Regarding #5 - We're up for it. We currently building for a beta launch of firechat.co.uk. It's a networking tool for UK students (email address filter for sign-up - must be a .ac.uk account holder). Also, our developers have some exciting ideas about using SSE within firechat. You can email us for news updates, but a blog will be up soon. Thanks!
Pete Cashmore
· 4 years ago
Craig,
Sounds great! Good luck with it.
Daniel Nerezov
· 4 years ago
#5 We'd kick start something like Facebook in Australia if anyone wants to talk to me about it.
Phil Hollows
· 4 years ago
Obviously, we couldn't disagree more abouth the value of mail services such as ours, FeedBlitz (www.feedblitz.com). TechCrunch also got it wrong - you can customize the email formats for $4.95 / feed / month, you can get metrics from the FeedBlitz dashboard and the FeedBurner stats, and subscriber export is as simple (and, horrors, as unsophisticated) as copy / paste. After 4 months of availability and much development, let me assure you - there's way more to this than a simple "feature" (look at the list here http://www.feedblitz.com/bloglet.htm for just an inkling of what's involved) and yes, there is a business here. Why trust your email communications to a hobby?
Not being up to par seems to translate to "doesn't like orange." At not point does TechCrunch say that it doesn't work. It works well - there are thousands of publishers and tens of thousands of readers. So how about trying it out?
Pete Cashmore
· 4 years ago
Phil,
You're right - I've taken out the part that says "the service isn't up to par, as Mike mentions" and replaced it with "although Mike doesn’t seem to like the orange color-scheme they’ve selected". I hope that's a fairer representation of your company. And I didn't say that FeedBlitz wasn't valuable, just that there's no incentive to build a company like this unless it's tied in to something like Feedburner.
Phil Hollows
· 4 years ago
Pete:
Thanks - I appreciate that. FWIW, FeedBlitz was growing very well through word of mouth - a Goldstein-esque virus, if you will - before we partnered with FeedBurner. FeedBurner saw the demand and, to cut a long story short, have poured gasoline on the fire. But the market pull was definitely and clearly there before we formally tied the services together. As for the incentive - let's just say it's evolving, along the lines Fred Wilson says here: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/11/evolution_vs_...
liberalcowboy
· 4 years ago
RSS is the new email. Feedblitz does seem good enough for me. They should just redesign though.
Chris Law
· 4 years ago
I think that all these ideas are great but one thing that I don't see is the systematic thought behind them though. Not that there necessarily needs to be. You can create great ideas for things that solve pain or create coolness without being systematic.
I prefer to be systematic. One thing that my co-founder at Aggregate Knowledge and I did before starting the company was to develop a Map of the Web 2.0 World where we could look at the landscape before deciding what things we thought were missing.
Would be curious to see what the others think the big trends and big holes are as the conversation develops.
/pd
· 4 years ago
Pete: good posting.wrt to item1, googs seem to have the infrastructure in mobile form. Are they planning petabyte storge and data centers stuff into a container ?? They can have all those nodes all across the globe !!
As for feedblitz, I for one have been chatting with thomas (who blogs @ joi) about it. He seems very interested as he plans of getting blog content into newsletter format with all the bells and whistles. So there is strong traction (imho) happening on that front.
Portable reputation is going to be hard nut to crack. Everyone wants that but the user holds the key. Who will build the model which permits users to be control will be the winner for that hand.
Yes, building something kewl with sse !! I think there's something in the works there and nobody wants to let the cat out of the bag yet :)-
Pete Cashmore
· 4 years ago
/pd,
Nice insights - and yes, it'll be interesting to see what gets built with SSE.
Pete Cashmore
· 4 years ago
Chris Law,
You're right - there are bigger trends at work here, and the companies which understand those trends (dare I say it: the "new consumer") will be more successful in the long term. Think big, start small.
I don't seem to have you on Skype, which is weird.
Jonathan Snook
· 4 years ago
I'm a subscriber of Feedblitz. I use the service on my site. I used it because it was integrated with Feedburner.
But design (and I'm not talking about the colour) needs some serious revamping. Issue #1: 404 errors on the top nav once you're in the dashboard (because you're now in an /f/ subfolder). I've got a large list of issues with it. Phil, if you see this email me (contact info on my site). (I've used your support link on Feedblitz but there was no feedback...)
