I have been doing some research into the various social networks and their uses, audiences and so forth lately and came across the rather great http://www.ning.com. Ning allows you to set up your own social network with most of the usual tools you would find on things like Facebook and MySpace.
The templates aren’t exactly pretty but you can customise the designs and utilise your own domain name. So users coming to your social network will think you’ve done a fine job of setting something up for them and won’t know it’s running from the ning platform.
It could be used for all sorts of things of course. For instance, we were thinking of using it as a social ‘intranet’ for the agency I’ve just been working with. Might get people off of Facebook for five minutes!
Or maybe I should set up ‘BruceSpace’ for all the Bruce’s out there. Might not make my millions on that one….
Popularity: 98% [?]
Google is busy working on providing a common set of APIs aimed at the whole world of social networking. You know, that world that every client now wants stuffed into their website whether appropriate or not!
Apologies, that was actually a bit cynical. I’m actually working on a new site design and build for a charity that will actually add value to their offering so it’s not all ‘let’s create a Facebook app’ all the time!
Anyway, the common set of APIs will make it easier for developers to create apps for social sites and of course work across sites. There is an impressive list of sites involved, including MySpace, Ning, Linkedin, ILike, Hi5 and so forth.
So if you are a developer then have a look; might not be of great use just yet but it could be soon.
OpenSocial – Google Code
Popularity: 81% [?]
I’ve been undertaking some consultancy work down here in sunny Brighton and was fortunate enough to be around for the start of a very interesting video focused website build; whose details I can’t go into until it’s live of course.
We had a few solutions along the way as to how we were going to enable users to upload their own videos and so forth. Attempting to use YouTube wasn’t as straightforward as expected and so another route needed to be found. The guys at Bionic Media were kind enough to tell us about Limelight Networks and their UGC framework which does all the upload, storage and delivery you could possibly need if delivering videos to your users.
It’s new and is only just being utilised for it’s first few projects just now but is based on their usual global structure that a lot of the big media firms hire Limelight Networks for. Worth checking out.
Popularity: 31% [?]
So I’m all for Facebook and it’s ilk in a general fashion. In fact I’m spending a lot of my time working out ways for clients to reach customers on these sites; and often advising them that it is the wrong route for their particular campaign.
And I do quite like Facebook and think it’s functionality is excellent. The photo recognition is particulary impressive. But why oh why do very good friends of mine insist on emailing me via Facebook?! They have my usual personal email address and my mobile number so why irritate me by using FB? So I get an email saying such and such has sent you an email via FB when they could’ve just as easily sent the same pub invitation to me via my usual email address.
It’s madness I tell you. Not too mention Facebooks possible identity theft implications that I might get into another day. But you aren’t silly enough to make your profile public now are you?
Popularity: 43% [?]
This is very good and bloomin useful! New from google maps. They have produced 360 degree views of streets in a few US cities to begin with. Try the link below for New York:
http://tinyurl.com/3bm34n (or go to google maps NY and select street view)
Click on a blue street or drag the little yellow dude onto one and get a nice panorama of the street itself. You can drag it around or follow the arrows to the next street. Pretty awesome…
Thanks to the excellent Googlemapsmania blog where I found this info this morning and am exploring many many other google maps functions and mash-ups. Go there yourself as it’s an amazing source of information.
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com
Popularity: 24% [?]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1937
This is neat and simple. I prefer macs but have to use a pc because of MS Project and Visio – but this adds a button to your firefox that onmouseover shows you all your open websites in a mac f8 (?) type of way. Pretty handy.
Popularity: 10% [?]
This is a very interesting way of searching for Amazon products.
Amaznode: “Amazon related product search” that lets you type in any word, then creates a web of Amazon products that are in some way related to that word. The process is similar to what Amazon does when it recommends products for its users, except instead of basing the search on prior purchases (which could have been gifts for very boring people, thereby throwing off the whole system), Amaznode bases the search off of any one keyword.
It displays the results in a good visual fashion. So if you searched for ‘Rome’ it show you related books and DVDs etc but all grouped together nicely and you can check out the ifo before you click through.
http://amaznode.fladdict.net/
Popularity: 10% [?]
Whilst I’m on the subject of useful web design tools I thought I’d share the Gemini issue tracker from Countersoft with you.
A lot of agencies tend to treat the whole testing and quality assurance process far too lightly but that is a major issue for another day. At the very least you should have somewhere to flag and track bugs and issues, assign priorities and actually assign the issues to someone to deal with. Gemini does all this and much more. I’ve used it at DNA and LIDA and the Head of QA at DNA, Peter Lewis-Dale, recommends it highly.
And he knows his onions.
Popularity: 83% [?]
I’ve been working in the web world for about ten years now and haven’t ever really seen a decent off the shelf content management system for flash based sites. But the guys at 10cms showed me a demo of their new-ish flash cms when I was working at LIDA . This looks like a top tool and the technical director at LIDA (my good friend Jon Chandler) has seen the updated version and says it looks like a good bet if you want to content manage small flash campaign sites.
http://www.10cms.com/
Popularity: 17% [?]
This has been around for awhile and is looking interesting – bit of a buzz about its uses going on at the minute:
http://www.platial.com/
Briefly then, it’s a tool for people to create their own maps – i.e. adding own places to google maps to create a map of say their top ten bars in London. This can then be shared with others users and added to by these users. Piccies and video (from Flickr and Youtube) can also be added – and as these maps can be easily incorporated into most blogging engines it’s a possibly interesting way of doing the whole ‘user generated content’ doo dah.
Popularity: 18% [?]
