After over a year of operation, Spotplex is closing up shop, according to a message on their site. The company states that, "We regret to inform you that Spotplex is going offline. This was a very hard decision for us and we are sure you will miss the service as much as we do."
I wrote about Spotplex, back in November after having a conversation with their CEO, Doyon Kim (previously founded Dialpad, which sold to Yahoo 2005). At the time, I expressed concerns with the way that their site operates. In order for the content from a site to be included on Spotplex, the publisher of that content had to install a code snippit on their site, which also tracked analytics. The most trafficked stories were then displayed on Spotplex's homepage. I think that this restriction severely limited the amount of content that was included on the site, thus drastically reducing its value. This may not have been the best approach, in comparison to sites like Digg and Techmeme which rely on community input and not publisher participation.
TechCrunch is reporting that the reason for Spotplex's shuttering is "lack of adequate funding." Whether that means that they failed to find additional investors for the startup or that their money was poorly managed is unclear right now. I tend to think that the lack of funding might be attributed to the site not catching on as well as expected.
There is no doubt that Spotplex had talented and experienced people behind it, but, in my opinion, there were some key flaws in the site's core functionality, which really hurt them in the end.
Monday morning, Zoho, the online productivity suite, announced full offline functionality for its Zoho Writer product. Zoho had previously released partial offline functionality for Writer earlier this year, but you could only read the documents and not edit them. What good is that? Luckily, as a little post-Thanksgiving gift, we now have full offline editing, utilizing Google Gears (download Google Gears for Windows or Mac from CNET Download.com).
The offline functionality here couldn't be any easier. If you need to go offline, just hit the "Go Offline" button at the top, give Zoho permission to use Google Gears, and you are ready to go. If you make any edits to the documents offline, when you get Internet access again, you just hit the "Go Online" link and there you are! Everything is automatically synced back to Zoho's servers, and you are good to go.
I have used the offline functionality, built on Google Gears, for Google Reader on many occasions, so I am not one bit surprised at how well it works with Zoho. Google has built a killer platform for offline Web applications. Zoho is leading the way right now, offering offline functionality for its word processor, even before Google Apps does. Zoho currently offers 14 online productivity services, so maybe it's time for Microsoft to start taking note.
via VentureBeat
The Web 2.0 style IT management tool, Paglo launched in beta on Monday.
Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing. For example, if you are concerned about how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on computers at your company and want to make sure that you are complying with your license, Paglo allows you to view that statistic in real time.
There are three key elements to Paglo: the Crawler, Search Index, and UI. If you are a network administrator, for example, you install the Paglo Crawler on your computer, and it will crawl the entire network, looking for computers, installed applications, devices, such as BlackBerrys, and information about users. That data is then uploaded to Paglo's secure servers and loaded into your personal Search Index.
Once all of this data is online, you can access it from any Web browser, so your access is not limited to only when you are at work. Maybe network admins can finally get some vacation time and still stay up to date with what's going on.
Paglo's UI basically works by allowing you to search for key terms you are curious about within your network. It can also, for example, allow you to find the e-mail address for any user on the network if there is a problem with his or her system. The real value of Paglo, in my opinion, however, is its Dashboard feature.
Paglo's Dashboard can be compared to a customizable home page, with space for widgets that show you different data about your network. So, if you want to save your search for computers with Office installed, you can put that data on your Dashboard, in graph form, for quick reference.
When I talked with Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Chris Waters, one of the things that they were the most excited with is the ability to share search queries with the Paglo community. If one IT pro comes up with an extremely useful, but complicated, search query, you can just grab that query and put it on your Dashboard, instead of having to come up with it yourself. This, in combination with Paglo's open API, creates a great opportunity for a variety of mashups and dashboard widgets.
Paglo is concentrating on delivering a quality, free product for now but will most likely be adding additional premium functionality in the future for a price. It's nice to see Paglo bringing IT into the Web 2.0 realm. Hopefully it will gain enough traction to grow into an essential tool.
We haven't heard much from the social news and analytics site, Spotplex, since the initial preview in February. Today, it launched an improved version of the site.
