Rrove - Officially Beta!!!

In the last couple of months, A friend and I have been working on an interesting social bookmarks project. IT'S FINALLY HERE!!! Yey!

Before I point you to the service, picture this scenario - you've been invited by a friend to his birthday party at a restaurant somewhere in the city. You had a great experience (i.e they serve an excellent Chicken BBQ Pizza), and you want to return to it. Well, guess what - you forgot how to get there (you've lost the invite, the address, and the map), and you're to lazy to email your friend.

You probably won't make it back, at least not soon.

Check out Rrove - its a social bookmarks service FOR LOCATIONS. Use it to save the places that you've been to, so you can return to them in the future!

And its done in a very simple, non-obtrusive way - you get it done IN ONE CLICK. After you add our Rrove buttons to your Bookmarks Toolbar (we'll show you how after you sign-up), head to your favorite map service and use it as you do right now (get a map of an address or get driving directions). After that, just click the 'Rrove This' button and your location(s) are saved in your account. You can come back to them anytime.

If you're familiar with what social bookmarks services do, then you'll know that this becomes a discovery engine. The locations you save can be marked public or private. If you make it public then you're letting everyone else on Rrove know about this location and what you think of it. This allows other people and yourself to explore new places.

You're probably excited about how it works, but a favor before you go. Please be gentle! This is a project and its highly experimental. The core function (saving locations) is pretty solid and the project is very stable. Neverthless, I'm sure there are ways to improve. If you have an idea or suggestion, email me at feedback@rrove.com.

OK - I've said enough. Go to Rrove.com now.

YouTube Sold?

Got this over the Social Software Blog - rumor says that YouTube has a buyer. And, as with what the blog says, I think that it's Yahoo!. They already have other social bookmarks sites (e.g. Flickr, Delicious), so YouTube is a perfect fit.

Here's something new - if they're smart, they should take Digg next.

TWiki Dakar & Feb Wiki Wed

TWiki.org is launching it's next generation TWiki (code-named Dakar) during February's Wiki Wednesday. This is the 4th version of TWiki and promises exciting new features including a WYSIWYG interface. Having been a TWiki fan for a couple of years now, I think that this is key feature that's been lacking. Sure, TWiki is mostly used by enterprises (who probably forces their users to live without one). But some savvy engineers are using it for (or as part of) their public websites.

There will be a short presentation by TWiki author Peter Thoeny, and a panel discussion about "The Future of Enterprise Wikis."

Sign-up for Wiki Wed (Feb 1, 2006) and meet everyone in the (T)Wiki space. Free food and drink c/o SocialText!

The Ideavirus and Promiscous Sneezers

Just finished Seth Godin's 'Unleashing the Ideavirus.' A great read that focuses on getting customers to do the marketing to you. Makes a lot of sense since interuptive marketing (TV, radio, print) is very expensive today. Essentially he talks about talking to one person and having him pass on the message (versus talking to everyone).

Seth talks about two types of sneezers (i.e. the people who will forward your message for you). One is the powerful sneezer who will do it for better credibility. The other is the promiscous sneezer - he'll do it for a fee.

Well, I came upon this article on News.com today. Guess somebody's built a business model targetting promiscous sneezers, and they recently took in 13.8M(!) in funding. They're called BzzAgent.

Wonder if Seth knows about them - not on his blog yet.

MashUp Camp

You had FooCamp, BarCamp, and TagCamp. Introducing - MashCamp! If the other un-conferences were any indication, this should should be a fun weekend of cool new stuff, smart people, and partying!

In case you don't know what a Mashup is - its a combination of two big company APIs put together. Perhaps the most popular is HousingMaps, a combination of Google Maps and Craiglist apartment listings.

Sign-up now! Only 250 slots available!

YouTube & MySpace

Came about a story about MySpace's blocking of YouTube's video feeds today. It made me reflect about these two companies a bit more. If you think about it, MySpace is driven by user-generated content. A couple of years ago, this content was simply people and their pictures. Let's be honest, you go to MySpace to oogle the good-looking people of the opposite sex right?

Well, the next wave of content will be video - its these cool people in moving action, sharing more of their glowing personalities. Sure, its a bit irritating for to wait for MySpace pages to load because of the video. But despite this, the service is still thriving. So the visitors must be good with it and YouTube will capitalize on it.

Hmm...maybe YouTube will be acquired by News Corp too. Shouldn't be too out there. At the very least, they have similar sound names ('My' & 'You'; get it?).

What does this imply? We'll the other social networking services should take note! This is the chance to get a leg-up on MySpace. While MySpace has video feeds for a long-time, they're more towards MTVs than personalized stuff. Start integrating video feeds. Aside from YouTube, there's also SoCal based Revver. Cut a deal now!

Also: did I ever mention that I once did an email interview with Tom Anderson of MySpace? This was waaay before they were big - kinda proud of it, saw them coming from afar. Interview came out in the UC Berkeley MBA newspaper too (if you needed the proof). Note that his name bears a close resemblance to a certain Keanu Reeves character in a popular sci-fi trilogy.

Slickr & Flickrlicio.us

Hey - Happy New Year! Wanted to kick-off 2006 with a bang...so here I am...with a blog post...!?

Came about a screen saver based on Flickr. I can't imagine it took a while for someone to think of this! Called Slickr, this software allows you to download Flickr photos with specific tags and to display them on your computer (duh). Be careful though - the program allocates 500MB to its cache...dunno if your really need this, but maybe you do since you want high-quality pics.

So, I was playing around with it trying to figure out how to get hot women from the Flickr site on my screen saver. Lo and behold - Flickrlicio.us (aka 'Babes of Flickr') is not available anymore - wah! I want my women!!! Bring back Flickrlio.us!!!

(I'm still figuring out the key tag words for hot women though. Someone have any ideas?)

While we're on this topic, how about a screen saver that looks like FilmLoop?