Month: April 2010

Lifeyo is a new startup that helps the average person create a website with minimal web development skills. Their mission is to make polished, professional websites accessible to everyone. They provide a simple interface and set of tools that allow you to build the website you’ve always wanted without needing to hire a UK website design company.

The procedure for getting your website set up is a simple one. The first step is to pick a title for your website. This is the general idea or concept behind your website. The next step is to pick one of the many professional themes or layouts to use for you shiny new website. There are currently 13 themes to choose from.

Your next step is to actually create your Lifeyo account. This will allow you to login and manage your website. There are 3 plans to choose from:

• Starter – this free plan gives you the domain YourName.lifeyo.com and gets your website online right away using the website creator.
• Use My Domain – For $30/year, you get to use a domain you already own while also taking advantage of Lifeyo’s advanced editing tools.
• Get a New Domain – For $40/year, Lifeyo will help you register a new domain and automatically connect it to your Lifeyo website.

Once you decide which plan works for you, you can proceed to editing your website. Keep in mind that you can always start at the free level and upgrade later if you just want to check things out.

Designing your website is as simple as dragging things where you want them. To edit an object, just double-click it. Easily add photos and text to your page and create any additional pages that you need. You can add advanced widgets like YouTube videos by adding a code block. Copy the embed code you need for the video or widget and paste it inside the code object.

You have full control over the visual appearance of your site. Change your theme, modify the title, and even change the background image. Quickly add a blog to your site so that you can provide dynamic content to your audience. Your blog posts can also include photos, videos, music, and any other file attachments you need.

Once you’ve got everything looking good, don’t forget to Publish your website for the world to see. Lifeyo is something like Stiqr, but it gives you a base to start from and doesn’t even require you to paste any code anywhere. You need absolutely no web design experience or knowledge to get involved with Lifeyo and create something awesome.

Take a look at Lifeyo and tell us what you think in the comments.

Ping.fm Adds Support For RSS

Ping.fm, the service which lets you broadcast your status messages across all your social networks, has tapped SuperFeedr to add RSS support. This is definitely a powerful new enhancement to the Ping.fm services, which was just recently purchased by Seesmic. I’m a big Ping.fm user and welcome any updates and feature additions, but this one has me worried.

There are a plethora of apps out there that completely automate Twitter with the goal of helping marketers get their message out there. Most of these service are abused and end up creating droves of spammy and useless Twitter drones. With RSS support in Ping.fm, there is potential to easily create the same type of zombies across the entire social media landscape. Maybe I’m just being overly dramatic.

Gowalla Goes Real-time

Gowalla is another service taking advantage of SuperFeedr to enhance their service. They’re providing real-time RSS feeds for checkins and venues. This will allow you to do things like add your checkins into Buzz, track your favorite venues and people right in your RSS reader, and we’ll probably see some fancy Yahoo Pipes magic in the near future. As RWW points out, Foursquare offers RSS feeds for each user, but they’re not the real-time PubSubHubbub feeds now provided by Gowalla.

iBooks Coming To The iPhone

The fancy new iBooks app that was created as part of the iPad launch will be coming to the iPhone with the new OS release later this year. It’s unclear why they’re making iPhone users wait until the release of the new OS to provide access to the iBooks software. When it comes down to it, it’s really just another app. Another issue is that Apple may be leaving a lot of money on the table by not snatching up existing iPhone users before they break down and get a Kindle. Amazon has more books, anyway.

Foursquare Cracks Down on Cheaters

Foursquare, pretty much the leader in location-based services, has one major problem: cheating. Anyone who knocks the service points out this Achilles heel and Foursquare has decided to solve the problem once and for all. If they can’t verify your location, your checkin doesn’t count.

One of the reasons I decided to go with Foursquare was that it was easy to checkin via SMS, so it was working out pretty good. With this new change, users won’t be able to cheat as easily, but I also won’t be bothering because pickings were slim via SMS already.

Dennis Crowley goes into detail about how the changes may affect in this comment.

Providing more proof that Google’s evil plan to take over the world is coming along nicely, both Apple (WebKit2) and Mozilla (Firefox Lorentz) are making modifications to their web browsers that mimic something Google’s Chrome already does. One of the reasons that Chrome is different and arguably more efficient than other browsers is in the way it separates everything into separate processes. Each tab is a separate process. Each extension is a separate process.

