Alltop Launches Frienderati to Help You Find FriendFeed Friends
Using AllTop’s new Frienderati page might help you find Becky McCray, a small town business professional who focuses on how the web can help out small business owners, especially those in rural areas. You might learn from browsing Frienderati that Becky sees things differently than others. And because it’s a feed from FriendFeed, you’ll see what she posts for pictures, how she uses Twitter, and whatever else she’s attached to the service to track.
She’s one of a whole gaggle of interesting people you might add as friends in FriendFeed once you peruse Guy Kawasaki’s new Alltop page, Frienderati.
Why do I like the project? Because it’s a way to help new folks coming onto the web to see things in a simple interface before they choose to go deeper. Have you looked at the project? What do you think?
Identi.ca Is More About What Comes Next
I’m checking out a new platform that’s essentially Twitter-like, called Identi.ca. It has the basics: profile, friending, short messages, etc. There are a few things missing ( it’s not very easy to follow back, for instance). But overall, it’s interesting. I also like that you can build credentials around your OpenID account. I can’t wait for services like OAuth to catch up in popularity, but that’s a digression.
What’s really cool about Identi.ca has nothing to do with the site itself (no offense meant to the team building it. It’s neat, and thanks for doing it). What’s neat is that it’s built on an open source platform called Laconi.ca, which is basically Twitter-in-a-box. That’s the nugget, tough guys. It’s a head start on building your own Twitter inside your business, behind the firewall, and that’s something noteworthy.
I haven’t read the other reviews of the platform from other notables. I’m sure there’s a buzz.
I’m blogging this mostly to raise awareness that it’s out there: an alternative to Twitter that you can pick up and run with. The parts that aren’t there are fairly important: short codes and SMS integration, some of the central nervous system stuff. But is it a neat starting point? I say yes.
I probably won’t use the platform much, so I’ve stopped doing friend connections over there (sorry). I just wanted to dive in and check it out.
But are you using it? Have you tried it out? What’s your take?
I’m still sticking it out with Twitter as my presence/status/micromessaging site of choice. What about you?
BatchBook is Great for Contact Management
BatchBlue Software was kind enough to give me a big sized account to try out managing my contacts with their BatchBook product. They let me do five things, if I’m so inclined: manage contacts, keep track of my communications, slice my contacts into lists (remember this one), manage to-do lists, and use their SuperTags to build small custom databases of meta information around my contacts. All of that is relatively neato, and something that lots of us aren’t especially doing well today (how many of you use a spreadsheet somewhere to track your important conversations?)
I should state that I know Michelle Riggen-Ransom (marketing goddess) and Adam Darowski (UX prince) through meetings at various social events, like SXSW, the occasional Tweet-up, etc. When you know the people who make the things you’re using, there’s a whole sense that everything could be customized or something. When I talk to Mario Sundar at LinkedIn, I feel the same kind of thing: like they care about their user base. Well, with BatchBlue, they are passionate about their customer base.
Things I Like
In the fun category, I like the little touches they’ve thrown in. I went to upload my latest LinkedIn database into BatchBook and combine it with my Gmail accounts. That ends up being around 6,200 contacts (boiled back down with dupes to 4760). When I uploaded the CSV file, here’s what I got:
Yep, the little touches like that are great.
Because I can tag things lots of ways, it means I can sort them lots of ways:
I further like that I can upload pictures for contacts, should I want a visual reminder of who they are:
But what’s coolest is the list feature.
Messaging Distinct Sets of People
Here’s where BatchBlue does something that most of my contact systems do not. Plaxo shares a lot of features with BatchBook, and it has one over on BatchBook insofar as user data on there updates when the other contacts change their information. Meaning, if you’re connected to someone on Plaxo, and that someone changes jobs, phone numbers, email addresses, your files are updated right away. Okay, cool.
Try messaging more than one person on Plaxo. Ditto LinkedIn. Ditto Facebook.
Grueling.
