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Tags Or Labels… Which Is Better?
Tags & Labels are slowly replacing Categories & Folders. Generally Folders for email and labels – popularized by Gmail, aims to bring the offline concept to the online world. Someone so used to offline world should find labels a better representation. Also, labels might suit in situations where tags could get misundertood for graffiti & sorting. Folksonomy in general enable better searching and simplify classification/grouping. Tags have the potential to empower or even easily replace search feature for the mainstream users. Labels might suit better for personal use while tags would work for both public and private usage, which are generally well understood. Tagging is also getting commercial with TagCow, paying 4 cents to properly tag a group of 5 photos.
Profile Your Customers’ Social Media Behaviors
Monetising social web has been an unsolved misery. Most of the startups in this social web space rely on advertising supported revenue. Since majority of the startups in this space are ‘built to flip’, only a few could be lucky to exit with a acquisition. But many advertisers are of opinion that ‘return on ad investment’ is very less on social web and are discouraged by the results so far. For those startups who have explored a solution are facing difficult privacy issues to deal with. Groundswell – a book, blog & powerful tool by Forrester Research is attempting to help companies and advertisers profile the users of social media behaviors & attitudes for free to achieve a marketing goal, which until recently had been reserved for high-paying corporate Forrester clients.
Happy April 1st: Almost Convincing 2008 Tech Stories
Almost convincing tech stories on April 1st existed for a while and this trend is now getting more popular. There is no dearth of 2008 stories. Read through them and have some fun. gDay with MATE announcement by Google Australia, giving the users an ability to search content even before it is created. ‘Gmail Custom Time‘ to be on time, every time – ability to send mails to the past. Michael Arrington is suing Facebook for $25 Million in Statutory damages. Cnet is reporting the acquisition of Tiger beat by Tech Crunch and re-positioning it as Crunch Kids. Better read through Seth Godin’s ‘When Poets get angry‘. If you find a good one, post it in the comments. Here is the complete updated list.
Auctions Tracker For Roaming eBay Sellers
You are at work and your company’s firewall blocks you from accessing eBay. ‘On the Move’ most of the time but still want to keep effective track of your eBay sales & customers. With ahTXT, stay connected to get information on sales, offers, feedback and other events in real time on your cell phone for free. Respond to your customers queries quickly and turn them into sales before the buyer finds another one. Sellers need to just verify their eBay account, specify provider and cell phone number to get started. This tool was developed by eBay powersellers having 100% positive feedback who understand such challenges. Looks like it’s currently US only.
Aggregating the Content Producer
Lately much has been H.Y.P.E.D. about friendfeed. Aggregated content presentation from a producer/contributer perspective is a new paradigm. The first generation feed readers made it easy to track individual content sources rather than the contributer. With friendfeed, producers decide what to share and the critics, spectators simply decide which contributer to follow. Greasemonkey script to filter by individual service should be built into friendfeed & UI needs betterment. Unintentional spamming challenge should be dealt with. Their ‘Comment’ feature could migrate some of the user participation away from the content source. Ability to subscribe from the individual’s friendfeed page is missing. Within days of announcing their API, useful apps are just around the corner.
Users Powered Hosted Customer Service
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.
LinkedIn Is Morphing Into An Destination Site
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.
Sphere Is To Visitors, Zemanta Is To Bloggers
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.
Craigslist Embraces Localisation For Growth
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.
Web Search With Privacy Enhanced Search Engine
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.
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