Rev2.org

Google has said they’ll be rolling out their new Nexus One smart phone, the “iPhone Killer,” in January.  A date and carrier have been established: January 5 and the carrier will be T-Mobile.  Now, a leak shows the pending Google page for selling the phone and another leak of an internal memo at T-Mobile shows something else. Google will sell the phone, not T-Mobile.

That’s an interesting twist.

The Google leak is based on the graphic here, which is a screen capture first published by Gizmodo when an anonymous tipster sent it in.  The graphic shows the Nexus One home page.  More screen shots show the sales page.  With pricing.  The phone can be purchased in two ways: unlocked through Google, without subsidies or a carrier plan, and locked into T-Mobile with subsidies and a carrier plan.

For the former, the direct purchase price is $530, which is on par with the comparable iPhone models when purchased alone.  The name Google Phone has been dumped for Nexus One officially, it appears, and the T-Mobile subsidy price is $180.  Other contract details were also spelled out on the pages, including the oddity that the customer acknowledges that HTC is the phone manufacturer and not Google.  Probably some legaleze their law department dreamt up to avoid lawsuits from people claiming they get brain tumors from the phone or something.

An internal memo at T-Mobile confirms that Google will be selling the phone from http://www.google.com/phone and that T-Mobile will not be selling the phone from their website.  This was posted on Engaget and confirms the Google screen shots.  This plan may backfire on Google, though, as most people I know do their phone shopping on their network’s site.  Perhaps T-Mobile will have a link to Google for purchase.

I think the reasoning behind Google’s decision to be Type A about the phone’s sales is because they are selling a completely unlocked phone at $530.  That phone is compatible with all of the GSM network carriers.  Which means it will run on AT&T, directly in competition with the iPhone. This is pointed out by TechCrunch.

All of those things are what I pointed out earlier this month when talking about the iPhone vs. Nexus One here.

So the drama rolls on, though it will probably die down within a few days of the Nexus One hitting the streets and the mystique finally getting worn off.

Designing sites is not usually a simple task.  The designer usually knows the general audience the site is geared towards, but often doesn’t get much feedback on the site’s appearance until a lot of work has already been put into the project.  Sometimes, something obvious to a visitor won’t be to the designer.

Tools like Usabilla.com aren’t a new idea, but they are definitely evolving into something very useful for the design team.  Where sites like IntuitionHQ are aimed towards client collaboration, Usabilla is aimed more towards surveying and commenting from other designers, friends, clients, or prospective site users.

The setup works fairly simply.  You create a design or sets of designs, create a test on Usabilla for them, and then write a series of questions for users to answer.  Then you open the test up for invites and have users go check it out and leave their feedback, answering those questions.  The feedback is analyzed and shown in graphical statistics which can be exported in PDF or PNG formats.

You can see which area of the design is most likely to generate clicks, what portions of the design are most memorable to users after seeing them, and so forth.  A lot of valuable feedback can be quickly received this way.

Usabilla is free to use and just came out of beta.  It’s headquartered in Amsterdam with a team of developers lead by founder Paul Veugen.

If you’re eco-conscious and wondering how green those items at the store really are, well.. Now there’s an app for that.

GoodGuide, the product green rating site, has developed an iPhone app that uses your phone’s camera to scan the barcodes on items at the store and then retrieve their green creds for you.  The information is based on company practices, the product’s production cycle, and other information.

The information is said to be independent, scientific, and based on health and wellness as well as environmental data.  Products are given a rating from 1-10 in (appropriately) green dots under the product’s match information.  GoodGuide boasts a database of over 50,000 products so far, with more added daily.

Ratings are delivered with an overall and three categories, depending on the product type.  Food items will have health matches, for instance, while household cleansers would have environmental and toxicity ratings.  GoodGuide also tracks what is being scanned so that those products scanned most often without a match are put higher on the list to be rated next.

The app is available for free from the iTunes Store.  It uses Occipitat’s RedLaser barcode scanning technology, which integrates with the iPhone’s camera, and the GoodGuide online database of product information.

Twitterfeed.com is probably the most well-known and used feed apps for sending site information (mostly blogs) to Twitter.  A lot of people use it, including CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the White House, and myself.  It’s considered the best tool for this job and it recently got even better.

At its most basic, you set up an account at Twitterfeed with your Twitter information, ad your RSS feed (or feeds), and the app will publish your feeds to Twitter automatically, as they’re received.  That’s nice, but most blogging software like WordPress has plugins for that.  Right?  So why is that special?

