Category Archives: Web 2.0

MySpace to Create Digg Clone

Myspace just announced that it will add a Digg-like news service on its site. Rupert Murdoch must think this area isn’t saturated enough. But heck, with over 100 million unique visitors, they’ll for sure generate more revenue with this service.
This is what the news service will consist of:

“The service, called MySpace News, resembles a mix of Google Inc.’s Google News, which collects stories and arranges them based on thematic similarities and Digg.com, which displays stories suggested by its readers and displays them according to their popularity ranking, executives said.

[…]

The news service, long rumored, will have 25 main topics and about 300 sub-categories ranging from celebrities and gossip to autos and fashion. “

Interview with Digg Founder

Michael Zhang from Folksonomy just published an interview of Kevin Rose, founder of Digg. The interview is short but concise. If you don’t know the story behind Digg, you might wanna read the interview.

Surprisingly, when Digg was created, people behind it didn’t really mean to create a business, they just built a service that immediately took off thanks to its uniqueness. It’s also hard to believe that Digg is only managed by 16 people…

Web 2.0 Means Free Marketing

For basic internet users like us, Web 2.0 means fancy AJAX applications, big fonts, flashy colors but also the ability to use and share our own data .

For companies like Nintendo, it means free (or very cheap) marketing. In the last couple of days, I couldn’t help but realize how much money companies must be saving in advertising thanks to Web 2.0. With their new console called Wii that everyone’s waiting for (including me :)), Nintendo is showing us how a company can benefit from the power of Web 2.0 sites. They are advertising their new console to millions of people without any effort.

So, what’s the trick? Just come up with something truly unique and revolutionary, and Digg, Youtube, Engadget, Delicious or Techmeme will do the marketing job for you. For Nintendo, it means free links, millions of visits, and thousands of people who can’t wait about the new console to come out.

In Wii’s case, Delicious has more than 2055 links about it, Digg has hundreds of posts, and of course Youtube also has a lot of videos to please the eyes of every gamer.

So, what can any business learn from Nintendo’s example with Web 2.0 sites? If you too want to get natural links and hundreds of people promoting your services for free, come up with something truly unique, exciting or revolutionary; be the first to do it; build a search engine friendly page or website, and the Web 2.0 sphere will do the rest.

Kudos to Sphere.com

Personally, I’ve never heard about Sphere until today, after checking my traffic logs. Basically, it’s a blog search engine, just like Technorati. But it seems like Sphere really wants to provide something different, with more relevant results and be user-friendly:

From their About page:

Who needs Sphere?

Everybody, of course! In one of three flavors…

1 People interested in timely topics, who aren’t quite sure about this whole blogging hoo-ha.

2 Readers who already use blog search engines, and are sick of disappointing results and spam. Those who secretly crave a faster, more intuitive, and feature-rich experience.

3 Publishers who might like to include some really good blog content in their websites, but only if it’s really, truly good.

Sphere has some really useful features such as:

– Sort the results by time or relevance

– Customizable time frames: you can search results from the last hour only, the last 12 hours, the last day etc… or you can even set a “custom range filter”, that allows you to view the results from one single specific date or between two dates.

– A user-friendly interface

I have played with it and ran a few searches, and compared the results along with Technorati, and it does seem to be able to provide very relevant results.

One missing feature for Sphere though, is the ability to specify the language of your search, the two options are only “English” or “Other languages” while Technorati recognizes 20 languages.

MyBlog3D: Welcome to the house!

Would you like to be able to have your own virtual house on the web, invite friends to have a talk, share your last pictures from your trip to Thailand or even play paintball with them?

A french company called I-maginer, based in Nantes, has developed a revolutionary application called MyBlog3D that allows you to create a 3D blog in order to create your own environment online and personalize it, and share things or discuss with your friends.

With MyBlog3D, you can:

– Create your own online world and personalize it (colors, images, etc)

– Create your own 3D character and personalize it with your own picture so that it looks just like you!

– Talk with your friends through Voip or even chat

– Share pictures, videos, songs

– Organize multi-player games such as paintball

MyBlog3D is not available yet but you can now subscribe on their site to receive an invitation to create your own 3D blog after the 26th of April. I signed up with the French version of the site, however it seems that there’s no link in the English version. I’ll check back later and also try to get in touch with them to see if they’re planning to fix that.

I really like the concept, the graphics aren’t quite perfect but I’m sure they’ll improve that very soon.