HyveUp

G1 Apps: Google Analytics on Android

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:47:37 PDT

Even on the go, I need to get a detailed overview of my traffic at any time. I am a Getclicky user (with a g analytics account as a backup), but the Clicky site is not really optimized for a mobile experience. I turned to the Android app market to see what was available to explore my traffic, and two free apps (I have that free lunch philosophy) popped up that offer to track your traffic through Google Analytics: Droid Analytics and mAnalytics. I tested how both perform, and here is the result of the battle:

Droid Analytics vs mAnalytics

mAnalytics
mAnalytics has a very simple and intuitive user interface. You start with the list of your site; after selecting one, select your date/date range; see your traffic in terms of visits/pageviews/pages-visit/bounce rate/average-time-on-site/%new-visits.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for mAnalytics. Maybe online marketing beginners will find a benefit to such a simple application, but the app isn’t attractive enough to compete with a browser-based experience.

Droid Analytics
Droid Analytics also starts with the list of your sites. Once inside a site’s analytics, you can press the ‘view as graph’ button to see your page views, visitors, visits, bounce rate, average time on site or page views per visits on a graph. You can see hourly stats, weekly, monthly, yearly, or use the date range selector.
The visual experience that Droid Analytics offers takes the analytics experience up a notch. mAnalytics is already down, but Droid Analytics keeps kicking its opponent with this feature:
For each Website tracked, you can also view their top keywords, top countries, top sources of traffic, top search engines, top referring sites, and top browsers. I personally really like the top keywords option. It’s a nice way to remind you how people find your site while you are waiting at the bus stop, and reflecting upon your online marketing strategy.
Droid Analytics also has a paid version (0.99 euro). Eventually, if you like the app, you will have to pay as the free version is only a 24-hour trial. The app has a 5-star average rating, and the comments are all very enthusiastic.

The alternative is Mobile GA for Android, but the app is $2.99, it only has 3 stars, and the comments are not really positive, so I didn’t even bother to try it out. If you know of any other app for Google Analytics on Android, please share.

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Gizapage: Bundle, Brand And Promote Your Social Profiles

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:35:47 PDT

Today, Gizapage is launching a set of new features to optimize your Gizapage's profile visibility and design. Gizapage offers users to gather all their online profiles in one page and make them more discoverable. I posted a video interview with the CEO Amit Jaipuria last month.

So what's new with Gizapage?

First you can add your own background image Twitter-style! I actually encountered an error while uploading my image - a 1K Gif, no biggie - so I could not see if you could repeat the image or not.

More interesting, you can apply your own URL to your Gizapage profile. With Facebook releasing vanity urls a few weeks ago, Gizapage blows it all up (it was on their roadmap) by dropping the gizapage.com. Users pay $4.95 per month for this privilege, but it is free if you apply your own URL before July 31st ! I think this is pretty cool.

"With the introduction of premium customization features, GizaPage is helping users take control of their Web 2.0 social identity, “ said GizaPage founder and CEO, Amit Jaipuria. "From having a personal URL to customizing your GizaPage profile, we’re letting you shape the social networking persona you want to present to others.”

Even if it is free for a year, redirecting the URL that contains your name to your Gizapage page is quite an important move in your online branding strategy. How will people find your Gizapage page?

A personalized URL usually looks good on a business card. Gizapage also added a link to submit your profile directly to the Google Base, which helps to make yourself more discoverable on search results. Also, the team is launching a profile widget, to promote your profile anywhere on the Web:

xavier vespa

Active on the Social Web

(The embed code is a little messy :)

With those tools, you should be able to get clicks and visits to your Gizapage profile. Now how will you know if a Gizapage profile is worth your dollar? (will this grow your connections across social platforms?) How many Gizapage friends you will make is an indicator of how well it works. This data is a weak indicator, but this is unfortunately all you have, and my guess would be that Gizapage's next features will offer a Mybloglog-style analytics tool to make the service more engaging (wild guess, high stakes!).

If not, inserting our own URL for the background image would be a nice way to let us track page impressions...

I didn't apply xaviervespa.com to my profile. It's not about Gizapage though: There isn't a social network that has convinced me yet to re-direct my personalize URL to my social profile. For Gizapage, I have created the subdomain http://gizapage.hyveup.tv, just to test how it works. I will admit that I was not really convinced by the concept the first time it was pitched to me, but I am slowly starting to see how brands could utilize this new service.

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A Review Of Youtube's Beta Channels

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:00:03 PDT

It's been known for a couple of months now that Youtube was slowly launching its Beta channels to the public. When I created the Screencast pro channel last month, I was invited to try out the new Beta channel. I accepted the invitation, and here is what I think of the new channels:

For visitors, I don't see a big difference. We find the same modules, and those were easy to understand in the old version. The innovation comes from the video player and the playlist in the sidebar: Visitors can watch all videos without refreshing the whole page. Only the video element refreshes. There is also a unique URL string for each event on the page.