If you have ever visited a single web page that crashed your entire browser, you have experienced the very reason why this is important. Having everything seperate means you can kill the tab or extension that is having trouble without losing your whole browsing session.

Chrome was built from the ground up with this separation as a basis for it’s design. Chrome was also built with the intention of shaking up the browsing industry. Since Chrome came around with it’s simple design, process separation, and super fast javascript engine, just about every other major browser has seriously stepped their game up. This latest development is just another step along that path.

In their latest beta build, called Lorentz, Firefox has duplicated this same process separation. If a page goes wild because of some plugin issue, you no longer use your entire Firefox session or lock up your computer entirely. Firefox goes gray and notifies you of the issue first, giving you the option to try again or just close the tab. The sad robot face is pretty much identical to what you would see in Google Chrome.

Apple’s Webkit2 announcement is very interesting because Google Chrome, Safari, and a few other browsers are actually based on Webkit. It’s not a browser itself, but is a framework to build a browser on. What Apple has done is take this idea of seperate processes and incorporate it into that framework.

WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.

Simply by default, Safari and other software based on Webkit will already have this multi-process ability built into it and should become more stable and efficient because of it.

A new deal with Universal and Fox means that you won’t see your new releases until 28 days after they’ve already become available elsewhere. The first release affected by this new deal will be Avatar. If you were planning on renting the DVD from Netflix so you could get caught up on your award-winning, excessively long, CG-animated, regurgitated film you will have to wait until May 20th. Everyone else will be checking out this race of blue people on April 22nd.

You might wonder why in the world Netflix would make such a deal. On the potential plus side, depending on how you actually use Netflix, you’ll gain access to a bunch of TV shows via streaming video. These shows are free to you as a subscriber. Stay tuned for previous seasons of “24″ and “Lie to Me.” You can also catch “Arrested Development” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in their entirety. The Universal side of the deal brings us movies like ”Gosford Park,” “Being John Malkovich” and “Do the Right Thing.”

Depending on how you use Netflix, this news either makes you extremely angry or you’re indifferent to the whole thing. It seems like a large portion of the geek demographic will be happy to see more streaming television shows online, but I doubt the average consumer wants to watch reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on their computer. As a matter of fact, I doubt the average Netflix customer even knows they can watch stuff online as opposed to just renting DVD’s.

What’s most interesting about this deal between Universal, Fox, and Netflix is the previous deal already in place between Universal, Fox, and Blockbuster. Blockbuster has been going downhill for a while now because of companies like Hulu, Netflix, and Redbox. They are just more convenient than going to the local video store and then worrying about late fees and whatnot. In an effort to save itself, Blockbuster literally sold out to Universal and Fox, giving them first lien on 459 stores in Canada, in exchange for being able to provide newly released DVD movies on the same day they’re released. Also, I’m pretty sure Comcast offers new movies On Demand say day as the DVD release.

Do you use Netflix? How do you feel about having to wait a whole month to see new releases?

AOL has finally decided to do something about the Bebo service, which most have long since written off. They plan to sell or just shut the site down by the end of May. The social media and social networking landscape has become very competitive. Even MySpace had to eventually concede victory to Facebook as a strictly social networking site. AOL has found that it will be entirely too costly to invest in Bebo’s success. In a memo to employees, AOL Ventures EVP Jon Brod said:

The strategy we set in May 2009 leverages our core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning us for the next phase of growth of the Internet. As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success. Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.

AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010.

AOL, as part of Time Warner, bought Bebo in 2008 for $850 million. While it remains one of the top social networks in the UK, it never took off in the United states except among young girls. It seems then president of Bebo, Joanna Shields, sold AOL on the whole social media thing. They brought Shields on to run one of their divisions which eventually bought SocialThing.

It seemed that AOL might have been on the right track with their social media strategy. They used SocialThing to enhance the Bebo service and it looked like it could have been interesting as a social aggregator, taking some cues from FriendFeed. A change in company structure brought new management and a new vision as AOL split from Time Warner and they brought in a new CEO. Shields left the company shortly thereafter. With no driving force behind their social media efforts, Bebo has sat idle while it’s executives were hired away and other jobs were cut entirely.