Phil Hollows
· 4 years ago
Jonathan:
You have mail! The 404s were the result of pilot error yesterday and fixed by days' end. I didn't see your mail :-( I try to get to everyone who writes in, sorry I missed you.
Phil
Nik Cubrilovic
· 4 years ago
Hi Pete. We are in early alpha with an offering that meets the requirements of what most people expect from hosted storage. The service is called Omnidrive and it has been in development for close to 11 months now. You are right about the economics of such a business, but our method is that we are moving away from simple file storage to offer users a range of value-add services on-top of just storage.
To start, we are building interfaces for windows, mac, pocket pc and web. The Windows interface tightly integrates into explorer, the Mac interface into finder, PocketPC into the today screen and the Web interface is essentially explorer.exe online. So we are 'any platform' - much better than a chunky web-based Java client or simple web interface with upload form elements.
In addition, the local interfaces behave like any other local drive - you drop a file on and instead of sitting around and waiting for the upload you carry on working while in the background the agent will transfer to the server what already isn't there - it will feed you back the status of all uploads in the taskbar of explorer (or equivelant on other platforms). Each Omnidrive has 'private' (encrypted personal storage), 'shared' (for sharing between friends or your organisation) and 'public' (good old public access). You can RSS (even filter on file types), tag (even from within the local drive) and search (within files, etc.). Uploading a video file to public or shared will convert it and put it inside a nice flash player. Uploading a folder of photos will create nice albums. Uploading a Word document will give the user an option to view as HTML.
The biggest disadvantage for most of the current crop of offerings is that to open a file, you need to download it first, you cant save back directly to your online storage - Omnidrive lets you do this. The other disadvantage is that if you are offline you can't access your files - Omnidrive synchronises locally.
So as you see, we are providing more than just 'online storage' so comparing it to what Google have with GMail is not just - GMail is a much more cumbersome interface, with file size limitations.
I don't want to talk too much about our planned business model, but we will have a free consumer offering that for us will be sustainable. At the same time though the users of the free offering will have incentive to pay a reasonable annual fee to get the most out of Omnidrive. The business-grade offering will be based on a subscription model but run on redundant and higer-grade dedicated servers.
We have opened up for registration for the beta program which will be made avaliable around christmas time. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Chris Law
· 4 years ago
I'm such a luddite. I really should use Skype more often!
I'm most often on instant messenger: AIM - clawaim Yahoo - claw_eloquence
Catch me sometime and I'd love to chat!
Pete Cashmore
· 4 years ago
Nik,
OmniDrive sounds great! It seems you've got a really comprehensive solution to the online storage problem - you're offering much more than the current crop of services can provide. I'm off to register for your Beta!
Pete Cashmore
· 4 years ago
Chris,
Somehow you managed to pick the 2 IM clients that I don't have. :)
But hey, I've been meaning to get Gaim for a while. Talk to you soon!
Nik Cubrilovic
· 4 years ago
Hi Pete - I saw your request come through, we are looking forward to releasing the beta and I am sure you will enjoy it. We are trying hard to distinguish ourselves from the current crop of providers since there is a stigma associated with online storage because of the number of 'free' providers who became non-free overnight (xdrive being just one).
YouPage
· 1 year ago
#7 "Open Source Yellow Pages" in part was the driver for the creation of YouPage.com.
YouPage.com is a search and discovery service that applies semantic web technology in the local business and services space.
The site is in prototype mode right now. Please feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think. Your feedback is more than welcome.
All Comments
Sounds great! Good luck with it.
Not being up to par seems to translate to "doesn't like orange." At not point does TechCrunch say that it doesn't work. It works well - there are thousands of publishers and tens of thousands of readers. So how about trying it out?
You're right - I've taken out the part that says "the service isn't up to par, as Mike mentions" and replaced it with "although Mike doesn’t seem to like the orange color-scheme they’ve selected". I hope that's a fairer representation of your company. And I didn't say that FeedBlitz wasn't valuable, just that there's no incentive to build a company like this unless it's tied in to something like Feedburner.
