Most of the websites are in the form of blogs where they write reviews about how the products are doing.  This can be really selfish and it is usually from one person’s point of view.

GDGT is a website for the gadget lovers to share and to find out how their gadgets are doing online.  It has a lot of sharing options for you to tell your Facebook friends, Twitter followers and more!

When I first try to add my new product, I was being told that they have been totally inundated with thousands of gadgets, so they will need to take a little bit to work through them all..

With GDGT, you can easily embed what gadgets you are currently holding onto your blogs or other forms of websites.

So, what is GDGT?

What is Google Voice?

It allows you to have a single Google number where your family and friends can call you on. And when they call you Google number, you can allow it to call any of your actual phone number such as your mobile phone number, or your home number, or anything else.  And if you want to keep it to voice mail, it is possible too.  Here’s a video demonstration:

Here’s the review of Google Voice:

There has been social media news around if Mark Zuckerberg should sell Facebook or not with an offer of $200million  of preferred stock at $10 billion valuation.  Though TechCrunch has announced that he will not sell Facebook at $8 billion valuation (seems like a discrepency here, or it’s another offer?), I believe they are still thinking about it as they are forecasting to make $550million this financial year.

If Facebook should continue to be better, here’s my recommendations:

About Facebook website

Facebook is a unique platform where it provides almost everybody in  different parts of the world a place to gather together.  Because it allows communications amongst the users, it virtually takes over some of the traditional ways of email communications.

Continue to innovate!

What Facebook really needs to do is to continue  innovating on their own platform for internal applications as well as third party applications.  There are always new competitors trying to create another “Facebook” website.  We will always be bombarded with the new competitors.  I can still remember how I was “poached” by my friend in Friendster to join Facebook.  I refused to join for a while, until I see many more people joining Facebook.  Seriously, I was left with no choice but to join Facebook.   I can still remember leaving my friendster-style testimonial on the Facebook wall while my friend teased me that I don’t have to do that anymore!

Today, I have not logged into my Friendster for several months.  I have no idea what Friendster has become.

What can Facebook do to continue retaining visitors in the next 5 years and so?

Looking from the history, it looks really common for one website to be taken over by the other.  And surprisingly, Internet should be only about 10 years old.  On the Internet, time flies really fast… One application can be famous for a few months or years, and immediately get out of the game!

From what I can see,

• ICQ has been taken over by MSN
• Friendster/MySpace is slowly taken over by Facebook
• Hotmail/Yahoo email users are slowly moving over to Gmail

And the upcoming webware are as follows:

• Google Chrome browser (taking over Internet Explorer and Firefox?)
• Google Doc (taking over Microsoft Office?)
• Google Reader
• WordPress (taking over BlogSpot?)

Something which can keep the website alive are probably as follows:

• No strong competition
• New things to keep users happy

The Number One thing I don’t like about Facebook

There are a few advertorial links in every webpage that Facebook tried to “trick” me to click.  They actually placed it beside the Facebook application I was using! And I thought it was the same application!  I can still remember one of the links actually charge me money without my permission!  Why?  Because the clause to pay money is really small!

I would say that Facebook has done a really good job of ad placement because I really thought they are associated.  But the part where they charge me money, is only to do with that scheming advertiser.

Should Mark sell?

Ok, here’s my thought.  If Mark should sell Facebook, it should be during the good times.  That’s when we can make the most out of our business.  Buy low, sell high… Isn’t that obvious?  But again, I would want to continue expanding my passion if I were Mark…

We all know how strict Facebook is when their 3rd party applications wish to access our information.  And when you install a Facebook application, you will definitely know this is in Facebook domain because Facebook is trying all means to protect their users.

Twitter, on the other hand, has so many third party applications which are built on top of it.  And because it has been doing really well as a very simple webware, it doesn’t have to worry so much about its third party applications as they are built on various platforms.

Now, Facebook is following the footsteps of Twitter in this area.  First, I saw the similarity of updating your “status” or what Twitter called it as “What are you doing now”.  Then, it turns into a feed reading place to update their friends from blogs, news and other RSS feeds.  I believe seriously that all these innovations come from Twitter.

I come to know this news from TechCrunch mentioning about Facebook is expected to announce third party access to their application externally.

I think this is a good news for every one of us because we will be able to socialize online in many different ways.  With Facebook so portable on different platform in the near future, it will mean website will be the place for headquarters only.  And users can simply use independent applications to access their information.

I don’t believe this will pose any threat to Twitter because twitter is unique in its following/follower way of connecting with people.  And we will still continue to use Twitter as it is for our social networking needs.

About Facebook

Website: facebook.com
Blog: blog.facebook.com
Category: Network/Hosting
Employees: 700
Founded: 2/04
Description: Social network
Click here for more info.

