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Update: we have invites! Head on over to http://viewzi.com/invites and enter “gio” as your referral code.

Visual search engines, or rather, the ones that make a claim to provide alternative visual ways to search, have been on the rise lately — and rightly so, with the advent of Flash and AJAX. A few days ago we reviewed SearchMe, which featured an Apple-like ‘Coverflow’ view of its internally-crawled search results. Viewzi is the latest play in the area and is being touted in the blogosphere as the first to get it right.

The search engine, firstly, differs from the few I’ve seen in that it doesn’t assume that only one type of an interface is suitable for every search. Instead, it presents and allows you to choose from a slew of different interfaces and tools after you make your query. These are slightly optmized to the query, but I didn’t find much of a difference between the ones I tried — perhaps its because of the limited number of search tools available at this point.

There are, obviously, a whole bunch of tools to select from, but I’ll cover the main few that were presented for most general queries (note: unfortunately you need beta accounts to click on the ‘example’ links. If the Viewzi folks want to help out invite-craving Rev2 readers, we’d love some):

Simple Text View (example)
Loads simple/regular text results from meta-querying Google and Yahoo!. While fundamentally the same as normal search results on the respective search engines, they are slightly more edge and ‘2.0′ and sleek with their highlighting, and provide a helpful Compete.com rank for each site.

Web Screenshot View (example)
Similar to SearchMe, the results with this tool are presented in the Apple coverflow style, although not so mimetically. Additionally, since Viewzi is a meta search tool and doesn’t crawl its own index, the results are from Yahoo!, and while drastically more relevant than SearchMe’s, the screenshots are of inferior quality.

Basic Photo View (example)
This is the image search function of Viewzi. Searching Riya and Flickr, the tool gathers images and presents them in a more navigatable format. Although, it links back directly to the original image as opposed to dynamically enlarge it unlike most other visual image search tools I’ve seen, which I thought was a little odd — if that’s the point, why not just use Flickr?

4 Sources View (example)
One of the strikingly different tools out there — and in a good way — this is like meta search 2.0. It searches Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask, and lays out screenshots from their results with corresponding labels as to which search engine it came from. For ones presented in multiple, or all 4, the screenshots are stacked. I’ll admit, it’s no less than neat.

Video x3 View (example)
One of the more nichely useful tools I found, this one searches through video search engines — namely YouTube, Blinx, and Veoh — and presents the results in a scrollable landscape video reel-like format. For a video searcher, it’s not a bad searching alternative as it is. I also love how the Blink search results are animated.

Everyday Shopping View (example)
This is one of my personal favorite tools. It searches shopping sites — Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Target — and lays out the results in a simple, standard format with the picture and the price. For a shopping searcher, this could prove immensely helpful. And in the interface lickability factor, it doesn’t score too badly either.

Conclusion
After reading through the hype and testing out the tools individually, I have to admit, Viewzi lives up to it. Something I love is that as a search engine, it’s focus is not on relevancy or providing the best search results, but on the different ‘views’ and how best to present them using search algorithms already out there. And it works fantasically. I’ll admit, there are a few clunky tools — such as the Photo View and Screenshot one that I’m not sure add a whole lot of value — but there are some real jems.  And the best thing is, as more get built, it’s going to keep growing with more new tools. For a visual searcher, for the 2.0 searcher, and for the advanced searcher, Viewzi isn’t just worth a try — it’s worth the replacement.

I have been a skeptic of the mobile platform for quite some time — specifically, mobile advertising and how effective it really is. But recently after watching Robert Scoble’s interview with Omar Hamoui, founder and CEO of AdMob, I’m convinced the platform will be a significant contender of ad dollars and perhaps the most effective/helpful/useful advertising platform in the future. There’s something huge happening here — and I’ve only just caught on to it.

Why Search Advertising Works
First, let’s back up a few steps and see why Google’s bread and butter — contextual search ads — is so effective. In one word, the reason is intent. When people search for something, they are essentially looking for something. More specifically, amidst their quest, they’re granting their search engine to guide them there. Notice that this is much, much different from “Just put Lost back already!” or “Oh, that’s nice. Nike has a new pair of shoes out and it syncs with iPod” or worse still, “Ok, random and annoying Win iPods Instantly site, I just want to Super Wall my friend“.