BatchBook has lists. For every one of the tags you assign a contact, you can sort those tags into lists, then download those lists into distinct addressable groups. So, for instance, if I want to email all the people I know who are related to PodCamp, I can. If I want to message everyone in the Boston area, I can. If I want to message people I’ve labeled as “mediamakers,” I can.
That’s the clever bit.
A Quick Note About SuperTags
They also have this feature called Super Tags. Basically, you can add all kinds of other fields and metadata around certain tags, such that you collect even more useful, sortable data on different kinds of contacts. I haven’t dug into that yet, but judging by the way Michelle and Adam talk about it all the time, I suspect that’s a cool feature and that I’m missing out.
In the End
I recommend BatchBook for the list sorting ability, for the tagging and slicing ability, for the Super Tags (though I’m not 100% clever on them yet), and if you have no other form of client relationship management software, this would be a great lightweight tool. I’m not using their todos or several other parts of the software, but that’s okay. I think it’s worth it for what I’m getting. Hey, I’m not a DBA, and this is a whole lot better for me to manage than a spreadsheet.
If you check it out, I’d be interested to know your take.
BatchBlue Software’s BatchBook might be just right for you.
Tripwolf Launches a Nifty Travel Site
TripWolf is a social site for travel, loaded with all kinds of goodies, like map mashups, people-recommended sights to see, friends and “trip gurus” to add for specific places, journal/blogs for your travel experiences, and the ability to meet up with other folks as part of your travel experience. I did a reasonably fast pass through the site and found it loaded with all kinds of information and facets that would make your holiday travel plans a little easier.
The other things I noticed that seem cool are Facebook integration, user-added info (kind of wiki style), geo-locative data (codes everything nicely), pictures (and you can upload yours, of course), and maps. Great maps that you can print, actually.
It’s backed by a larger European travel company, but it has a very standalone startup feel to it (the site, at least).
All in all, a decent launch for travel season. What do you think about it?
(I got word of this via a nice email from Jennifer from Tripwolf).
Zoho Show 2.0 Launches Today
Zoho, everybody’s favorite cloud software developer, released a new 2.0 version of Zoho Show today. It’s presentation software that includes slide making features as well as chatting, remote sharing, and desktop sharing, making it a little more powerful than your typical Powerpoint or Keynote, insofar as features goes. That’s one of the tricks with Zoho. They’ve built such a suite of apps that they can mix and match.
Some of the changes in 2.0 target ease of use, and this is probably where I’ve complained a bit about certain Zoho apps in the past. I’ll tell you that I used it while on a conference call to doodle out what you see below, and it worked super easy and intuitively.
Zoho also allows you to embed the presentation on another site after you publish it (like SlideShare), and has about a dozen features that I didn’t cover here. If you’re in the world of presentations, this might be worth considering as a free, flexible offering. The closest similar product online is Google Docs and their presentation software, but I tell you, Zoho’s product works, looks, and feels better.
Good job, Zoho.
See a bigger picture here:
Enterprise Technology Reborn
Sam Lawrence has quite a powerful post today about enterprise technology. He’s writing about the way collaboration inside the enterprise used to be file-centric, but with tools like Jive’s Clearspace, collaboration has become people-centric.
I’m a big believer in how Jive sees the enterprise collaboration space. From my perspective, Jive has their passions in common with Mzinga, another favorite collaboration/community platform. There are differences between the two companies (I know - I attended the shoot out at Enterprise 2.0), but in both cases, I see their efforts as being about making people the center of the process.
To that end, read Sam’s article here. I think it explains the space VERY well.
Three Photo Editing Tools to Check Out
I just learned about Dumpr from Download Squad. It’s a tool that offers free and pro photo editing options. Checking out this site reminded me to tell you that I’m also pretty fond of some other great web tools that you might not be using.
- A.viary is a hardcore photo editing app, kind of like Photoshop without the price tag and disk install. But it’s way cooler than that. It’s a whole lot of really interesting editing abilities and a whole community of people doing their own thing with the tools that makes this one a great choice. Note: it’s still in an invite-only beta period (when does that end, guys?), but maybe I can score you a few invites, if you’re interested. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll ask the team.
