There’s a ton of podcasting news coming out. I’ll profile a couple of other companies tomorrow but I thought it was worth mentioning that BackBeat Media launched a podcast network today with three initial participants – Coverville, Evil Genius Chronicles and The Mac Observer’s Mac Geek Gab.

My understanding is that Backbeat will provide advertising sponsorships and some operational support to participating podcasters. Press release is here.

Gtalkr, a flash-based website to access Google’s Gtalk, launched yesterday. It allows you to access your Gtalk instant messaging account without a client, from any computer.

Comparisons will inevitably be drawn to Meebo, a similar service, although built on Ajax, that allows users to access a variety of instant messaging services (including gtalk). I wrote about Meebo back in September, and the passionate user comments to that post illustrate the popularity of these services.

Gtalkr is taking a different approach by focusing just on Gtalk, and adding in additional features to, I assume, get users to use it more as a home page or dashboard. Gmail emails are pulled in as well as Yahoo maps (Google maps doesn’t have a flash API, Yahoo does). Gtalkr also plans on pulling in addtiional services, such as del.icio.us and flickr. Independent Flash developers can create these extensions as well.

It’s a useful tool, and like most flash applications I see, very well designed. It does not support gtalk voice (just text IM), and a few bugs are being worked out. See Brian Benzinger and Om Malik for more.

Chris Pirillo’s Gaba.be continues to roll out new features weekly. They’ve also made a change to the URL structure for tag queries to become better indexed by search engines.

This tag based search engine is still somewhat under the radar for many people, but it is quickly becoming one of my most-used sites for research. It’s also the best place I’ve found to do cross-application photo searches.

My original profile of Gada.be is here.

Yahoo gathered a small group of bloggers, press and others at Sauce in San Francisco tonight to announce the launch of two new RSS products. They have integrated an RSS reader directly into Yahoo Mail Beta, and are expanding Alerts to include RSS feeds.

These are significant new products, aimed squarely at new and mainstream RSS users. The service is not live as of the time I am posting this. I’ve added a screen shot picture from the live demo.

Mail

Yahoo has deeply integrated RSS into the Yahoo Mail beta experience. Directly below the email folders are “RSS folders”. Clicking on the top folder show all posts in a “river of news” format, meaning all posts for all subscribed feeds are listed in the order they have appeared in feeds.

Each feed also has its own folder, allowing the user to read feeds individually (more like bloglines).

A post from any feed is treated exactly like an email – any post can be forwarded as an email or dragged into a folder and saved. All of the great AJAX functionality already working in Yahoo’s Mail beta works with the new RSS functionality as well.

Adding feeds is straightforward – include the feed URL or choose from a number of popular feeds.

Alerts

Yahoo users can now use Yahoo Alerts to be notified whenever RSS feeds update. Alerts, which include a summary of the updated content, can be configured to be sent via sms, email and/or messenger. This is a great way to monitor small groups of important feeds.

Yahoo clearly took the lead for best email application this evening. The ability to “pop in” other email accounts, the ajax functionality and, now, the integrated RSS reader are absolutely stunning features.

John Furrier was at the event tonight as well, and as usual has an exclusive podcast.

UPDATE: RSS in Yahoo Mail is now fully live. As Jeff Clavier says, My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail syncronize feeds – a long list in email doesn’t work so well in My Yahoo. I spoke to Scott Gatz at Yahoo about this earlier this evening and he says they’ll find a fix for it. There are a few other features which still need to be added, but Yahoo Mail is just an incredibly awesome product.

Songbird replaced its landing page with a blog and is giving more information on the product (I had next to no details for my original Songbird post earlier this month). The site now has additional screenshots and a few posts that begin to talk about the product.

I am alpha testing Songbird now and am very impressed, even though they say it is only 30% done (as of November 18). They have asked me not to blog about non public information yet, and I won’t. One thing to clear up is that Songbird is not an online application – it is (among other things) a next generation media player. And it is absolutely turning my head around in the way I think about certain things.

They’ll be pushing a preview release in December.

Microsoft will be beta launching a new web 2.0 service under the Live.com brand in the next few weeks. The final name is TDB, but the current project name is “Fremont” and the URL fremont.live.com will redirect once its fully live. I had a chance to see a demo of the product – it’s very cool and will definitely shake things up.

Zipingo joins the ranks of local business review and ranking services such as Yelp, Judy’s Book (which just raised $8 million from Mobius Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Ackerley Partners) and idealab’s Insider Pages.

Like the other sites, Zipingo aims to pair yellow page-like contact information for local businesses with user reviews. It was created (and owned) by Intuit.

Since all of these sites are well done, have similar feature sets and have financial backing, it will be very hard for any of them to gain enough critical mass to dominate the market. This is certainly an attactive space (combining local advertising with the potential for premium listings).

However, it’s my belief that a single, open API (in and out) yellow page service, with consumer ratings, could dominate this market very quickly. As great as these services are, they rely on centralized content and getting users to come to them to both write reviews and find a business. An open service could have an easy way for businesses to insert their listings (and pay for enhancement), and anyone could take the data via an API (enhancing the network effect many fold). I wrote about this very briefly last week in a post about companies that I’d like to profile but don’t exist yet (no. 7 on the list).

