Pibb, a comprehensive communications tool has launched some major updates today. The most important new feature is that you no longer need to login to see what the Pibb community is up to.  Simply go to Pibb.com and browse or search the channel directory for a topic that interests you.  Then click on the channel link or icon and you will be taken to the channel's landing page which will show all active threads on the right hand side. There is also a link to an RSS feed for the channel on the bottom left.

The other major update is the way they handle OpenID and this is an update I like. Basically AOL and LiveJournal accounts automatically have an OpenID account associated with them. Rather than having to remember a complicated URL for the account, just enter your AOL or LiveJournal account and Pibb will do the rest to get you to the login screen on the respective service. I hope they push this out so sites like CN can use it as well. They claim over 75 million OpenID accounts are "active." Now if they could just make the "nicknames" more friendly than: http://myspaceuser.myspace.com/billjones that would be excellent :)

I asked Michael Graves, Pibb CTO for a quote about these updates, "Pibb is a communications platform built on top of OpenID. As the single sign-on and social networking benefits emerge in the ecosystem that OpenID enables, Pibb will provide messaging tools to leverage those benefits in your communications.

"Consolidate your blog comments, chat, private channels and public forums, all taking advantage of the same social networking and identity resources that make portable identity and portable reputation useful for OpenID users. As the OpenID-enabled web develops, users will find increasing value in tools that facilitate flexible communications and connections between OpenIDs, and Pibb is a platform that will enable those features."

Check out my review of Pibb from earlier this year.

Ben Metcalfe sent over a link last week to his latest project called Bubbletop. Bubbletop is a start page from France Telecom/Orange and is similar to Pageflakes, Netvibes, yourminis and Schmedley. My first reaction after using this for a while was, "oh another start page, eh?" But what I have come to learn is that each startpage has it's own flavor and will appeal to a different type of user.

Bubbletop uses a friends system to share the content you find/use on Bubbletop. This is what makes Bubbletop unique. You can "friend" people on Bubbletop and then click the share button and after selecting your friends, they will get a notification of new content from you. What this means is that your friends must be using Bubbletop as well. Pretty groovy and innovative.

Another feature I like about Bubbletop is the ability to bring in my own widgets from other providers. In fact, I could take a widget from yourminis and bring it into Bubbletop. Ben notes, "you can bring widgets from other providers into Bubbletop – no need to build them twice!"

The Bubbletop Foundry is opening soon and will allow developers to collaborate on extending Bubbletop and creating new and interesting content for the start page.

On the business side, Mike notes, "This is an overly-crowded space (and now Google is now promoting their iGoogle product hard as well). But Orange has nearly 90 million mobile customers to try to push to their new online products."

Else, Bubbletop is another start page. I think the social features make it more interesting than 80% of the other start pages out there, but to make this feature really work, my friends need to use the app as well. I would suggest that Ben take a look at Schmedley for some design inspiration as Bubbletop looks more like a developer designed it than a designer.

This is a quickie from the "Great Idea" department. The Google Earth blog has a story today about Chris McCall of Provo, Utah. Chris is a new business owner and is in the pool service and cleaning trade.

The Google Earth blog describes Chris' use of the program as, "Rather than just sending a mailer to every house in a neighborhood, Chris got onto Google Earth and found the neighborhoods with the most pools. Then he drove out and wrote down the addresses of each house with a pool. He then used that mailing list to do more targeted marketing of his services."

I think this is a brilliant idea. I would take it a step futher. Zoom in and see which houses have what type of pools. Try to gather as much information as you can from the images. Then send personalized letters which would note some information about the homeowner's specific pool. "Mr. Jones, I wanted to provide you with some free tips about keeping your pool running smooth this summer." And then follow it up with the services provided by Chris' company.

Chris' full story can be found on the AllPointsBlog.

So the big buzz over the past day is that Nielsen/Net Ratings will no longer use page views as their telling metric, replacing it with time spent on site. Yawn. My post yesterday describes the analytics apps we use on CN.

Let's take a brief look back at metrics. In the mid-90s, sites used "hits" as the primary metric. I remember the days at CKS when a newbie would run around the office talking about how many hits his or her client Web site received. I just laughed from my Aeron chair. Then to prove a point, I took a client site, added 100 blank images and the next day showed them why hits was a stupid metric. But I couldn't change the industry so I just kept working. I also remember beta testing the first WebTrends version and emailing the product team about how poor hits were as a metric. CKS rocked though.

Then in the late 90s, the shift moved to page views. Another joke of a metric. On the surface it seems better than hits, right? Now we are only counting each view of a page no matter how many images and other items are on it. Not so fast bub. In 1999, a large percentage of the big players realized that this could easily be manipulated by splitting content into multiple pages. There went page views.