The huge change is for channel owners. No more do we have to toggle the editing interface and the channel page to make a change and see how it looks. The edits are operable from the channel page, and changes are applied immediately. Also, no more transparent modules which colors were dependent of the background color. Yay!

I personally like that the channel's tags are editable from the channel page as well. My video content keeps evolving and transforming over the months. Channel's tags are very important to make your video discoverable, so it is crucial to be constantly reminded that they can be easily updated.

In terms of look'n'feel, it is a big change, but nothing that will make most Youtube channels more beautiful (it's like Myspace pages, they let users customize it, and it's a mess). What changes is the modules' management system: Now, the modules can be handled almost like widgets on an iGoogle page (hint). When I see Youtube's Beta channels, I see: a lighter and widgetizable interface, which for me can only mean two things: mobile-compatible channels, and portability-ready through widgets. When you consider their last feature integration, the autoshare function, it is understandable that they now have to make their platform more mobile-ready.

Finally, there is one last addition to those channels that is worth noticing: Our profiles are also editable from the channel page. Before, if you filled in an info about yourself, it would automatically display it on your channel page. I wanted to let Youtube know who I was, but for my professional channels, I didn't want to say "HyveUp, male', for example. With the Beta channels, you can fill in all the info you wish, and select which one you want to be displayed on your channel.

Overall, I really like the new channels. Youtube is following the right direction there. Again, for all of those who say that Youtube is just slurping Google's money, pay close attention: For more than a year, Youtube has been innovating like it's nobody's business, making it a breeze to communicate through video while on the go.

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Top 10 G1 Apps

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:57:37 PDT

Back in January, I wrote about the best g1 apps that could be found in the market. Since that date, a lot of new apps came up, and the Cupcakes update also changed a few rules. So what are the essential apps you need on your Android phone to get the most out of it ?

App Manager
The first app you want to install from the market is the App Manager. From this app, you can launch, uninstall, copy to SD or search the app in the market. You can also backup all of your applications to the SD card in a few clicks. Most importantly, you can easily install apps from your SD card, which is the gateway to downloading any app you want online and putting it on your phone.

Scoreboard
The simple app was developed by Google. This app allows you to keep track of all of your favorite sports team through your phone's notifications system. It takes about half an hour to set it up, but then you don't have to worry about it ever again, and sports results come to you live automatically.

Babble
Babble is the only Facebook app I know for the g1 that runs smoothly. From Babble, you can easily access your friends' feeds, and drop comments on your friends' updates. Uploading photos and videos to your profile are also part of the experience. The developer also added a quick 'log out/log in as a different user' button, which is quite smart !

MyTracks
I just love this application. Through your phone's GPS, MyTracks will record your position while you are on the go. I personally use it to compare how I perform when I rollerblade to work. I think most people use it for their biking or walking hikes. Once you are done recording, MyTracks creates an KML file and a map on your Google's MyMaps account. You can then easily share this map's URL or embed it anywhere you want.

Glympse
At first sight, Glympse is very similar to MyTracks (or Latitude, Google geolocation-based social network). Glympse is different because it lets you easily share your location live with the person(s) you want, during the amount of time you want. The persons who receive the Glympse can see your location in real-time on a map, from a computer or on a phone.

Twidroid
I am not a super active Twitter user, but anytime I want to interact with the Twitter platform only, Twidroid has been the best app to let me easily tweet and read tweets. From my friends' feeds page, I can 'reply', 'show profile', 'favorite', 'retweet' or 'send direct message' to any item displayed. You can also search Twitter for fresh content about a specific subject, see what's hot on Twitterverse.com and access your favorite items. In the settings (and this is what I like), you can enable notifications for different kinds of events, chose your photo hosting provider, chose your url shortener, and much much more...

Androzip
Androzip is the best and easiest way to bundle documents in a ZIP file (ZIP, GZIP, TAR). From within the app, you can easily select several documents, ZIP'em, and send it to whoever you want. Must-have if you want to manage a lot of documents through your phone.

S3Anywhere
If you have an S3 Amazon account, you will love this app. It lets you easily access any bucket of your account, and provides the upload/download functions to share files between your cloud hard disk and your phone. It becomes interesting when you consider that you can access your documents on S3, ZIP them with Androzip, and send them from your gmail app to anyone you want.

MyAccount
It's the app from T-Mobile to keep track of your account's balance. It's very simple, but I think it is the first time you can access your account balance info from your phone in one click. Must-have!

Metal Detector
The metal detector... detects metal. It acts like a magnet and guides you to the closest source of metal around you. From the settings, you can define the sensitivity of the detector (more sensitive also means more battery used). This is not an essential app to have, but the technology it is built on is pretty interesting. By putting a magnet in a phone, it is the first time that we have a phone that can directly interact with your surrounding environment. It is the cornerstone to a generation of smarter phones (yep, even smarter than what we already have today).

if you have any essential app to share, please do so in the comments, and don't forget to explain why you think it is essential!

