Ajax Girl

Being kept “in the loop” usually means you want to receive information but not necessarily exchange it. A company called Loopnote allows people to stay in the loop on any given topic by subscribing to one-way information updates.

Loopnote launched in private beta today. It is a service that allows users to join groups and receive regular information updates from the moderator of that group. Founder Alan Seideman gave me a demo last week and explained way too many scenarios in which this would be useful.

Say you are a member of a volleyball league and you want to be privy to real-time game updates. You can subscribe to the league’s loop and decide if you want updates via RSS, SMS, email, IM, or all four. So if a game is rained out, the moderator can send a cancellation message to the entire group.

Only the moderator of a loop can send alerts and thankfully the members of the group cannot reply to all.

“We may allow the reply-to-all feature in the future if the loop owner chooses to allow that but then you run into some issues with spam,” Seideman said. “The group SMS services are for small groups of friends. But with Loopnote, I don’t really need to have a dialogue with all 250 people in my volleyball league.”

Seideman actually does moderate a volleyball loop, which is why that was his favorite example. But I can also see this being useful for several scenarios, and not just activity organization. What if a notable professor whose work I want to follow sets up a Loopnote? I can see myself activating an RSS feed to read journal articles or other information he/she posts.

“You find something that you’re an expert in and get people in the loop,” Seideman said.

I really like that you can choose how you want to be notified. It seems pretty unobtrusive. The reply-to-all feature of the group text services such as Zemble and Yahoo’s new Mixd is something I want zero to do with personally.

Loopnote is a free service, but regular text fees apply of course. Currently, you can give the site your email address and they will invite you to the beta. The three founders have a few possible profit models in mind that they hope to follow but they are not married to a single one yet until they observe just how the product is used by those who sign up for the beta. Possible profit generators include contextual advertising or commercial sponsorship of loops.

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Seattle based Jott will launch its new voice to text product sometime this week. It’s very simple - a user calls a specific phone number and leaves a voice message along with a recipient or recipients (an obvious use for Jott will be for people to leave themselves quick notes). The voice message will then be converted from voice into text and delivered via email or SMS. The recipient or recipients can choose between reading the text or listening to the original voice message.

Like many new Seattle startups, Seattle PI reporter John Cook got an early look at them and was able to test out their software. While the voice recognition isn’t perfect, it seems good enough. His message of “Jott Networks is a new startup that converts your voice into text and delivers it via e-mail” was translated into “Jott now works as a new startup that converts your voice and ___ delivers it via E-mail.”

Jot is currently a four person team that includes two former Microsoft employees - John Pollard and Shreedhar Madhavapeddi. The company has raised less than $1 million in capital, from Ackerley Partners, Draper Richards and Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom.

Jott looks to be big competition for high flying startup Pinger, which just completed an $8 million round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and DAG Ventures. The Pinger team says that they are seeing significant usage growth, but they do not convert voice into text - recipients must listen to the original voice message. See a Pinger demo here.

Conversion to text is a big advantage that Jott has over Pinger. Chances are Pinger is hard at work to add this feature, too. In the meantime, I anticipate that I will often use Jott to send myself and others messages, particularly when traveling.

Note also competitor Spinvox, which is currently only available in the UK.

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Since we’re on the subject of messing around with media today, I’ll also point out PikiPimp, a new service that lets users quickly create pimped out versions of pictures and them embed them on other sites or download them in fairly good quality. I think the one I did is much more creative than Steve or Orli’s, but you get the idea. I’d make one of these for TechCrunch writer Natali Del Conte, but she’d probably resign (readers are encouraged to do so, however). More fun for MySpacers.

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Brand new Israeli startup BubblePLY has created an easy tool for adding text or link comic-book style bubbles to videos from popular video sharing sites. Tell it the link to a video on YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe and others, and then add your own content. The video is saved and can be shared via a link or embedding on a web page. See the demo here, and an example is here (there seems to be some problems with embedding right now).

This is way too much work for me, but my guess is that some MySpacers will find this compelling.

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Ten Ships have created a simple Ajax VPS management system for OpenVZ servers.

Info and a demo are at Vizzo VPS

Biggest gotcha in their words:

Biggest gotcha? Not ready for IE6 until the next beta :(. We are currently focusing on implementing features, we will go back and fix non-compliant browsers in a future release (although soon). We are currently looking for user feedback, suggestions and bug reports from the early-beta live demo currently live on the Vizzo website.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/vizzo-vps-management

As 2006 closes in, my favorite web service of the year is MyBlogLog. Despite Yahoo! acquisition rumors a few weeks ago, the company is still privately-held. If I were in the web M&A business, they’d top my list along with music social networking service Last.fm.

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Today, MyBlogLog has added support for MySpace profile pages. This is a way for them to infiltrate the MySpace market. MySpace pretty much offers what MyBlogLog has, except MyBlogLog has 2 things MySpace lacks:

1. MyBlogLog will show you who recently visited your webpage (only other MyBlogLog users) — this comes in handy for the curious cats that like to know who’s viewing their profile.
2. MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking system that allows you to communicate with not just users of MySpace, but users visiting thousands of other blogs/websites on the web.

How it works is that you create an account with MyBlogLog, grab a snippet of code, place that code in your MySpace profile, and then you can see what other MyBlogLog users visit your website.

The only qualm I have with the MyBlogLog service is the company name — it pigeon holes their business to blogs. In all reality, they should have partners such as NHL.com, NYTimes, and Slashdot — websites with communities of users that would love to learn more about each other and message each other. In my opinion, every website should have MyBlogLog — it allows your users to interact with one-another and builds community. I’m waiting to hear about the first marriage that happens as a result of MyBlogLog enabling two users to meet each other on a website that both had regularly visited for years, but never had a means of learning about each other (or other visitors of that website).

A couple months ago, I exchanged messages through MyBlogLog with CEO Scott Rafer, whom told me they have been looking for an alternative domain — do you have a suggestion Scott and his team?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

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