Webware

Fuzzy scheduling tool Liquid Planner is expanding its reach into the collaborative task management market with a neat new feature called project portals. These are group pages that offer some of the same basic collaboration features you get with the core product, however they can be branded and shared with anyone else who is not a paying Liquid Planner customer.

Any project you're working on in Liquid Planner can now become "portalized." These pages serve as a central place to access shared files and lets outside users keep track on a project's status and ongoing tasks without the coordinator having to go out of their way to keep the other parties updated.

Every portal page includes a built in group microblog, that like Yammer, is a place for team members to provide small status updates on what they're working on. All the other users within that group can then track and respond to those updates, replacing big group e-mails and putting things like edit requests and approvals in the project's workspace.

Most importantly, portals have been designed to serve as a simplified heads-up display. For someone who hasn't used the product before, this makes it far more approachable. There are quite a few knobs and buttons, which give the service an incredible amount of power, but can be overwhelming to someone who isn't familiar with the product. This simply focuses on the basics of progress, tasks, files, and communication.

Project Portals can be branded to match a company or client's look and feel, and give both parties a quick eye on all the details of an on-going project.

(Credit: Liquid Planner)

Liquid Planner is letting its users create as many project portals as they want, but unpaid users who have been invited don't get access to all of the service's planning and tracking features. For instance, these users cannot track time, or see the full detail and structure of a project the same way they could if they were a subscriber.

Next up for Liquid Planner is a mobile client. In a phone interview last week, CEO and co-founder Charles Seybold told me the first device to get a native Liquid Planner app will be Apple's iPhone. It's the platform that's most requested by the service's users--the majority of which are in IT. Seybold says the mobile client will bring live notifications, let project members edit task lists, and track project activity. The iPhone version of Liquid Planner won't be here until later this year though. After that, Seybold says other platforms should follow.

A look at the 'My Networks' widget.

(Credit: AOL)

Social networks are front and center in the latest redesign of AOL's AOL.com homepage, which the company announced Thursday and says it will start to gradually roll out to users over the next few weeks (unless they choose to opt in earlier).

A widget (or module, or gadget, or whatever you want to call it) on the new AOL.com features a tabbed interface with updates from five different social-networking and messaging services: AOL's own AIM and Bebo, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. Called "My Networks," the tabs invite members to log into their social profiles and see a limited amount of information--feed and in-box updates from Facebook and MySpace, new Twitter messages, AIM status messages, etc.--as well as links to access the full versions of the apps.

The Facebook credentials, for example, come from the social network's new Facebook Connect service, an extension of its developer API.

These are just the launch partners, AOL executive James Clark told CNET News last week, and more social-networking and messaging services will be added to the lineup over time. "(It's) part of a consistent evolution of opening up," Clark explained, pointing to AOL's addition last month of outside e-mail service alerts to AOL.com. The more dynamic homepage, which also includes an embedded RSS reader, is indicative of a new direction for AOL, he said.

"Traditional portals have gone about as far as they can go," Clark added.

AOL acquired social aggregator Socialthing this year, but has not specifically integrated its technology into the new AOL.com--yet. Clark said that the separate teams have been "comparing notes," though.

Friday at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is set to announce an interesting update to the curated Web directory. The front page will get a ticker, or in modern terms, "live blog," of news items, updated in real time by a dedicated team.

Calacanis told me that the Mahalo home page has been getting some traction as a repeat destination site for visitors, and he wanted to get those, and other, users to stick on the site for longer. He also believes that news is a major driver of Internet traffic. So he's adding the ticker, and aims to have 20 updates an hour running through it. There will be eight people staffing the feature, with four to eight online at any one time, around the clock, every day of the year. "We're going to live-blog every single thing in the world," Calacanis says.

The ticker will have a dedicated page of its own, as well, with more live features: during certain hours of the day, a Web cam will be pointed at what can only be described as an anchorperson, and there will be a chat room where Mahalo users can talk about the news.

Each ticker item will be flagged by content area, and eventually the pages for those areas (like politics, sports, and weather) may also get tickers, as may high-traffic pages such as those for political candidates during an election.

Calacanis says he's not yet worried about monetizing this feature. He believes it will make the Mahalo site more sticky, which will drive clicks to pages that carry advertising. (I'll have more on online advertising in a future post.) With a claimed four years of operating capital in the bank, Calacanis says he can afford to experiment and aggressively launch new features. He also said he's looking forward to, possibly, picking up distressed online properties--either companies that are having trouble raising operating capital now, or projects that he expects the big online companies will soon be interested in offloading as not core to their business.