Well, first off, it’s reliable.  Second, that’s just the beginning of what Twitterfeed can do.  It also publishes to your Facebook account, and it can use PubSubHubbub to do all of this in near-real-time.  Twitterfeed also can link to your bit.ly account for integration with your stats management there and can use UTM tags for Google Analytics as well.

Recent improvements make it even more powerful, with several back-end updates having been made in October to increase the site’s reliability and ability to handle more feeds and data.  Those happened because Twitterfeed, once a one-man show (by its creator Mario Menti, a Londoner) sold a majority stake to betaworks and The Accelerator Group, which added more developers and funding.  As Menti put it, it was getting to big for him to do alone and would soon reach a point of breaking its current ability with the number of users climbing fast.  It appears he made the right choice.

Twitterfeed is popular for a reason (350,000+ users).  It’s easy to use, it’s free (unless you want advanced features), and it’s a great, reliable tool.  It’s entirely Web-based, so there’s no software or downloads, and its definitely worth using.  You can sign in using any of a number of popular IDs: AOL, Google, Yahoo.

Definitely a service worth using if you aren’t already.

If you have a blog or website where you publish product reviews, you’ll be interested in this.  Here at Rev2, we obviously do reviews and so the new FTC rules will apply to us.  Those rules, under the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, material connections to the products mentioned have to be disclosed.  Here at Rev2, of course, we do not receive compensation for the apps and websites we review, but we’ll still be subject to the new FTC regs.

This new service, CMP.ly, hopes to help site owners have a standard for disclosure so that reviewers aren’t giving mixed messages to their readers.  After all, is a review where the product was received free of charge in order to review it a “paid” review?  Do you need to disclose that you got a freebie to do it?  What if you own stock in the company that makes that product or app?  Do you disclose that?

CMP.ly puts up some pretty simple rules, numbered 1-5, that give those kinds of disclosures.  You then just grab the code they provide or copy the image with the information in it and use it in your reviews.

0 = No connection, unpaid, entirely the writer’s opinions.

1 = Based upon a review copy (freebie was given for review purposes, to be returned later).

2 = Given a sample by vendor/agency/brand (similar to freebie, but given as a keeper).

3 = Paid post with cash or other compensation (including cross posting) given.

4 = Writer is employee, shareholder, or has another business relationship involved in review.

5 = A custom disclosure which will be available from CMP.ly later for case-by-case use.

Those are pretty straight forward.  A graphic can be used (see below) or a simple link to the graphic’s information can be added to the review in question.  Since the links are so short (merely http://cmp.ly/0, for example), they can be easily tweeted as well.

Very cool and definitely worth trying (it’s free).  A good beginning to standardization for disclosure.

CMP.ly was introduced by Tom Chernaik and Kris Smith and its parent company is DigComm.  Chernaik’s background is in integrating music with technology and entertainment law.  Smith’s background is technology and he has been a part of several startups, including TechStartups.com.

This site is a comprehensive, centralized lifeflow platform, by their own description.  I would say it’s a social media sharing platform, which is the same thing, but doesn’t sound so “Web 2.0 launchy-mission-statementy.”  It’s based on a relatively old idea, but is much more all-inclusive and integrated than most apps of this nature.

Launching in September, Rrripple.com is in public beta.  It’s been in development for two years, however, and the site definitely shows that.

The focus at Rrripple is on real-life social networks rather than the somewhat disjointed ones we tend to create through the standard streams like Twitter or Facebook.  It’s made for sharing things with small, private, and relevant audiences like immediate family, close friends, church groups, and that sort of thing.  It could potentially be used by business who need to share documents and so forth as well, I think.

Of course, you don’t have to have a physical, real-life connection with those in your Rrripple network(s).  There’s nothing stopping you from inviting all of your Facebook friends or Myspace contacts to join your Rrripple network.  When you see how it works and what it does, though, you most likely won’t bother doing this.

Rrripple is a sharing tool.  It’s not a groupie site for playing Mobsters or Farm Town (I admit, I’m addicted to that one), it’s for sharing personal videos, photos, documents, voicemails, and so forth.  For doing that, it’s really slick.

The layout is like most apps of this nature: dark and techy.  That doesn’t change how well it functions, though.  Which is why I mentioned they’d been in development for two years.

Your media is laid out in chronological sequence so you can have photos that lead into video or explanation documents and scans of your yearbook tied with each other.  It functions primarily as a life diary in this respect.  You can ad sound, video, pics, documents, and all kinds of things to your Rrripple account for display.  You can mark things as private, public, in-network-only, etc.

The sharing part comes into play when your network is apprised of new additions.  Interactive messaging and other tools make it easy to chat about old times, remember something great, or congratulate on something new.

It’s easy to use, uses https for security, and works pretty well.  It’s worth a try and is free to use in beta.