Tags: Microsoft
Jason Calacanis wrote up a post about AOL and I responded in the comments. He asked if AOL should provide free Internet services like Google and Yahoo. I say that it may already be too little and too late for AOL to make an impact with more free services. They kept up their walled garden for so long, that people became fed-up and left for more open pastures. I know I did years ago. AOL was the second ISP I ever used, right after Prodigy, and after a few years I started using NetZero more heavily and then switched to high-speed Internet. AOL just didn’t offer good speeds in my area and the quality of the bloated desktop client was poor.
Though free services could help keep AOL’s current customers using the service in some capacity while they jump ship, I would say its a necessary move from AOL that may not help. They took over the Netscape brand and pretty much abandoned the browser, which is now an important Microsoft competitor. They didn’t even put their weight behind the browser for their Internet service users. And their relationship with Google is sketchy at best. No one knows how they will leverage their business agreement with Google (where they received $1 billion for advertising and other goodies), especially given their botched merger and Netscape buy.
I think AOL should offer free services, but that they should have been doing it for years. Do you think there is any juice left at AOL? Is their recent interest in blogging enough to save them? And what do you think went wrong with the Time Warner merger and Netscape buyout?
Tags: AOL
Criticker bills itself as a “personalized film recommendation engine.” With it you are able to rank moves on a scale from 0-100. Based on your scores you can then receive recommendations based on other users with similar rankings and interests. A nice feature is being able to view rankings of movies currently in theaters. Though they don’t always get it right, this is a unique feature that could help people sort through the glut of bad movies. Thankfully there have been many good movies lately. And I just noticed they recommend A Scanner Darkly for me, so they must know me pretty well.
Digg released version 3 of their popular website 3 weeks ago, and with it they also announced some upcoming tools to bring a new level of visualization to the site. One of the tools will reinvent the Digg Spy feature by enabling you to see users swarming around stories. The other tool is Digg Incoming. You will be able to see visually what posts are getting the most hits. The incoming traffic is displayed as blocks falling in real-time onto each other. The tools will be released in mid-July, and may already be released at the time of this post as I scheduled it ahead of time.
Below is the Diggnation episode that features the Digg v3 launch and demo.
It appears that Photobucket is pushing a branded version of the Flock browser. I’ve been meaning to test out the latest version of Flock, but I’m too busy trying to keep Firefox from crashing. Ever since that last Firefox update the browser has been buggier and slower than ever. Maybe it is time to check out Flock again.
(Photobucket news via SiliconBeat)
It appears that the latest update to Firefox has solved a serious bug I often ran into. The browser would frequently crash if you try to switch tabs while loading Gmail. According to Mihai, the issue appears to now be fixed in version 1.5.0.2. Bug 265740 describes the problem and shows it as being resolved. Firefox 1.5.0.2 also fixed several other crash bugs.
So far I haven’t noticed any more crashes, but I will let you know if I do. Have you been using the update, and do you still experience crashes with Gmail?
Pandora is a music site that lets you find and listen to songs that are similar to your tastes. You choose a song or artist, and they use the various aspects of that song to find similar ones that you might enjoy. It’s from the people who started the Music Genome Project.
The songs play in a flash movie and you can switch to various stations that are each based on a certain artist or song. You can mark whether you like a song that plays, and whether you want to hear more like it or never hear it again. This is all very cool in my opinion.
There is even an unofficial method to save the mp3s of the suggested songs so that you can listen to them on an mp3 player. It requires running a java app that constantly checks to see if a new song is playing and will copy it to your output folder in MP3 format. It also tags the MP3 with the artist and song title.
3bubbles is a new service that lets you add chat to your blog. The chat can either be in the page, or launch as a popup. You can see how many spectators there are, and how many people are currently chatting. By default it shows the last 10 lines typed, but you can view a bit of a longer history (up to 100 lines currently). The creator of Jabber, Jeremie Miller, is a founder of 3bubbles.
Since launching on TechCrunch recently, they have opened their site to user registration so that you can login and your history of comments can be kept. Or you can just choose a name and not register, but you won’t develop a history or be easy to find later on. So go register as a user if you’d like at 3bubbles and start chatting away on TechCrunch with the “Live Chat” links under every post.
You can signup for the beta here.
Listable lets you create a list of site/products, and visitors can rate them up and down.
By using Web 2.0 features such as AJAX, folksonomy (tagging), social elements such as voting/commenting and the listible’s listonomy (listing), resources can be sorted in a way that will be digestible. You can search what you need quick. You can contribute your resources easier.
There’s a Firefox Extensions for Power Users list, and a Web 2.0 Products and Services list.
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