Twingly's Focus Tilts To Microblogging And Group Conversations
Twingly, the Swedish startup which started off as Technorati for the European market has been quite a regular mention at Arctic Startup. It is in news once again as Twingly shifts gears towards group communication and microblogging. The shift changes quite a bit compared to what it had been doing earlier; social aggregation.
Sfeed Is Twitter For Everything You Want To Have
Sfeed, an Estonian startup, is capitalizing on the popularity and dynamics of Twitter by introducing a service that let's you follow a stream of updates that center around physical objects that people like be it a sofa, a designer watch or a Blade Runner movie (Yes, I 'Sfeeded' all of the above). Accordingly, the service is called a shopping microblog.
In a similar fashion to Twitter, in Sfeed you can follow people and instead of status updates you then see the objects they have 'sfeeded' in your home stream. When you find a person with a similar taste to yours you can follow them and start receiving all their 'sfeeded' objects which in effect are likely to be stuff you like as well. Once you have chosen to like (sfeed) a few objects, the service starts to understand to recommend more objects to you based on what you have liked in the past. Simple, but quite powerful and addictive as I have come to find out.
sfeed.com introduction from sfeed on Vimeo.
To add products you need to add an easy-to-use bookmarlet to your bookmark toolbar. Once you see an interesting item while visiting an online store just click the bookmarklet and it highlights the item, add it's name and the service automatically adds it to your Sfeed feed. The bookmarklet can be added to most common browsers, namely Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. I added an item from a tiny Finnish t-shirt store, Puoti.fi. It worked nicely without any problems, so either Sfeed guys have already an agreement with the small store, or they add everybody and get a commission only from the bigger ones like Amazon before they get to the small ones.
You can also create sets (see my set below) and build your set on top of say a photo of your living room. This way you can immediately see whether the objects you have chosen to the set fit in your living room interior. Nifty! Similarly you can post a link of your own sets to Twitter, Facebook, all the other usual suspects or embed an html snippet to your website.
Since the service is build around physical things that are sold in stores, it's not such a stretch to figure out possible business models for the service, which can go from commission to advertising and everything in between as long as there is enought traffic. As hinted above, currently Sfeed's chosen method of monetization is referral sales commission (there is a link to a store that carries the item in question right next to it). That said, a sfeed like service isn't very hard for a service like Fruugo to copy and direct the traffic to their partner merchants, which is a natural consequency of Sfeed being such a simple, clever and easy to implement service. Sfeed was build on Amazon Web Services and financed by a round of seed funding in 2008. Then again, there's always ton of quirky little sites and products that Fruugo or might not be able to get or want to get in their selection, and it actually seems that the two work together quite nicely. Although, I doubt it whether Sfeed will ever get a commission from Fruugo, as Fruugo itself is asking a commission from its merchants.
All said, I very much enjoyed using the service and will make sure to visit again to find more aspirational things I would like to see in my living room.
Twingly Sees The Forest From The Trees With Microblog Search
Twingly announced yesterday that they have launched a microblogging search engine that can search across the most used microblogging services; Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca and lots more.
What makes this a game changer in my opinion is that Twingly has created the microblog search engine for the rest of the world. Fair enough, Twitter is the de facto microblog and it has gained a lot of traction even in the Nordics, there is still quite a bit of potential in the other platforms especially for corporate users. Martin Kallström, the CEO, confirmed to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch integration with FriendFeed is on the way - one of the most popular threaded microblogs around.
Twingly's microblog search works exactly the same way as does their normal blog search. A simple black search field and results that you can vote on to give relevance points to the most approriate blog posts. In essence, if you think of it - Twingly has integrated the wiki search that Google is still playing with into their product's core.
What I mean by the title of the blog post is the fact that when you are looking for conversations on certain keywords, you want to be able to search all conversations - not limit it to a single service. Search engines and filters to seek the relevant content will become more and more important in the future for corporations looking into ways to tap into customer dialogue. If Twingly is able to package this in an appealing way to the corporations wanting to tap into the groundswell, they could have an easily capitalisable product on their hands.
Microblogging hotter than ever – Bloggy.se launches public beta
While Twitter is hitting a new heat wave, Friendfeed just won the Crunchie Award for the Best New Startup 2008, and dear Jaiku keeps struggling with its maintenance issues, and just announced going open source!, what better time than to bring a new player into the field - Bloggy.se.
