Webware

Docstoc has a new service for site owners that makes Web documents more readily accessible. Called Docshots, it presents any linked document in a pop-up viewer that site visitors can read without leaving the page.

If you've ever seen the pop-up thumbnail previews from Snap.com, the idea behind Docshots is the same. You simply hover your mouse over the link and the viewer pops up. Presumably the people visiting your page won't leave and forget to come back if they can read it right there. It also cuts down on any embedded Docstoc Flash viewers that can slow page load times.

To install Docshots, site owners must drop in special code into the body of their site's template. Once it's been added, the tool goes live on all your pages, both new and old. Like Snap's previews, links that have been given the Docshots treatment get a little orange page logo beside them to let you know it's not a normal URL.

While convenient, this new service isn't something I'd put on my own blog. I find Snap's preview service distracting, and with Docshots it's not just a site thumbnail--it's an entire document. I will give a nod to its simplicity though. It's a noble attempt at trying to rid Web pages of embedded Flash documents--something that unlike videos, are hard to enjoy when not viewed in full-screen.

Here's a demo of how it works:

Weddingbook is the highest-ranking wedding-planning application on social network Facebook, which recently awarded developer WedSnap $25,000.

(Credit: WedSnap)

The Knot on Monday announced that it has acquired WedSnap, the developer of the popular online wedding-planning application Weddingbook.

With the merger, The Knot is marrying its site with the highest-ranking wedding application on Facebook, which last year awarded WedSnap $25,000 in seed money as part of its FBFund competition.

While The Knot remained mum on the purchase price, it touted the features Weddingbook will bring to its site.

The Weddingbook application features community boards on which users share wedding advice, a tool to create a wedding profile box to post updates to the upcoming nuptials, and direct links to the couple's gift registries.

"With this acquisition, The Knot community broadens by branching into the fastest-growing social network of brides on Facebook, while Weddingbook members will have access to our extensive repertoire of tools, content, and vendor directories," David Liu, The Knot's CEO, said in a statement.

On Tuesday, Glassdoor.com, an online community that offers career advice, released its first Employees' Choice Awards, which lists the top 50 "Best Places to Work." According to the report, which features data from employees at more than 11,000 companies operating in the U.S., General Mills is the best company to work for in the United States. In the tech space, Netflix and Adobe made it into the top five and Google wasn't far behind in seventh place. Google CEO Eric Schmidt also received an 89 percent approval rating from employees, while Netflix's CEO Reed Hastings managed a perfect 100 percent approval rating. Apple is ranked 19th in employee satisfaction, while Microsoft failed to make the list. The survey was conducted by polling thousands of employees at over 11,000 companies and asking them what they thought of their employer. They were also asked to evaluate their employer's CEO.

Location-based social network Brightkite announced Monday that it has added Facebook Connect support to its service. According to the company, Facebook Connect will now allow Brightkite users to update their Facebook status, as well as publish their location, notes, and photos directly to their news feed. The offering was in beta for the past few weeks, but Brightkite claims it has "worked the kinks out" and anyone using both services can start cross-posting immediately.

SnapMyLife, a company that provides access to photos uploaded from mobile phones around the world, announced Tuesday that it's trying to start a grassroots campaign around New Year's Eve. The company is asking its 500,000 global users to take a snapshot of their New Year's celebrations at 11:59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m. and upload those photos to their accounts so SnapMyLife can create a collage of New Year's celebrations. Upon taking a picture with their mobile phone, users need to tag the image as "newyears" and upload it to the service. Once complete, SnapMyLife will combine all the images and publish the collage on its site in early January.

TechCrunch is reporting that online directory YellowPages.com acquired the domain name YP.com for $3.85 million in early December. YellowPages.com, which is owned by AT&T, acquired the domain from an online classifieds service called LiveDeal. YP.com now redirects to YellowPages.com.

FriendMobilizer: A Facebook pretender, with ads.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This past July, Facebook's excellent iPhone application joined similar apps for BlackBerry and Palm to bring core Facebook features to mobile socializers in a distinctive Facebook wrapper. Curiously, there's no official software for the Windows Mobile platform, and no word that a program is in the works. In fact, Facebook has kept mum to my inquiries, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile team responded with evasive PR nonsense.

That doesn't mean social butterflies of the Windows Mobile breed are left in a lurch. Two software companies have stepped up to bring their own freeware versions of Facebook to Windows Mobile smartphones and PocketPCs. There's FriendMobilizer, which debuted in July for Windows Mobile Smartphone and PocketPC, and Snap2Face, which just released its first full version on Thursday. Neither is as simple to install as the sanctioned Facebook mobile apps, nor are they as comely to behold. Yet both are acceptable stopgaps until Facebook comes out with a long-awaited replacement. They're certainly more convenient than hitting up Facebook's mobile site, m.facebook.com.

