In the spirit of examining the economics of social network services, as I did yesterday with Meebo, today I'm looking at YooNo, another social product that we've reviewed favorably but that appeared to be in desperate need of a business model. YooNo is a social network aggregator: You install it in your browser and it helps you keep track of your friends and what they like.
And here's the revenue model: Today, in addition to announcing feature improvements such as a new IE version and support for MySpace and iMeem networks, YooNo is also announcing the addition of a product recommendation pane. If you're on a site--any site--that mentions a product, author, or artist, YouNo will scan product data from partners Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, Walmart, iTunes, and other stores and display relevant product info. If you buy a product by following one of those links, YooNo gets an affiliate fee.
The service can also be used on the product pages of commerce sites to show other stores that have the same product you're looking for, but possibly at a better price.
The YooNo sidebar locates products from a variety of stores based on what's showing in the main browser window.
When the shopping widget launches on November 24, it will display products based solely on the page you're on and what the partner sites are selling. Future versions will take your friends' activities into account.
As YooNo VP Regan Fletcher told me, "It's really difficult to monetize social aggregation itself. We are monetizing our discovery technology. YooNo bundles social aggregation and discovery together, and we're able to monetize one."
Affiliate fees are substantial, compared to advertising rates, so the model makes sense in theory. Where it may fall down for YooNo in practice is scale. The service is based on a browser plug-in, and that's just a gigantic roadblock to achieving scale in the social media market. With a plug-in as the distribution model, a good product should be able to grab a devoted core base of users, but you don't get to scale quickly these days--or at all--if you require people to install code.
Note: Yoono is in private beta. We've got invites set aside for Webware readers. To get yours see the link at the end of the post.
Tonight Yoono, a browser add-on for discovering and sharing Web content is launching several new features designed to help you track what your friends are up to online.
The tool now integrates with several popular social networks and microblogging services including Twitter, letting you access and interact with the communities of all of them in one place. Previously users were limited to sending links to friends via e-mail, or interacting more easily with in-network users (called "Yoosiers") than friends from outside social networks.
Users can now view related pictures, music, and videos from pages they're on. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)The company is calling its plug-in a "remote control," but I'd argue to say that it's more a set of highly customized widgets that are interconnected and can share the same piece of content in different ways. Starting today there are just a few that cover different things like photos, videos, and music, but the company hopes to expand, adding more tools and services while letting people pick what they want to avoid an overload both in information and desktop real estate.
The pile on of services that are trying to do this is almost as fatiguing as the goal they're attempting to fix, however Yoono's newest offering is inherently stickier because of where it resides. It's not in your taskbar, it's not a separate application--it remains in your browser where you'll be hopping around from site to site.
As a recent user of Digsby, I've come to enjoy this kind of do-it-all functionality, but having one less thing running on my machine is an attractive proposition. If you're ever used Flock you'll know what I'm talking about, and in many ways Yoono now gives you some of Flock's best features without needing to hop over to a new browser.
While the new access to social and chat networks is nice, one of the newer features that lets you view photos off Flickr as an overlay of whatever page you're looking at is far cooler. You can casually search for any photos on the service using keywords, or you can click one button and have it parse whatever page you're looking at for related shots. Is this useful? Not really, but it's addictive and will have you browsing shots for hours. To see it in action, click on the screen shot on the left.
Other small additions include a scaling back of the "buzz it" feature I wrote about last year, a really slick bookmarking tool that lets you grab anything off a page and blog about it while bookmarking it in a set of personalized feeds. The team has made it considerably easier to use in the hopes that more people will take advantage of it. Users will also soon be getting access to their friends and information updates on Bebo, MySpace, Imeem, and Friendster.
I'm impressed with what Yoono is doing, but it's in a crowded market. Recent releases from Me.dium, Digsby and Adobe AIR apps like Alert Thingy are offering some compelling, and most importantly, simple solutions to trying to sort out the influx of information. However, I really do appreciate a service that's trying to add this type of functionality to an already useful do-it-all tool.
Yoono is still in private beta and currently the new functionality only works in Firefox. Internet Explorer users will be getting an updated version in about three weeks. We've got 200 invites for Webware readers. To get yours, just go here.
Fleck is a free Web annotation tool for marking up blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles with little sticky notes. The service launched late last year as a Firefox-only tool and has since added compatibility with Internet Explorer. Fleck, like other annotation tools, can be a dead-simple way to collaborate and leave visual feedback for others without the hassle of software or the complexity of more advanced business collaboration tools.
Managing annotations with Fleck is very simple. Just plug a URL from any Web site into Fleck.com and you're ready to go. You can create and move around small yellow bullets that double as full-sized sticky notes when you expand them. Everything is managed from a floating toolbar that resides on the bottom of your browser window. The toolbar gives you straightforward access to add and share annotations with others. You can send off your notes to someone via e-mail or publish them straight to your blog if you're a WordPress user and are willing to install the plug-in on the server that's running your blogging tool.
Annotations show up in two ways: either as a bullet or a full sticky note.
(Credit: CNET Networks)What's more interesting is the Firefox extension Fleck launched last month. Once installed, it shows any publicly available Fleck markups for the page you're currently visiting. It's reminiscent of the Smart Digg Button extension we wrote about last week, although a little less creepy. By default, all Flecks are turned on as public, although users can set them to be private by checking a small box.
Fleck is really simple to use, but doesn't offer some of the really rich sharing and markup options we've seen lately with Yoono [hands-on] and Grouptivity [hands-on]. I'd like to see Fleck add a drawing tool, and a way to make lines and boxes, too. There's also no way to make changes with others in real time. The closest thing to that is the versioning feature, which gives each user multiple workspaces.
