I'm at the San Francisco New Tech Meetup tonight, immersed in Web 2.0 startupville. Tonight's lineup of pitches:
Conduit. A utility for making toolbars to go with your blog or site. We recently covered the tool's new capability that lets the user swap between different toolbars they've installed. The concept is interesting: It lets site publishers put their sites into toolbars. I didn't expect users to take up this idea, but the company's executives report strong growth and more than 12 million users.
SezWho. This is an interesting system that allows users to rate other users' content, like their uploaded videos and blog comments. It's distributed, so if you have a good reputation as a contributor on one site and then you go to a new site, you good reputation can go with you, as well as links to all your contributions on other sites. Requires site owners to install links or plug-ins on their site, and SezWho then gets all the data, which it distributes to member sites. Interesting, since it knocks a few bricks out of the walls that sites tend to build up around their user bases. Very good for the new media powerhouse: the blog network.
US4real. Yet another real estate mashup that combines data on cost of living, crime, school performance, etc., with real estate and rental listings. It's a bit rough at the moment, and there are several very well-funded companies in this space. Also, it returns data only by city, not neighborhood--that's not specific enough. It does appear to have a comprehensive listing of houses and rentals, though, and it has a cool feature that flags houses whose prices have dropped a lot recently. Also, it will let you draw an outline around an area you're interested in, and will e-mail you when houses on it go up for sale. Cool.
GlobalMotion. This is a wiki focused on locations, maps, and geotagged images. It's an interesting way to navigate geodata, and it reads in location-tagged images already on EveryTrail, Panoramio, and Flickr, which is kind of neat. A good question from the audience, though: Why not just contribute this functionality to Wikipedia, which already has about 200,000 entries about locations? The answer wasn't very satisfying.
CrazyMenu. This was my favorite site of the evening. It's a utility for business lunching. It helps you corral co-workers together for a lunch, decide where to go, and even create group orders that you can transmit to your restaurant before you get there. Since I love lunch, I look forward to trying this out. Great idea.
Conduit users can now get packs of toolbars and switch between them easily.
With today's release, when Conduit users add toolbars after the first one they have, each becomes an option on a drop-down item within the toolbar. Conduit is also releasing multitoolbar packs with preloaded combinations of toolbars. There's a Blogs pack (Webware is included in it) as well as Music, Sports, Games, and Video.
I also like the notification Conduit users get when they surf to a site that has a toolbar they haven't yet installed. It's like the little RSS icon that lights up in some browsers when you go to a page with a feed. It makes it very easy to add sites to your Conduit lineup.
Conduit is, in a sense, a one line-high, single-page aggregator. You can add a lot of sites and feeds to your Conduit lineup, just like you can with a SPA, and quickly jump between them.
Developers can also write little widgets for toolbars. For example, the Lufthansa toolbar lets you look up flight data.
To get the wide view of what's important to me, I still prefer visiting a single-page aggregator like Netvibes. But Conduit is worth a look. It makes accessing your favorite sites very easy, and it adds utility to them as well.
Conduit Chief Marketing Officer Reena Jadhav explains the new features in the video at right.
Here's a way to maybe keep your audience engaged with your Web site even when they're not on it: offer them a branded browser toolbar. Conduit's newish Community Toolbar feature makes it easy to build a toolbar (for free) that you can offer to your site visitors (also for free).
When I heard about this I thought, Great, just what we need: more toolbar clutter. Also, we have experience at CNET with toolbar downloads. For us, they weren't worth the development time. Conduit is a little different, though. Regarding clutter, you're only supposed to get one Conduit toolbar at a time. If you download the Webware toolbar, for example, and then another Conduit bar from another site, you won't end up with two toolbars (in theory); you'll get instead the option to switch between the two toolbars in your browser.
The Webware toolbar
And as far as development, since it takes very little time and costs nothing to create a toolbar, site owners really have nothing to lose by offering one.
I'm impressed with the options Conduit offers toolbar builders. In addition to the standard Web and site search, it offers links to current stories (via RSS feeds) and static pages, a mini audio player (for podcasts or music), a chat window so your site's fans can talk with each other even when they're not on your site, and other widgets that are not out of place in a persistent toolbar. In the future, Conduit will include widgets that can float over a Web page.
Working on a toolbar.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I ran into some implementation snags, though. I couldn't get the audio player to work on two different systems, and the chat function annoyingly resized my browser window, twice. And despite being told that Conduit wouldn't install multiple toolbars in my browser, I did in fact end up with two toolbars onscreen at the same time.
As a Web publisher, I like the idea of giving readers persistent exposure to Webware--via a toolbar, a widget, an e-mail, or anything else that keeps them aware of the site. But as a user, I can't see myself using yet another toolbar. Nothing that Conduit offers can't be done better with dedicated tools. (For example, I use Google's toolbar for searching, because it offers more options; I read my high-priority feeds in Yahoo Widgets; and I listen to audio and chat with users on sites themselves.) Some of Conduit's numbers indicate that I have a minority opinion, but not all do: according to Conduit, there are 12 million Conduit toolbar users who performed 22 million searches last month. That's an impressive volume, although it's also fewer than two searches per user per month, very low for a search interface.
I can't get very excited about custom toolbars, but for some sites I think the idea works. Sites with users who can't tear themselves away from the content or community come to mind: social networks and sports sites, for example. For other sites, Conduit's toolbars seem innocuous.
And here we have two more companies that were featured Tuesday at AlwaysOn's media event:
Like many of the companies presenting at this conference, Critical Mention has released a variety of products, some geared toward corporate clients and others toward individual media junkies. Critical Mention's raison d'etre in both cases is to connect Internet users to what's happening on TV. It's developed a set of tools that help companies, agencies, and political campaigns find out when they get television mentions, but Critical Mention also has a downlodable toolbar that can perform similar functions for ordinary Web users. So, if you're really desperate to see when Justin Timberlake makes a televised appearance--here you go.
While Critical Mention uses toolbars as one tactic in its overall strategy, Conduit is completely centered on toolbars. With Conduit, you or your organization can make a custom toolbar that integrates, well, whatever you think a toolbar should have. That includes Google search, local weather, drop-down bookmarks, radio, and even messaging and chat functions. (And, yes, you can make your own personal Conduit toolbar if you so choose.) Conduit gained a good bit of buzz when TechCrunch used Conduit to make a promotional "CrunchBar" for its TechCrunch 8 party in New York a few months ago.
All Conduit toolbars are free, but the company ropes in some of the revenue from the Google ads that are displayed when someone searches using the toolbar. It seems like a rather indirect mode of monetization, but hey, there's been a lot of positive talk about Conduit's business model recently, which means they must be doing something right.
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