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Youtube Adds Autoshare, Pings Twitter, Facebook... And Google Reader?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:00:17 PDT

Youtube's agility and pertinence keep stunning me. Today, I noticed this when opening the upload page :

For starters, Friendfeed just lost one unique feature: Linking Youtube to Twitter.

Also, I can't help but link this new addition to the Android's recent release of video uploads to Youtube through the Android app. This means that anyone can upload videos to Youtube while on the go, share it automatically, and receive feedbacks through Twitter. Well, anyone could do this if Twitter offered @myname email alerts: Then it would be easily accessible and widely used.

I love that Facebook is there too! I have a personal Youtube channel, so hooking this channel up to my Facebook stream is going to spare me the effort of sharing the link on Facebook after it's done uploading.

I think this is a small step for the dev team, but a big one towards networks' interconnectedness. The thing with video is that you start the upload, and then you have time to write a post about a new autosharing feature before it is done uploading and transcoding. Now, Youtube pings you and your friends (unless you set the video on private) when the video is ready to watch.

To optimize your video visibility on Twitter, write the video title as if it was a tweet to someone. Or use a hashtag to index your video directly in a category. So much to be done !

On the other end, I have yet to see what Google Reader sharing is. I imagine it appears as a shared item in my friends' feeds, but I don't see the point of that. My friends don't accept to follow my content on Google Reader, they accept to follow the content I share. I like this though because it is a little hint on how Google is trying to make people connect around items on the Web (aka build a Google social network): through Google Reader (and iGoogle by extension, I imagine).

A little research on the Web did not pulled back any explanation for Google Reader:
ReelSEO
Inside Facebook
...

Update: The Google Reader autoshare feature places your latest videos in your shared items:

Again, I don't find this really relevant, but maybe it will be when Friendconnect will centralize the social structure around Google products...

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RateItAll: Login Through Facebook On Our Widget

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:34:59 PDT

Today, RateItall released its new widget, just a few months after the old one disappeared from the consumer-ratings platform.

The new widget is now seamlessly integration with Facebook Connect for easy login, rating, and sharing. This move is interesting because it just made RateItAll very volatile: For one, users do not need to go rateitall.com to drop a review, and two, users do not need to login with RateItAll to post and share a review. Go ahead and leave a review below to test the Facebook connection:

HyveUpTechnology Blogs

Here is CEO Lawrence Coburn introducing the new widget right outside of the SFnewtech Meetup :

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Outbrain vs Linkwithin: Recommendations For Blog Posts

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:15:00 PDT

One obvious way to generate more page views for your blog is to recommend content related to the post that brought a visitor to your site. I was formerly using Outbrain's widget: This widget pulls out related articles from its network of users and recommends those links at the end of your post. The widget also includes a (star-) rating system, which most probably plays a role in the article recommendation algo.

The good: The widget's design is pretty pleasant, and finding that some readers take the time of a click to rate your stuff is rewarding.

The bad: My blog did not experience any observable change when Outbrain's widget was installed, and recommended posts were often from the same source.

Uninstalled !

For a few weeks now - even a few months - I have been using Linkwithin. Linkwithin offers a 'related posts widget with photo thumbnail'. Viewing an example is as simple as scrolling down to the end of this post (unless you're reading this from your feed reader).

Linkwithin does it right because if only fetches related posts from my blog. Hence, clicks generate page views.

The good: I stopped seeing traffic going away more than coming in through the recommendations widget. Also, it is nice to see more of your content on your site.

The bad: There is way less clicks on the Linkwithin recommendation widget than on the Outbrain's widget. Whether my content is unattractive, whether Linkwithin recommendation algo still needs fine-tuning. Either way, it means that engagement on my site is going down. The design is a little basic, and beware of posts without an image thumbnail to display: it doesn't look good !

After balancing out the pros and the cons, I have decided Linkwithin could stay on my blog. I really try to keep a minimal blog-bling philosophy, but Linkwithin's internal recommendation system is so vital that it should be a default feature on any given blog.

Linkwithin would start to really impress me if they had a custom-built Feedburner FeedFlare...

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Tubemogul's New Video Views Widget

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:00:00 PDT

I would like to take a moment to thank the Tubemogul team for the great widget they have released. I had a discussion with an employee of Tubemogul through Disqus, where I asked for sexier Tubemogul widgets. I was told that there was something in the making. Well here it is:

This flash widget shows HyveUp's cumulative views across several video platforms. There is no branding Tubemogul whatsoever, but I am not sure if flash coders can tweak and personalize this widget (you can also hold click on the sphere and make it spin)... I now use it on HyveUp video page. This way, visitors get a better understanding of HyveUp's reach.

