a premium subscription. Pricing is as follows:

	STANDARD subscription	1000	$9.95
	PRO subscription	3000	$19.95
	GROUP subscription	10000	$49.95
	BUSINESS subscription	50000	$199.95

A.nottate puts forward a healthy offering, and to anyone who finds a use for it, it can be extremely valuable. Annotating digitally in general has not been as practical and useful as we’d expect, and A.nnotate solves that. See what WebWare has to say about it here.

Alternative money-making services for publishers and content creators have been out there, but only now are we starting to see real, liable forms of these be practical take off. One such service is RevResponse, which pays publishers a CPA (cost-per-action) for offering audiences in their particular field free related content (magazine subscriptions, etc.), along with a co-branded avenue (such as ours) or integrated widget to lead to them.

The service advertises itself as a ‘B2B performance-based publisher network,’ a step up from the 90s cliche B2B schemes and sites, and one with a practical applcation to it. Publishers sign up and use the step wizard to create and add the links code to their site, blog, RSS feed, or e-mail newsletter. The ‘links’ or subscriptions are audience targetted and can be anything from magazines to white papers, downloads, and podcasts.

The service, or at least its CPA-payment scheme, can be looked at as a viable alternative to traditional CPM or CPC based advertising. While those formats serve greatly do a diverse and mainstream audience, for more targeted audiences — what most blogs and content creators carry — it can be a more superior optios.

Something notable about the idea, of course, is that everyone wins in what would otherwise be pay-for value (e.g. magazine subscriptions). The publisher makes a buck, the magazine or content advertiser/publisher on the other end gets an additional subscriber, and more importantly, the reader/user/consumer gets value. It’s a win-win for all.

Just a few moments ago, FriendFeed launched FriendFeed Rooms — a feature that, in a few words, allows you to make and have your own mini-FriendFeed for a particular subject or a group of people.

For an example of a room, check out the FriendFeed Rooms Feedback Room (meta enough?). The room has an administrator, and multiple members. Everyone in the room can share stuff and comments with each other that (only) everyone else can see. The room can be public, or private, where members have to be invited. To create a room, follow this link.

The feature, essentially, is FriendFeed’s version of Facebook Groups/Pages or member-grouping features that have been around since the advent of mailing list. But it has its purpose: as opposed to leaving pointless messages and comments, you’re sharing meaningful stuff around the web which (hopefully) the other people in the group care about.

To FriendFeed, which has just been starting to gain traction, this means more usage, and hopefully, a meaningful solution to groups or teams around the web. Additionally, it’s a great way to classify news on particular subjects — for example, to people who care about Soccer, it’s a good way to share and get updated on the latest news.

Update: Twitter responds, unofficially, to most of the statements made in this post.

Om Malik spent some time digging up details on Twitter’s supposed funding round and was able to report that they have raised a $15 million round. The VC seems a little unclear but Michael Arrington was able to confirm that, along with their existing VC (Union Squared Ventures), the investor Spark Capital. The amount raised is, almost certainly $15 million, at a $80 million pre-valuation.

And that’s the news part of the post — the rest of it I’ll spend on giving them some extremely, extremely unqualified, naive, nescient advice based on what I’ve seen happening with Twitter lately. Why? Just because I can, but mainly, because it seems very obvious to me and I’m another one of those Twitter fanatics that wants to see the service excel and doing so makes my level of frustration much better.

Twitter’s Problems
So, it’s well known to any avid Twitter user, or any tech news follower for that matter, that Twitter has been having a lot of problems lately. Whether it’s the departure of Blaine Cook, Twitter’s former lead architect, or the multiple draining down times they’ve been repeatedly having and gaining a lot of user frustration from, things have been going wrong for Twitter while they’ve been going right.

A post in the Twitter Blog today by Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and CEO, leaves readers with the message they’ve “tried and tried, don’t know what’s happening, and are on the verge of giving up.” Ok, maybe that’s a little strong, but there’s a sense of helplessness expressed, which no user can probably truly understand, yet the poor folks at Twitter have to deal with every day.

So, what’s Twitter to do? It’s the Valley talk-of-the-moment, (I think) it’s seriously undervalued at $80 million, it can’t sustain itself, the phrase “monetization” (as Obvious as it seems, no pun intended) is as far from the company as can be, and meanwhile it’s experiencing user growth at a level never before.

Twitter’s Solution: Think Ahead
Frankly, I think this is the sign of a weak team that’s been working solely at the moment, for the moment. In Silicon Valley, or in business in general, you simply can’t do that. You have to be thinking 1, 3, 5, 10 years ahead, and working on what’s going to be needed NOW, as opposed to letting the need catch up later, to make that vision happen.

I’ve heard many CEOs and founders and executives talk about the future, what’s coming up, what’s down the pipeline, and I think I only now understand why they prefer to focus on the up and coming as opposed to fixing stuff or answering to the current state of the market. Because when it counts later on, that’s when it matters. Today’s problems only matter today — but tomorrow’s are going to matter for the rest of the company’s existence. So, why can’t Twitter do that?

