BlogTalkRadio, the site that lets users record and broadcast live podcasts, has updated their UI and added some excellent new features. I’ve used blogtalkradio a lot in the past, and absolutely love it. The fact that you can sign up, call a phone number, and create a live multi-user podcast with audience interaction….all for free is amazing.

The new features include:

• BlogTalkRadio Learning Center- A place to find comprehensive guides, FAQs, tutorials, etc.
• The Forum- A place to interact with other show hosts and listeners to "learn how to market your show, increase your listeners, and expand your Internet radio voice."
• My BlogTalkRadio- A new dashboard that has all your account info in one place.
• Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace Integration- Show hosts can now add their account info for their social networking sites, allowing listeners to follow or friend them.
• Google Calendar and Outlook Reminders- You can now set show reminders that can be delivered via Google Calendar or Outlook
• iTunes Integration- You can now click on icons that allow you to subscribe to keywords and shows via iTunes.

I’ve always loved blogtalkradio for its functionality, but the UI and user account features were really awkward. Finding something to listen to was nearly impossible. But it seems that all that has changed. Excellent.

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And the winner of the most convoluted and awkward blog post title of 2009 thus far goes to……….this post.

This morning I was going through a bunch of unread emails, unsubscribing from lists and deleting junk. I then saw an email from a service called Soocial. The email let me know that the service had complez`ted a full backup of my gmail address book. I vaguely remember doing something like that, and I definitely didn’t remember what Soocial was all about. I went to the site and found that soocial is a universal address book that synchs contacts between macs, blackberries, gmail, phones and outlook. They promise "hassle-free" contact management, and even go so far as to have a cartoonish photo of David Hasslehoff on their site:

Hassle-Free Contacts

I took about five minutes to check out the service, and it looks like it is as promised. But I had an overwhelming "so what?" feeling. Why? Because I already use something else to accomplish the same task.

The Cost Of Switching

Without knowing it, I was doing a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the cost of importing my contacts and the risk associated with giving my login credentials to yet another service was just too much. The switch wasn’t worth it. Which made me ask the next question: what would soocial need to have in order for me to make the change? Then the question moved into more general grounds: what does any competitor need to have to get users to switch from a service they’re currently using?

Think about it for a second. If you use flickr, what would a new competitor need to offer in order to get you to join and bail on flickr? If you use twitter, what would the new microblogging/status tool need to have to get you?

The first answer to this question is: well, it depends. I mean, if we’re talking about a "social" service that derives its value on the community of users, that’s one thing. A new competitor to twitter could have any feature you can think of, but if it didn’t have people using it, it wouldn’t matter. But let’s ignore the social stuff for a minute. Let’s talk specifically about services that are kind of in-itself offerings. Things like contact management tools. Like text editors, blogging software, etc. Applications that matter to you and you alone regardless of what others say.

Let’s pretend you use MS Word. Price aside, what would a new word processing competitor need to have to get you to switch?

Sequential Building Blocks

Here’s an example I had today. Since switching over to using a mac, I’ve been looking for a decent alternative to Windows Live Writer. I absolutely love WLW and I just can’t find something comparable for the mac. I was so used to it that I had all the shortcuts memorized and composing a post was a breeze. I’ve tried everything I can find for the mac, but nothing does it for me.

I’ve been using Qumana for the last two months, and it’s decent. It’s very basic, but it gets the job done. But when I hear of another blog editor for the mac, I’m always willing to check it out. I heard about a similar product called Blogo and had to give it a try. The interface was really slick and simple, but it lacked some of the features I’d grown accustomed to in Qumana. Even though Blogo had features that Qumana lacked, I bailed.

Why? Sequential building blocks.

To me, a new competitor needs to have everything plus. That is, it needs to have all the features of the product I’m currently using along with additional features. Otherwise I’m out. Maybe I’m more impatient than the public at large, I’m not sure. But if someone comes up with an alternative to Excel, it better have everything excel has…..and more. Otherwise what’s the point?

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As a startup, it makes sense to do awards submissions. One of the biggest ones out there is “The Crunchies”, a competition put on by TechCrunch to award the best startups and internet/tech innovations of the year. This is the second annual competition, and final voting just started. This afternoon I got the following email from 12seconds.tv:

Dear 12ers,

The Crunchies, Baby.