Bloggy is a Swedish microblogging service in Swedish, and a one-man show by Jonas Lejon. It all started for eight months ago as a free time project alongside with full time job and a newborn baby. (And then I haven't even mentioned a bunch of other web services Jonas has in his portfolio.) He had been a frequent user of both Jaiku, Twitter and Pownce (recently closed down) but wasn’t too pleased with any of them. He also wanted to bring microblogging to the non-tech savvy crowds, so he picked out the goodies from the other services and molded them into Bloggy.se.
On September 25th last year the first closed beta invitations were given to the Swedish Jaiku community and the reactions were immediate. Speculations on whether Bloggy was going to take over Jaiku were raised. (In Swedish)
The service was well received, as some of the first comments by couple of heavy Jaiku users can tell:
(Translated from Swedish)
- "Thought I was going to call it an early night but happened to stumble in here. Having a crush...:) " @mymlansofia
- “Testing Bloggy.se. Extremely impressed by Jonas Lejon.” @tedvalentin
- ”Bloggy.se is the first serious candidate to threaten Jaiku within "the Bubble" (Jaiku user group) (OMG, what am I saying? I, who can't live without Jaiku)”. @morris
Jonas has been a true crowd surfer since the start, and he continuously keeps asking their advice on both logo design and future features. Bloggy uses Get Satisfaction as the customer service and support tool.
Today, four months later, Bloggy has over one thousand users and growing. The Swedish industry bloggers have listed Bloggy as one of the highlights of the year, and even called it the microblog service of the year. (Both articles in Swedish)
So, what is under the Bloggy hood?
A Bloggy user gets an easy-to-follow user interface with threaded posts and comments, customized profile design, lifestreaming by adding feeds and all standard update (mobile, SMS, MMS) and notification (Jabber/Gtalk, email) features. Bloggy has support for updating both Twitter and Jaiku statuses. At the moment Bloggy is the only microblogging service in Sweden offering outgoing SMS updates (only on incoming SMS). Posts has standardized length of 140 characters, but like Jaiku the comment length is unlimited, a feature that encourages conversations. Bloggy users find new friends and topics on the main page that shows the public feed with current new members and a tag cloud with popular words.
It also offers the "I like/heart" feature, as part of the service itself, as does Friendfeed. There are now rumors about the similar feature on Facebook. Bloggy has support for geolocation services such as FireEagle and Geode, and there is naturally an API for developers.
According to Jonas himself the users have been especially happy about the automatically updated and threaded posts and comments (Ajax implementation). Jonas himself is most proud of the quick response times of the service, alongside the fact that Bloggy already contains almost all the functionality of the other microblogging platforms.
Unique to Bloggy is all the different file upload formats it supports (.JPG, .PNG, .GIF, AVI, MPG, 3GP, .MP3), all up to 20Mb. The user can also upload images via MMS (Friendfeed has Mail2FF).
The service differs from Twitter, Friendfeed and Jaiku in two ways: The user can't choose to be private, only public profiles are supported. It is also possible for anyone to leave a comment without being a registered user.
When now launching (In Swedish) in public beta, Jonas has added more features into Bloggy. It is now possible to update your status using Hello.txt and ping.fm, services that make life easier for those who want to update all their social networks at once. If you rather hang out on GTalk/Jabber all day, you no longer need to leave it to update your Bloggy status, there's support for it, too.
Is there a future for Bloggy?
Microblogging and social networks, as we have come to know, are all about where one's friends are, but with Bloggy filled with lots of functionality, channels on the way and continuous improvement of the user experience, I think "There is likely plenty of room in the niche and custom communities precisely because Twitter is purely public" as Rob Diana on louisgray.com so well argues. Why? For example, I've already noticed the use of #svpt (Swedes on Twitter) hash tag on Twitter just to track other Swedes and Swedish conversations. It's a jungle out there and the need to hang out with your own people and alikes is very strong.
Zircle - Elisa's Microblogging Platform
Elisa, a Finnish telephone operator and ISP, has created their own microblogging platform called Zircle. The service itself is having some hiccups at the moment as I couldn't get the registration to work and thus was unable to test drive the service. However, there are plenty of tips around the service that tell what it does.
The service in itself is some sort of port of Jaiku and/or Nokia's Friend View. Zircle does not provide their own mobile application, but you can use the service through the mobile browser, according to the FAQ -section.
Some other features of the service include free SMS messages (at least for now) between the users and the possibility to name the signal towers to your liking. In short, the value proposition of the service is relatively - if not the same as Jaiku's.
