Webware

Back in 2007, we put out two April Fools' Day posts chronicling fake and absurd start-ups. One was a Google Maps mashup for rodent sightings in New York restaurants. The other was a prenatal version of Twitter where unborn children could post status updates. A few readers took the bait in the comment sections, but it appears our ideas weren't so far off, as both have come to fruition just a year and a half later.

The first is, true-to-form, a maps mashup where New York City residents can see where local eateries have had rat-related health code violations. The site was launched in late October by New York City health officials as a way for users to help police local businesses and feed data for scientific research.

The Rat Information Portal's map lets you browse by borough to see where there have been high inspection and infestation rates of rats. Yum.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The maps portion of the site isn't as easy to use as a Google Map, but it does a fine job at letting you filter the data to show all sorts of juicy tidbits, like which places had the most follow-up inspections and how far gone infestations were in each part of town. The data goes all the way back to 2006. Consider it yet another thing to check about your new neighborhood before taking the plunge on that new apartment.

Our other fake start-up, called UltraSoundd, was based around the idea of taking sound from unborn babies and converting it into status updates. In our implementation, this involved sticking a telephone to your stomach and using dial-up Internet. Designer Corey Menscher has come up with a far more ingenious plan however, by creating a sensor belt that will automatically convert any baby movements into Twitter status updates such as this one:

Your baby kicks--you get a Tweet. All courtesy of Corey Menscher's Kickbee belt.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Menscher calls it the "Kickbee," and in its current implementation it looks like a weight belt with a bunch of wires hanging off it. Within its folds is an array of sensors, a microcontroller and Bluetooth transmitter to send everything off to a nearby laptop. So far it has been tracking kicks and sending them to Twitter since early this month. You can find the entire project page for it, along with Menscher's other works here.

UPDATE: Gossip blog Valleywag decided to out this for what it is--an April Fool's joke. Oh, well, it would've been funny to see people pick up on it.

With the rise of "microblogging" services like Twitter that limit the number of characters in a post, URL-shortening sites like TinyURL and URLtea have taken off. A new service that just launched, Urlrurl, promises to step it up a notch by tracking the popularity of online memes that are tossed around the Web through viral link-sharing.

"Urlrurl.com stands out from other link shortening services because of its patented Relay-Stick algorithm," a release from the new start-up read, "which dives into the links put through its shortener and exposes common memes across the pages people are clicking on." That sounds pretty cool. It's also connected to the Twitter API, plugging it into one of the biggest pools of URL-shortening activity on the Web.

And there's more: "In early June, a free stats program will launch, as well as a premium service for bloggers and publishers," the release continued. "The premium service will allow publishers to register their site with Urlrurl.com and receive deep insight into how content and memes have traversed the web." Considering that no one can really tell where Internet memes emerge these days--4Chan, Fark, Digg, iVillage--this kind of service, provided it actually works, could give some interesting and oft-hilarious insights.

Urlrurl is headquartered in New York with development offices in China, and counts TechCrunch czar Michael Arrington among its angel investors.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

We just got the word on a new social network called UltraSoundd. It's aimed at unborn children who want to blog their lives and post pictures and videos of their dwelling space to share with friends. Other social networks have similar efforts, but with their parents managing the profile and posting updates. Ultrasoundd lets the kid do all the work. The site just secured a $2 million round of Series A funding from Gerber's parent company Novartis.

To set up an Ultrasoundd account, parents need simply register with the site and download a small, 130KB Java application to their mobile phones. Once installed, an expecting mother just needs to duct tape her phone to her stomach, and the program will run automatically--sending blog updates to the child's profile page. Landlines work for users without mobile phones, but the parent will need to dial in manually.

We ran into a few problems with this service. For one thing, our photos were turning out dark. Like really dark. We were also getting a ton of spam from other Ultrasoundd members with garbled messages and friends requests that the service calls Amnioticalls. We also got a text message that said "0/?/womb RDY 2 PRTY?"

Ultrasoundd is an innovative service; we just don't think it's ready yet. Things just feel a little premature.

Here in NYC, we've been hearing a lot about rat problems in restaurants. That's a problem that the guys behind Ratatattle are trying to combat; they've created a real-time Google Maps mashup that lets users report on which dining establishments in their cities have had issues with rodents recently. It's completely user-generated: if you happen to see a rat, just head to Ratatattle, hit the "tattle" button, and you'll get a series of prompts for entering the dining venue, number of rats, size of rats, and whether or not they were anywhere near the food.

Ratatattle's user-generated Google map mashup.

(Credit: Ratatattle)

It's a great resource if you're new to a city and are concerned about the levels of rodent infestation--the directory is very detailed, right on down to letting you know whether it was the KFC or the Taco Bell in a KFC-Taco Bell hybrid where the rats were spotted.

Ratatattle is still in beta, but the creators have planned a whole host of new features for the full version, due to launch in early June. They've hinted at real-time tracking of "ratspots" within cities like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. Additionally, there are additions in the works that will incorporate embedded videos (for when you catch that sneaky rat on your camera phone!), a Digg-like "RatRank" of the scariest-looking rodents spotted, as well as a social network for "rat-aware Internet users."

They're even indicating that they may expand to include mashups to track the presence of other pesky animals, like cockroaches, moles, and feral pigs. Unfortunately, such offshoots won't have the rhythmic ring of "Ratatattle," but I still think that it's important to know which regions of the country have feral pig infestation problems. Talk about an untapped niche of Web 2.0.