Because of your participation in 12seconds, we’ve been nominated for a Crunchie. It’s like the Oscars but for startup nerds and it means a lot to us. It’s enough that we were nominated but we’re still going for broke (literally) and we’d like you to vote for us once a day, every day until you can’t vote anymore. If you’d like a daily reminder, please emailftw@12seconds.tv and we’ll remind you every day at noon PST. We’ll even include a daily affirmation like, “you are really good looking” with every email. Thanks for helping us out.

Wow. I love it. The voice is just awesome. It’s conversational, it’s humorous, it’s self-deprecating, it’s honest. I love the idea of creating an email list that will send a message every day at noon to remind people to vote again. I have no idea if it’ll be effective, but it’s great. I also love the ftw@ email address. For the win. Love it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Crunchies Nominations Are Out, Time to Vote
• ShopSavvy nominated for a 2008 Crunchie!

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New on Media Bullseye this week, I’ve got an article about pretty much the same thing I’ve been on about since leaving CustomScoop in October–when my job doesn’t require it, how do I stay involved in social media?

I’ve got my own top five tips and ask that you contribute your own! If you’re busy at work, and busy after work, how do you stay tuned in?

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RadWebTech has just launched ScrAPPlet, a browser based “blank canvas that makes it easy for anyone to customize a page, connect social profiles, or design a portable site with drag and drop ease.” While other social network aggregators and bridges have used the “enabling users to connect to multiple accounts” angle, scrapplet has gone for customization and data portability as their lead message. And I’m a sucker for the data portability stuff.

I like the idea and the screenshots, so I went to check it out. Boy is it buggy. I can’t honestly give an opinion of the service, as I couldn’t get it to work right. First, I tried to sign up:

And then….

Hmmm. Ouch. Well, hey, it’s a beta, right? I understand they can be buggy, so let’s try to forge ahead.

So, if you go to the home page after signing up, it does show that I’m logged in:

But clicking on “My Home Page” gives me a 404 again. Aight, fine. Let’s go to My Scrapplets. Okay, so this works, and since I have no scrapplets available, it’s time to make one:

Looks like these thing cost points to make, and I’ve got 500 available. Okay. Works for me. But then……

404.

Okay, I’m out.

Since I really can’t do anything, I’ll just share what the press release says. Maybe they’re just getting slammed right now because they just opened their beta.

Scrapplet Extends, Enhances, and Integrates Facebook, MySpace, Wikis, Blogs, and Websites

Personal and customizable online canvas breaks down Social Media walls to help everyone create, consolidate, and share their Web

December 22, 2008, Fort Lauderdale, FL RadWebTech today announced the public beta release of Scrapplet (www.scrapplet.com), browser-based blank canvases that make it easy for anyone to customize a page, connect social
profiles, or design a portable site with drag and drop ease.

Unlike everyday, do-it-yourself Web site builders, Scrapplet is a hub for social profiles, the relationships maintained across each network, as well as a showcase for ideas, thoughts, experiences, and expertise. It started as an application for Facebook and quickly evolved to provide seamless integration with MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and
more. Now as a standalone Web service, Scrapplet makes it easy to drag and drop content and functionality from each network, tying distributed connections together, while creating a new kind of virtual website.

Update: Though I still can’t do anything to create a scrapplet, I happened upon the “explore” page:

Which leads me to the most popular scapplet page:

Click on the above picture to see the most popular scrapplet page.

Well, since I can’t try it out for myself, I can’t say much about the actual data portability and social features. From what I can see, it’s a drag and drop version of geocities. But again, I can’t really judge something I couldn’t try.

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So, I was super excited when my blog post “Top 10 Tips To Get Your Startup Noticed” over on marketingstarups.com started to pick up steam. I got a lot of great feedback and comments, and even had to change my bandwith limit three times.

In the post, one of my tips was to submit your site to relevant resources. I listed a bunch of the top tech blogs, and at the end I added a shameless plug for my own blogs, saying:

“Hey, it’s easy. Just contact me (nathan.burke@gmail.com), let me know what you do, and if your site or service is relevant, I’ll review it here.”

Well, a lot of people did just that, or added comments to the post. A lot.