Back to Zipingo and the other related services, if there are any dedicated users who’s seen a unique feature or have noticed heavy user participation, please ping me.

23 is a lot like flickr. Almost a clone, even down to the UI and feature comparisons.

The service is free, for up to 15 MB of uploading a month. 29 EUR gets you an unlimited bandwidth account.

The things I like best about Flickr right now are the “sets” (23 calls them albums) and the uploader tool which takes the pain out of uploading many pictures at once. 23 needs a similar tool.

As to whether another photo sharing site can take reasonable market share now that Flickr is so entrenched – Sure. Maybe. This is still a massive growth market, and since 23 is located in Europe they will have an easier time getting users there, where Flickr does not have the market penetration.

Greg Yardley has more on 23.

I’m intruiged by Seth Goldstein’s Root.net, the first commercial application of the Attention Trust platform (see my Attention Trust posts here and here).

Seth wrote a lengthy and descriptive post outlining the service for all participants on Transparent Bundles. The core service leverages the Attention Trust Recorder, which can be installed by an internet user (currently firefox only). Root.net calls users “consumers”.

The recorder tracks everything you do with your browser (it can be turned off at will, and root.net allows deletion of data you’ve recorded that you want to remove).

As a consumer you get two primary benefits – the ability to see your own data (see screen shot), and the ability to trade your data to other parties for some benefit – like more targeted advertising that you will actually find useful. This is something John Battelle writes about extensively in his book, by the way.

Publishers can also use the root.net system to generate leads, which can be sold to advertisers. Root.net also has anticipated arbitrage players, which they call “investors”, who will purchase leads from publishers and sell them to advertisers. The goal, of course, is to create a more liquid market.

I understand at least part of how it is intended to work. An internet user clicks on an ad and fills out a form, becoming a lead that is owned by the publisher. These leads can be sold to advertisers and investors in a liquid market

This is a big idea. It will take a lot of pushing to get it off the ground, but if it works it will redefine online advertising and lead generation.

Joyce Park’s Renkoo looks interesting.

The Renkoo blog give a number of interesting feature hints.

It looks to be an event/calendaring application, but it seems to include chat and other features as well.

It is the goal of Renkoo to help people plan and remember and share peak experiences.

and

The Renkoo’s application interface intentionally blurs the lines between “webby”, desktop, and instant messaging.

Anyone out there beta testing Renkoo and care to comment?

CollectiveX, a new venture backed by serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Clarence Wooten, has put up a landing page and is taking requests for people interested in taking part in their early 2006 beta.

I’ve known Clarence for years (I used to be his attorney), and I’ve heard his ideas for CollectiveX. It’s going to be an awesome web application for communicating with and managing your relationships with groups of people that you are affiliated with.

Domains.Live.com is a free new email service offered by Microsoft. It’s a simple but very useful tool. And, like Office Live, it is disruptive to the existing domain name registrar market (are they even paying attention?).

So the basic service is this: Microsoft will host email and instant messaging for you in a domain you own.

• Create up to 20 e-mail accounts within your domain
• Get a 250 MB inbox for each account
• Check your e-mail from any Web-enabled PC
• Junk e-mail filter protection using Microsoft SmartScreen technology
• Virus scanning and cleaning of e-mail
• Seamless access with MSN Messenger, MSN Spaces, etc.

More details on the Custom Domains blog.

Here are my thoughts:

First of all, this is great. Until now, generally only domain name registrars offered this kind of service, and it was both costly and had a very web 1.0 interface.

Second, when I look at services like this and Office Live, it seems to me that the industry that needs to be most concerned are the domain name registrars. Many of the services Microsoft is offereing for free are the types of things that reigstrars charge for today.

Microsoft is starting to create really impressive productity tools for the small business. And they aren’t charging for these tools. Competitors need to watch out.

Thanks Robert and Brian for the tip.

Silicon Beat had an interesting article about Palo Alto based Dipsie dCloak yesterday (press release), a product designed to help websites make their content more indexable by search engines.

Much, if not most, of the web is considered “dark” because the data is not readily available via a permanent URI. Cookies, forms, javascript and flash can affect what content (or if any content) is shown on a page. Today, this information is not indexable by search engines.

dCloak is a product that websites can use to make this content visable to the engines.

There are, however, some concerns that the technology could be used by spammers to further promote their content.

Glenbrook Networks is another company trying to tackle the Deep Web problem. However, they’re attacking this from the search engine side, which wouldn’t require website changes like dCloak.

Glenbrook has developed a suite of proprietary unstructured information retrieval and extraction technology that trawls the Deep Web (see Jeff Clavier’s post here) . The company has built a showcase around job search in the Bay Area (they were actually the first ones to deliver a job/google maps mashup), and is reportedly building an application in the local search space.

The interesting thing about the Deep Web problem is that both sides, search engines and websites, want to make the content indexable. It will be interesting to see how this space evolves.