This kind of cumulative views widget is unique right now on the Web, so massive respect to the team for pulling this off! I still have a few requests regarding this widget that would turn my Tubemogul world upside down:
- Resizable widget (I like getclicky's traffic widgets)
- Insert text options (title, url)
- A widget for each video I track (I know, I'm crazy)

Tubemogul' been going through a lot of changes recently, so I tell myself that the dev team is just rolling out the goodness step-by-step. Right?

Android Youtube Uploads: One Wrong Login At A Time

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:57:39 PDT

I have been using Flip Cams for the past two years to record HyveUp's video interviews. I always dreamed that my Flips could be connected to Youtube (seriously !). Unfortunately, the company behind the Flips was bought by Cisco, which was a big disappointment to me.

A few days ago, along with the Android Cupcakes updates came a whole new phone: The camera turns into a camcorder that offers a very acceptable video quality. Videos are stored in the phone and super-easily accessible. And most of all, I can upload my videos straight to Youtube. Heaven yes !

The big flaw so far is here: if you have several Youtube accounts, Google will automatically assign one for you, and there is nothing you can do about it. Apparently, Google determined that the channel HyveUp is my main Youtube channel. I admit it is the first channel I created on Youtube, but it is not my personal channel.

For the time being, YouTube will support one login per person, and an account is needed to be able to upload video. (Silicon.com)

Fair enough, they should still let me chose which login...

The turn around is to send your videos to the email address associated with your channel (that you will find in the mobile setup page, as seen above). That's the old school way though... I find the Youtube app on Android really well-designed, to browse my stuff and discover new videos, so I wish I had the flexibility to chose my default account.

Almost there...

This little feature gives a whole new mobile edge to Youtube. When Google's short-messaging services will be better integrated into the Youtube's platform, a live Twitter-like video discussion will start to see the day, something I think Seesmic was after before redirecting its efforts towards social messaging apps.

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Contenture: Freemium For The Masses

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:13:56 PDT

Online content publishers need to explore new monetization models to make their activity more profitable. Today, the team that brought us Clicky Web Analytics is launching Contenture.

Contenture is a network of content publishers (kind of like an ad network). Regular visitors to this network can pay a small amount monthly to get special privileges. Those privileges include taking away the ads, giving paying users priority access to new articles, exclusive access to archives, and more. Check out the help page for more info.

What's in it for the publishers? Basically, Contenture gathers all payments from users, and splits it according to each publisher's traffic in the Contenture network. So do the high-traffic blogs get the whole enchilada? Almost, but they work for it. However, small publishers get more than the traditional penny Adsense gives us every month ;)

There isn't much more to say right now about the service. There are a few thing I still can't figure out: How will users be tracked? Can they sign in from my site? which ads are going to show for non-users? If you have answers, please share.

It is a nice move from a team that provides an analytics service I have been paying for and using for more than two years now! If I've been paying for a service they provide, other people will!

Try Contenture with me!

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Notify.me When You Switch It Back

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:28:05 PDT

A week ago, I noticed Notify.me's new bar and wrote a post about it. I really enjoy Notify.me's RSS solution, but along with the new bar came a few changes that make the service less satisfying.

1. My email alerts from notify.me do not show short summaries anymore. It just shows a title and a link. Notify.me is a productivity tool that allowed me to have a first look at an item before opening it in my browser (when on mobile). Without the summary, I lose crucial context info that makes notify.me less enjoyable to use.

2. As mentioned above, a big plus that notify.me provides is RSS connection while on the go. Since it just shows a link on the email alert, I sometimes open the article in the browser, only to find that the new bar is not fixed. This means it goes up when you scroll down, therefore hiding a big chunk of the text you're reading.

3. The last thing I find wrong with notify.me has been a problem since I started using the system. For the blogs I absolutely to get notifications from, I get them sent to my gtalk account. Athena, notify.me's name on google talk, has a beautiful name, but the way it sends me updates is all wrong. On my Android, I get a link, but I can't click on it :(

Don't get me wrong, I am a notify.me enthusiast, which is why I deeply wish those bugs could be fixed. Sorry for the bad quality of the captures. Thanks to the team if you read this.

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Stephanie Quilao on BuzzLogic Vino Diaries - Episode 24

noreply@blogger.com (SpDL) — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:29:26 PDT

Stephanie Quilao of BackinSkinnyJeans fame joins us over a glass of bubbly to give us her raw and unfiltered view on blogging in the health and lifestyle category. She shares the serendipitous experience of finding her true voice and creating a blog that truly reflected her desire to portray real images of women and real issues rather than the glossy cover shots we are all used to seeing.

Stephanie shares her biggest challenges and offers up a multitude of suggestions for the everyday blogger including ideas for monetization options beyond advertising.

The Scribd Store Is Now Open

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:48:55 PDT

Yesterday, the team over at Scribd announced the opening of the Scribd store. How does it work? Remember how Scribd took the 'Youtube for documents' approach to launch their service? Beyond sharing user-generated documents, Scribd users can now join the 'partner program' and market their documents through the Scribd network (Scribd makes 60 million uniques a month). The Scribd store is the final touch that transformed the Youtube for documents into the iTunes for documents.