And now I feel like a jerk because I haven’t had time to get to them. I asked, they answered, and I haven’t been able to do my part just yet. Though I will absolutely keep my end of the deal, I thought I’d at least give 15 of them a mention and a blurb today.  So, check out the following, and let me know what you think of them. Vote for your favorites, and I’ll come up with some kind of stupid, cheap prize. I’ll be doing individual posts on these startups in the very near future, so think of this as a little preview of what’s to come. Here goes.

1. SavvyGraph.com- From their site: “One of the most valuable features of Amazon.com® is the wealth of data contained in the product ratings. SavvyGraph uses Amazon’s consumer reviews to plot the “best” items in your search results. Try some of the following search terms to see it work – camcorder, TV, DVD player, binoculars, GPS, car seat, vacuum cleaner, digital camera”

2. feedbackjar.com- From their site:

• FeedbackJar is community offering feedback for both business owners and customers.
• Customers can share their experiences with other members.
• Business owners can listen and respond to their customers.
• Members can voice their opinions to their favorite local businesses.

3. Muspy.com- From their site: Muspy will notify you when artists you like release new albums.

Have you ever missed an album of one of your favourite artists only to discover it by accident weeks after the release? Do you spend a lot of time on official websites looking for release announcements? With Muspy you will save time and won’t miss any releases.

4. Xpenser.com- Expense Tracking and Management From Any Device-
Any Device, Anywhere
Record your expenses via Email, iPhone, SMS, Voice, Twitter, IM, search box, and more.

Manage, Analyze, or Export
Using tags, keywords, advanced search, or export to your favorite application or as RSS.

Budgets, Per-Client Routing,
Mileage Tracking, International Currency Conversion, Import Bank and Credit Card Statements, and more.

5. Tribesmart.com- From their site: “A website for the products you have bought and used, loved and loathed.” This site is useful and social. We want this site to become ‘the other side of the story’, a true picture of products, general, niche and specialist, based on the real experiences of those who have bought them. We want to draw on your collective experiences to provide a content packed website which helps others find the most innovative, quirky, durable, useful, green, stylish and fun products according to you – the tribes.

This website aims to level the playing field, a true product meritocracy, where big marketing budgets, brands and distribution won’t cut it with the tribes unless the product does.”

6. Clarity Accounting- From their site: “At Clarity Accounting, we provide small business owners and self-employed individuals with an online accounting software that is simple, reliable, and secure.

Track Income & Expenses

Clarity Accounting is a dream come true for self-employed individuals and small businesses. Our simple and intuitive design makes it easy and effortless for small businesses to keep track of income and expenses. Create and send an unlimited number of pdf invoices in seconds.”

7. Entitea- From their site: “Entitea was built for tea lovers to come and share their recipes with the world, as well as find wonderful new recipes. We all know drinking tea is good for you and really healthy, but lets face it, drinking the same tea day after day can get a little dull. So we made a place where everyone can share their favorite teas, so that you can keep drinking tea with new unique tastes.”

8. Minutetraders- From their site: “Minutetraders.com is an online marketplace for buying & selling telecommunication routes.

Buy termination routes from wholesale national and international VoIP providers, or sell your VoIP/TDM routes (or A-Z) to a worldwide audience. Our web-based marketplace directly connects telecom providers with termination carriers rapidely, securely and efficiently.”

9. CloudFire- From their site: “Last year 50 billion photos and videos were taken but only less than 10% of them were shared online. We believe sharing photos, and especially videos, is just not as easy as it could be…

CloudFire is the fastest way to share all your photos and videos with the people you know. There is no uploading, no reorganizing, no transcoding - just share it and let CloudFire do the rest.”

10. Mobnotes- From their site: “Mobnotes - short for “mobile notes”- is a geo-aware social utility. It allows you to stay connected with your friends, family and co-workers by providing a simple way of telling where you are and what you do.
Know what’s happening nearby: keep track of your friends & meet people in your neighbourhood, post mobnotes with photos and video to locations. The world, in your pocket: m.mobnotes.com r”ocks on your shiny new iPhone and it even works on your mom’s old mobile!