Snap2Face and FriendMobilizer give you many of the same features as the Facebook-branded mobile apps, but with little of the visual refinement. Snap2Face uses a tabbed interface to switch between your profile and your friends' pages, then places mini Facebook icons at the bottom of each screen so you can partake in photo-viewing and message-sending activities. Snap2Face also boasts a photo album slide show and a feature that syncs Facebook profile photos to your phone contacts. Both would have been neat had the app not been plagued by crashes and hang-ups that required us to frequently refresh the screen or restart the app. Installation could also be smoother, but because one component of Snap2Face is a third-party Facebook app, you'll need to give it log-in permission via Facebook.com.

FriendMobilizer looks even less like Facebook.com, opting for a table-of-contents-like interface that lists new notifications to the left and places an ad to the right. Other actions are navigated to through the context menu, a system that actually works because it requires less scrolling than Snap2Face and lays out the tasks in a form factor that's familiar to Windows Mobile users. The benefits pretty much stop there when it becomes clear that FriendMobilizer is a shortcuts portal that opens pages in Facebook's mobile site. At 381KB, FriendMobilizer takes up one-third the space of Snap2Face's 982KB app, yet only has a fraction of the capability.

Snap2Face resembles Facebook, but seems to suffer inconsistent performance.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Though Snap2Face is by far the better product of the two, it would struggle to hold its own against Facebook's faster, smoother, and prettier proprietary apps for Palm, BlackBerry, and iPhone.

That begs the question: why is Facebook dragging in releasing its own Windows Mobile app? Until it does, FriendMobilizer gets the opportunity to make a buck off an ad placement and Snap2Face gets to revel in being the only convincing show in town. That's not a bad thing, but it's also not the best thing. Hurry, Facebook, hurry.

Ever wanted to post a screenshot or thumbnail of a Web site on your blog? Probably not. But if you're like us then this situation comes up all the time. Enter SnapCasa, a service that lets you drop in a preview of any site in one of three thumbnail sizes that will regularly update as time goes on. We debated using a service like this for this year's Webware 100 winner pages, but opted instead to use static images since seeing what Web services looked like years later can be kind of interesting (see Archive.org).

The tool works by having you drop in a special IMG code into your post that links up to SnapCasa's servers. It will pull in updates to that image occasionally--with future versions providing real-time screen grabs and the option to change how big and what format you want the thumbnail to be.

Competing service Snap offers some of these features already with its SnapShots product, but wraps its live screenshots around text links instead of embedded images. I've embedded a few examples below, which should update despite this post gathering dust.

There was a strange moment this afternoon at the Snap Summit 2.0 in San Francisco. Dave Morin, Facebook's Senior Platform Manager was fielding some audience questions after spending the better part of an hour giving a very broad overview of Facebook's development efforts to a room full of mostly developers. For many, the event was the highlight of the day in a conference whose very promotional materials were made to emulate the look of a Facebook profile page.

An audience member in the back called Morin out on preaching openness despite the fact Facebook is one of the largest social networks not a part of OpenSocial, an initiative that was designed to compete with Facebook's system by letting user data cross-pollinate between sites and services using a single API.

Morin shrugged the question off saying simply "It's pretty interesting. We've made some pretty interesting commitments to openness as well." Not to cut off the chances of Facebook joining the project in the future, Morin followed by saying that Facebook would continue to "evaluate OpenSocial and Facebook's potential place in it." Audience members let out a few sighs and Morin ended the Q&A session immediately.

As it stands Morin and company seem to be quite happy with Facebook's open yet closed platform that's has more than 300,000 applications. Morin nostalgically noted that when he was first brainstorming the platform project with others on the Facebook team, he had hoped they'd get 5,000 applications in the first year, and had no idea it would grow to be what it is today.

So what's next for the platform? Commerce. More specifically, integrating a payment system into the developer tools so application developers would be able to get cash from users instead of just advertisers. Morin says the tools will be in the hands of developers within the next two quarters. Facebook users have already been christened into the idea of giving Facebook money with its first-party gifts service, which lets users spend real world money on virtual gifts friends can display on their walls. The service represents a very early play on what developers would be able to do with their applications using upcoming commerce tools.

Also in the works is application localization for different countries. Facebook's grand scheme is to use specialized markup tags to let users localize applications by language without having to do any of the translation themselves. The result would be making one application work in every country Facebook can be found. The company has already been using a similar system on its own international sites by having users do the heavy lifting when it comes to translation. Morin didn't give a time frame on this feature, but noted that it would come later on.

Coming back to what Morin said about OpenSocial, I honestly don't expect Facebook to join the newly created OpenSocial Foundation or movement anytime soon. The company has a very powerful upcoming strategy of letting people spend money quickly and easily with micropayments (a la iTunes), and spreading the Facebook's presence internationally with the help of users who are willing to do the work for them when it comes to translation.

Opening up Facebook user to data, or giving up the system that's clearly been working very well isn't in the company's interest at the moment. In the meantime it's worth watching developers of both platforms closely, as they've got two big platforms to launch applications, and the opportunity to attract users and make money is only getting bigger.

I'm here at the SNAP Summit in San Francisco. Most of the people in the overflow crowd are trying to figure out how to make their sites more social--how to tap into the viral effect that's busted companies such as RockYou and Slide into the big leagues.