The intent is most of the times connected to monetary potential, in that the searcher is looking to buy something, or for a service they need, or a guide to something. Connect that with an online shoe store or a digital camera repair service that gives upto a 30% discount — and bingo. You have a clickthrough 5% of the time, you have a purchase 5% of the time, and the advertiser is happy, giving Google another 5 months more access into their knee-deep pockets. And that’s why Sergey Brin can afford to have a marriage in the Bahamas.

Why Mobile Advertising Could Work Better
So, what do you get when you take intent — the core of search advertising
— a step further? Need. And in one word, that is why mobile advertising may prove to be more valuable, effective, useful, and helpful than search advertising.

When I’m visiting San Francisco next time, and I’m in town, hungry for some Pizza, finding a good Pizza place is not going to be my intent, it’s going to be my need. And when I’m doing some hunting on the iPhone and come across an ad that says “Best Pizza in San Francisco — 3 Blocks Away! Click here to pinpoint location,” you can assume a happy $30 customer in the next 15 minutes at that very moment.

Similarly, one of the AdMob ad demos that is shown in the Scoble interview is that of Starbucks on the iPhone (embedded below). Arguably, this is better than my example above. In an ordinary mobile portal page, an ad on the top says “I see Starbucks in your future.” The user clicks the ad, which drops down to a textbox asking for a zipcode. The user enters one (in the future, GPS could very well replace this), and up pops the iPhone Google Maps application showing all Starbucks locations in the entered zip code. BINGO! Advertising, usefulness, and intuitiveness to its best — Starbucks has a new customer.

Conclusion
Certainly I’m no genius, and the possibilities here seem very clear even to me. If not clear, certain. Advertising works best where there is intent, desire, and need — and all three are more than present here. Obviously, not everywhere, and not on every single impression delivered, but watching the Scoble interview where CEO Omar Hamoui sets up a simple ad for a photo sharing website and gets 100 clicks and thousands of impressions within a couple of minutes time, it certainly seems more effective that what we’ve seen on the web.

To sum up, keep your eyes out for players like AdMob and the mobile landscape in general, because the emergence of local, mobile, and advertising is going to bring together a wholly new, different, and effective platform for advertising — and shake up some markets no doubt — to create the most effective advertising platform ever. The question is, when?

The blogosphere’s been abuzz lately about Twitter — everyday, it seems a Twitter disaster makes its way to the blogs of its very users, leaving them with nothing more than a cringe and a hope. Whether it was the weekend downtime where users’ Twitter streams looked more than half empty, or fellow Web 2.0 enthusiast Orli Yakuel’s privacy disaster where her direct messages made their way into the very public Twitter stream, or, most recently, the firing/resignation of Twitter Chief Architect Blaine cook, Twitter has been very much in the public eye.

As I Twittered yesterday (how’s that for irony?): “Does anyone else notice the Facebook hype/meme/craziness is dying? If Twitter can hold itself, it’s TNBT. Problem is, it can’t and hasn’t.” And I beleive that. If MySpace was 2005, YouTube 2006, and Facebook 2007, I have a feeling Twitter has the potential to be the talk of the year for 2008. But the problem is — when you can’t merely stay alive for half the time, there’s very little chance everyone is going to talk about anything other than the fact that you can’t merely stay alive.

As Michael Arrington suggests in his post, it doesn’t matter if Blaine Cook was fired or resigned — what matters is that things can only get better from here. Cook semi-famously gave a talk at the Silicon Valley Ruby conference about scaling Rails and Twitter. In one of the slides (pictured right), he’s quoted as calling the scaling issue “Really Easy” and has a six-step secret sauce as to how to go about doing it, which very obviously hasn’t worked. Infact, I question whether he even went past Step 1 — it seems that lately, it’s been only the users complaining.

That said, there’s still some time left for Twitter. If things are, indeed, only going to get better from at from this point — with their new infrastructure, new hirees (Cook’s replacements — among which — an expert who was involved in scaling Blogger), then Twitter still has a chance to win back the hearts of its cringing users. And I have to say, I’m one of them. It’s clear that its users very much care about the service, and as a result, whenever Twitter has an outage (both literally and figuratively), we go through the same cringing/loving feeling as someone watching their sibling perform badly at stage. It’s not nice, and we want it to get better, but we’re powerless when it comes to it.