It's still nice to use one of these tools without the need for registration or any sort of installation. The downloadable extensions that Fleck offers only makes it easier, and a little richer for exploration.
To see an example of a Webware post with Fleck annotations, click here. To mark up this post, click the 'annotate this page' link I've embedded below.
Yoono is soon to release a new annotation tool for their recommendation-and-bookmarking service. Called Buzz It, the new functionality will be part of Yoono's installable toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Buzz It closely rivals the usefulness and functionality of Clipmarks, and Grouptivity--giving users a way to archive and share content they find on the Web. The company was showing it off in the exhibition floor at this week's Web 2.0 Expo.
Clicking the new Buzz It button displays a dialogue box that lets you pull in various pieces of media, from whichever page you're viewing, into what Yoono calls a "memo." You can share each memo with others either by posting the memo to your blog or by sending it via e-mail. If you don't already have a blog, Yoono provides all its users with their own pages, complete with an RSS feed, to keep track of all bookmarked and noted items
Users also get a contextual menu option on any Web page to add a link or entire story to one of their memos. This eliminates the need to use bookmarkets or the Yoono toolbar itself.
This new feature reminds me a lot of Grouptivity, which I looked at yesterday. What Yoono has done very well, however, is to give people the option to bookmark several items at once and send those all in a single e-mail. I was pleased to find that instead of having to dig up e-mail addresses, Yoono had integrated Plaxo-like functionality to let you grab your contact lists from a number of e-mail providers. There's also a neat "save to my computer" option, which will export your selections into an HTML file you can open in any browser.
There are a ton of these personal annotation and recommendation tools cropping up, including del.icio.us', StumbleUpon,, and share2me, to name a few. While it's unfair to say there can only be one, Yoono's effort is very user friendly. To get notified of the public launch of the Buzz It-enabled Yoono, there's a sign-up on Yoono's blog.
More shots after the jump.
Personalizing a memo is a little bit like blogging. You can add text, images, video clips, and even smiley faces, as I'm doing here.
... Read more
Stickis is a new service that lets you attach little sticky-type notes to Web pages you visit and lets you view the notes other people have left on pages.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
There was a service like this during the last Internet bubble. The product, ThirdVoice, was criticized as allowing "graffiti" on Web pages, since anyone's markups would be visible to any other ThirdVoice user. Stickis is different. The idea with this service is that you intentionally subscribe to various commentators (such as bloggers), then when you visit a site that one of these writers has a note on, it pops up on your screen. You can respond to their note with one of your own.
Bloggers can also add their feeds to Stickis, so every post they write automatically becomes a note linked to whatever sites they are linking to. Actually, anybody can do this for any blog. For instance, if there's an obscure political blogger you like, and you want to know when he writes about the stories you read on CNN, you can add his feed to your subscription list, and whenever he links to a story you're reading on CNN or any other site, you'll see a little alert pop up on the story page so that you can jump over to his blog and read the post.
I tried this with Webware.com (of course). It was simply a matter of giving Stickis the URL. Then when I went to sites I'd recently covered, such as WhoToTalkTo and LicketyShip, I got a note pointing me back to my posts. Pretty slick.
There are some user interface issues the site has to work through. For example, it's unclear how publishers will get the word out that they are writing Stickis content. In the beta I saw, I was automatically subscribed to several channels of content (all of them, I believe), and it was up to me to unsubscribe from the ones I didn't want. If Stickis takes off, opting out of new channels as they pop up won't be a satisfactory way to manage your content. Also, the Stickis plug-in is available for Internet Explorer only right now. [Update: the Firefox plug-in is done. See CEO Mark Meyer's comments to this post.]
But this is a really interesting idea. It links Web sites together by content automatically, sort of like Sphere and YooNo. And I love the idea of the portable expert: With Stickis, you can take your favorite bloggers with you wherever you go on the Net. That's just incredibly cool. The service could stand to lose some of its advanced features in the name of not confusing the heck out of its users, but the underlying idea is powerful.
See also: Diigo
YooNo is a useful browsing utility that combines several social features. On any Web site, it shows you: other sites that were liked by people who bookmarked that site; blog posts and articles related to the page; and info on the site's primary users (called "Yoosers").
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
It could be an overwhelming amount of information, but it's actually pretty helpful. The Links (related sites) function is both the oldest YooNo feature and its most useful. Based on YooNo's shared-bookmarks function, it helps you find sites related to the one you're viewing. It's a collaborative filter, in other words, but you don't have to know that to use the site. And you don't have to collaborate, either--YooNo returns results even if you keep your own bookmarks private.
Coming soon (within a few days) is a new feature that will show stories and posts related to the page you're on. This is based on searching and link analysis, not analysis of bookmarks, and is reminiscent of Sphere. It could become a good site for picking up the newest news on pages that interest you, although in my tests (using a beta) it didn't reliably return good info.
Finally, the "Yoosers" section will soon show you the people who bookmarked the site you're on, and let you can drill into a user's public bookmarks to explore a topic in more depth. You'll be able to pull up a very fun, floating-bubble view of the network of users around the one you're looking at, based on shared bookmarks. Frankly I find it incomprehensible, but it sure is fancy. MyBlogLog does a better job of creating ad-hoc networks around Web surfing behavior.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
The service also lets you synchronize your bookmarks across multiple computers, a handy feature.
YooNo works as a plug-in sidebar for Firefox (IE is coming) and is a worthwhile download based on the related-site feature alone. The related-articles feature could also be very useful. I don't know what to make of the Yoosers function.
See also StumbleUpon, Wink, Diigo, Del.icio.us, and Shadows, among others.
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