With abysmal unique visitors, there is no way Bebo will get sold for anything close to the $850 million AOL bought it for. Interestingly enough, AOL’s stocks went up after the announcement that they would be getting rid of Bebo, jumping up almost 4 percent.

Gmail has added a couple of noteworthy features to Gmail Labs. Nested Labels allows you to create a hierarchy or tree of labels, much like you would do with the folders in other email clients. The second is the Message Sneak Peek feature, which lets you see a small preview of each message without actually opening it.

Nested Labels

First thing you need to do is activated the Nested Labels feature in Gmail Labs. Find the green labs icon next to your email address on the top right of your Gmail window. Enable Nested Labels and remember to click Save at the bottom.

The next step is to actually create your nested labels. You do so by including a forward slash “/” in the name. So, you could create a hierarchy with “Black Web Media” as the root and have it contain labels like “Black Web 2.0,” “Young Black Professionals Guide,” and “Politic365.” Just create labes with the following names:

• Black Web Media
• Black Web Media/Black Web 2.0
• Black Web Media/Young Black Professionals Guide
• Black Web Media/Politic365

A couple of things to note here:

1. If the root label already exists, you don’t have to create it from scratch
2. If the sub-folders or sub-labels already exist, you will still be creating an entirely new label. For example, you already have a bunch of emails labelled as “Black Web 2.0,” but they won’t show up under “Black Web Media/Black Web 2.0.” This means that you will have to do a lot of relabeling if you want to move your current labels into the new format.

Message Sneak Peek

Most other mail clients offer you a preview of your messages in a separate pane. Message Sneak Peek brings a similar feature to your Gmail inbox. Once you enabled it in Labs, simply right-click on any message to see a pop-up preview of it’s contents. From here, you can decide to read the whole message, Archive the message, or Delete it.

If you have hotkeys enabled you can open the preview by pressing “h”. There are also a few other actions you can take, including:

• <Shift> + t : Add to tasks
• s : Star conversation
• <Shift> + i : Mark as Read
• <Shift> + u : Mark as unread

Google has been rolling out a new version of Google Maps and the latest update for Blackberry is pretty extensive, including connections to Buzz and a search by voice feature.

We’ve been rolling out new versions of Google Maps for mobile at a fast pace lately, and the first Google Maps for BlackBerry update of 2010 is a big one. For version 4.0, we’ve added new features to help you find places faster, post from those places with Google Buzz, star them for quick access, and more.

Up until now, the Google experience on the Blackberry has been pretty lame. With this latest update, it looks like Blackberry users can actually be proud of and actually enjoy using their Google services. What may be the important part of the update for most Blackberry people is the search by voice update. Instead of trying to type out directions with your thumbs, which is a pain even on a full keyboard, just hold down your green call button and say where you want to go. A map of your search result appears on your screen.

This feature works great for locations where you know the name, as you can just say it, but also works when you might only know an address or intersection. It’s basically just the power of Google’s location search without the hassle of typing everything out. This frees your hands and eyes to do more important things…like driving.

Google Buzz for mobile is the next hot new feature that is now available on the Blackberry. Using the layers interface, you can see what others are saying on Buzz, or post your own Buzz. Just as on the standard web version, you can also share photos, videos, and news.

There are many other features that come along with this update. Now, like on Android, you get personalized search suggestions based on your previous search history. Your starred items also synchronize to your Google account. You just need to make sure you’re logged in first.

To get started, install the application on your Blackberry by visiting m.google.com/maps in it’s browser. The new 4.0 version should install automatically.

Amazon announced a new system today that will make it simple for developers to provide push notifications to users of their applications and even to other applications. The new feature, which is part of Amazon’s web services, is known as Simple Notification System or SNS for short. According to the website:

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

To put this in English, this will allow developers to easily add a notifications feature to their applications so that you know what’s going on with them. The primary benefit to developers is that they can skip the boring task of coding a notification system from scratch. They also avoid the pitfalls of a polling system, which wastes resources and kills your battery.