For the last couple of days, I’ve been vigorously trying out a range of productivity tools. Given that I’m going to be at home for the next couple of weeks — I figured it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get some work done. So when a couple of friends Twittered about RescueTime, I was immediately curious. With buzz words like “web-based time management” lurking their homepage I anticipated another project management web app with the to-do list and time tracker and the usual feature-full things that are supposed to make me more productivity, but it’s something completely different.

Founded by Tony Wright after selling his AJAXy job search engine Jobby to Jobster in May 2006, the project has raised funding from Y Combinator and goes after the idea of “ridiculously easy time management.” We wrote last year about Wakoopa, a service that tracks your software usage a la Last.fm for music, and while similar, RescueTime takes the concept a step further: instead of just telling you, it wants to make your more productive with this data.

The way that the service works is that users sign up, and install the RescueTime tracker utility for their OS (Windows and Mac both supported.) RescueTime then sits silently in your system bar (or taskbar in Windows), watches, and reports back to its servers as you spend countless hours answering e-mail and watching stupid funny videos on YouTube.

Let it do its thing for a day or so, and you get this in your RescueTime dashboard:

Perfect! Now the whole world knows how much time I spend watching useless celebrity gossip channels on Slingplayer.

But of course, the tool doesn’t end there. Once you’ve collected a slew of data, RescueTime lets you tag particular applications and categorize them in this way (i.e. work, personal, media, useless, etc.) And here’s the cool part — you can then use these tags to set up special goals and alerts for yourself when you’re spending more time than you need to on them. For example, I set up a goal stating, “I want to spend less than 3 hours per day on entertainment.” Now I can subscribe to an RSS feed or get RescueTime to SMS my phone everytime I’m over my goal limit.

Undoubtedly, RescueTime is one of the coolest and most intuitive time management utilities I’ve tried out. What makes it so is its core idea of “ridiciously easy” and “no data entry needed.” Additionally, for the first time, computer users can finally measure their real productivity and act on them — as opposed to constantly training their mind to “watch less YouTube videos” or “stay out of Facebook.” For the value it provides, I’d definitely pay for such a tool, too, if that’s the direction they want to take for the future.

Back in April last year, we did a list titled the “10 Most Successful Startups to Date.” The list outlined what were, at the time, the most successful startups by perseverance. When we looked to doing a version 2.0, we noticed a funny thing: most of those startups — at least the ones that haven’t been sold yet, and a bunch of new ones — now had actual estimated valuations surrounding them.

Call it thin-air, call it bubble, call it hype — here are the current 7 hottest unacquired web startups, as ranked by the thin-air that surrounds them.

1. Facebook

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $15 billion
REASONING: $240 million investment from Microsoft at $15 billion valuation (see our coverage)

Launched: February 2004
Founded by: Mark Zuckerberg
Type: Social Network

Traffic: 15 billion pageviews/month
Funding: $338 million

2. Slide

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $550 million
REASONING: Rumored valuation of last funding round (see VentureBeat).

Launched: August 2005
Founded by: Max Levchin
Type: Widgets

Traffic: 200 million+ widget installations, 20 million+ uniques/month (QuantCast)
Funding: $58 million

3. RockYou

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $400 million
REASONING: Rumoured valuation of rumoured Morgan Stanley investment (see BoomTown).

Launched: 2006
Founded by: Jia Chien & Lance Tokuda
Type: Widgets

Traffic: 180 million widget views, 7.5 million+ uniques/month (QuantCast)
Funding: $16.5 million

4. Digg

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $300 million
REASONING: Rumoured “asking” price (see our post, TechCrunch, and Valleywag)

Launched: December 2004
Founded by: Kevin Rose
Type: Social Bookmarking/Content Discovery

Traffic: 208 million pageviews/month (September 2007, Compete)
Funding: $11.3 million (Series A + Series B)

5. Twitter

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $100 million
REASONING: $20 million pre-money as of July 2007, inflating with market valuations and Twitter’s growth spurts since April 2007.

Launched: July 2006
Founded by: Obvious Inc.
Type: Micro-blogging/Social Network

Approximate Traffic: 1.2 million uniques/month (Comscore)
Funding: $4.8 million (Series B)

6. Mahalo

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $100 million
REASONING: Rumoured pre-valuation of last funding round (see PaidContent).

