More goodness in today's Observer. www.thenewrevolutionaries tracks further developments in Silicon Valley and in particular points to the following applications;
The new MySpace is ... Blue Dot
Users click on a blue dot on their screen when they find something they
like on the web, storing it and sharing it with their friends. They
also receive a constant update of their friends' selections of blue
dots, a way of following their interests. Blue Dot spokeswoman Erin
Petrie said: 'You know what movies your friends have seen and what
restaurants they've been to. It makes for richer conversation.'
The new YouTube is ... Loopt
Loopt causes mobile phones to send a 'beat' to a phone mast or
satellite every 15 minutes, pinpointing their location. Phone owners
can share this information with friends' phones or computers for $2.99
per month in the US.
The new iTunes is ... Pandora
In every song, they study hundreds of musical details such as melody,
rhythm and lyrics. The point of it all is Pandora, a website that
invites users to type in a favourite song or artist, then finds songs
with a 'genetic match' and plays them like a radio station. The service
is free, supported by advertising, and has four million listeners.
The new Google is ... Powerset
today's products, such as Google, search only for keywords and cannot,
for example, distinguish between 'book for children', 'book by
children', and 'book about children'. But a natural language search
could identify 'function' words, understand that word order means
something and respect the importance of small 'stop words'.
The new Craigslist is ... Yelp
Volunteer reviewers, or Yelpers, write about their local restaurants,
shops, doctors - anything worth reviewing. Their eagerness to share
combines the best of social networking with the tools of local search,
such as Google Maps.
I haven't checked them all out yet, but Bluedot looks especially intriguing. I also like the sound of Squidoo, where you can build pages that demonstrate what you're passionate about in contrast to the blogosphere where much of the focus is on the individual.
Squidoo also donates to charities and they've already built a school in Cambodia and are funding research into diabetes.
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