11. Chemsink- From their site: “ChemSink is a chemical reaction database. It is a place for anyone interested in chemical synthesis to come and discuss their successes and failures with specific chemical reactions. The chemsink database is free to download, alter, and use.”

12. Buzzup- From their site: “Think of Buzzup as a social media site for the hottest tech news that are generating buzz in the tech blogs. Our users submit their own stories to Buzzup.com and get voted by others.”

13. Just Parts- From their site: “JustParts.com is the newest and fastest growing online marketplace built just for parts. As a user, you can either buy or sell new and used parts, parts-cars, tools and accessories on our site.

JustParts was created to fulfill the need for a powerful online parts solution that allows users to buy and sell parts in a fast, efficient and practical way. We’ve combined the best elements from dozens of leading parts programs together with input from hundreds of top industry professionals to create a powerful marketplace.”

14. Spectackler- From their site:” “Welcome to Spectackler, designed and built to help you overcome the confusing intricacies of those daunting product specifications. Say you have decided you want to buy a digital SLR. You know the price you are willing to pay and may even have an idea on what features you require from your new purchase, but trawling through the product details on different sites can be a very time consuming task. Not forgetting the task of remembering which products you liked and why. With the money you are going to spend you want to make sure you are going to get it right and Spectackler is here to help you. Whether you know exactly what you are looking for or need to be given a few pointers, Spectackler can help you find the product to suit your needs.”

15. Anamigo- From their site: Welcome to Anamigo.com, your pets place online. They’re there when you wake up, when you get home from a long day and when you’re ready to get into bed. And yet, you cant get enough of your pet. We get it.

So we created Anamigo.com, an online pet community dedicated to giving our pets their own place online. They are such crucial players in our lives in the real world, and we believe they deserve to come online as well.

By design, our site is only as immersive as you want it to be. Relax during a short break from the day-to-day and browse the cutest dog, puppy, kitten and cat pictures from pet people just like you. Create your pet’s profile and upload as many photos as you like. Or dig in and participate in our forums, blogs and groups. Anamigo.com is a place where you choose how engaged you want to be - and our aim is to make sure you’re rewarded for every moment you spend here.

—————-

So, which do you like? Add a comment and let me know.

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Back in October, I wrote about Signal Patterns launching a facebook app to match personality traits to voting behavior. Today, they’ve announced the official launch of their two first web apps: Personality Patterns and Music Patterns. From their press release:

The applications are now available on SignalPatterns.com, a first-of-its-kind website where people use professional psychology tools, developed by leading PhD researchers and scientists, to discover psychological insights, connect to other like-minded individuals, and for content and music discovery.

The Signal Patterns applications offer people unprecedented insight to how psychological traits influence their behavior, emotions, relationships and content choices. This is the first time professional level grade tools have been incorporated into publicly available online social applications. In addition, the Music Patterns application offers personalized music discovery and automatically creates customized playlists based on a person’s "music personality."

So, I took the personality patterns test, which looks a lot like this;

After a long personality test, a registration prompt came up, though I was already logged in. There was no option to log in, so I had to try to register again. When I did that, it said my email address was already on file, and I had to login again. When I logged in, I found I’d completely wasted my time, as my account page said I’d never taken the personality test. Boo.

Perhaps this is another one of the tests. Maybe they thought it would be fun to piss someone off and see if their answers are different after logging them out after taking the whole test. That would actually be pretty funny.

So, since I’ve come this far, I took the test again. All 40 questions.

Here’s what I got:

Hey, maybe it was a test to find out if I’m "flappable."

So, what do you do with it?

Well, you can:

1. See how your friends compare to you by having your facebook, imeem, last.fm, flickr and myspace friends sign up and take the quiz.

2. Find people like you that have already become members on SignalPatterns.

3. Show your patterns- You can get embed code for a badge to put on your blog or social network profile.

I’m not sure I fully "get" Signal Patterns. I know they’re saying that they’re passionate about helping people know more about themselves, but I’m just not sure there’s anything left to do after getting questionnaire results. It’s like taking a strengthsfinder quiz and finding out what kind of work you should do, but instead, you just find out some personality traits.

If someone were to walk up to me and let me know that I’m a calm and creative person, I guess I’d thank them, but I don’t know if there’s any way to apply that information toward anything.