Launched: March 2007
Founded by: Jason Calacanis
Type: Search Engine

Traffic: 4.1 million uniques/month
Funding: $16 million

7. Technorati

ESTIMATED VALUATION: < $100 million
REASONING: Market position, traffic, growth, future prospects — and the fact that no blog player has yet exceeded a $100 million valuation.

Launched: January 2005
Founded by: Dave Sifry
Type: Blog Search Engine/Content Discovery

Traffic: 2.8 million unique visitors/month (Comscore)
Funding: $21.6 million (Series A, B, & C)

In the midst of covering cool startup upon cool startup, it’s been a while I’ve done an opinion piece directly from the heart on Rev2, so here it goes. For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying Twitter (follow me pahleez!). This is partly because of having recently been a Mac switcher and being acquainted with the wonderful Twitterific client and partly to join the conversation, break myself from the skeptic image, and to do what the cool kids are doing. And I’ve come to a conclusion: Twitter will never reach the mainstream demographic. But it’ll be hip with us — the Internet crowd — and in the end, that’s all that will matter.

Here’s the thing. Twitter is based around the idea of informing others what you’re doing at a particular moment. By doing so, you’re joining a conversation, interacting with a community (people who you follow), and participating in a global discussion. But there’s a slight detail that that’s left out when someone attempts to describe Twitter: you need connectivity. A laptop, a phone, e-mail, IM, SMS, a client — you need some form of a connection to the Internet.

Now, for us cool, hip, and tech-savvy folks, it’s a given. Either we’re working all day on our laptop, or carrying an iPhone, or visiting an Internet Kiosk at the airport. We’re connected — we’re totally in it. But that 90% of the rest of the world? Err… not so much. A few minutes a day, an hour, two if they’re lucky, is all the tube-time they get. For the rest, they’re either travelling or working (not at or around a computer) or socializing. Of course, this is changing as more people get high-tech phones and phones have Internet connectivity, but generally not a lot of txting is done even now with our early adopter niche (5% is an estimated figure — see the fantastic ReadWriteWeb data survey on the many ways people Twitter.)

So Twitter faces a problem. It’s not like any other website where you can check e-mail or catch up/add new friends and pimp up your profile or watch the five videos grandma sent you. For the idea to work on a mainstream scale, it needs community, it needs conversation — it needs its userbase to be atuned to what’s happening, and add to it. Of course, right now, that’s exactly what’s happening, and as someone who is online at least six hours a day, I found it useful and interesting and exciting to catch up on stuff that my peers have been twittering and say stuff back, occasionally blurting out random thoughts that come to my mind. People like me is whom Twitter is made for — and it’s a great utility for us. But for that mainstream? I’m not so sure.

So let me make a bold prediction. The tipping point graphs that you’ve seen with Wikipedia and YouTube and Facebook and MySpace? Not gonna happen with Twitter. You can argue that it already has — but I think it corresponds to the early adopter/techie/hip crowd, not the mainstream — and hence has been at a much smaller scale than your regular “tipping point.” Instead, what’s going to happen is Twitter is going to continue to see slow growth over its new users and its current ones are going to participate more, in turn making it into a 1/10 of the usual giant Internet website. Anyone who spends their life on the Internet being connected to tubes most of the day is going to use it and love it. And for anyone who doesn’t, it won’t matter.

Ed. Note: We have 250 free Xoopit invites for Rev2 readers! Head over to this link and enter “Rev2″ as your invite code.

San Francisco-based Xoopit unveiled in a private beta this morning, also announcing a $5 million Series A round led by Accel Capital. The startup aims to convert your inbox — a simple and traditionally unaltered form of communication — into a more exciting and usefully presented social network (though what it really is, is better e-mail.)

The service works in three forms. With your Gmail account, iGoogle homepage, or directly on the web. The signup process consists of entering your Gmail account information (currently the only e-mail service supported) and installing the plugin — a cool thing about this being that your e-mail login (e.g. Gmail) IS your Xoopit login. Meanwhile, Xoopit spends a few minutes excavating  “precious photos, videos, and files” from your inbox. In my case, it must’ve taken around an hour so.