In today’s Internet, we have blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, wikis, and all other sorts of webware that we can lay our hands on.  The Internet is also finding ways to make you platform independent with all the software that you are using such as office productivity software (with Google Docs), email software (with Gmail) and image editing (with Picnik).

How about managing your projects and tasks with your job?  You have been a really busy executives and managers, and you would really hope how you can make your work more efficient.

Well in fact, one of the most time-consuming tasks in your project(s) is the task of managing the priority of all the actual tasks.  You would hope to know what you need to do today, and what your staff are doing in exactly the way you wanted.  You don’t have to micro-manage them, in order to manage what they are doing today, tomorrow and the day after.  All you need to do, is to manage the actual task overview of each employee.

Introduction to Producteev

Today, I am going to talk about Producteev.  It is an intuitive and fully drag & drop-able solution to collaborate with your colleagues over shared projects and tasks.

How did I manage to find this site?  I chance upon this site through Chris Brogan on twitter.  And I thought this is quite a good addition to our world wide web!

Here’s a summary of what Producteev is:

• In a nutshell, you can create tasks for yourself or to assign to members of your team, and you can then leave comments on these tasks as your project evolves with time.
• You will be accessing to a lot of useful task-management features such as file management, reminders, a calendar and numerous third-party applications such as mobile apps, desktop and IM bots.
• You will also be able to manage both the tasks as well as to-do lists, and communicate efficiently with your team.

In fact, as you can see, it is still in beta version currently.  Even though the software is already in place, they must be still trying their very best to test the software first before they make it official.

Overview of Producteev

You will see boxes of to-do tasks on your dashboard when you log into the system.  And on every box, you will share your tasks with your colleagues, or to make it private.  You are free to create a new box whenever necessary.  (See below)

There is also a live feed section for you to find out what your colleagues have done in the tasks.  This live feed also allows you to message your colleagues, upload a file to the message, and even to message privately. (See below)

You can also upload files onto the server.  Your colleagues can also comment on it. (See below)

Any other features on top of that?

Simply said, this is what Producteev is all about.  And they surround their features to be compatible with different mobile devices.  On top of that, you can also sync Producteev with the various services such as twitter to update your tasks!

Interview with Producteev CEO

I have been able to interview the founder and CEO of Producteev.  His name is Ilan Abehassera.

When I approach Producteev, I wonder if they are going to accept my interview questions with my current startup of this blog.  Never did I knew that Ilan is a really approachable person who not only answered all my questions immediately, he even added me in his LinkedIn account.  Wow! Thanks Ilan.

Here’re the questions I have interviewed on 2 April 2009:

1) When did you start to have this idea of starting this website?
Ans: I had the idea 2 years ago, and starting working on a prototype 1 year ago. I finally decided to start a company around it on July 8, 2008

2) How long have you been working on this site?
Ans: Since June 1st 2008, so 10 months

3) What’s your vision of this site?
Ans:  ”Producteev is building the first productivity platform developed on top of the tools we all rely on every day (email, IM, mobile, desktop, outlook, gmail, google docs,…)”

Group Task Management is still a largely unsolved problem : emails or IM are used as our main tool to assign tasks to colleagues, but we can all agree those are not efficient to manage and track tasks and projects. 

=> With Producteev.com, we help you centralize tasks, projects, internal communication and files by using whatever communication service you rely on.

4) What is the server technology behind?  Why is the server able to support all of our information in terms of space and bandwidth?
Ans: We are based on the LAMP stack, with 2 servers (1 web server + 1 mysql server) 

5) How many of you are working on maintaining this website?
Ans: 3 full time 

6) Will there be any always-ongoing research to further improve the system?
Ans: Of course, we have a huge roadmap ahead of us, and just recruited a mathematician that will build a better algorithm to prioritize tasks (but sshhhh, this is a secret!)

Conclusion

First of all,  I would like to thank Ilan for the interview in this blog post.  His other two colleagues include Aric Lasry (Co-Founder and Lead Developer) and Simon Dawlat (Director Product Marketing).  They have a lot of experiences before they work on this project with Ilan.  You may find out more about them in their “about us” page.

Looks like Producteev is progressing as I have just checked Ilan’s twitter that they are employing their first employee!  Congratulations!

Producteev certainly has potential as this very simple task management can be quite complicated when it involves two or more people.  I can tell you that because I have been working in an office and most of our time is to keep our tasks insync!  We’ll see how this project is going to evolve into!

Top Website Designers and Developer Tools

I find this pretty useful for those of you who are looking for tools for your website designs and development.  (Oh by the way, the landing page for this link is also pretty nice!)

It’s also another site which links to many external sites.  It’s a great resource here. Enjoy!