For those who are not familiar with Spotplex, it offers up a snippet of code that blog owners can install on their site. That snippet does two things. First, it provides information about its traffic to the blog owner, much like Google Analytics. Second, and most interesting, it uses traffic data from the sites that have this code snippet installed to determine the most popular stories in a variety of categories. One major complaint with the site initially was that larger sites would have a huge advantage in getting popular stories to the home page since they get a lot of traffic. Spotplex has corrected that and it now judges an article's popularity relative to the traffic that the site normally gets.
Among the other improvements it is offering today is a new geographical tracking feature, so you can see what stories are popular in different parts of the world and blog analytics tools that are customized for the various blogging platforms.
The major problem I see with Spotplex is that in order for the stories on its front page to be accurate, a large percentage of bloggers have to have its code installed. This is a vastly different approach from what Digg or Techmeme do. They give all sites an equal chance of making the front page, regardless of whether or not they know that they are participating. This results in a much more accurate representation of the most popular stories on the Internet. Spotplex, however, maintains this approach is flawed because these sites rely on the contribution of users. Spotplex is hoping that its customized analytics tools will coax blog owners into installing the code, but I'm not so sure that this is a big enough draw.
I had the chance to talk with Spotplex's CEO, Doyon Kim, about this release and how they might go about attracting more blog owners to use the service. He clued me in that they are working on some key partnerships with the people behind popular blogging tools such as Blogger and Six Apart. This could help to significantly increase Spotplex's user base, but we will have to wait and see how that pans out.
Right now, Spotplex has served up 7,000 code snips to bloggers and it estimates that it has 3,000 to 4,000 bloggers with the code currently installed. Spotplex seems to have a good idea going in theory, but in order for this to be pulled off correctly, it will have to have mass participation by the blogosphere, which will prove to be very tough.
NBC and News Corp.'s new Internet video site Hulu is finally seeing the light of day. On Monday, Hulu finally launched the private beta of its site, which includes almost 100 different TV series and movies. After a number of delays, Hulu has its site out the door in October, as promised.
Hulu is a Web platform for viewing and sharing TV shows, movies, and clips. The programming selection (via NewTeeVee PDF) for Hulu on launch is pretty impressive. Content providers include Fox, NBC, E, Bravo, FX, SciFi, USA, and Universal. Hopefully, we will start to see some more TV networks and movie studios jump on this, because I'll admit that I was a little disappointed to see that a couple of my personal favorites, Lost and Adult Swim weren't included in the list.
Sharing videos in Hulu works a lot like YouTube in that you can e-mail videos to your friends, or toss it up on your own Web site via the embed feature. Hulu actually takes sharing one step further than YouTube. You can set start and stop points on the videos that you are sharing, so if you only want to share one scene, or a particularly good 20 seconds of a video, you can do that.
According to TechCrunch, like many of the TV networks' online video solutions, unfortunately Hulu will only make the most recent five episodes of a given series available. Given that I do not know the specific terms of the deals that the companies involved have with Hulu, in my mind, there is no reason for them to start pulling episodes after five weeks of being on the site. As long as they can serve up advertisements with the videos, I think that it would be beneficial to the users, Hulu, content providers, and advertisers to keep those videos up. Although I would imagine that this policy would be different for TV shows that have already run their course, such as Arrested Development.
Hulu is looking very promising, and I expect to see a lot of content providers jumping on the bandwagon in the near future. Being a private beta, it is very likely that features and functionality will change significantly between now and the official public launch. That said, I'm putting downloadable videos (with or without ads), formatted for computers and portable devices on the top of my wish list for future releases.
Today, Techmeme unveiled a new feature that they call the "Techmeme Leaderboard." The leaderboard essentially makes data that Techmeme has had for years available to readers. It lists the top 100 sources for Techmeme stories, ranked by Presence, which is described as, "...the probability that a random Techmeme headline at a random time over the past month was published by that source."
Obviously there is going to be some bias in any "Top 100" list, regardless of the topic and that is the case with this list. Regardless of bias, I think that there is a lot less potential for tampering with this list than there is for tampering with the current king of the popular blog lists, Technorati, who just counts unique links to a blog to determine its rank. Technorati is going to have to scramble now to try and figure out a way to get back on top.