With the e-mail excavated and plugin installed, heading to your Gmail inbox reveals a whole new kind of dimension to your e-mail — a Gmail 2.0 or rather what Gmail could be in the next three years. A top bar gives you an expandable line of thumbnail previews of the latest Photos, Videos, and Files in your inbox, which you can search through, as well. Clicking on the respective links takes you to a more deeper view — for example, in the same way that your inbox hows you the conversations you’ve recently exchanged, clicking on “Files” shows you an inbox-like view of all your recently received files, same with “Photos” for photos, etc.

This in itself is a really useful way of getting a grip on the contents on your inbox and seperating out an e-mail from its contents, but that’s not where it ends. Heading to Xoopit’s own website and logging in reveals a full-fledged social network with the whole Facebook-style News Feed of your recent items, but produced without you or anyone else having to take a single action.

For example, I can see that recently, I’ve been sent 10 photos by my mother, 3 files by a college, 3 photos by a PR person, an .RTF “FYI” receipt from a recent order I made online, and so on. To be honest, this is the most dynamic, useful view of my e-mail that I’ve ever witnessed. Listed under “People” (friends list) are all my contacts with whom I’ve recently been in touch with, and clicking under the name I’m able to browse through tabs to see the stuff they’ve sent to me recently.

Xoopit is starting small, but I can without a doubt say they’re onto something. If this kind of presentation and interaction isn’t the future of e-mail, then I’m not sure what is. Frankly, I’m surprised no one’s thought of this idea before — it seems obvious after Xoopit that social networks have undoubtedly mastered the “here’s your life” user interface, and there is a whole world to conquer with e-mail in this respect. I certainly hope with their $5 million round they’re able to get somewhere with this concept, because this is how I want to live through my e-mail, darnit!

Ed. Note: The Richter Scale is a new series on Rev2. Following important announcements, we’ll be interviewing industry experts and featuring excerpts from their commentary on Rev2. We believe the insight of competitors and peers in the industry is essential in evaluating the significance and meaning of events.

Taking a cue from the vast movement of applications to the web, Adobe took a significant step today by announcing Photoshop Express, a free offering for those who “want to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects.” The offering focuses a lot on simplicity, but features 2GB of free storage for all users. TechCrunch noted that Picnik, another online photo editor with slightly more advanced features, “is not scared” by Adobe’s announcement. Rev2 spoke to Avi Muchnick, CEO of A.viary, a “rich content creation and distribution” company that’s presently best known for their sophisticated Phoenix image editor. You can her more from Avi in next week’s Rev2 Cabinet, which will be centered around A.viary. In the mean time, he offers an excellent perspective on Adobe’s recent announcement.

Zach Sims, Rev2: What’s your take on Adobe’s announcement?

Avi Muchnick, CEO of A.viary: Let me just preface: I don’t think that Photoshop Express is competition for Aviary, because we cater to completely different markets. They decided to focus on the mass consumer with an offering that is good for red-eye reduction, rotation and some neat finishing effects. That’s great for the consumer level user who is uploading their works to Facebook and wants to do small correcting. Aviary is great for hobbyist level users who want to do advanced special effects. It has layer-based editing more akin to the desktop version of Photoshop, and targeted to more advanced users. This gives our users real access to do anything with their files, no matter how complex the desired outcome. Different markets.

The Sketch Filter in Photoshop Express, One of the App’s Simple Abilities

I also think that this is wonderful market validation for web apps in general. We now have two major publicly traded companies (Adobe and Google) getting fully immersed into the web apps industry. They have a finger on exactly where technology is headed, so it’s a safe bet that web apps is that place.

Rev2: Do you think Adobe stepping into the market will be a tidal wave that propels other players to follow suit?

Muchnick: Well, I hope that will be the case as it will just increase the market validation and force everybody to stay sharp, but I don’t know if this tool will singularly have that much of an impact on web development, any more than other Flash apps that came before it. Platforms are more appealing to me and traditionally cause “tidal waves” when they become opened up for development (Facebook as the case in point). What I’d love to see is for Adobe to focus on extending their platform development and let third parties build out exciting applications in new and innovative ways as a way to promote Flex/Flash. That is what will encourage more developers and companies to look to web apps.

