I’ve been looking for web services to use at plasq for certain tasks. Thought I should share as they will be handy for other small business’.

Lining up meetings

• diarised.com


• meetwithapproval.com


• doodle.ch


• timeanddate.com meeting planner – We have often used this the last year. Am yet to try the others.

Sending out mailing lists

• newsberry.com


• campaignmonitor.com – Great! we use this, as do twitter and apple for example.


• letterpop.com


• primomailer.com


• zookoda.com

Surveys

• wufoo.com – Does much more than just surveys though


• surveymonkey.com – Needs some design help, but seems feature-full and reliable

Free or inexpensive stock photos and art

• imageafter.com


• sxc.hu


• iStockphoto.com


• Flickr.com – Creative commons

If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

There was a article The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need on digg a few months back for more.

Update: Some tools here for small biz

It’s interesting… 2 of the biggest things changing the online world are in ways, total opposite.

Advertising and Open Source

Advertising is about as commercial as you can get – Open source is for some, a backlash to commercialism.

But both give the end result – free products and services.

Licensing User-Generated Content – Fred von Lohmann

• red flag knowledge VS waiting for take down notices


• Points out YouTube has no ads on video pages because don’t want to be seen benefitting from illegal content


• flickr become a great stock photo point


• talk to your lawyer now, not later!

Immersive Experiences: Lessons from Game Designers – areae.net – raphkoster.com

Audio of his talk here

• unpredictable/unknown policies makes people behave


• suggests reading ‘influence’ – I’m not sure who by.


• have myths that people can hang on to


• iterative tit for tat


• anything you publicize, you will get copy cats – humans are lemmings.. even subconsciously


• don’t make something perfect.. People like to feel smart to find things wrong and tell you or

Designing for web2.0 – lukew.com – blog

Slides to his talk here

• Eye tracking – etre


• Ways of interaction: locomotion, conversation and manipulation


• Meaningful shouting – make messages stand out where they make sense.


• Might be cheap to get a web app done and hosted, but marketing it to a point where you want to succeed isn’t.


• yahoo in-context step by step guide – nice!


• Make the ‘unpacking experience’ great. Don’t wack them with a form before they can even do anything. Let them become part of the expereince right away. Jump cut was given as a good example.


• Incontext editing = good.


• Bill scott has compiled a lot of interaction methods


• Sites are going away from highly hierarchal to ‘content objects’.


• It’s a ‘search world’ – high % of people get to content via a search engine


• chicago tribune = lots of site overhead – new york times = concentrates on the content


• Renkoo.com – invite system – Strong ‘call to action’ when you recieve an invite


• plaxo.com – Addressbook system


• Sharp focus on what your site does – cut the clutter –


• myspace and craigslist – ‘usefully ugly’


• mike industries manages to make a nice myspace page – but had to jump through a lot of hoops


• table table table = LOL


• “Most user generated content is crappy. As we create better tools, we’ll increase the value of the output of those tools” – Will Wright (sims, spore)


• make it easier to do a good thing than it is a bad thing.


• accept that if you are creating a tool that people are going to use to express themselves, the results may not always be attractive.

plasq.com
The Social Media Revolution: You Oughta Be in Pictures – Jeremiah Owyang, Thomas Hawk, Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble

• Total live media (twitter, IRC, video stream) geek fest.


• Chris and scoble streaming to ustream.tv


• Not many people who are at web2expo went to SXSW - interesting.


• Most people don’t click the ‘next’ button on a search page.


• WTF…. “Social Communities”?


• want a good hotel recommendation, google for “stayed at {hotel name}”


• Search for “{company name} sucks”

web2open wrap up meeting
(web2open was a open barcamp style conference within the web2expo)

• Had a brainstorm session to come up with thoughts on how the web2open went


• Lots of ideas came up


• It was a success!


• Personally wish I’d gotten to more web2open sessions.. Hard to split time between the 2.


• I hope more of what happened gets wiki’ized – who spoke and results of sessions for example.

Misc Links

• architectureforhumanity.org


• openarchitecturenetwork.org


• weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/


• sliderocket.com


• www.picnik.com/


• virtub.com

John Battelle talks to Eric Schmidt

• Google announced a powerpoint like web-app – this completes the line up of the ‘office suite’


• John is funny


• “Mobile Mobile Mobile”, Eric Schmidt

An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts – http://cal.web2expo.com/talk/view/71

• widgetbox.com


• google adwords – the most successful ‘widget’


• widgets must be easy to add to your page


• ‘small pieces, loosly joined’

Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users – Ted Rheingold, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Biz Stone
http://cal.web2expo.com/talk/view/83

Areas your customers/users/fans can input:

• Quality assurance


• design


• Submitting content


• Market research


• Customer support


• talent pool – you can hire from your ‘fans’


• word of mouth


• guardians – eg, speaking out in public places where you might have some trolls or upset people.