When I met the Founder of Scribd a few months ago for an interview, he emphasized his speech around the great potential writers found in Scribd to promote their books. Some writers generated tens of thousands of views on Scribd, turning the document-sharing platform into an opportunity land for writers.

Scribd's revenue model is very promising for 3 reasons:
- Scribd's iPaper technology provides a viral potential to any documents uploaded.
- As iTunes has showed, people want to legally own their media files.
- As Blurb and Lulu are proving, sometimes paper is better.

Bryan Trussel, Glympse - Where Are You Doing?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:44:47 PDT

Using maps to communicate a position is gaining a lot of popularity in the social networking sphere. The iPhone offers over 1,900 location-based apps in its store. Tech entrepreneurs are seeing gold in this river. It's not just a startup thing: Google launched Latitude, a location-aware social network.

This is only the beginning of new lifestyles. Twitter created a new form of networking by asking one simple question: What are you doing? In the location-aware space, there is one app that follows the same philosophy and asks: Where are you ?

Launching public today for the Where 2.0 Conference, Glympse is the first application that lets you share your location with whoever you want during a limited amount of time. You use Glympse when you want to let others know where you are.

Glympse is dead-simple: once you installed the app, launch it, let it find you on a map, set a timer, choose a contact, and press send. For the amount of time you have set, the person(s) you have chosen will be able to see you on a map in real-time. It is called 'sending a Glympse to someone'.

Example 1: You leave the office. Instead of calling home to let the family know you are on your way, send them a glympse.

Example 2: You are meeting a business partner at a Starbucks downtown. Set a Glympse on one hour and send it to him. It will make it a lot easier to find each others.

I have tested the app with Bryan Trussel, the Founder and CEO of Glympse. We met in the San Francisco's SOMA for the video interview below, and thanks to Glympse, I didn't have to show up 15 minutes in advance 'just in case': I was at Starbucks having a Frappuccino, enjoying the sun, and keeping an eye on my guest's nearing.

Technically, sending a Glympse to someone is creating a unique glympse url with your route in real-time on it. Virtually, anyone who has this url can view you in real-time. In terms of privacy, that's the only issue I can identify. The fact that Glympse is meant to run in the background is also an issue for some phones. Otherwise, the simplicity of the concept has a lot of merit, and I know I will be playing around with it pretty often.

Is Your Website On Youtube Questionnaire

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:42:44 PDT

I would like to get a little feedback from the community, so I created a little 5-item questionnaire, if you don't mind taking a minute to answer the questions.

I am grateful in advance.

Xavier

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Notify.me Adds A Bar, Slowly Killing The Traditional RSS Reader

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:16:15 PDT

Notify.me is this awesome tool that lets you grab any RSS feed and decide on which medium you want that feed: email, chat, SMS, or Notify.me's Air app. Today, as usual, Notify.me sends me an info that I care about, so I click along and land on this:

The URL, of course, is a notify.me shortener (http://c.notify.me/xkJCBA). Once you log in, the bar becomes a notify.me dashboard with a few basic feed management options.

Digg's move definitely created a micro-craze around bars and url shorteners. Everyone's got his own, literally. With bars and shorteners, you can:

- Increase your traffic (significantly)
- Get extra insights on traffic analytics
- Develop your brand

SO what is notify.me's plan? The company's blog does not mention anything... A Google search is vain. In other words, we don't know where notify.me is going with this yet.

However, it is not hard to match this new addition to their latest Ping.fm integration. A little more social integrations and Notify.me could become a RSS reader killer. Why? Because notify.me is a RSS reader without the hassle of the RSS reader. Users get their feeds through their existing communications outlets, and the notify.me bar adds those social features needed to interact around content. Why bother going to a place where my news are, when it can all come to me?

Notify.me's RSS model is definitely easier, and has the potential to bring RSS to a broader crowd. Tech geeks will stick to readers, but the rest of the Web might just like Notify.me's simplicity.

Gizapage Brings All Social Profiles In One Spot - Interview With Amit Jaipuria, Founder

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:38:14 PDT

Starting today, you can try a new tool in the online social networking ecosystem that will hopefully boost our social productivity. Gizapage is a social networks manager that aggregates all of your social profiles into one. Just link to your Gizapage url, and your visitors will be offered to connect with you on the network of their choice, all from within Gizapage (yes, the url is customizable).

The benefits of aggregating your social profiles are two-fold:
1. It creates richer networking opportunities,
2. It is a personal dashboard that helps you monitor your own profiles.

Here is our interview with Amit Jaipuria, Founder of Gizapage:

Gizapage comes at a time when social networks are battling to turn your profile into your online ID card. Gizapage has an edge in this ecosystem since it also enables you to manage the profiles you are showing, making it easier to monitor and display your online identities.