Digg Did
Digg has so far shown a great example of thinking ahead. When the comments system backlash began, they were just trickling out other, more complex parts of the site and rehauling and restructuring the site all together. Users wanted a new comment system, but thankfully, they did a huge favor to the users by not listening to them, and focusing on a much, much more important aspect of the site: its stability, growth, infrastructure, spam-filtering, and things and features that made Digg’s future, as opposed to Digg’s present, more bright. Two weeks ago, they released a brand spanking new comments system, and the site is now better than ever.

But of course, for a group of people who think ahead, they’re not done, not far from it. Infact, in the latest Digg Townhall broadcast, they even announced that site will be going through a major rehaul once again in the next 12 months — infrastructure-wise — to support them for that next wave of growth. Now there’s a bunch of people that think ahead.

Facebook Did
Another great example of thinking ahead is by Facebook. They launched the News Feed, and users rebelled. Protest groups were started, and it faced a problem. Zuckerberg, or someone in the team, saw the feature as a vital part of the site in the future, and decided to stick. Today, that is one of the things which makes Facebook what it is.

Sure, they’ve made their fair share of mistakes with Beacon and data portability all, but I think they’re learning and I’d be truly, truly surprised if, while the world is hatin’ on Beacon and pointing fingers on their take on data portability, they didn’t have something bigger up their sleeves all together.

And You Can, Too
So here’s some advice to Twitter: think ahead. You’re rehaul of the service — which hopefully isn’t based on Ruby on Rails and deals better with database in/outs and makes improvements to the UI — should already be in the works. You should be concerned about your monetization strategy, or if not concerned, have a million ideas on the table you can experiment with, because frankly, you’re going to need it. If it’s going to make you better, we users can compromise. You should already be buying 10,000 servers and working on setting them up with the rehaul — because, you know what? Google, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, they all did it, and look where they are now — so there’s absolutely no reason you can’t.

Don’t consume yourself with temporarily fixing today’s problems, but instead, think about how you can solve them permanently, three months, six months, nine months down the line. Because you know what? If you did that three months, six months, nine months ago, you wouldn’t be having this problem right now. You would be on the cover of Newsweek and FastCompany and Time and already be changing the world, working on the next multi-billion dollar company. Instead, look where you are: you have the idea of the century, the hype of a millennium, you are dealing with thousands of frustrated users, you’re not making a dime, and you just raised $15 million at a $80 million (ish) pre-valuation, which frankly, by Sillicon Valley standards, and especially those of today, is pathetic. Surely, you’re worth more than 1/150th of Facebook?!

Conclusion
I know I’ve been a little harsh on Twitter throughout this post, but to be honest, if that doesn’t show how much I love them, I’m not sure what does. I guess their problems only illustrate what happens when big, big things happen to a small, small startup. Maybe that’s why they say scaling matters: because it does. And once you figure it out, you’re up there. My point is, with the resources, the smarts, the VCs, everything going for them, there’s no reason why Twitter shouldn’t be able to scale as well as MySpace, or Facebook, or YouTube did, and end up with the same fate. And more so, there’s no reason why, after going through this dark period, they can’t change things around from NOW.

So Ev, Biz, Jack, if there is one thing you can take away from my very, very unqualified, naive, nescient piece of advice, it’s this: think ahead. Some time later, in the future, when it matters, you’ll be glad you did.

Fuzz.com, a website for music lovers and creators, launched Blip sometime this week, a service that is basically a Twitter for music listeners and asks “What are you listening to?”. The site has been spreading virally among Twitter users with its integration capabilities, which is what lead me to it.

The service presents itself as being strikingly similar to Twitter’s interface. In the same fashion, you have your archives, replies, favourites, and listeners (as opposed to followers.) Insteading of posting a 140-char message, however, you search for a song or artist, “Blip” it, and attach an optional message.

Here’s where the service gets cooler and adds on to Twitter’s basic concept. Unlike Twitter where you can only read the message, your “listeners” can actually play your songs (and vice-versa). If it’s something that strikes, they can click on “Buy this MP3″ and buy it from Amazon. In this way, it’s similar to Muxtape, a simple virtual mixtapes service, but with a more real-time and connected structure.

Blip is a great example of an appopriate and innovative product from a startup for its specific area. Fuzz’s main bread and butter is going to remain its main musical content site, Fuzz.com, but by experimenting a product and idea like Blip, they can go to new places without changing the whole company’s direction or work on only one idea. Additionally, it’s practical and a super-helpful add on for Twitter users — I’m glad that they chose to see themselves as a Twitter latch-on as opposed to a Twitter competitor.

Officially unveiling tomorrow, Microsoft is launching Live Search Cashback — a tool that seeks to save shopper-searchers money, or at least, those who use it. The site, or at least a majority of it, seems to be live already.

The way it works is that by using the tool as a shopping search engine, little tidbits or ‘cashback’ deals are offered with specific products. These are indicated with a little icon (). You can sort products by the bottom line price and compare to find the best deal. Once you’ve selected your product, you’re asked to setup your free cashback account, and once that is done, your account accumulates as you save cash. After you reach $5 worth of savings, you can go ahead and claim it.