Other notes:

• If you have an API, that is the best way to get external help


• Fans help a company/service not to increase your company value, but for the social aspect of recognition for their contributions. “if you help someone, it makes you feel better” – Stuart Butterfield


• This kind of help is free due to these social aspects


• Very risky to listen too much to people who really love a product. You will get really deep requests that take a lot to develop and miss fixing usability issues for new users. These deep features are likely to positively impact less people in the end.


• del.icio.us do about 3 feature/bug releases a week


• a common thing flickr hears is “i had a fucked up childhood, i don’t cope well with change, please change back!” – In relation to rolling out updates/new features.


• Direct interaction with customers with the makers/founder of a product/service worked well for flickr – They would be activly looking and commenting on photos and generally welcoming users.


• with webapps, it’s a constant battle of features VS performance (mostly scaling the servers/database).


• over half of del.icio.us traffic is over RSS now


• for hiring – try having them ‘consult for a month’ to see how it works out for both sides.

Birju Patel from radialpoint.com

• ‘churn rate’ drops when a customer has more services from a company – (Me: ahhh, “churn reduction” – thats what they call making it annoying to get out of a service..)


• The ‘mass market’ want a ‘trusted brand’ to guide them due to worries of security, no phone support, multi billing and complicated experience


• Service providers commonly ask ‘want fries with that’ – figuratively


• Service providers typically choose one partner per product category


• Fulfillment of services is a big issue for adoption. if it’s hard to get something, people get unhappy and don’t buy/download/get. Has to almost be funneled to them. (Me: I’d then think, if it does have to be funneled, do they really want/need it?)


• “Nice experience” preemptive message saying – “you look like you are having problems, contact us”(Me: you would run a fine line between helpful and clippy-hell)

Watched a great demo by Carlos from scrapblog as part of web2open. Slick web app!

Afterwards, I went and had dinner with some lovely aussies from Minti and Tangler, then off to the party plasq co-sponsored @ Varnish.

The other sponsors: Viddler, Ma.gnolia, Citizen Agency, JanRain, WineLibrary.tv, FaberNovel, Facebook and Scrapblog.

Thomas Vanderwal – Tagging that works – infocloudsolutions.com

Thomas has posted the slides on his blog here

• Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of pages for ones own retrieval and usually done in a shared environment.


• The less you have to think about tagging, the better (i’d also add, the less you feel you need to think, the more you will tag)


• Taxonomy (business) VS Folksonomy (‘Customer’) = merge for a product


• ‘refindability’ isn’t being covered by products.


• art of the pivot – hmm, I didn’t understand this..


• easy tagging – ‘yes / no tagging’ or plus and minus – making suggestions of tags and letting a user make a decision just by clicking.

Misc Links

• tagcommons.org


• librarything.com


• rawsugar.com

Jeff Bezos

• Over 5 billion items in S3 now


• 900 something million requests per day

I’m in SF for the web2expo and here for about a month. Wanna meet up? email me

A Skitch beta tester, Kent Bye, has made an awesome video about the social aspect of the web and more specifically, vidcasting/video blogging. Check it out:

Click To Play

Kent said by email:

I found that Skitch can be easily used to spice up screencasts to great effect. It allowed me to quickly take a screenshot, and then seamlessly line up the photo over the web browser so that I could record the animated effects of circling, pointing to and highlighting various aspects on the webpage. I could also zoom into certain parts, and edit out the cruft to create slick animated effects. So you’ve saved me hours of animation and keyframe headaches with Skitch!

It’s so great when you create a tool and it gets used to create terrific work – even uses you didn’t even think of. This was also the case for Comic Life and I imagine, any software.

That cute dog you see on plasq.com, the Comic Life box and now, the Skitch icon is my Dog. He is a Harrier Hound named atari. They look like a bigger yet younger looking Beagle.

He turned 8 on March 1st – w00f.

Uploaded with Skitch!

He is cute.

Looks like we, plasq and the creator of Spotlaser have independently struck onto something similar.

Skitch:

Spotlaser:

This is mostly cosmetic – In the case of Skitch, you can ‘drag a file off’ with drag me. On Spotlaser, it is a button to start the search.

PLUS! they both start with ‘S’ and we are both from Australia. ohhh spooky.

I’ve started a User Interface review group on Flickr for anyone who wants to give feedback or upload screenshots and receive feedback on their work. Check it out and join here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/uireview/

Spread the word!