Rev2.org

Local search has been fairly traditional since it has been deemed the “next big thing” in search. Today, Google Maps is more or less the standard for most consumers — search for a business in a specific region or location and map it out. But there are surely a lot advanced techniques not implemented with today’s local search, and GeoSpot looks to fill the gap.

Better than I could describe the service is this statement on its homepage: “Search deeper than just business name and location. Search for bars and restaurants that are open now, or at a time you specify (i.e. after 10pm). Search for individual services and products offered (drive-thru, burger, onion rings, chicken salad, etc.).”

With GeoSpot, you’re able to search for businesses and shops that are open right now, as opposed to which just exist. This way, when you’re looking for a component cable at 6pm and don’t know which shops are open, or where you can get a meal at 4:00am, GeoSpot can help you find it. For example, here is a list of currently open coffee shops in San Francisco.

I think this is one of the many “frontiers” of local search — there are many ways to search, organize, and sort through data that have yet to even be thought of apart from the usual “business name and location” — and as we add mapping to equation, it’ll be only sometime before we’ll have to worry about where to eat or shop. While Geospot isn’t much different to many of the other utilities currently, I hope it is able to stay ahead and innovate in this space.

I like services which fulfill people’s curiosities and make information more widely accessible in the world, and that’s exactly what Glassdoor.com is — for salaries. Ever been curious about what people at Google, Microsoft or Apple make, or what Jerry Yang, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt’s approval rating is? Your curiousity has now been fullfilled.

The philosophy of Glassdoor is simply to share a little, get a lot. The idea is to have people share their salary information, ratings, and reviews at their specific company, and in return, provide them to be able to access all the information that is available on the site — i.e. salary, review, ratings data for all the companies listed on the site. The process repeats itself, and the data on Glassdoor and gets richer and richer.

The service has so far had a great start and a lot of useful data has already been accumulated. For example, as part of the preview, you can already see substantial salary data for companies like Microsoft and Google. Case-in-point: a product manager at Google makes $30K more than a product manager at Microsoft.

For the first time, what has always been very sensitive, private data — personal salaries — is now public, and I think a lot of potential and current employees of the companies involved are going to be impacted. As the service gets richer, it’ll be interesting to check back six months later and get more accurate salary averages. Overall though, it does, indeed, fulfill your salariosity.

In my continuing covering of sites, services and startups that do more good for humanity than they do for Sand Hill Road, I was informed today about Changents — a site/social network/community that is focused on bringing change by having “change agents” (changents), or rather, superstars who are actively making the world a better place in seperate areas by doing radicle things, and getting a “backers” or “followers” (ordinary people) to do it with them.

The site features a variety of change agents — ranging from environmental issues to poverty, human rights, and politics. Each changent has his or her own set of backers. A backer can be a fan, a buzz builder, a first responder, or an advocate (ranging from passive to active). They also have different ways to browse through the change agents, including by cause area and by location. Members can nominate themselves or others as a change agent.

The service, of course, shines on the interaction between with the change agent the backer. When a member has decided who to back and at what level, Changents asks for some kind of contact information, which the change agent can use to get in touch personally if needed (of course, it’s at the backer’s discretion to supply whatever they’re most comfortable with.) Also, change agents can put out real “action requests,” describing and requesting for whatever they need, and members can respond directly to it with whatever they can help with.

Today, the service announced a set of five change agents titled “Earthkeeper Heroes.” The new changents include a bunch of university students who are crossing the country this summer in a tricked-out Harvester school bus that runs on waste vegetable oil, to a recent college grad and his scrappy team “in a mad-dash sprint to build a global online/offline climate action movement.”

inSuggest is a really cool service which launched a little while ago and I’m surprise I missed. Recommendations and suggestions have a thing on the web ever since the early days of Amazon when it was being touted as their secret sauce. inSuggest, however, takes a different approach and gives you on-the-fly recommendations on things you enter.

The service currently has three sub-services: Web, images, and Bookmarks:

Web inSuggest
You can enter a website, find a random one or search by keyword, and drag it into three of its recommendation boxes. It then suggests similar websites that you might like based on the ones you entered or selected.

Images inSuggest
Find an image by keyword (representing your theme or idea) or choose from some of the random ones, and it gives you back similar images in return.

Bookmarks inSuggest
What I personally found the most useful, it lets you enter your del.icio.us username and returns bookmarks you haven’t yet bookmarked that are similar to your bookmarks (if that makes sense). If you’ve got a substancial del.icio.us history built up, this will come really useful in finding new and interesting stuff.

While the service is not a day-to-day need, it’ll definitely come in handy when you’re on the look out for something similar to something you’ve seen, or in the case of bookmarks, once in a while when you’ve run out of interesting stuff. It’s definitely an interesting way to discover the web — one which requires only some technology and your human input.

While there are some who have jumped on the idea of “social media campaigns,” running campaigns and advertising around widgets, social networks and the web, I’m not a big fan. And I usually think they’re lame. So when I was informed this morning about CokeTag, I was a little doubtful — mainly because with campaigns like these, the focus on the brand vs. user is usually 80 - 20, so being a user-centric publication, there’s not much to cover.

CokeTag, however, is kind of an exception. The only thing it has common with Coke, the drink brand we know and live, is that the name and the fact that it’s sponsored by them. So, what is it? Basically, it’s an app, currently only for Facebook, which lets users customize and personalize links to a bunch of cool sites they like, and presents them in a rather unique, yet widget-ized way.

A CokeTag can be created only on Facebook. Once you’ve added the app, you’re presented with a creation interface, allowing you to choose or make your category (i.e. gaming, movies, music, fashion) and add your top five links/labels in there. The idea is kind of similar to Facebook Pages where you can fan celebrities and public figures, except they’re presented in a much more interesting way.

As I said, I am not a fan of online PR efforts, but CokeTag struck me as something a little different, and something which could be of actual use. What I loved about it, though, is that Coke has decided to take a very passive approach, and I think that’s what we need more of — don’t just think because you’re a big company, people are going to share around widgetized versions of your lame PR idea, unless of course, it’s useful to THEM.

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.