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Today, telonu launched the public beta of their service, a community site where users can talk about their employer anonymously. The site mixes reviews and ratings of companies with networking features. From their press release:

Telonu Inc. today announced the beta launch of its free user generated content community website, www.telonu.com focused on the workplace. Users gain valuable insight to what insiders are saying about a company. In turn, they can share what’s on their mind regarding the workplace, the people they work with and other important things in their lives, such as schools, brands purchased, and even what’s hot for lunch!

The Upside

When looking for a new job, it’s hard to find out what a prospective employer is actually all about. Every company talks about their “culture”, but how can you get an objective opinion about working at a company until you actually work there? Telonu tries to tackle this problem by having employees anonymously post opinions about their employer.

Taking a look at a review of Citigroup I see this:

Go to an ivy league undergrad — work on the Street — Go back to a top tier Business School — get lured into Citi bank thinking that you will climb up the corporate ladder faster as you have a combination of people savyy and financial engineering smarts picked up at B School — and then get laid off. This is the story of hot shots at Citi and others — not to mention our friends at Bear and Lehman … this is a white color top tier recession — that we have never seen

On the other end of the spectrum there are posts like this one about myspace:

I was at a party recently in the bay Area and there were some facebook employees there. I was just amazed at the fact that they believed that Facebook was larger than MySpace. We are far better than facebook, have a lot more users and also make tons more $ — guys — get over it!

The Downside

While it’s easy to see that there could be value in a site that gives a real, insider’s look at a company, there are some drawbacks:

1. Authentication- Since the foundation of telonu is built on anonymity, there’s nothing to prevent a user from signing on to the service and pretending to be an employee of a company. For instance, if I have a competitor I don’t like, I could post a negative review and say I work at the company.

2. Spam- On the other hand, employees of companies can use telonu to talk about how great they are, using it as a spam vehicle.

3. Motivation- The one question that comes to mind is: why would someone take the time to review a company unless they’re extremely unsatisfied (as can be seen with people posting layoff notices) or are using the service as a marketing channel.

4. Anonymous Slander- Aside from rating companies, users can also rate and comment on individual employees. And since the users are anonymous and are not authenticated, anyone can say they work with anyone else and call them a big fat jerk.

Have a look at the site here and let me know what you think. Would you use telonu when researching a company? Is the system too open to manipulation?

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Veedow is a shopping discovery site that recommends products to users based on their expressed interests. The moment I heard the word "discovery", I was all over it. Frequent readers of this blog may remember that until October, I worked at matchmine, a media discovery company that recommended music, video, podcasts and blogs to users based on their interests and tastes. Because of that, I’m extremely interested in any recommendation and discovery services, so hearing about a site that took the discovery angle to a shopping site immeidately piqued my interest.

How It Works

From the veedow site:

Veedow collects a wide range of products from multiple sources and distributes it to users according to their chosen interests. The system generates a personalised page where users can rate any product, add it to their wish list, suggest it to friends or comment on it. We collate all these actions to learn people’s tastes and generate better recommendations for them and the whole community. For instance, when people leave high ratings for a specific product, this will likely be displayed to other users with the same interest.

When you sign up for veedow, you’re asked to select your interests:

Once your interests are added, a personalized set of recommendations can be found on your veedow page:

You can highlight each product and see:

Clicking the more button will show you user reviews and clicking the "shop this" button will redirect you to a page where you can buy the product.

Summary

Veedow, like any discovery engine, serves a niche interest: people looking for something that they don’t know exists. So if you’re looking to find something new, it’s really a great service. For instance, one of my interests in the Animal section was dogs. Going through my recommendations, I found this:

This is exactly what I need, though I had no idea it existed. My dog keeps trying to jump up in the front seat while I’m driving, and I keep having to elbow him to keep him back. Not so much fun while driving from Boston to NY.

So, if you’re looking for inspiration, I’d suggest checking out veedow. One note: it would be really cool if you could go into "gift mode", where you can change your interest settings for, say, a relative, allowing you to add their interests and see what veedow recommends for them. It would be a very cool holiday shopping tool. But I guess you can just change your own interest settings and accomplish the same thing.

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My article, entitled “Content and Communications Companies Dominate WebInno 20“, is now available on Media Bulliseye.

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