The technology and concept is ported from Jellyfish, a startup which Microsoft acquired in 2007. Jellyfish was popular among its shoppers for the very Cashback Rewards service, and Microsoft is now incorporating it into the shopping search part of Live Search.

Unlike their past acquisitions, it’s great to see Microsoft take that step and use it to better their own product platform. Of course, Live is relatively behind and despite its supposed reach and technology, has failed to make grounds among daily Internet users, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. Online shoppers, save your bucks.

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Twitter made the world share, in 140 characters, what they’re doing at the very moment, and in a similar fashion, BeenUp2 wants to let the world share what they’ve been up to generally with their life — whether that’s through photos, videos, places, music, or books.

The service, among other things, focuses on making sharing stuff on the go possible. After signing up, users get a special unique e-mail address to which they can send photos and videos to — whether that’s through their cell phone or laptop. You can, of course, also use the web interface to share both and provide additional details such as time and location along with it.

Apart from sharing photos and videos instantaneously, the service lets users do a few more things that help in defining what they’ve been “up 2.” Firstly, users can start a trip — specifying a start date and an end date (i.e. “Trip to Australia.”) Users can also input what they’re’re listening to by searching through songs and artists and clicking on “I’m listening to this, and in a similar fashion, what you’re reading by search for books and authors.

Overall, the service seems like a more complex, organized, and restricted version of Twitter. Unlike Twitter, where the 140 characters is your blank slate, BeenUp2 focuses on getting the world to share strictly what they’ve been up to. Good or bad, useful or not, is strictly up to the user’s use.

Techmeme, which has become the single go-to site for all important and note-worthy tech news over the last few months, has finally added search functionality to the site — a way to search through its database of news stories it has accumulated since its existence.

The search ‘engine’ searches through all major news stories that have surfaced the site (at the highlighted, main news level — not ‘cited’) and displays them in reverse chronological order, as in newest first. Full text search, unlike other typical search engines, isn’t on by default — unchecking ’search title & summary only’ trigges so.

The site admits the search function isn’t a replacement for a news search engine, but simply a way to look through archived and most notable news stories. The site admits Ask Blog Search, Google News, and Topix do the complete job when it comes to news search, although I think Techmeme’s search results should be ample to do the job for most people looking for a record of major news stories.

The site has bootstrapped its way a long, long way from the simple meme aggregator that it launched as. For a lot of people, a Techmeme headline has become the standard measure of importance in the technology news area. All credit goes to its simple and functional interface and accrediting story/importance selection.

Disclosure: Userplane has been a longtime sponsor of Rev2.

With video already tipped in the real world, web publishers have been playing catch up to the demands of today’s consumers. Text is old, pictures can only go far, so a lot of websites are incorporating more media-centric content, and even more so video. But YouTube can only go so far for a lot of them — it may be the best option for consumers, but the control-seekers and brand-controllers of the world are on a wholly different level. Userplane is launching Media Player tonight — a free white label video solution for content publishers.

White label video hosting have existed for a while — the most prominent current player I can think of being Blip.TV. What Userplane brings to the fold is their expertise, experience, support, and mostly importantly, core driver of the company: white label solutions for communities. They’re by far the biggest player in the market, and while you may see video sites fade in and fade out — and do so with your content — you can be sure that is not going to be the case with Userplane (and the fact that they’re owned by AOL adds for assurance.)

Based on Adobe Flex, the Media Player application integrates with other Userplane apps such as Webchat, Webmessenger, Webrecorder and Desktop. If you’re an user of their existing products, that should be an added benefit. Additionally, the upcoming version of the app will include their Minichat software, giving users the ability to chat with others about the video they’re viewing as they view them.

A lot of site publishers and commnity leaders will find Media Player, if not the idea of white label hosting, come to their advantage in many ways. If you’re producing video content, the last thing you want is to for it to be on services which you have no control over whatsoever — nor that are willing to give you help, support, or assurance shall you need it.

When I first saw the demo of FireFly, my instant reaction was, “no freaking way!”. Turns out I was wrong, and yes, there is one freaking way — it’s called FireFly. Launching recently at the Tech Meetup in New York, it’s a product of combinator/VC firm BetaWorks. Undoubtedly, it’s received a response no less than amazement in the blogosphere (Dave Winer wrote about it as did Allen Stern.)

The best way to describe it is this: it’s a simple flash widget that anyone can embed which lets you, and your site visitors, watch and interact with each other at a given moment. Obviously, this means visitors can chat to each other, but here’s the cool part: they can practically watch the mouse movements of other visitors on the site at a given time. What they’re clicking on, what they’re highlighting, everything.

It’s a form of spying, I’ll admit, but it is ridiculously and very freakishly cool. The site it is currently in a private beta, and I was unable to send a request by the time I wanted to get this post out, but you can see a working demo on their site — just click the “View Demo” button. If the FireFly folks are reading this — I would love to get an invite so I can embed the widget to this post.

Why would such a technology be useful? I have no idea. Visitor interaction or something like that. But the point is, it’s possible. And there definitely a lot of useful applications. To put this into context, it is basically using a simple web browser and Flash to multi-screenwatch a number of people’s mouse movements. Now that is something.