nonsmokingarea.com

Seth Godin and Ron Hornbaker from Alexaholic (a smart tool for comparing several sites by their Alexa traffic-data) have put together a comprehensive ranking of almost 1.000 web2.0-websites (’web2.0′ being defined as sites that ‘let people collaborate and share information online in a new way’ - Wikipedia).

while it’s fun to grep through the list (from rank 500 downwards it gets quite obscure), I don’t think it’s really relevant - the mix of compared websites is just too diverse. or is there anything remarkable in that developer-targeted sites like rubyonrails.com or dojotoolkit.com are outnumbered by consumer-sites like myspace.com or del.icio.us? in between there are random personal blogs, while authorities like TechCrunch are missing. I’ld suggest to split the list into categories like ‘consumer’, ‘dev/backend’ and ‘media’. furthermore, Alexa’s objectivity is of couse debatable, at best.

to no surprise, tech-geeks enjoy a drink after office-hours like anyone else does (maybe even more?). weither your’re into beer, wine or stronger stuff - the new, social web has got something to match your taste…

cork’d.com is a free service aimed at wine-lovers. users catalog, rate, tag and review wines they’ve tried out. on the social side, ‘Drinking Buddies’, sharing a similar taste in wine, allow the discovery of new brands and flavours. cork’d.com is well designed and includes everything you’ld expect a web2.0-site to offer, from tagclouds to rss-feeds. a possible improvement would be allowing users to upload bottle-labels. [if you're interested in cork'd, thinkvitamin has recently published an (audio-)interview with co-founder Dan Cederholm]

if you’re more into beer, ratebeer.com is probably your drinking-site of choice. ratebeer’s database contains information on 30.000 (!) unique beverages, more than 4.000 breweries, several hundredthousand ratings & reviews and a worldwide schedule for beer-related events (in case you’re in Belgrade tomorrow, check out the Belgrade Beer Fest). an extensive user-forum and weekly articles on beer-culture make ratebeer most definitely the best web-ressource on beer - though the site’s design could use some makeover.

don’t know what kind of drink to squeeze out of your home-bar? after telling Extratasty what ingridents are available, the site offers a list of possible recipes. recipes can be rated, commented and easily linked in your blog (if you’re still able to blog, that is). Extratasty includes features to network with other drinkers and allows mobile access using your mobilephone or any iPod as recipe-scrapbook. the site’s light design matches its name - extra tasty!

Desktoptwo is a web-based desktop-environment introduced on TechCrunch recently. currently in beta, Desktoptwo is based on the spanish-only computadora, an online service offering email, IM, calendar and storage to currently 100.000 subscribers. unlike YouOS (which I wrote about a few days ago), Desktoptwo is 100% flash-based. applications include mail-client, IM-messenger (MSN, Jabber, Gtalk - no AIM-support yet), blogging-tools, address book and mp3-player. beta-accounts include 1gbyte file-storage on desktoptwo’s servers, accessible only through the flash-desktop.

Sapotek, the mexican-american company behind Desktoptwo, will most likely position the product as a closed web-service. there seem to be no plans on offering APIs for third-party developers, which is a substantial disadvantage in comparison to open projects like YouOS, which currently offers hundreds of extensions.

during the past year, AJAX-driven portals have sprung up like mushrooms. most of these sites don’t offer more than consolidating RSS-feeds and other (3rd-party) web-widgets. examples include startups like PageFlakes, HomePortals and Protopage as well as Microsoft Live and Google IG.

YouOS (discovered on Zinnaglism) is a browser-based ‘collaborative web operating system’ which goes far beyond. like traditional operating systems, YouOS offers a user-interface-toolkit and open APIs, which 3rd-party developers can use as a fundament for building rich internet-applications in JavaScript.

YouOS’ user-interface is based on the traditional desktop-metaphor, well-known from current operating-systems like Windows or Linux. preinstalled applications include a web-browser (which of course is just a div-element filled by the local browser, so to call this an app is a bit far fetched), a very simple command-shell (including unix-like commands, f.e. ps, kill…), IRC-client, mailbox, richtext-editor and file-manager. the apps offer only minimal functionality and reassemble the look & feel of early Linux/X11-programs.

currently there are almost 300 additional applications available. highlights include P2P-networking among YouOS-users, the obligatory RSS-reader, a Java-based Nintendo NES-emulator, Spreadsheets, ssh-client, mp3-player and an IDE. ‘installing’ apps into the start-menu is a matter of a single click.

without a doubt, YouOS is an ambitious attempt to create a common platform for online-applications like Writely or other app’s I reviewed in my office-is-dead series. I’m just afraid big names like Google will rather continue to consolidate their brand services among another, than switch to an open platform like YouOS. without support by major application-providers, YouOS will never be more than a cool demonstration of web-technology.

…is the title of skeptic’s latest post on dead2.0. if you’re a regular reader of, lets say 5, A-list tech-blogs (or valleywag, for that matter), you certainly will have a feeling that statement might be true - “Why Web 2.0 is just like High School” gives plenty of evidence…

In High School…You really hope a lot of people will sign your yearbook, even with meaningless goodbye wishes.