I think that Techmeme's list is a pretty accurate reflection of what I consider to be the most influential blogs and news sites out there today. The leaderboard is a great addition to Techmeme's already stellar offerings and I think it will keep people coming back almost as much as their front page news does. So, for all you ambitious bloggers out there, now you have a new list to shoot for.
Check out the Techmeme Leaderboard here.
There are a few different ways to view music in Contrastream. The first and default view is called "Fresh Albums." This contains new albums that are very active on the site. "Top Hype" contains the albums that are getting the most votes and activity on the site. "Upcoming" and "New Releases" are self explanatory.
Contrastream places an emphasis on keeping the site filled with true indie music. As a result, it has introduced a feature called "Flag as Sell-out." If you think that a band on the site has screwed their fans out of money or has gone too mainstream, then you can flag them as sellouts. If a band/album gets enough of these votes, then they will be taken off of the site. Contrastream's about page details its philosophy, "With a group opinion, those artists won't receive the promotion when other artists deserve it."
Contrastream goes live to the public on September 3, according to TechCrunch, but you can put your e-mail in now and hope for an invite if you just can't wait.
I've spent the better part of the day today checking out a new web video creation site, called Animoto. The concept behind Animoto is that you upload images to the site, either from your computer, or online photo sites, such as Flickr, Facebook, or Photobucket, pick a song to go along with it, and Animoto will automatically create a cool video for you. Unfortunately, right now Animoto doesn't include support for putting videos into your masterpiece. Yes, there are already services out there that make it easy to create picture slideshows, but Animoto takes it a step further.
Animoto uses a technology, developed in house, that analyzes the pictures and music that you upload and creates a movie, based on the genre, energy, build, and rhythm of the song. This ensures that the movie flows well with the music that it is set to and that no two movies that Animoto generates are the same. After Animoto analyzes, produces, and creates your video, you can tweak it by adding or deleting images, or changing up the soundtrack. You can also perform, what they call, a "One Click Remix." That feature tells Animoto to generate the movie again, giving it a new feel.
If you are questioning whether or not these people know what they are doing in video production, no need to worry. The company was founded by producers from Comedy Central, ABC, and MTV. Animoto is launching to the public on August 14th and I recommend that you give it a spin. Can Animoto make you the next Spielberg? Well, probably not, but Animoto is definitely a slick, fun, easy way to compile your photos into energetic videos.
Today I'm checking out the new news aggregator, Newser. Wow, that's a mouthful.
When I first loaded the site up, I really liked what I saw. It has a very slick design, and the news is presented really well. The concept for content selection is pretty good too.
Newser's editors hand-pick the top stories of the moment and write their own summaries of them, also pulling in images relevant to the story. This style of presenting news is going back a little bit to Slashdot's style and moving away from the more hands-off approach of Digg and Techmeme. For me, however, Newser has some fundamental flaws that I just cannot get over.
The first and most serious flaw of Newser is that there is no blog presence whatsoever. The Newser page of top 100 sources shows the 100 sites that Newser's editors most often cite. Clocking in at No. 1 (at the time of writing) is the Associated Press, with 340 stories since March. On the other hand, there is not one single story from any of the top blogs, including sites like Engadget and TechCrunch.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with having AP content on Newser. The AP is a very important and influential news organization, and it should definitely have a portion of the content, but if you are going to do an Internet news site, you have to embrace new media, at least to some extent. Having 340 stories from the AP and 0 from Engadget is just absolutely ridiculous.
The other thing that seems pretty curious about the site's concept is that on its About page, it states that "Newser seeks to offer information free of bias." As Josh Catone at Read/Write Web says, "when you add a human element, you unavoidably add a bias as well." I absolutely agree. It's impossible to be unbiased when there is such a large human element involved in the selection process.
I think that Newser could have something good going for it. I like the idea of having news sites with hand-picked content to balance out the automatically generated sites. The editors just really need to expand the spectrum of the content that their editors are picking from and maybe throw in a few social features, such as comments, just for good measure.
