Ajax Girl

Twitter Users are currently given two primary interfaces through which they can interact with the growingly popular service: by the Twitter website itself or through TXT messaging via mobile phone.

A number of companies have launched third party tools to enhance computer based Twitter interaction. Twitterrific has a strong fan base amongst Mac Users, Twitteroo a PC version of Twitterrific, and more recently Tweetbar bought the Twitter homepage into the Firefox sidebar.

A new Firefox Add-On from Infinity Media, TwitBin, takes these previous platforms to the next level with a custom inline application of Twitter that just works.

Sometimes it’s the simplest things, and TwitBin cuts right to the chase: you get your Twitter messages down the left hand side of your Firefox window, broken up by color. A text box is provided for the addition of your own Twitters: no post this button is provided, Infinity Media thought this one through and knew that most people understand the concept of hitting ENTER.

Advertising purists wont like one part of the plugin: a 180×50 px banner ad is present at the bottom of the add-on. It wasn’t flashing or offering me free iPods; it’s subtle, so I didn’t have any issues with it, but some might.

In the absence of any other competitors this add-on should be popular amongst the army of Twitter fans, and it’s something I’ll be using from now on.

The developers shared one additional tidbit with us that was worth highlighting: it took less than 2 weeks to develop and cost less than $1000.

Clever thinking and good code need not be the exclusive domain of the mega rich or the VC funded.

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Any serious Internet startup tries to guess early growth rates so that they have enough hardware to scale (hopefully the software hangs in there, too). Stealth search engine Powerset (see our earlier coverage) is being very transparent about their modelling, and have posted some of their thinking on their company blog.

Steve Newcomb, co-founder and COO, wrote the post and goes into considerable detail as to how they built the predictive model. The graph above shows Newcomb’s model as applied to a competitor - Snap.com, after the new Snap Preview Anywhere release and its re-launch of its product.

The shaded area shows predicted growth and the actual results are shown by the blue line. Not a bad job, although I assume they tweaked the model quite a bit to make it fit.

Powerset should publish the model itself (without the specific Powerset assumptions of course) and let other startups tweak it for their own use. Most new companies don’t have the excel jockeys or the time to do this kind of work. Any competitive issues would be overshadowed by the considerable goodwill (and link juice) they’d get from doing this.

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Everyone else has one, so why not one more? Orange, a massive European mobile phone carrier that is now a subsidiary of France Télécom, is beta testing a customizable Ajax homepage product called Bubbletop.

The team building this is actually based near San Francisco, and also created the Pikeo photo sharing product. For some reason, they decided to break the story of their launch on a French blog with an interview/demo video that is also in French. The product itself, though, appears to only be offered only in English.

I can’t tell much about the product from the demo in the video, although it appears to be a standard module-based Ajax home page that also includes social networking features such as including a friends area in the left sidebar (I’m speculating - see screen shots).

This is an overly-crowded space (and now Google is now promoting their iGoogle product hard as well). But Orange has nearly 90 million mobile customers to try to push to their new online products. I’ll post more on this if I can get into the beta. Sign up to enter on the Bubbletop home page.

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If Web 2.0 is a bubble of hype, then surely Linden Lab’s Second Life is the shiniest bubble of them all. Companies from IBM, CNet, Reuters, American Apparel, Coldwell Banker and many more have established their presence in the metaverse, but a new study of Second Life finds that the expenditure may be wasted.

comScore reports that not only are there more Germans actively using Second Life than Americans, Europeans as a whole outnumber Americans by more that 3 to 1. The figures themselves look even worse than the ratios: only 207,000 people in the United States logged on to Second Life at least once in March. The statistics tracked unique users without considering frequency, so many of those visitors could have easily been one timers, signing up to a free account of the purpose of taking a look, never to return once confronted by sex clubs, casinos and flying male appendages.

It’s not all bad news for Linden Lab, European usage is on the rise with 777,000 active users in March, up 32% across Europe from January, 70% in Germany and 53% in France.

When you compare the billions of page views by millions of users at MySapce, to Second Life’s potential full unique user pool of 207,000 people across the same month, and then you consider that there is only a small chance they may visit your Second Life destination due to clunky in-world search and a smorgasbord of competing choices, the value proposition just doesn’t add up for US based business.

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It’s Friday night in London. You’re out on the town with some friends at the local pub, drinking some beers and the call of nature beckons. Making your way to the restroom you’re confronted with advertising that tells you that 75% of online information goes through one company. On the other side of the Pond, a soccer mom makes her way along the New Jersey Turnpike, passing a sign that reads “The Algorithm is from New Jersey”. Of course whilst the first example begs the question “are they taking the piss?”, both have been exposed to the latest viral advertising campaign from the IAC owned Ask.com.

There’s no official word on how much the Crispin, Porter + Bogusky designed campaign costs, but it would be fair to presume that it’s not small change: Algorithm and “Information Revolution” advertising has been spotted on both sides of the United States and throughout the United Kingdom. But is it working?

The numbers would suggest that it isn’t.

Despite the big spend, the campaign has been too clever by half. Does the average internet user even know what an algorithm is, or more importantly even care? Do pub goers in the United Kingdom care that Google controls over 75% of search in that country?

If the Algorithm constantly finds Jesus, why can’t it find increased market share?

To be a little fairer to Ask though, the comScore traffic figures only cover the period to the end of March, the campaign was rolled out in February and into early March, and things look a little brighter in April according to Alexa:

More recently Ask have announced their intention to expand the campaign to television. Greg Ott, Ask.com’s VP of Marketing writes after making the announcement that the company wants people to think of the Algorithm in the same way people think of “Intel Inside”. And yet it still doesn’t find traction for me. Perhaps I’ve been around too long and still yearn for the days of Jeeves when you visited Askjeeves.com if you had a question you needed answered, instead of Yahoo! Answers.

There’s one thing that I’ve always considered Ask to have going for it, ask.com as a URL, 3 letters, easy to remember…indeed the simplicity and marketing potential of the name was one of the reasons given when Jeeves was dropped, and yet not one advertisement drives home the name. If a tree falls down in the woods and no one is around to hear it- does it make a sound can be equally applied to Ask: if a search engine does a viral marketing campaign and no one understands it, does it make a difference?

Photo credit: Hessam on Flickr.

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