In Web 2.0…You really hope a lot of people will trackback your post, even with meaningless “me-too” posts.

read the full post for more!

first released august 2005, online text-processor Writely has been one of the first attempts of moving desktop-office-apps to the web. initial hype among web2.0-evangelists eventually peaked in an aquisition by Google in march 2006. since than, Writely kept quite stable (not to say stalled) - it hasn’t got any new major features, isn’t integrated with Google’s CI and other services, and still isn’t open to the public. if you are interested in trying out Writely, drop me a comment for an invitation.

word-processing features

Writely covers only basic text-formatting like font-styles, paragraph-alignment, bullets and enumerations. moreover it offers five paragraph-styles (header 1-3, Normal and Blockquote) which can’t be customized, effectively preventing the formatting of larger documents. there’s a table-editor, a spell-checker for english language and support for images and hyperlinks. all together the featureset is comparable to that of Zoho Writer (which means: it’s basically a WYSIWYG-blog-editor).

document management & collaboration

similar to GMail, Writely’s document manager allows to archive, ’star’ and tag files. documents emailed to a user-specific email-address (…@prod.writely.com) are automatically saved to the workspace, great for quickly importing loads of documents. import of Word-documents seems to work ok for simple files - problems occur when source-documents contain elements like headers or footers, which are currently not represented in Writely. documents can be exported to HTML, Word, OpenOffice, PDF and RTF, plus there even is a print-view.

the collaboration features work similar to Google Spreadsheets: after email-invitation, several users can edit documents simultaneously. the latency for synchronizing updates seems to be quite high though (>15 seconds), leading to mutual conflicts when a particular paragraph is edited by several users. the revision management (including revision-history, color-highlighting of each collaborateurs changes and RSS-feeds to track documents) emphasizes Writely’s aim at teams.

currenty Writely satisfies only very basic requirements for text-processing. if Google plans to further integrate their toolset (GMail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Writely…), creating a lightweight web-office-suite, they will definitely have to improve each app’s featureset. at the moment I really can’t imagine using Writely for more than as an instant document-viewer on-the-go, the experience creating or editing documents just is too inferior. however, the collaboration-features are promising, leaving the question why Microsoft still hasn’t managed to extend their products in that direction (in a web-based way).

SingShot, an online-karaoke-webapp (check this TechCrunch-post earlier today) made me waste spend almost two hours of my evening. basically it’s a flash-applet playing the instrumentals of a chosen song, tele-prompting its lyrics for singing-along on screen while recording your voice from the microphone. SingShot’s community will review and vote on your recorded karaoke-sessions with no mercy. recording via flash works great (including microphone-check-routines). the selection of songs could be larger, and I’m missing a ‘karaoke-stage’ where users can queue up and listen to performances live. after 14 days of free trial, SingShot will cost about 10,- USD per month.

(and no, I won’t link to my recordings )

skeptic from dead2.0 started an interesting series of posts, asking his mother - who he claims has been an average internet-user for years - about her knowledege of substantial web2.0-buzzwords. the subject of interest is given 30min, researching the given term on the web. covered so far: RSS and Wiki. unsurprisingly, the candidate has never heard of both, and wasn’t able to give a proper definition even after research. sure, you might argue that the whole thing is scripted/a hoax…but still, it mirrors my personal experiences.

I know a lot of tech-savy people who haven’t discovered the possibility of reading blogs via feedreaders/RSS yet (yeah, they still visit blog-websites with their browser [good for advertising at least]… if they read blogs frequently at all). many of my friends respond with ‘how’s that spelled?’ after directing them to my flickr-page. and most of my peers, who are on the net since the late nineties, haven’t even heard of the web2.0-meme.

so what does that mean? when starting to develop a web-application, think of the long tail of users - i.e. that 98% who won’t use be introduced to your product just because it’s got fancy features like tagging, RSS-feeds or - even more abstract & irrelevant - an AJAX-driven user-interface. while a TechCrunch-review might help to gain momentum, it won’t bring continuous traffic. this goes especially to all the ventures trying to move office-applications into the online-space - the more I try out, the more I lose faith in them (check my Office-is-dead-series for more details).

there seems to be this new sport among (unemployed?) graphic-designers who are reworking old-established logos and trademarks the web2.0-way (caught on dead2.0)…

if you’re addicted to web2.0-artwork, you might wanna try these links:

• http://yh.yayhooray.com/web20logos.html
• http://livewavecam.com/logoredesign.html

unimpressed by the ongoing dispute between digg-founder Kevin Rose and AOL/Netscape’s Jason Calacanis concerning Jason’s lucrative offer to top digg-submitters, digg labs just launched two innovative data-visualization-features which might help staying ahead of Netscape.

the stack is a live-representation of users digging storys. each digg is visualized as a white bar dropping from above. each stack on the ground symbolizes a story.

the swarm adds another dimension by representing every digging user by a yellow orb - you can even track users as they digg from story to story.

both features are flash-based and give a great impression of what’s currently going on at digg. I imagine that visualization-features like this can massively increase the feeling of ‘liveliness’ on any community-website.