Rev2: Do you think this is Adobe’s first step in assembling a suite of online applications?

Muchnick: I do love that they are offering 2GB of free upload space presumably to be shared between all of their applications. That is a positive sign to me.

Photoshop Express’ My Photos Organizer

Regarding Photoshop Express specifically: I do think this is the first step for Adobe (technically, their second, as they already launched Premiere Express in YouTube’s beta site a year ago). But that being said it’s not a full step in that direction. This is a hedged step intended to promote Flex, add headcount to their marketing efforts, bring in some upsell opportunities to their core products, but at the same time not compete at all with their core desktop products. That last part is unfortunate to the end user.

Adobe, a billion dollar corporation that also owns the Flash platform, ahd the resources to create an actual web-based port of Photoshop with layers, brushes, and selection tools instead of making a consumer light application that most people already have included with the purchase of a digital camera.  I can’t help but feel they deliberately limited themselves as they don’t want to hurt their existing desktop software sales with a coimpeting product.

Rev2: In our Rev2 Cabinet conversation [which will be posted next Wednesday], you mentioned that A.viary was for users who don’t really need Photoshop and do not need to pay for its extensive feature set.  Is this a sign that Adobe has realized the value in that demographic as well?

Muchnick: I think Adobe recognizes the need for a less advanced offering than Photoshop CS3, but I’m not sure they are comfortable hitting that mid-way point where the software really needs to go (and where Aviary currently resides).  Instead they catered to the least advanced type of customer and entered a space that is already well-served by Picnik, FotoFlexer, and other consumer-focused companies.

Conclusion, Zach Sims of Rev2

Adobe’s entrance in the market is symbolic, and Photoshop Express is one of many online apps Adobe is now managing.  Their increasingly large online portfolio, which includes apps like Buzzword, have convinced some, like Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb, to say that Adobe’s building an “online empire.”  Flex is becoming an increasingly important part of the rich internet application movement, and Photoshop Express is an interesting demonstration of its abilities.  We’ll be featuring another application, SlideRocket, tomorrow that also pushes the envelope with Flex, but in the area of presentations.

Avi Muchnick is the CEO of A.viary, a “rich content creation and distribution” company.  He is also the Founder and CEO of Worth1000.com, a Photoshop contest website.  He will be the focus of next week’s Rev2 Cabinet article and podcast.  If you’d like to read more from Avi, please visit the A.viary blog.

It’s amazing how unpredictable the “Sillicon Valley Tipping Point” is. Last year, it was Twitter. Around the same time, Facebook. Then before that, YouTube. And before that, MySpace. And if you can remember that far back, Friendster had its moment too. FriendFeed — which I reviewed last month — and at that time seemed to me like any other Web 2.0 awesome service but go-nowhere baloney, is going through one right now. And as people talk, the tipping point becomes clearer and clearer.

Duncan Riley calls the service “othing more than a fancy RSS service with commenting thrown in for good measure.” Louis Gray will defend it for his life. Marshall Kirkpatrick, who is clearly one of the more informed on this topic from his interesting interview with Dave Winer, considers the service useful but acknowledges that — ironically so — there a number of very similar services that have launched at the same time, including SocialThing and Iminta (our review here.) Michael Arrington acknowledges its tipping point and calls its a “destination site built on the back of all that third party data.”

The idea behind FriendFeed? On the one side, services like YouTube and Last.fm catalogue omy media habits. And then there are services like Digg and Delicious and Google Reader (or any RSS reader for that matter), who know what kind of stuff I’m into and what I’m reading. Recently, I’ve been finding that most of my online life revolves around three services: Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. All three have a strong sense of a community and a user base constantly feeding stuff into them. FriendFeed’s objective: combine ALL my data across ALL services into one, single stream. And build a social network around it.

And you know what? I think it’s a nobrainer. The more I think about it, the more obvious a service like FriendFeed seems to me, and what seems more obvious is the question that why I don’t use them instead of going through my 15 bookmarks to see what everyone is up to. After using Tumblr for my reblogging needs (YouTube, Digg, Twitter, etc.), I’ve recently made the decision to using it solely for its purpose — text and media blogging — and point everyone single-handedly to my FriendFeed page to keep up with my life. And the more people that use it, the easier my life is going to get in getting people to follow my life in one place.