Regardless, I think the new live blog feature is smart for Mahalo, and a precursor to a new round of one-upsmanship in live news coverage on the news portals, as their teams try to figure out how to get users to stick to their sites for longer times per visit.

The new Mahalo home page will have a live ticker of news from around the Web, staffed 24/7 by a team of eight.

The ticker will have a page of its own, with a live news desk and chat room.

We've been hearing reports of lag and downtime issues involving Yahoo and several of its properties Friday morning: Yahoo's instant messaging client has been on and off, a reader reported that the Flickr photo-sharing site was down (worked fine for me, though) and the Yahoo main home page and Yahoo News portal have been fickle as well. Some CNET editors and writers encountered similar problems when testing the sites out; others found them to be working fine; still others reported unusually slow load times but no downage.

We've put out a request to Yahoo for comment but have not yet received a response.

Last summer, we saw some heat-wave-related server issues, including a high-profile outage at MySpace. Some regions of the country have had some pretty hot days recently, so the root of these issues at Yahoo could be similar.

Let us know if you've had issues with Yahoo services Friday morning.

Claria, the company known for its abandoned Gator pop-up advertising business, has completed work on a new "personalization engine" that serves both Web surfers and advertisers.

The company earlier this week completed work on PersonalWeb, software that generates recommendations for content based on a user's search history and preferences. PersonalWeb was built using the Axon Personalization Platform, which the company said this week is being licensed to partners.

If, for example, a person starts going to Web sites to get news on the Chicago Cubs, the Axon software will create a widget with Cubs news and recommendations of other sites on PersonalWeb. The gathered information is anonymous, according to the company.

PersonalWeb is funded by advertising, which uses that same content preference information. If the person searches for high-definition televisions on Amazon, ads for HD TVs will appear on that person's home page.

Claria has extended this Axon personalization technology to other devices as well. It has worked with GoWare to bring content to mobile devices and is working with Building B, which next week will announce a digital video recorder using the Axon software.

Rather than trying to market itself to millions of consumers, Claria plans to partner with other companies, such as PC manufacturers, that want to provide a personalized portal to their customers that includes their own content. The company has exited the pop-up ad business altogether and is focusing on content personalization, said CEO Scott VanDeVelde.

VanDeVelde said that the Axon technology is an improvement over portals like MyYahoo where end users manually have to submit preferences. It also tracks users' activities wherever they go on the Web rather than on just a single portal, he noted.

Web portal PersonalWeb is built using Claria's Axon personalization software.

(Credit: Claria)

We recently covered Daylife, a beautifully designed (some would say overdesigned) guide to the day's news. We called it the "anti-Digg," due to its editor-driven content and its focus on design. Today, another content packager launches: Boxxet.

A good starting point for Prius fans

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Boxxet collects information on popular topics--sports teams, popular TV shows, consumer products, and so on. Each Boxxet topic (or set) gets links to related news stories, photos, stuff to buy, a Digg-like list of bookmarks, forums, and its own RSS feed.

The organizational scheme is good, and the pages are easy to navigate considering the amount of info they contain. For Boxxet to work, though, it needs content, and this is where the site breaks with current thinking. Unlike social bookmarking services and also unlike community topic sites such as Squidoo, Boxxet's pages are run partly by machine and partly by editors. Boxxet has harvesting technology that collates items into its pages, and its editors and volunteers rate items for applicability. CEO You Mon Tsang calls this "bionic" editing and claims that it can maintain quality in the most popular topic areas.

Boxxet's list of Prius links

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In other words, users can help fine-tune the items Boxxet includes in its pages. But they can't create all-new sets on their own (at least not yet). Boxxet thus covers not the voguish "long tail" of content but rather the "short snout"--just those areas that the company knows are popular and that are worth the effort and money to create sets for. Boxxet is a good resource for exploring a topic it has a set on, but it's frustrating when you search for a term (such as "Deadwood") and come up dry, because there's nothing you can do except e-mail the company and request that it start a new set for you. In that way Boxxet is a very un-Web 2.0 experience--it's reminiscent of About.com.

There have been some interesting pieces written on Boxxet's different philosophy for creating online resources, including this story from the MIT Technology Review. But the question we ask at Webware.com is practical, not philosophical: Is the site useful? So far, it is. In many ways Boxxet is what a Web portal should be. For topics it has coverage of, its pages are useful, up-to-date, and nicely organized. It's worth a try.