Here is a screencast demo of Gizapage:

The idea has merits. Where Friendfeed takes content away from its sources and doesn't really send it back, Gizapage enables users to keep updated versions of their online IDs. Each profiles appears in a frame withheld in a tab. It sounds like a fair deal to send traffic to social networks through frames, but this model holds a lot of limits (like mobile access), despite being the cornerstone of Gizapage's originality. Users can do things through the frames that are impossible to do through a well-regulated API for example.

If you want to give Gizapage a try, click here.

If you want to connect with me, click here.

There's Something About Twitter

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:45:34 PDT

If Web companies were humans, Twitter would be the hot chick whom men of all ages tried to bon... bond with: young Facebook , middle-aged Google , and pepper-haired Apple .

What makes Twitter so irresistible? Because Twitter is the first-ever public social network. Twitter brings people together by exposing the smaller details of life that we don't necessarily talk about because we think they are unconsequential. It lowers the expectations.We can't really worry about saying something if it has no consequences.

I identify 6 components of Twitter's technology that made the concept of public networking possible.
- Updating Twitter's status is easy (unconsequential)
- Updating Twitter's status is fast (140 characters)
- Updating Twitter is possible on the go (SMS)
- Updating Twitter is social (followers+search)
- Twitter is live (as fast as the sound of a voice)
- You can tweet passively (automatic updates)

The real gold in the social networking space is to track users' identities and activities, online and offline, simply because that is what advertisers will pay for. Facebook holds your identity, but it has a major privacy issue that makes it hard for them to monetize its data. Google has your online activities, but only when you are using a Google product (most of which are accessed from a computer). Apple knows what you are doing while on the go, but because they are the hardware provider, they also face privacy issues. Twitter is the first social network that unveils what users are doing offline, voluntarily, whether from their computer or on the go.

Twitter has gold between its hands: it knows what people are doing and where (hem, sometimes), and anyone (hem, advertisers) can interact directly with users because users voluntarily engage in this public form of interaction.

Here is an example of Twitter's amazing reach:

I am on the way to the ball park and tweeting from my phone: 'On the way to the ballpark'. From that, Twitter knows my location (because sent from a mobile), and it also knows one very precise keyword about what I am doing: 'ballpark'. Semantically, I can divide 'ballpark' into a subset of keywords: baseball, sports, hotdog, beer, caps, sports gears.. Based on my location, a search of close-by businesses can be done, advertisers that fit my tweet's keywords can be sorted out, and ads from the highest bidders for my keywords can be sent to me as an @ message for example.

This is a big deal because local advertising dollars represent a big share of the advertising market, and so far no web technologies has been able to offer an efficient solution, despite the opportunity that 2.0 technologies are creating. No other social networks have been able to pull this off because they promised not to share users' personal info, which is why users agreed to use the service in the first place. Twitter doesn't have this problem, it is all public.

Twitter's problem is different: How do you turn an advertiser's intrusion into a useful information? The solution is to normalize the intrusion of location-based messages in your notifications. In other words, add a geo-targeted news service to its features. This way, a tweet from your local coffee shop won't seem so weird if you also get tweets from a stranger who reports an accident in your neighborhood.

Twitter's other problems are: Its users' geolocation intelligence is not... smart enough , at least when it comes to serving millions of geo-targeted ads. A lot of tweets are not geo-tagged. It's changing, but slowly. So Twitter goes talk to Google , who's developing a major geo-data center. Twitter's identity system is also a little weak, which is why finding a way to work with Facebook doesn't seem so stupid. I could bet that 99% of Twitter users also have a Facebook profile. However, since the two might have not found a way to work together, maybe Twitter could try to get users' info on their own through social links on users' profiles, which is merely a way for users to give away more info than a nickname and an email address.

Now Apple jumps in the Twitter madness. Those companies do not actually want to buy Twitter. They are actually all betting on one horse, and feeding it with people's attention. If you start tweeting, they all win: Twitter buys identities from Facebook, buys geo data from Google, and then it can serve one-to-one, geo-targeted, contextual (and expensive) advertising opportunities to local advertisers. They can also re-sell that data to mobile service providers like Apple who maybe wishes to serve ads to its users through its applications network.

Just an idea though...

10 Tech Blogs You Should Read

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:21:40 PDT

During social networking events, I am often surprised by the lack of knowledge some people in the tech industry show about good sources of information online (one guy did not know Readwriteweb, pfff). My point here is not to make an extensive list of tech blogs (I'm not suicidal), but instead to list a few essential blogs you should have in your reader.

