Ajax Girl

Mattel’s virtual world Barbie Girls hit the 3million user mark in its first 60 days and is growing at the rate of 50,000 new users a day, according to a report from the Scientific American.

To put that in perspective, Second Life took 3 years to get to 1 million registered users. At its current growth rate, Barbie Girls should pass the number of Second Life registered users between November and January based on Second Life’s existing growth rate. Barbie Girls would also pass World of Warcraft around the same time as well*.

Barbie Girls allows users to customize Barbie dolls, dress them up, create virtual homes, adopt pets and chat with other users. The service is free to play with a revenue model focused on the purchase of virtual goods.

Saying this is a crowded space is probably now an understatement. Competitors include Cyworld, Zwinktopia, Stardoll, Haboo Hotel, Web Kinz, Club Penguin, Gaia Online, Neopets and others.

It would be easy to dismiss an offering like Barbie Girls (feminists are probably going to roll their eyes at the whole concept) and yet 3 million registered users in 60 days does say one very, very clear thing: virtual worlds are going mainstream and the user base is dramatically shifting from being predominantly male to majority female. That shift isn’t quite as important now as it will be in the next 5-10 years as those playing Barbie Girls grow into adults; simply the next generation of online gaming and virtual world users will not be dominated by men.

*WOW figures of 8.5million users are paying, regular users where as the Barbie Girls figure would be registered users as opposed to regular players. Barbie may have a much lower regular player figure as Second Life does.

(in part via World in Motion)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/134066091/

For whatever ridiculous reason, knitting is popular in America, and becoming more so. So of course there needs to be a social network around the activity, and Ravelry is going to fill that need.

The site is still in private beta and has a long list of knitter-types desperate to get in - 17,000 people have requested invites and they’ve let about 1/3 of them in so far. If you want to get a feel for the features and look/feel of the site, see the screen shots they posted here.

Needless to say, the idea is to build out a profile and then add friends, create a blog, add pictures and participate in the forums.

But users will also be encouraged to put up information about projects they are working on, and other users can participate by commenting, recommending, etc.

If you’re a knitter, join the waiting list immediately. Everyone else, nothing to see here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/134028704/

Xinu aggregates content on anything and everything to do with your website. Type a URL in and several dozen XHR requests later, the page is populated with a screenshot, pagerank, Alexa rank, Digg tally, you name it. Seems to have been written by this Spanish-language blogger. (via TechCrunch).

One possible improvement would be adopting Unique URLs - I was unable to link directly to the Ajaxian stats shown above.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/133866677/xinu-dashboard-for-webmasters

Streamy, which we wrote about last week, is sending out early beta invitations and I had a chance to be one of the first people to poke around on the site. The video we included in that post still shows a very current user interface, and the feel of the product is very close to what is shown there. Or click on the image to the right for a very large screen shot of the home page.

Streamy takes features from many new web startups, but it is not a competitor to Digg. No voting to drive stories to the top, for example. It’s a personalized news service and social network. Digg isn’t personalized. It’s news for the masses based on popular opinion.

At its core, this is a social network, where adding friends is the first order of business. Once you have friends, you can share news items with them, and get recommendations from them via email or a built in, Meebo-like instant messaging service.

You also need to build out your profile. Do this by adding a picture and personal information, joining groups, adding feed subscriptions, etc. A screen shot of co-founder Donald Mosites’ profile is here.

Streamy, The News Recommender

But Streamy is all about the news, and the social network is there to spread the good stuff. Like many who’ve tried and failed (see the discussion under “Mgnet” on this post), Streamy is offering a personalized news service. News items shown to you on the home page are based on it’s idea of what you will like. It takes into account the types of news feeds you subscribe to, what you are commenting on, and what your friends are reading.

Above the recommendations, though, are the top stories. This is the only place where Streamy will compete with Digg, in pushing popular stuff to the masses. The stories are image-driven (see top of first screen shot above). AOL also went this way with their new Mgnet product after a lot of user testing - people like pictures, apparently.

Each news item can be commented (very similar to what Newsvine is doing), emailed, or dragged into an IM conversation. Users can also set up topic-based filters to drill down to stuff they really want to see.

Is It Viral?

I’m sticking to my initial opinion of Streamy (”It is well designed, has lots of intelligent features, and is almost sure to drop into obscurity immediately after launch.”). It’s pretty and extremely well thought-out, but it’s not clear that it does anything new enough to grab people’s attention.

There is, however, one feature that’s pure brilliance…the built in instant messaging feature already integrates with AIM, so you can see your AIM buddies on Streamy and send them stuff from the site. In the next few days they say they’ll be adding support for Live Messenger, Yahoo and GTalk as well, which gives it most of the functionality of Meebo. Users will have the ability to quickly spread news items to their friends right on the site, and this is a very viral feature.

I do have one complaint - the site makes a lot of noises, similar to I’mInLikeWithYou, and there is no obvious way to turn it off without muting the speakers. Not good for use at work.

Streamy is based in Hermosa Beach, CA (Los Angeles). They raised $100,000 in May 2007 from Driftwood Investments.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/133864377/

The following video “How To Raise Money From VC’s” comes from 5min.com, an instructional video site we covered in May, and is currently getting a lot of attention in Israel. The video (in Hebrew with English subtitles) provides some fun advice for anyone looking at raising money from VC’s. Content aside I was just impressed at not only the quality of the video playback, but the built in support for switching subtitles on and off as well. If quality is the defining point of differentiation amongst instructional video sites, 5min has positioned itself very well. Enjoy.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/133842254/