Unlike most of the services we’ve seen lately, I think what makes FriendFeed super-useful is that the service literally needs no action (or interaction) from the user to make it work. You don’t have to Twitter, or Digg, or rate videos, or blog, or review stuff. Instead, you can do all that as you’ve been doing so and continue to live your Internet life like you’ve been in the past. And what FriendFeed does is simply catalogue it in one place. It’s more of a aggregation tool — and something you’d read in your coffee break — and a less of a service you actually have to feed into and get something out of.

But of course, if all I’m using FriendFeed for is to broadcast my life stream, I’m only getting half the show. It’s equally as useful to keep up with your network of friends — you know, your pals, collegues, the people that follow you on services like Twitter whom you care about. For example, the only Robert Scoble I know of is the one who I follow on Twitter and occassionally read the blog of. With FriendFeed, I get to see the complete Robert Scoble. I can see the videos he publishes and favourites, the photos he posts, the stuff he shares on Google Reader, and his activity from about 10 other services — including of course, his blog and Twitter. If we discount the “why I would care” aspect, the value proposition to me as user is really amazing — take no action, and get the world in return.

A couple of FriendFeed’s features to me really validate its greatness. Firstly, it’s their recommended friends feature. This is something I’ve truly never seen work as it should with other services, and with FriendFeed, it’s their most important feature in their viral growth. Why? It’s great for the user, and FriendFeed. The feature basically goes through your network and finds links between people, suggesting a bunch of people you’re likely to know and befriend. I’ve added about 50 people through this and I continue to add more — because the click on the “Subscribe” button and its loading speed makes it more of a game for me (Who do you know?) and less of a chore. Secondly, as TechCrunch reports, they just launched a search feature. And now, you can search through your network. This is equally as useful — for example, when I want to see what my network is saying about the Sarah Lacy incident.

FriendFeed is not the new Twitter. It’s not the new Facebook. It’s certainly not the next Google. But what it is, is a kickass aggregation service. It’s to people and relationships and online activity what Techmeme is to tech news. And the fact that I don’t have to take any action on the service itself, or put up with ads, or pay for it, I can’t see why I wouldn’t want to at least have it aggregate my activity while I’m getting on with my regular Twitters and Diggs and YouTubes. As I said, the value proposition is what makes it truly amazing.

Ed Note: Apologies for the delay in getting this up — we’re scheduled for every Wednesday but it was completely my fault. Also, apologies for being post silent for the last three days. I’ll be back tomorrow for sure. Thanks!

The Rev2 Cabinet is a weekly investigative series at Rev2 where we take an in-depth look into some of the leading companies, startups, and services. Along with a podcast interview with our associate editor Zach Sims (embedded below and in the RSS feed), leading executives and CEOs offer insights into their startups and services which we analyze with an in-depth writeup. If you’re interested in being profiled, please contact Zach.

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Online advertising is no joke. Recent estimates peg interactive ad revenues in 2007 at $25.5 billion, a 27% increase over 2006’s approximate revenues. The quick moving segment currently makes up approximately 6.1% of the global ad market. An IDC report sees a general pattern that “companies are redistributing advertising dollars from traditional media to online media.” That trend is visible almost everywhere, and what really excites analysts are the prospects of the future. Kelsey Group analysts predict that interactive ad revenues will grow to $147 billion in 2012, and that interactive media will comprise 21% of the global media market.

As companies rush to get in on what is veritably the internet’s own gold rush, there have been winners and losers. Early on, it’s clear that Google is the commanding leader of search advertising, and the company’s AdWords and AdSense dominate contextual advertising. With control of more than 60% of the search market, Google has begun to assert their dominance over other areas, like video. Their $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube has brought them deeper into the video market and introduced a new advertising product for video. As the company grows, so do its ad initiatives. Despite its best efforts, the company’s market share of the advertising market dropped half a percentage point between 2007’s third and fourth quarter to 23.7%.

Google’s Famous Sponsored Links Beside a Search for “Digital Media”

Other companies, seeing unfilled niches and opportunities for innovation, have jumped to fill the void left by Google and its competitors. MixerCast was one of the first companies to fuse together the interactivity of the internet with advertising to create an entirely new field. I spoke with CEO Jen Cooper to learn more about the company.