Techcrunch - Stay in the loop, read what everybody else is reading in the tech industry.
Readwriteweb - A little less breaking news and a little more reflexions on the becoming of the Web.
The Inquisitr - Politically incorrrect tech news, and other offbeat stories from the Web.
AVC - Venture capitalist Fred Wilson (Disqus, Twitter, Tumblr...) blogs about the Web economy.
Android And Me - A lot of blogs launched to track the promising Android platform for mobile, but not a lot of them keep up the pace and provide useful info. Android And Me does!
Springwise - Read about fresh innovations daily, very often tech-related.
HyveUp - A little self-promo! HyveUp provides opinions on tech news, video interviews with Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, and tips on how to better handle your Web activities.
Sexy Widget - RateItAll's Founder Lawrence Coburn blogs about widgets, apis, SEO, and anything a seasoned Web entrepreneur in the Valley can share with the world.
SheGeeks - (ex?) Readwriteweb's blogger Corvida shares fresh tips and news to enhance your social experience on the Web.
Youtube Blog - Stay in touch with all the latest features from the leading online video platform.

And as usual, the 11th out of a 10 list:
Oreilly Radar - Tech insights that are just way ahead of the curve. Yay!

If you don't feel like going to all of those sites to grab the feed of each and every one of them, just grab this feed: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/10TechBlogs

It's all the blogs above under one feed! See a preview of the latest updates below to get an idea of what you are subscribing to:

Prosper Breaks Back In

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:26:44 PDT

For six months, Prosper froze its activities. Borrowers still had to keep paying back their debts, but no new loan bids were allowed. And today, Prosper is back!

So what happened there? Here's a brief explanation from someone who has a 5-cent-worth knowledge on loans:

When the Lending Club finished registering with the HEC, it was able to open up their pool of lenders in 15 states. Prosper was under a “cease & desist” order from the SEC for selling unregistered securities, so they replicated the Lending Club's move.

Today Prosper relaunches, but only residents of California can lend money on Prosper (which gives a clear advantage to the Lending Club in this competition). Even worse, according to this source, Prosper “flipped the bird” at the SEC by relaunching today.

So where is this fugitive going? As a come-back stunt, Prosper is launching a grass-root campaign on fixthecreditcrisis.org, requesting visitors to send a letter to their state's government, and request an authorization for Prosper to operate in their states.

Ambitious! What is so unique about Prosper that you don't find in the competition, and that would push some people to want Prosper more than its competition? Currently, Lending Club and Pertuity Direct are the only two p2p lending platforms available to most investors throughout the United States. Prosper's model is different because, among other things, loan rates are determined by an auction among lenders. This auction system is what makes Prosper unique and unwanted by established credit institutions. Applying a bidding system on loan rates will attract borrowers and threaten banks' hold on this activity.

There is an obvious war going on in the p2p lending field, one that extends to areas beyond my comprehension, so I won't even try to go any further.

However, couldn't Prosper stay on a quiet period while launching the fixthecreditcrisis.org campaign? I think launching back today was a nice way to get a little attention for this week's Finovate 09 event... What do you think?

What Happened To Oosah?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:45:48 PDT

Recently, I was reminded through a Youtube comment of Oosah. Oosah is the hub that syndicates your media files from all the major media-sharing platforms, and offers a 1gb memory space to upload your stuff on Oosah. At least that was the launching buzz strategy. The comment that reminded me of Oosah also pointed out to a very good question: What happened to Oosah?

Today, here is what Oosah's homepage looks like:

Acquired? Transition? I probably spaced out on the company's last blog post. Unfortunately, the company did not bother to write a post about it :( I don't remember receiving an email from Oosah that announced this (I just did an email search, and no sign of Oosah there).

I actually got really into wanting to know what happened to Oosah when I realized that a bunch of people are wondering what happened to Oosah.

The last bits of news we got from Oosah was the site for iPhone users, and the release of an Android app. When Oosah previously launched a series of widgets, the writer of Widgets Lab expresed his skepticim towards the buzz strategy of Oosah:

This huge amount has garnered some skepticism, mine included because every service in the past who has ever offered big space for free just like that ends up in bankrupt in a year or less. This has not happened to Oosah and it is maybe because they not popular yet

So is it possible that Oosah's buzz strategy was a money-bleeder? I don't hold the charts in my hands, so I can't really tell you. When I talked to Mike Duggan a year ago, he was considering monetizing the widget they would later launch. The widget weren't a big hit. Going mobile and selling paid apps is probably a safer bet for a company that provides a personable media environment. In the same post of Widgets Lab mentioned above, the blogger added:

while i still find hard to believe that their Freemium + Ads business model will hold them for the long haul with such a huge amount of storage they are giving away. they look to have a utility and user hosted media content angle they want to build on for the future.

Sure, I am still wondering though: Did Oosah got acquired and is preparing a come-back? or did they just set this banner up on their Website, stole all the fiber optic from their office and left for the South?

So will Oosah come back? You can cast your vote here:

Update A source close to the company told me they just ran out of money, but haven't given yet on a long-term development project.