Joshua Porter, who runs Bokardo Design, launched the day by offering up five principles for effective social design. The undercurrent of his talk: Serve your users and they'll keep coming back. That's a simple thing to say, of course. Here are Porter's five tips to making it real:

Personal value precludes network value: Paradoxically, to make a strong social site, you've got to start by making a good personal site. If the features you offer don't serve a solo user, it's unlikely your users will stick around long enough to become social. Examples: YouTube and Flickr both work as utility sites for individuals, even without the social component. Most users on Deli.cio.us start by using the service as a bookmark saver. The social angle comes later.

Joshua Porter

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Tie behavior to identity: In other words, what you do on the site should describe you more than what you say about yourself in your profile. Amazon and eBay aren't Web 2.0-era social sites, but users' identity on these sites is very strong, based on feedback they leave on products and sales.

Give recognition: Digg leveraged its users' competitiveness to get on the front page of the site. Its top users eventually formed cliques to get and hold these positions. It was a good strategy to get the community going, but eventually Digg turned off the recognition feature since it was reinforcing the influence of the grandfathers of its network, and making it too hard for new people to rise up in the rankings. The challenge with recognition programs, Porter implies, is that you have to make them meaningful and desirable, but also temporary. Once a user is recognized as a top contributor, let them fall off the map if they don't stay active.

Show causation: If you're going to ask people to participate, make it clear what participating does for them. Netflix, for example, gives users better recommendations when they rate DVDs.

Leverage reciprocity: This is Porter's fancy way of saying that you want to appeal to people's narcissism. People contribute to social sites in large part because they want to see what other people say about their contributions. Make it easy for people to interact on that level--by leaving feedback, compliments, awards, and so for each other.

The Snap Instant Communicator is one of the weirdest little gizmos I've seen in a while. It's a push-to-talk intercom system that runs on a PC and it only works when the Snap hardware console--which is just a few buttons, a speaker, and a microphone--is plugged in to it.

The console has eight labeled lights for the people you talk to the most. Once you add other Snap users into your account and label their spots on your device, all you have to do is press the button next to a name, and if the other party accepts the call (by pressing the corresponding button on their device for your name, which will be blinking), you're connected in real time.

Intercom 2.0? It's the Snap Instant Communicator.

(Credit: CNET / Rafe Needleman)

Let's be very clear: There are dozens of other ways you can connect with a co-worker for quick communication. You can call them, Skype them, or use a Nextel push-to-talk connection. You can use instant-messaging software, or e-mail. You can video-call. You can yell.

But if you like the idea of being able to just push a button to start an instant hands-free voice communication with someone you work with closely, then this is the gizmo for you. As Josh says, "It's great. As long as your boss doesn't have one."

The intercom concept is ancient, and the device has a certain retro flair to it, but the Snap has modern functions. The lights next to users' names act as presence indicators. They're on when the user's PC is on and they're working, and they go off after a period of inactivity. (Users can also press the Privacy button on the device to disappear from the network.)

Users can create a real-time conference call among Snap users just by pressing more users' buttons. If a user tries to connect to someone who is not present, the system can automatically try a telephone line instead (U.S. calls are charged at 2 cents a minute). Alternatively, a voice message can be left, which will be sent to the user as an e-mail attachment.

Configuring is done on a simple Web page.

It looks like the setup will be very easy, although our early beta units did give us trouble. To get started, users run an application from the Web, plug in the device, and invite co-workers (or buddies). If the invitees have a Snap, they'll be connected to each others' network. If not, the person on the receiving end will get a coupon for a discount on their own device. That makes for a nice viral business model.

My biggest complaint is that there's no "soft" version of the intercom. Users must have the hardware to use the network. Traveling businesspeople are not going to want to schlep their Snap gizmo with them everywhere they go. I had a disagreement with CEO Todd Smith on this. Smith said that he couldn't guarantee call quality on laptop speakers, and that his business is based on selling hardware. He suggested that users will take the intercom with them. "But it's too big," I complained. "And you've weighted it to make it seem more substantial." "No, we didn't." Smith said. Meanwhile, the VP of engineering, who was sitting behind him, was looking at me and nodding his head. At any rate, I think I got Smith to relent, and he is considering a software version of the product for traveling users.

The Snap Communicator will be officially announced in March, and should hit retail stores in April. It will initially sell for $99 in two-packs. It's PC-only and is clearly not for everyone, but I think it will find a following.

SnapVillage, owned by Corbis, is one of a host of 'microstock' sites for inexpensive downloads of stock photos.

(Credit: SnapVillage)

SnapVillage, a microstock site founded in June by stock-art sales company Corbis to compete with rivals such as Fotolia and Getty Images' iStockphoto, has expanded to include international sales.

Although the site now works beyond the United States, the Web site is English-only for now. The company plans to localize with more languages later, a representative said. The site is still officially in beta testing.

The site receives about 10,000 new image uploads a week, SnapVillage said in a statement Wednesday. Although there are several rivals already better established, Corbis believed it would be better off starting its own site from scratch.

The company wouldn't release specific download statistics, but said sales are growing. In the last three months, the number of image downloads per week has increased by a factor of 8 and the number of new accounts created per week has increased 60 percent.