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Pandora
Pandora is an internet radio station that intelligently streams music customised to your tastes and preferences. The science behind Pandora is impressive. The experience is incredible.
All you have to do is type the name of an artiste or song you like. Based on this starting point, Pandora starts to stream similar songs (based on beat, rhythm, etc.). Hear something you don’t like? Give it the thumbs down. Hear something you like? Do the opposite. Pandora’s Box is “music to your ears”.
In web 1.0, the rage was Amazon. Amazon was able to tailor your shopping experience to your interests. All you had to do was start clicking on a few books and the site would start to “float” books of the same genre or similar books that other customers have purchased.
Amazon was the beginning of “implicit personalisation”, “explicit personalisation” and “collaborative filtering”. Though many have tried in 1.0, no one reached Amazon’s level of sophistication. What Pandora has done, is taken this whole idea and applied it to music. Pandora’s gone one step further – it has made the user experience so seamless it’s a pleasure to use.
The most aggressive music player in those days was Real Player. And it was all about pushing music out. We had nothing as intuitive and intelligent as Pandora.
Neat Stuff:
- Easy to use (super)
- Wizard-based interaction to understand your tastes
- Start as many stations you want to match your moods
- Intelligent
- Share stations you have created with your friends
End note: I love the name Pandora. I can only imagine that any branding consultant would have said it connotes something negative and it definitely shouldn’t be used.
Filed under: Music, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment
Ning.com
Social networks are all the rage, so why not create your own? Is your lack of programming skills stopping you. With Ning, you don’t need any. You can create your own social network in a matter of minutes.
The closest we got to in 1.0 was groups. Groups in web 1.0 were more like discussion forums that were closed to a group of friends you could invite. There were groups everywhere in web 1.0, from mass consumption sites like Yahoo! to niche sites like Gay.com.
With Ning, you can do much more. You can add video and photo sharing just by clicking, dragging and dropping. This is a vast improvement over Ning’s original beta and definitely a step up from the stuff we could do in web 1.0. If you’ve got the geek streak, you can edit the source code and extend the application anyway you like.
The only downside is that all the Ning members you have really go into a great big “Ning” member database. In other words, you are helping them to create a large database of registered users.
Neat Stuff
- No need to know programming to create a social network!
- Create social network in minutes
- Easily customise the look & feel
- Click to add video sharing
- Click to add photo sharing
- Click to add RSS
- Click to add blogging engine
End note: Anyone of you tried Ning Beta? In Beta, you could do photo wars, instantly create Google maps, etc. I was even able to create a “share secrets” network with Google maps. What’s available now is pretty watered down although it’s much easier to set up social networks than Ning Beta.
Filed under: Web 2.0, Web Applications | Leave a Comment
yourminis.com
Create your own personalised widget space on yourminis.com.
YourMinis lets you create a personal pages much like those from NetVibes, PageFlakes, WebWag, Google, Microsoft Live, or My Yahoo, which raises the question: Why? The Flash “minis” are attractive, but the eye candy on the YourMinis page does slow things down a bit, and other start pages (such as NetVibes) offer more modules.
There were some “brave” attempts to do personalised web spaces in web 1.0. We didn’t have AJAX then and Flash wasn’t as prevalent as it is now. But that didn’t stop us from trying.
Yahoo! led the pack with My Yahoo!. The focus was more on personalising content to help users keep up with the burgeoning web content. However, My Yahoo! never really took off because most users (like me) were pretty lazy. But what was apparent, even then, was that we needed a much more modular approach to personalisation.
Not long after, we started seeing content management systems roll out “portlets” which end-users could personalise. It was hot with corporate intranets but less so with public-facing websites. They weren’t fun to customise, but you basically had to do it at work so you could be more efficient.
What’s really neat about yourminis.com is that it’s fun to use. It’s one of those things on the web that you definitely don’t need. By making it fun to use, yourminis converts people like me, who don’t need it, into users because it’s just fun to use.
Neat stuff
- Everything is graphical
- Drag and drop
- Tabs to separate work, fun, reading, whatever stuff
- Ready-made widgets (but not enough) from BBC, Veoh, etc.
- Productivity widgets like to do lists
Filed under: Web 2.0 | 3 Comments
Yahoo! Alpha vs SearchMash
Is Yahoo! losing out to Google because there are just too many words on the Yahoo! homepage? Yahoo! seems to think so. Check out Yahoo! Alpha, the company’s new search engine. The homepage reminds you of Google doesn’t it? Dig a little deeper and you can also see it closely resembles Google’s unbranded search site called SearchMash.
But both ideas are not original. A9 made it possible some time ago to search different sources and cluster the results by sources:
Google’s gained a new unbranded site called SearchMash where it plans to test user interface ideas without Google’s brand somehow skewing the tests. Below, more about the site and comments from Google about it.
Currently, SearchMash allows you to perform a search and get web and image results presented side-by-side. It’s similar to how A9 has long allowed side-by-side results…
While SearchMash results are organised as webpages, images, blogs, wikipedia etc. Yahoo! Alpha is more brand-centric. Results are clustered by Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, YouTube, etc. SearchMash also asks “Are the results useful to you?” which, to me, is important.
Who will come out tops in the search engine slugfest? My crystal ball doesn’t work as well as the one TechCrunch has. IMHO, the audience will be divided. There will be two camps: those who want to customise their search and those who don’t.
Yahoo! Alpha offers the ability to add new search sources, customise the layout of the search results, etc. Yahoo! can do this because it already has a community of users, the by-product of being one of the first movers in web 1.0. SearchMash currently doesn’t offer this capability. You just have to live with the results that the search engine fetches.
However, it will come as no surprise if Google ends up offering customised search. It’s already begun a campaign of acquiring registered users through gmail, google analytics, and most recently, my maps. So the battle might continue with left hooks and right punches till someone or some company creates a search engine where you can simply add the results to your personal blog, del.icio.us, Google my map, myspace, etc?
Filed under: Search Engines, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment
ILetYou
Create your very own online rental DVD store with ILetYou. In a matter of minutes you can be the next Netflix.
ILetYou is essentially the online storefront for a whole bunch of video stores. When someone places an order, the video store handles the shipping and logistics. ILetYou takes a cut of the transaction fee. When you set up your DVD rental store on ILetYou, you get a share of that transaction fee too.
Is it new? Definitely not. The idea of affiliate marketing is very web 1.0. So far Amazon Affiliate programs are the most widely publicised. There are also a ton of affiliate programmes available at Commission Junction (again a web 1.0 thing).
However, ILetYou does signal the possible return of affiliate programmes. In 1.0, it was pretty hard to drive traffic to your website. Today with blogs, technorati, myspace and tons of social networking sites, it’s easier for personal web pages to drum up traffic.
Personally I have never made any money from affiliate programmes. And trust me, it’s not for want of trying!
ILetYou is still in beta.
Filed under: Making Money, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments
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