I have a strong feeling that this is some sort of a ported white label service to meet Elisa's need. If not, this raises serious questions about the possibility of Elisa to bring this sort of a product to the market. Where are the e-mail signups for the early adapters waiting to hear when the service is open, where is the buzz from the closed beta group leaking links and screenshots around, etc. etc? Elisa has nevertheless provided a quick tour of the service that tells more about the service, what it looks like at the moment and in short, what it does.
Building a community service where you don't involve the early adapters and possible evangelists to your service from early on is up for an uphill climb. It's all about taking that beach head in some group of people and building from there on, taking advantage of the connections people have. Then again, I don't know what they have up the sleeve so I may be speaking too soon.
First Impression Of Nokia Friend View
I'm playing with the Nokia's new service Nokia Friend View as I type this. I downloaded the software on my phone this morning and been using it through out the day.
In short the service wants to be a location aware microbloggin service.
I'm not blown away, nor have I completely lost hope with Nokia. They are trying fairly hard. The service is very Nokia-like in that it's not very user friendly compared to some others that have emerged from the west coast of US. The UI is rather ugly and after you start using it feels that someone has designed it on paper, but never really used it herself as it's not logical all the way through. Similarly the service is still very buggy, not loading the map on the web browser, eating one's battery in no time ...the list goes on and has still some really retarded features like the fact that the nick name is case sensitive. I registered as villevesterinen and now wondering whether there will be another VilleVesterinen. Does not really help you finding your friends from the service if there's two of each name.
I won't go into the nitty gritty, data portability etc. yet as Nokia is still in developing the service and I haven't used it long enough to get down and dirty with the features. Similarly, I won't go into how it could be integrated with Nokia Chat and the Ovi.com service in general for the simple reason that I don't use Ovi.com, since it only replicates other services I use like Flickr and MobileMe. Who knows, maybe Friend View lures me to use all of Nokia's services, but I'm not there yet. Nor is Nokia for that matter.
It's not all downhill though and this, after all, is still an early Beta. I don't know how my Nokia Friend View usage will evolve and where it becomes the most useful. I'd imagine I'd like to use it when I'm traveling and planning to meet people in a city at a given time. It would be very nice to see where their train is coming or see their plane above the Atlantic, but there's still a bit go before that. That said, it would be nice to see when my girlfriend is coming from work and see when she's just behind the corner or if she hasn't left from the office yet. But as many (In Finnish) communicated, they'd like to be able to control the level of privacy between the different contacts. The more of these services advance, the more privacy they invade. Nevertheless, I can find uses for the service already.
The sad part of this new service is that Nokia once had 'the next big thing' right in front of it: Jaiku was build right on Nokia's front porch and is doing much of what Nokia Friend View tries to do without the location bit. Add location to Jaiku and Voilà! One of Jaiku's co-founders and the father of the idea, Jyri Engeström, even worked at Nokia at one time, but of course it was too risky for the mobile phone giant at the time: It could not possibly put its weight behind a venture that is not already ubiquitous like microbloggin services now. That would be risky, which does not go very well with the Finnish management ideology. To make the irony complete Jaiku conversation threads are currently the best places to find out about how the Friend View works (or does not work in many cases), and Jaiku is still better service than Nokia Friend View, Twitter, Plazes and FriendFeed combined.
Now that Nokia has found the new focus for its strategy from the online services arena to go along with the hardware business, it should also embrace the new ways of working. Jaiku went to Google and nothing wrong with that, but if Nokia wants to be an innovative player in the online services field it needs to embrace different kinds of risks compared to ones it has before. This does not deal with mobile phone design, but rather with new behavior in communication as the web evolves. This risk involves betting on smart people, but not in a way Nokia has done before. I'm not talking about hard core MBA heavy hitters that can manage the hell out of any firm, but rather people who are the real pirates of the Internet. I'm talking about entrepreneurs.
Nokia needs to look at how Google has approached this issue by acquiring early stage startups and getting a boat load of smart people along with it. Nokia should start seeing the value in these energetic and smart people who want to change the way we communicate and won't stop until they do.
Similarly, Stefan Constantinescu, who's telling about the service in the YouTube clip made by Nokia, is also one of the best evangelist Nokia could hope for as the guy is super active and vocal in for example Jaiku. Let's hope that Nokia has learned its lesson and sees the value in what Stefan is doing and tunes into the Jaiku channels for community feedback.