Social Marketing Solutions

MixerCast has its hands in several different areas of media production, with tools for both the consumer and the enterprise client. In attempting to define the company’s aim to me, CEO Jen Cooper said that MixerCast was meant to help “publishers of digital content” in new innovative ways. She calls the new creations social marketing solutions. In a way, some of MixerCast’s consumer offerings compete with other slideshow creators like Slide and the previously interviewed RockYou. MixerCast’s core product is a widget canvas, allowing users to easily include media from dozens of websites in one easily embeddable object. For example, one could make a MixerCast pulling in photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, and additional photos from MixerCast partner Getty Images, all synched to music from Pump Audio, another one of the company’s many partners.

Scores of Options Are Offered for Sharing MixerCasts

The partnerships the company has truly set them apart from other widget producers. Their CEO, formerly of Yahoo! and a variety of other web companies, brought previous connections aboard to participate in MixerCast. Some of the more famous participating companies include National Geographic, Universal Music Group, Virgin Records, Warner Music, Warner Home Video, and more. These key partnerships allow consumer users to mix commercial content into something completely new. It’s not quite remixing the songs or pictures themselves, but it’s compiling them in new and different ways.

Starting Small

As with most companies, use cases determined the path of MixerCast. After a while, they discovered that it wasn’t just consumers using their terrific mashup tools. Instead, larger media companies had been using the tool to form interactive advertising campaigns. Noticing this, Cooper changed the company’s focus and began targeting larger advertising projects. The company is currently working with New Line Cinemas on Will Ferrell’s new movie, Semi-Pro. The MixerCast Semi-Pro widget, shown below, is an excellent example of the company’s future. It pulls together promotional content, like the official music video, with a new contest. Users download the music they need to make their own remixes from within the widget and then can re-upload their modified music video back through the widget. Those that interact with the widget can then view the submissions of others. All of this is contained within a large widget that can be easily embedded on dozens of different websites, all to promote the movie.

MixerCast’s New Semi-Pro Widget, Produced in Coordination with New Line Cinemas

For this particular project, MixerCast worked together with New Line’s ad agency, who created the concept. MixerCast helped the agency to make the vision a reality, and the widget is now embedded on dozens of different social networks. As soon as a new video is uploaded, each of the widgets have access to the new content as well.

New Directions

A successful experience with New Line has provoked MixerCast to look into targeting “social marketing solutions” for the enterprise market as their number one area of business. They currently have “projects with every huge movie studio,” said their CEO. The widgets to come, promised Cooper, will be more advanced than what was seen early on with the Semi-Pro widget. Real time interaction is only the first step. She imagines MixerCast used with political campaigns as well as with the entertainment industry. A partnership with Entertainment Tonight has taken their widgets in another direction. The ET news widget brings the latest photos, text stories, and videos together in one cohesive widget experience that can be embedded on any website. The possibilities, emphasized Cooper, are endless. Users are often given the option to “remix” some of the established widgets to their own liking as well.

Entertainment Tonight’s MixerCast, Incorporating Photos, News, and Video

The company’s initial experiences have led them to place more effort into building the creative and advertising areas of the company. A new branch for creative engineers is being established during the first quarter in order to respond to the creative needs of the media companies working with MixerCast. The company’s current focus is on supplying solutions to these new enterprise clients. Normal consumers can still use the tools provided by MixerCast, and can insert advertisements into mixers in order to revenue share. The big change, however, will come with MixerCast’s redesign at the end of the first quarter. The goal of the project is to “make the experience easy to use” for every customer, and to make it “more distributable,” with new ways of tracking interactivity.

A Onetime Pioneer Prepares to Blaze Trails Again

Down the line, the company plans to have a fleshed out pipeline for new widgets and lots of deployments. Their virtual team, located around the world in India, Belarus, Minsk, and elsewhere, will continue to work on the product. The company’s CEO, Jen Cooper, was one of the first evangelizers of streaming media at VXtreme, a company later acquired by Microsoft and made part of Windows Media Player. With time as Yahoo’s Executive Director of Business Development, Cooper brings a wealth of experience to MixerCast. She’s been part of the first online video revolution, and I’m confident that MixerCast will be an integral part of the burgeoning field of interactive marketing and social marketing solutions.