Push notifications only happen when an event actually occurs. This not only frees up your mobile device or computer to do other things, but it prevents you from redirecting your attention periodically to check if anyone or anything hit you up. The fact that this has been made available in the cloud from Amazon at a pretty affordable price may be a huge benefit both to developers and consumers.

This new notifications system goes right along with the way the web is heading. Push notifications happen in basically real time. Take a location-based application as an example. Using SNS, users of the application can be notified immediately whenever a friend checks in nearby. The notifications can happen via the protocol of choice (email, HTTP, etc.) to provide the best solution within the current application.

The system requires the user to opt-in so that we can avoid any spammy situations. SNS is secure and scalable so that, as the user base grows, your notifications system doesn’t get bogged down or clogged. Nothing worse than getting a sudden burst of notifications about old information.

What is most interesting about this service is the Free Tier. For applications that don’t send out that many notifications or that are just getting on their feet, you may not need to pay a dime to use the service:

You can get started with Amazon SNS for free. Each month, Amazon SNS customers pay no charges for the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests, no charges for the first 100,000 Notifications over HTTP and no charges for the first 1,000 Notifications over Email. Many applications may be able to operate just within these free tier limits.

According to market research firm ISuppli, the components required to build an iPad only cost $260. On a device that retails anywhere from $499 to $699, that’s a pretty nice profit Apple is making. ISuppli estimates the cost of the touchscreen on the iPad at $95 and the Apple-designed, Samsung manufactured processor at $26.80. Most interesting is the fact that most of the cost in putting together in iPad goes into the screen itself.

Much of the iPad’s component costs went toward making the device appealing to use, said ISuppli principal analyst Andrew Rassweiler, who supervised the “teardown” analysis of the product. More than 40 percent of the iPad’s cost is devoted to powering its touch-screen display and other components of the computer’s user interface — “what you see with your eyes and what you feel with your fingers,” he said. The distinctive aluminum casing on the back of the device contributed about $10.50 to cost of materials.

Not very surprising given the fact that most of Apple’s popularity comes from the user experience provided by their products rather than the products being ground-breaking or innovative in some way. It’s no secret that Apple did not invent the MP3 player, the touch-screen mobile device, or the tablet device. They just took these ideas, improved the user experience, had better marketing, and put the stuff in nicer packaging.

The ISuppli evaluation shows a 52 percent profit margin for the lowest cost version of the iPad, priced at $499. This is apparently consistent with other Apple products. We also must take into consideration that this only covers the actual physical components that go into putting the device together. This doesn’t cover intangible things like cost of any software, development of that software, design and testing, or actual manufacturing costs.

ISuppli found more silicon chips devoted to powering interactions with the iPad screen than they thought they would, at least 3 in all. This seems to indicate that we could see price reductions in the iPad as time goes on since their is room to simplify and combine some of the components. I know many people who wouldn’t even think of an iPad at $499 but, at $299, it would fit into a lot more budgets.

Yesterday, Digg CEO Jay Adelson stepped down. After “five years, forty million users, and an amazing ride,” he felt that Digg was in a good and stable place, having ramped up hiring and left the startup phase. Because of this and the impending launch of the new dig site, he felt it was a good time […]

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Rally Up is the work of the team from video site 12seconds (plus a few others) and pretty much solves all the problems most people have with the entire genre of location-based services. This isn’t their claim, but it seems they’ve got all the bases covered. According to their website:
“Rally Up is a new kind […]

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Yes, you read that right. Alicia Keys has a job posting on Monster.com and is looking for a head blogger for her new site IAAS.com (I Am A Superwoman). This will be a community primarily for women and applying for the job is only the first step in the process.
The goal of IAAS.com (I Am […]

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Sounds kind of disturbing and probably a touchy topic for some, but search giant Google has started highlighting the suicide prevention phone number at the top of searches containing terms like “i want to die” and “kill myself.” It’s pretty specific in where it includes the number, restricting it to searches in first person regarding […]

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Google Buzz caught a raw deal. The brand new service has been getting attacked since the day it launched. Central to the arguments against it is the issue of privacy. First and foremost, Buzz launched as an opt-out service. This means that, regardless of whether you wanted Buzz or not, you automatically became a Buzz […]

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