Rate HyveUp On RateItAll, The Reviews Factory

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:48:11 PDT

One of the biggest lessons I have learned with placing a widget in your sidebar is: Write a blog post about it. Let's get to it!

If you like to share your opinion on just about anything, then click the badge below and go 5-star my blog in RateItAll.

You'll need to sign in to get started :( but if you are looking to promote something online (like a blog), then you'll be able to create a page for that something and invite your friends to rate it :)

RateItAll was already around before the big clock hit 2000 AD. The company pioneered the concept of consumer-reviews widgets, which vanished during a recent major rollover that aimed at providing a smoother experience to the users of this reviews factory.

Tip: If you submit your product in their database, give it a good review, but don't forget to also give a good rating to the list where your product appears.

Oprah Castrates Micro-Celebrities On Twitter, Welcome To Friendfeed

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:36:46 PDT

Today, Oprah is going live on Twitter (my favorite coverage on the Inquisitr). That same day, Ashton Kutcher reaches 1 million users. Oh wait, there was a bug in the system, the whole thing was set up. In other words, a great day for Twitter, but the day that the early-adopters will start to leave the twittershpere for good.

Actually, leaving Twitter is not the right term to use, as passive twittering is always possible (something I have been doing for the past few months). But until recently, tech micro-celebrities were leading the Twitter leaderboard, and this is not the case anymore (scobleizer, 80,000 followers, pfff). No more geek egotrip potential in Twitter, Oprah is bringing the facts back on the table.

Now for us, early party-goers, softcore socialites, the attention is on Friendfeed (well for some of us the attention has been on Friendfeed for quite a while). Friendfeed is a nice getaway from twitter because:
- It's geeky and nobody uses it
- It's as powerful as Facebook
- It now works almost instantly with Twitter
(Yea, that's a lot of techcrunch linkbaiting, not my fault if they have the got stuff)

So do you feel castrated by the mainstreamization of Twitter? Then head over to Friendfeed: You'll find the same robust search features you have on twitter, it's real-time too, the founders are active users and listeners, and no one bothers to know how many follower you have (I guess only Friendfeed uses that data internally). It's always better to be a big fish in a small pond, right?

Did Google Pulled A Youtube On Domino's?

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 08:00:00 PDT

Two days ago, I followed up on Brian Solis mention of the Domino's pizza fart episode on my personal blog, to share the idea that those employees did not do this joke out-of-the-blue. Anyhow, now I just posted on the Click2Map blog to explain how the corporation was actually able to spot the store where this bad joke happened. But I'd like to add one more detail to this whole story before shutting up for good.

Click on the video below (no it's not some javascript trick to spam you):

'This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Kristy Hammonds.'

Kristy Hammonds is one of the employee in the video.

Wow! I did not think of that. This whole story is based on a video that was illegally uploaded to Youtube! In a way, isn't there a procedural error at the source of this scandal that should neutralize the implication of the two Domino's employees? Couldn't they argue (if they were as merciless as their employer) that this video was illegally distributed by Youtube, and therefore Google should pay the price of this disaster?

However, to close the case on this whole story, I don't think it tainted the pizza brand at all. It's just a little glitch that brought entertainment into our lives. Junk food is junk food, and a little fart won't change that. Another interesting fact for online videophites like myself is the CEO's announcement through Youtube:

This incident generated some good thing for the Domino's youtube channel:

Yay for them!

Wish Google Reader Were More Like Delicious

connect@hyveup.com (Xavier Vespa) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:00:00 PDT

Like a lot of geeks out there, I love Google Reader, and even more since I have a g1. I keep adding more and more feeds, just to make sure I don't miss a news item, and it works perfectly fine. There is just one thing that really grinds my gear is Google Reader's tags and folders management system.

Every time I want to manage my tags, I feel like going back on an Amstrad 464: I have +900 tags, and they are all manageable one-by-one. I couldn't care less about my tags, except that they are mixed with my folders, and I care about my folders.

Today, I decided to do a little spring cleaning. I backed up my feeds, erased them from the reader, and erased all my tags... hem, tried. 'Ooops', says Google Reader when I select all my private tags to erase them, 'an error occurred. Please try again in a few seconds'. You can wait all the seconds you want, it just doesn't work.

I'm not the kind to give up, so I started to delete tags by bundles of 10. After 300 tags deleted, the same error message started to appear again. And now I just can't delete one single tag anymore.

Long story short: Why can't Google Reader be more like Delicious? Why is the tag/folder management process so archaic? When the Google Reader team announced the launch of comment threads in the reader, this user rightfully complained about the total lack of development prioritization the Greader dev team is showing.

I am now going to re-import my feeds, in a reader that has 600 stand-alone tags. That doesn't make sense. I created a discussion around this weakness, and I hope it will be fixed pretty soon.

Please, Google Reader dev team, make the tag/folder system more like Delicious, where tags can be renamed, deleted, bundled, and so on. You would kick Yahoo's ass right there!