- Picnik is a lightweight photo editing tool that gets me through pretty much all of my needs right now. I use it about twice a day, and have found that it does most everything I need from a photo editor. It’s not really good with batch-based activities, but if you’re into editing things one at a time, this is for you.
- Skitch (the bonus round) acts as a screen capture and annotation tool. It’s super easy to use, has just enough tools to be useful but not so many that you feel bloated and misunderstood. I use it to do lots of odd jobs on capture screens and little images from web pages. Definitely good to have.
More and more, I’m choosing tools and applications that live in the cloud. Why? Because after dropping my laptop the other day and losing every on-disk application, I realized that there are lots of benefits to having my data and my tools available from anywhere there’s a web browser. There are some exceptions, of course, but when I find great web tools, I want to share them.
What about you? What are you using on the web that’s cool?
Corporate Takeover - Web Style
News of Technorati receiving funding had me stirred up with mixed feelings. I blog every now and again how the app has gone far afield of how we all used to talk about it back in the day. Now that I’ve heard they’ve received some more money to go and try to figure out how to take on business services, I realize that I want them to do something with that money. I want them to buy Twingly
Twingly could be considered a remix of Technorati, back to what Technorati did well years ago. They have some neat features, like this widget that shows the recent blogs linking to your post. (And for the record, I like Twingly and what they’ve done.)
Further, they are building a search-meets-reputation kind of data set, very similar to what is in place at Technorati.
So, it works, is a refresh, but harkens back to what Technorati has done a different way.
I say, buy it, absorb it, sort things out, and then build us even more tools we can use. What’s necessary? Personal reputation data, attention data, affinity metadata (if you like this site, you’ll love that site), and more.
Could Technorati do that without buying Twingly? Sure. I think they could. But wouldn’t the infusion of fresh blood make for a potential better swing at the prize?
What do you think on this one?
I use Skitch to do screenshots. It’s cool.
Have You Tried Freshbooks
I’m friends with Sunir and Saul from Freshbooks (the company supported PodCamp Toronto, and I met the guys at South by Southwest), so I wanted to check out their app again. I logged into an account a while back, but when I refreshed my experiences with the tool the other day, I found a new appreciation for it. If you’re a small business or a professional consultant or the like, you might give this tool some consideration.
What It Does
Freshbooks is a way to manage invoices, expenses, and time tracking for small businesses. It’s a web-based application, with a really simple interface. Build things that might recur (like clients, or invoice types, etc), and then things gets fairly automated.
Pricing
It’s not super cheap, but it’s not inexpensive, either, and their pricing has tiers:
I think it’s reasonable for what it’s doing for you.
Overall
I think Freshbooks is a simple tool that does what it sets out to do well. I like the features that I was able to test, and found it easy to grasp.
I’d love to talk with others who are using the app. Are you? I’m curious how well it works when you’re invoicing a bunch of folks, what you’re doing with the expenses tab, and how well it integrates into your other business processes.
You should check it out here. (Note: I don’t get any money from Freshbooks for this link, but definitely want them to know I sent you!) I’m curious what your take is on the product, and whether it works for social media types as their potential billing system of choice.
What ELSE are people using for invoicing, time tracking, and expense management?
Kirtsy Back in Business
Kirtsy is the new name for Sk*rt, who skirted into waters that weren’t as comfy for a moment there. It’s a pretty cool site. Mix the wisdom of the crowds with 22 engaged and passionate editors and you get a fabulous hybrid of social news meets curated content.
Kirtsy is a site where women point out the cool stuff. Is that simple enough? There’s obviously a lot more at play here, but after looking around the site, I think you’ll figure it out pretty quickly, as well, and so I won’t dig in too deeply.
What I will say, however, is that Kirtsy has some neat features (the mix of editing and voting, for one), a nice design, and has a lot to offer women looking for information on a whole host of subjects, including family, design, travel, mind and body, and more.
Give Kirtsy a look-see, and let me know what you think-see.
Screen caps made with Skitch