Now comes word that Nielsen is moving to "time spent" as the default metric for reporting. Sounds good right? So if someone spends 10 minutes on my site, and only 5 on yours, my site should appear to rank higher, correct? Let's push out the easy issue here which is that sites are sometimes hard to navigate which will artifically raise your time spent on site. If you and I serve the same content but it's 40% easier to find it on my site vs. yours, then you appear bigger. Love that! Now we will see half-assed sites coming out just to scam this "new" metric.

Here is the real issue. We need to go back to the drawing board, erase everything we know about metrics and analytics and start over. Using a metric that has already been used and abused won't cut it. But Nielsen knows where their bread is buttered and when companies like Microsoft change their web site to reduce pageviews by 30-40% (by my estimation), the page views metric would have to be changed to satisfy their clients.

So how does this new metric reporting system handle YouTube with regards to watching videos? Is that considered time spent on site? Is an embedded video counted? What about RSS feeds and widgets? Content vs. application sites? It sure feels like Nielsen just put all of their currently tracked metrics into a hat and pulled one out.

Some others discussing the news:

• Scott Karp has an interesting perspective from the Google side of things. Scott notes that Google uses clicks as their metric.
• Andy Beal makes an excellent point about tabbed browsing – I hadn't thought of this!

The bottom line is simple – It's time for new standards and systems for reporting. As opposed to 1996, we have so many new ways of communicating and I would think starting the discussion should be easy. While it may take a long time for us to agree, let's get the conversation started.

I am always looking for ways to increase the income that is generated from my Web sites. I have used a variety of affiliate programs over the years including Commission Junction and Amazon. Amazon has always worked best for my sites but the income has dropped from the late 90s. When Patrick Gavin from TextLinkAds fame launched AuctionAds earlier this year, I didn't think such a program would work well on my sites. I don't know many techies who really use eBay a lot so I left the program behind. Then I gave it a try and here are my results.

First a brief overview about AuctionAds (AA). The program is very simple. Basically you are using AA to become an eBay affiliate. You signup and then create units in the same style as Google Adsense. You can also link to any page on eBay which makes the system even more powerful. There are many options for creating the ad units and there is no limit on how many you can place on a page. Quoting from the FAQ on revenue generation, "When your site's visitors click on an Auction Ad listing and take an action on eBay you earn cash. Actions are defined as a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration." What's great about Auction Ads is that you can also generate revenue on affiliates as well. If someone clicks the "Ads by AuctionAds" link below the ad and registers, I earn 2% of all revenue generated by that user for the first 6 months. Pretty spiffy indeed!

Here is an example ad:

To create this ad, I used the term iPhone and selected a standard 468 sized ad. Total time to create/post was less than 30 seconds.

Results

Here are my results for June, my first full month using Auction Ads. And it is important to note that the ad was placed on ONE page only. I used the iPhone cost page as my test for this program. So the revenue earned in June came from this one ad on this one page plus any affiliates I sent (which is not reported currently).

Total revenue earned: $35.35 with a 1.91% clickthru rate. Pretty impressive. Frankly I was shocked to see such a high amount and inquired if it was correct! I received confirmation and did a big Yahoo! While I know that pushing the program out to more pages might not provide the same benefits overall, I am certainly excited at the potential. $35 might not seem like a lot but when you think about the fact that it was generated on one page with one ad unit, it certainly looks rich to me. I know I did not generate $35 from the other ad programs I used during the month on this page. 

Summary

I am excited about the potential of testing AuctionAds on more pages, especially on my web development site HTMLCenter. I will report back in several months with an update on earnings to confirm how the program is working over a longer time period. If you are looking for a potential new revenue stream for your blog or Web site, AuctionAds might be worth a try.

Note: This review was not paid in any regard, however for proper disclosure, if you click the "Ads by AuctionAds" link in the ad above, I will receive a commission on any transactions made through your use of AuctionAds. That said, feel free to click the direct AuctionAds link if you are not interested in the affiliate deal.

Update: Don't forget to come to the pre-party and say hi! I will have some of our exciting merchandise to give away and a few big surprises.

I am VERY excited to announce that CenterNetworks is  sponsoring (along with Flying Dog Brewery) the pre-party for BlogPhiladelphia. This is our first sponsorship (thanks to our sponsors!).

If you are near Philly, check out this "unconference" and register quick because there are only a few spaces left. It's free! It looks like a great lineup of speakers and who can pass up the opportunity to run up the Philadelphia Art Museum stairs like Rocky?

Drop me a line if you plan to attend!

Alright, last week we were the first to get you a review of the Flock 0.9 browser and tonight we have the first screenshot of the new Flock.com launching on Tuesday to support the new browser. Check it out below! (click for larger version)