Rev2.org

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.

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.