Web 2.0 Archive

Web site monitoring service Pingdom has announced the launch of a free plan option today. Paid plans are still available starting at $10. The free plan is only limited by the number of websites that can be monitored — which is one website. They are even offering the free customers SMS alerts – I’d have left that out of the free plan as an incentive to push people into one of the paid plans.

Pingdom notes, “Pingdom Free has all the features of our paid account types. The only limitation is that you can only monitor one website or server, but that should be enough for a lot of bloggers and hobbyist webmasters out there.”

I wonder how Pingdom will make sure that webmasters don’t signup for 100 accounts, each monitoring one website. I guess creating all of those accounts would be more of a hassle than just signing up for a paid plan.

Amazon has announced a new option for users of Amazon Web Services called AWS Import/Export. This new Import/Export option allows you to mail a hard drive to Amazon and either have the contents placed into a S3 bucket or the current contents of a bucket placed onto the hard drive. Another usage Amazon notes is when your customers are regularly sending you drives filled with data – now they can send the drives directly to Amazon.

Amazon explains that if the import or export is set to take a week using your Internet connection, the Import/Export option might be the answer. They continue, “If you have large amounts of data to load and an Internet connection with limited bandwidth, the time required to prepare and ship a portable storage device to AWS can be a small percentage of the time it would take to transfer your data over the internet.”

The cost is $80 per drive plus $2.49 per hour of data loading. Amazon will ship the drive back to you at their expense.

As a heavy user of S3 – this is an awesome option – especially for creating off-site backups. For a couple hundred dollars, you get an external drive with all of your data which you can store offsite. Since it’s a one time import or export, I guess the idea is that you hook up the new drive to the Internet for partial backups after the initial export is completed.

Last night at the Web2NewYork meetup in NYC, Jobs By Blogs founder John Wagner presented his new service. Jobs for Blogs offers a place where you can create a blog and portfolio that is career-related. It’s a way to show off your skills and talent. The main site is an aggregator of sorts which combines the best posts from across the Jobs By Blogs network. John says that the service is a place for people to promote themselves.

The network runs on WordPress MU and offers job seekers a place to blog. They also offer ways to upload media to create a mini-portfolio. The company plans to generate revenue by selling listings and connecting companies with applicants.

Here’s John’s video demo:

Note: As you read this post, I’d ask that you read it in the mindset of a mainstream Internet user.

Currently it seems the top three services fighting for the “real time feed” crown are Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. Dave Winer recently asked what FriendFeed would be if it didn’t pull in Twitter – the answer is simple: a service with very little activity. But for all three services, I find that there is nothing but confusion over the structure of how the three services work together and can imagine that mainstream Internet users face the same issues. I will use Friendfeed in the examples below because it faces the most mainstream issues but there are similar issues with all three services.

In terms of initial content inflow, Facebook and Twitter mainly gather their content via comments (e.g. “my dog just peed on the carpet”, “i had a roasted turkey sandwich for lunch”) while Friendfeed mainly gathers content by pulling in the comments from Twitter and Facebook and then applying a layer of content aggregation on top of that. Of course many populate their Twitter feeds via aggregated links which complicates the issue even further.
Continue reading “Real Time Confusion: Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook” »

Back in 2006, Berlin-based Ludwig Gatzke put together a chart showing all of the Web 2.0 companies at the time. As we know, since then companies have been acquired and many have shut down for one reason or another. London-based Meg Pickard has put together a new version (seen below) of the chart which combines companies that have been acquired in green circles and companies that have closed in the letter X.

Meg works at The Guardian newspaper in the UK and updated the chart because she knew the landscape has changed since the chart was first produced. Amit at Digital Inspiration has additional comments about both charts – sadly both Meg and Amit seem to think there are only two startup review blogs :)

After watching the interview with Digg’s Owen Byrne, the truth is that the more times you fail, the more likely you are to have a success. When I was younger someone once told me that to find the perfect woman, you have to date a lot of wrong ones. If you only date one, the chances of her being perfect is pretty low.
Continue reading “The Web 2.0 Startup Map: 2009 Edition” »

As I use my iPhone 3G more and more, I notice more and more things that frustrate me about it. Please don’t get me wrong; I am not complaining about the iPhone; I am simply positing ideas as to what I would like to see added. As a Web developer, there are quite a few things I would love to see added to the device. If you know of any iPhone apps available that perform any of these tasks or actions, please let me know.

Let me make this clear, however: I will not be jailbreaking my iPhone. Even if the phone was not owned by the government (which it is), I would still have no interest in jailbreaking it.

Saving E-mail Attachments

Aside from photos (which you can save to your Camera Roll by holding your finger on the picture while viewing the e-mail message), there is no way to save attachments. Ultimately, my ideal situation would be to be able to save a Word, Excel or PDF document attached to an e-mail message, then upload it to my Web server.

Continue reading “What’s Missing from the iPhone?” »

This morning the New York Senate unveiled their new website at an event held online, in NYC and in the Albany. I watched the entire event online from my home in NYC and I’d like to provide my thoughts and a review of the site. First let me say that it’s great to see our government beginning to think about technology and how it can help to improve the conversation between elected officials and the parties they represent. It seems like across the world more officials understand and are using technology more than ever before and that can only lead to more efficient use of funds for projects. With that said, let’s get to the review.

First, I don’t want my elected officials pissing away their time on Twitter. It’s cute that Senator Malcolm A. Smith sat on the side of today’s event and wrote several messages on Twitter. I’d rather see each senator have a forum or question and answer section where comments can be posted in public and the replies would also be public. When I look at the profiles of the Senators who have Twitter accounts listed, most haven’t even participated. If I ask Senator Smith (or anyone else) a question on Twitter, how do they other millions of NYS residents learn about my question, the answer, etc. With a public forum on the NYS Senate website, an answer is more likely to be forthcoming and the general public can discuss the issues as well. The same could be said for Facebook – it’s just not needed or necessary for this purpose. I’d be ok with a #nyssenate search feed made available on the website.

I like the RSS feed idea – my suggestion would be to add a way to get the updates via email as not everyone knows what RSS is or how to use it.

Continue reading “The New New York Senate Website – Grade: C” »