beta @ amanzi

The online homepage market just got a little bit bigger with the release of yourminis from Goowy. The main players in this market are Netvibes and Pageflakes, along with the bigshots Google Personalised, and Live.com.

yourminis is marketed as a web dashboard and has a whole bunch of widgets that can be added to your personalised page. The site is programmed solely in flash and as such it has a rich interface that is only achievable with Flash.

Apart from the Flash aspect, I couldn’t see anything unique about this offering and I can’t really see the need for another player in this already crowded segment. It is pretty though, and is worth checking around just to see the cool interface and the nifty things you can do in a rich, Flash environment.

Recently there have been a couple of start-ups that have emerged with the intention of allowing companies to pay bloggers to post about their products or services. The problem with some of these first companies is that they allowed companies to require a certain tone to the posts and also did not require bloggers to disclose that they are receiving payments for the posts.

This led to huge debate in the blogosphere about the morality of sponsored posting with most of the A-list bloggers speaking out vehemently about the services. The problem is that most of these A-listers are already earning a good income from their blogs and have no interest in receiving a few dollars to post about a new service. Struggling bloggers would more likely sell their soul to generate a bit of extra ad revenue.

My personal opinion is that I have no problem accepting payments to post about certain products or services but only if I wasn’t being forced to write a positive review and also only if I disclosed the fact that it was a sponsored post. I justify this by comparing a company paying me $20 to write about their site, to a company treating an A-lister to an expensive lunch where they pitch their product. The A-lister wouldn’t consider a free lunch as payment, in fact, they may think of it as their right to get lunch paid for if they are listening to a product pitch.

I initially signed up with PayPerPost who provide a market place where advertisers can pay bloggers to write reviews about their products or services. I didn’t like the idea behind this because the advertisers could say what type of a review they wanted. Also, there was no obligation on the blogger to disclose that they were being paid to write the review.

But the new player in the game, ReviewMe, has changed the rules slightly. They are also providing a market place where advertisers can pick bloggers to write about their products. However, the advertiser has no control over the tone of the review and the blogger is forced to clearly disclose the fact that the post is sponsored.

Prospective bloggers sign up with ReviewMe and submit their blog for approval. Once approved, the blog is automatically given a value based on several factors including traffic, subscribers, and theme design. Advertisers can then browse the list of blogs in different categories and then select them to write a review on their product or service. The blogger can then accept the request and write up a review on their site. The review must clearly disclose the fact that it is a sponsored review and must be at least 200 words. Once the review is submitted the blogger receives payment based on their blog’s value, which can be made via cheque or PayPal.

The ReviewMe site is well-designed and easy to navigate. The service is clearly explained and is completely legitimate as disclosure is compulsory and the tone of the review is not allowed to be influenced, and because of these two facts I think this site will do well.

This is a sponsored post, please see this post for rules of sponsorship.

Like Visual Search has just launched with much fanfare – it’s so cool, it even gets an ‘alpha’ label. Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington have provided us with the best coverage, with Robert providing two podcasts for your viewing pleasure. Other coverage here.

My first impression of the site was that it was nothing more than a gimmick that wouldn’t catch on but after playing with it a bit more, I’m starting to get impressed. I won’t go into too much detail about how it all works as it’s more fun figuring it out yourself.

I tried searching for a couple of relevant items such as a red purse for the wife and a black leather wallet for me. The results were surprisingly quite good but to be fair Google Images does a pretty good job with these searches too. The killer feature that Like.com is working on (it’s still not perfect) is the likeness searches.

Once you’ve found something that looks like something you want, you can then choose to search for similar-looking items. This is something that no other search engine can do yet which is why Like.com is generating all of the fanfare. Not only can you search for similar-looking items, you can also search for similar-looking areas of the item.

This feature is probably more useful for searching for items like jewelry as you can highlight a particular feature of the jewelry and like.com will attempt to find other matching items. The other key feature that I haven’t yet mentioned, is that all of the results that are returned have prices listed and a link to the respective website where you can purchase the goods online.

As I mentioned before, this still isn’t perfect and you may get some odd results, but it definitely has a lot of potential.

I’ve just been checking out the new Flickr feature that allows users to geotag their photos. This was a feature that Flickr competitor, Zooomr, introduced a while back.

Flickr now have a much better interface to allow the geotagging – you just navigate to a spot on the map, then drag and drop your photos from the Organizr onto the map.

The problem I have with Flickr’s implementation is that they have chosen to use Yahoo! Maps instead of the far superior maps from Google. I guess, ‘chose’ is the wrong word as they are now owned by Yahoo!, so no doubt they had no choice but to use Yahoo’s offering.

My justification for saying that Google’s offering is far superior? Well, I admit that Yahoo’s maps are very quick and easy to navigate, but they lack any real detail outside of USA. Try finding street level maps in Europe, New Zealand, or Australia in Yahoo - these are the places that I wanted to use geotagging first. Now check out Google Maps, or even Microsoft’s Live Local maps – see the difference?

So this raises a big issue of whether the cool, new, ‘Web 2.0′ companies should retain the rights to use the best software available when selling out to the bigger companies like Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft? I suppose not, but it’s frustrating when the favourite sites are crippled by the big boy’s decisions.

This just makes Zooomr look a lot more interesting for me. That is, until they are bought by one of the big three and then forced to be crippled with political, instead of technical, decisions.

Tags: flickr, yahoo, zooomr, geotag, microsoft, google, live, live-local, google-maps, maps, photos

What do you think – I’m interested to know…

Solution Watch got the scoop on Traineo a new Web 2.0 offering that aims to help people lose weight and increase fitness.

Traineo’s blurb: “traineo is a free and simple website that gives you the motivation and support to reach your weight loss and fitness goals.”

The site is really well designed and has just enough AJAX to make it quick and usable, without getting bogged down with flashy effects. Sign-up process is simple and you enter some personal details and your goal weight. You can also select up to four people (known as ‘motivators’) that will receive weekly updates as you enter them on the site.

You get to enter your daily diet, i.e. what food you’ve eaten for the day, and your daily exercise. The daily exercise screen is really cool – you can select from a bunch of predefined activities and then select the intensity and the length of the workout and it automatically works out how many calories you burned. The diet screen is a bit more difficult – you’re asked to enter the amount of calories consumed, and I have no idea how to work this out or where to even start.

Overall the site works wonderfully and is a pleasure to use - hopefully it will help me lose some weight too. You can read some more about my personal goals here: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz/2006/08/17/traineo-for-…

Tags: traineo, fitness, web-2.0, solution-watch