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Call it Customer Service 2.0 - Universal support by crowdsourcing. getsatisfaction.com a platform for facilitating user feedback & discussion about any sort of products & services. Increase your 'Reputation Capital' and customer loyalty by addressing user's concerns and listening to them - a sense of belonging. While users appreciate the transparency, keeping the whole conversation public without any moderation makes the companies officially responsible. Users can also help each other and share ideas on any product. Moderation would be required in the long run to maintain sanity when threads turn into battle grounds. More than 1000 companies are covered, of which about 40% have chosen to respond to customer queries on the site. API will enable the distribution of the conversations across the web in the near future. (0) Trying to ease the 'Extreme Networking' need, LinkedIn started as a simple social networking feature for professionals. In an attempt to generate more revenue, cornered itself into being a recruitment portal. Added 'Answers' feature to get repeat visitors by enabling it's members to actively engage and share knowledge. The latest UI changes - though not that great, Network Update feeds, Corporate Profiles directory, Friends Recommendation engine, API announcement & miscellaneous minor features is an indication of embracing web 2.0. LinkedIn is looking for growth by being a new 'destination site' for the professional community. They should be looking at doing something like Hacker News/StartupBug in the near future. (0) The 'longtail' of bloggers will find the semantic layer offered by Zemanta very useful in doing a thorough research for their upcoming blog posts besides offering their visitors enhanced & enriched content. This browser based addon which currently works only for Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad enables bloggers to find and append similar & related semantically smart content from their index of 300 top media sources & other Zemanta user blogs. Their recommendation engine analyses posts to provide contextual images, links & tags suggestions. Their not-so distant competitors 'Sphere It' & Proximic allows visitors reactively find contextual content across blogosphere. Zemanta is aiming to be the blogger's geeky friend. Their future feature rich iterations should definitely enhance blogger's experience. This is a good beginning for the semantic web. (1) Is it too little, too late? Localisation happens to be another trend for growth in usage and revenue for most online services. More than a feature, It's a strategy for Paypal and now Craigslist is supporting multiple languages in an attempt to expand it's reach internationally. This may not affect the print media the same way it happened in US, but atleast will give the local established competitors a run for their money. India's diversity should be a challenge for them and China's would be an interesting battle to watch. (0) User's search logs are either retained, deleted or anonymised. Some of them even link searches to the user's info and use it for behavioral targeting. Majority of the search engines do not provide and opt-out of behavioral targeting option for users. None of the major engines offer any kind of control to the users. Ask tried with AskEraser. Despite other limited improvements, average users have little or no privacy. There is a market for Search with Privacy for new startups. PrivacyFinder by CMU Labs allows you to define privacy levels and helps you search Y!, Google & Shopping with that set privacy level. Ability to compare user privacy standards with the web site's privacy policy using P3P adds another layer of comfort. (0) Can one company's API destroy it's competitor's product line? The consequence of main feature of Cemaphore Systems's 'MailShadow' for Google Apps built by taking advantage of Google Apps open API allowing to synchronise between Outlook and Google's gmail, calendars and contacts could replace Microsoft Exchange Servers with Google Apps servers according to Miguel Heleft. The challenge is to get the corporate IT manager's to embrace this change with a lot of belief by addressing their concerns with passion & with a sense of belonging. This synching ability is an positive next step for Google Apps while 'cloud' computing scores another point. (0) Having logged into Google account, do a Google web search, you'll notice a new option 'Note this' for every result in the SERP's for .com and also it's international sites. This is a neat extension of bookmarking without having to visit the actual web page. Using this option changes the status to 'Duly noted' for individual results. Unfortunately, the results page does not retain the 'Duly noted' status when navigated between different pages of search results. Additionally it throws up the miniature notepad which eases the management of noted items. Another benefit in terms of minimizing the mini notepad while the user continues to browse the search results on a given page. Atleast an option to retain the widget when navigating across pages should be a useful. (0) Thumbshots with annotations in search results is a past. With Searchme, the new visual search engine offers an option to browse through search results in the regular format or clickthorugh the album of real screenshots of actual search results. Beauty is that the selected visual result highlights the textual result when browsing in dual mode. Textual results can be hidden if only visual format is preferred. Relevant vertical search options are provided while the search keyword or phrase is typed dynamically for the users to choose. Quantitatively, it's yet to catch up in terms of indexing the web. Addition of some elements of social web would be better. Ability to navigate between categories in results pages would be another good usecase. Surprisingly they don't blog which is a rarity these days. (0) Jaanix is taking the crowdsourcing to the next level by considering clicks, ratings, tags, saves, comments, and new posts to identify your interests. Digg probably does some or all of this with their stealth algorithm. Sliders help users tune the main page dynamically to suit their topic which is very handy. Only the firefox bookmarklet allows the users to submit stories to Jaanix. UI across the site needs a lot of improvement with Jaanix. Votetheuser, not the story is an attempt by YCombinator's Hacker News to consider the user karma in ranking the submitted stories. (0) Can creating web forms get any simpler? May be Yes. But with hosted web form creation service Wufoo, more than just form creation can be accomplished like even integrating your payment gateway within a few minutes. Very neat & flashy UI adds fun to the form creation task. Creating even complex of the web forms is made simple with good usability. Hosting & storage is cheap these days, but paid options are quite expensive. Pricing based on unique technology will not give them an edge in the logn run. Besides generic options and without being just US centric, a good amount of international usecases does exist. Wish they had a self-hosted script for those who prefer to manage forms on their own server. Roaming workforce will hugely benefit with the notification feature. (2)| | |
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