Thanks - I appreciate that. FWIW, FeedBlitz was growing very well through word of mouth - a Goldstein-esque virus, if you will - before we partnered with FeedBurner. FeedBurner saw the demand and, to cut a long story short, have poured gasoline on the fire. But the market pull was definitely and clearly there before we formally tied the services together. As for the incentive - let's just say it's evolving, along the lines Fred Wilson says here: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/11/evolution_vs_...
I prefer to be systematic. One thing that my co-founder at Aggregate Knowledge and I did before starting the company was to develop a Map of the Web 2.0 World where we could look at the landscape before deciding what things we thought were missing.
Would be curious to see what the others think the big trends and big holes are as the conversation develops.
As for feedblitz, I for one have been chatting with thomas (who blogs @ joi) about it. He seems very interested as he plans of getting blog content into newsletter format with all the bells and whistles. So there is strong traction (imho) happening on that front.
Portable reputation is going to be hard nut to crack. Everyone wants that but the user holds the key. Who will build the model which permits users to be control will be the winner for that hand.
Yes, building something kewl with sse !! I think there's something in the works there and nobody wants to let the cat out of the bag yet :)-
Nice insights - and yes, it'll be interesting to see what gets built with SSE.
You're right - there are bigger trends at work here, and the companies which understand those trends (dare I say it: the "new consumer") will be more successful in the long term. Think big, start small.
I don't seem to have you on Skype, which is weird.
But design (and I'm not talking about the colour) needs some serious revamping. Issue #1: 404 errors on the top nav once you're in the dashboard (because you're now in an /f/ subfolder). I've got a large list of issues with it. Phil, if you see this email me (contact info on my site). (I've used your support link on Feedblitz but there was no feedback...)
You have mail! The 404s were the result of pilot error yesterday and fixed by days' end. I didn't see your mail :-( I try to get to everyone who writes in, sorry I missed you.
Phil
To start, we are building interfaces for windows, mac, pocket pc and web. The Windows interface tightly integrates into explorer, the Mac interface into finder, PocketPC into the today screen and the Web interface is essentially explorer.exe online. So we are 'any platform' - much better than a chunky web-based Java client or simple web interface with upload form elements.
In addition, the local interfaces behave like any other local drive - you drop a file on and instead of sitting around and waiting for the upload you carry on working while in the background the agent will transfer to the server what already isn't there - it will feed you back the status of all uploads in the taskbar of explorer (or equivelant on other platforms). Each Omnidrive has 'private' (encrypted personal storage), 'shared' (for sharing between friends or your organisation) and 'public' (good old public access). You can RSS (even filter on file types), tag (even from within the local drive) and search (within files, etc.). Uploading a video file to public or shared will convert it and put it inside a nice flash player. Uploading a folder of photos will create nice albums. Uploading a Word document will give the user an option to view as HTML.
The biggest disadvantage for most of the current crop of offerings is that to open a file, you need to download it first, you cant save back directly to your online storage - Omnidrive lets you do this. The other disadvantage is that if you are offline you can't access your files - Omnidrive synchronises locally.
So as you see, we are providing more than just 'online storage' so comparing it to what Google have with GMail is not just - GMail is a much more cumbersome interface, with file size limitations.
I don't want to talk too much about our planned business model, but we will have a free consumer offering that for us will be sustainable. At the same time though the users of the free offering will have incentive to pay a reasonable annual fee to get the most out of Omnidrive. The business-grade offering will be based on a subscription model but run on redundant and higer-grade dedicated servers.
We have opened up for registration for the beta program which will be made avaliable around christmas time. Any feedback would be appreciated.
I'm most often on instant messenger:
AIM - clawaim
Yahoo - claw_eloquence
Catch me sometime and I'd love to chat!
OmniDrive sounds great! It seems you've got a really comprehensive solution to the online storage problem - you're offering much more than the current crop of services can provide. I'm off to register for your Beta!
Somehow you managed to pick the 2 IM clients that I don't have. :)
But hey, I've been meaning to get Gaim for a while. Talk to you soon!
YouPage.com is a search and discovery service that applies semantic web technology
in the local business and services space.
The site is in prototype mode right now. Please feel free to give it a try and
let me know what you think. Your feedback is more than welcome.