NumSum isn’t new, but I hadn’t really played with it until today (it’s actually nice that things are slowing down for Thanksgiving, giving me time to check out stuff I’ve missed).

It’s well thought through Ajax spreadsheet application, with very basic functions. They’ve added tagging, and you can generate a permanent URL for any spreadsheet, even without creating an account (non-registered spreadsheets will only be up for seven days, however).

There’s also a great tool for importing the spreadsheet into a blog. See this post by Adam Marsh for an example.

It’s more of an experiment than a truly useful application. I do not believe you can make spreadsheets private, for example. However, seeing stuff like this and writely make it extremely clear that a full office suite on the web is not only achievable, but should be here already.

Richard MacManus, Fred Oliveira and I formed the Web 2.0 WorkGroup about a month and a half ago. We’ve now grown to twenty blogs:

Our goal is to provide a list of high quality blogs that are writing about recent trends on the web. We continue to add blogs regularly and are working on a number of ways to make their content more accessible. Today, we’ve broken the blogs down into rough categories, provide RSS feeds for each blog and an aggregated OPML feed for those of you who’d like to subscribe to all of them. We will be adding more functionality soon.

Please continue to recommend good blogs to us. We’re always looking for a way to expand the conversation.

Other group members posting today: Read/Write Web, Dave Winer, Steven Cohen, Programmable Web, Susan Mernit, Bokardo, Jeff Clavier, Brian Benzinger.

Feedster has updated their Top 500 List of Blogs. Scott Johnson, Feedster’s CTO, writes about it here.

The first list was published in August. The new list incorporates recent links and has changed substantially from the previous version. In particular, they’ve added user tagging and a tag cloud to assist in search/find. The tagging interface is in Ajax (with captcha to reduce spam).

I spoke with Scott Johnson last night about the new list. They’ve taken big steps to remove spam blogs and links, and will soon be tying authority to links to further refine the list.

The Feedster list is very focused on recent links in, looking back only two years and giving additional weight to more recent links.

The tagging feature is an interesting way to find blogs in the list. They’ve added a tag cloud on the right sidebar for easy navigation to specific types of blogs. For instance, click on “celebrity” and get that type of blog. Great way to drill down.

And finally, Feedster will be adding “Import into Excel for Analysis” and an OPML export of the feeds.

Del.icio.us just put up a completely new site. Recent bookmarks on the left, popular bookmarks on the right.

It’s about time. Nice one, Joshua.

Logged In:

Logged Out:

Thanks for the tip Brian.

There are companies I review every day that I don’t write about. Reasons vary – it’s been done already and the product isn’t even as good as what’s been done, its a mostly or totally one-way application, or it isn’t consumer focused (or have implications for consumer focused applications). Even with this filtering, I get flame comments on some of the stuff I do choose to write about as “not worthy”.

But there are a number of companies and/or products that I would like to write about but don’t exist. I’ve been keeping a list over the last few months and I am posting it now.

Some of these are big ideas, some small. Some could potentially receive venture backing, most wouldn’t. But I believe that a viable business could be built by an entrepreneur around any of these, and I will be happy to profile them if and when someone builds them. In a way, this is number 11 in my previously post “Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged“, but its also much more than that.

And let me know if and where these should fall in Nivi’s matrix.

1. Better and Cheaper Online File Storage

Photos, movies, music and important files take up a ton of hard drive space. I recently purchased a new desktop computer with a 250 GB hard drive, and the hard drive is full from recorded television shows that I haven’t watched yet. Yeah, I can buy a network drive for my house, but they are expensive and if the house burns down I’ve still lost everything.

It’s amazing to me that all of us aren’t backing up our important files online regularly. As far as I’m concerned, the only reason is because no product has emerged to fill this tremendous demand, with the right features and at the right price.

We need a good product. Something as easy to use as the Flickr uploader on the client side, and easy web access. These tools need to go a generation or two beyond what xdrive is offering.

Features I’d like to see: drag and drop file adding and removing, an rss feed for my files, tagging of every file for easy search later, easy sharing, and the ability to publish files to the web with permanent URLs. And off location backups in case your building burns down.

Pricing needs to be dramatically lower too. Find a way to make this cheap. Include ads or whatever, but this needs to be very low cost (remember that Google offers over 2 gb of mail storage for free). Xdrive is currently $10/month for 5 gigs. Even Godaddy, at $10/year for 1 gb, is way too costly.

I have no idea what the cost economics for a business like this are, but plan for scale and give some amount, at least a gig or two, permanently free. No 15 day free trials – we see right through that. Give me a lot for free and let me scale up to, say 500 GB for $20 per year.

2. Blog/website Email Lists

People can visit my site, and get the content via RSS, but I know of no quality service to allow people to subscribe to my site via email.

I hate to rip on Feedblitz, which is really the only choice right now, but it sucks. It’s orange. Really ORANGE. I want the look and feel to be TechCrunch, not theirs. I want people to have the option of getting an email every post, every day, or every week.

I also want to know that I and I alone control these email addresses so that they will not under any circumstances be misused. If I change services, I want to have an easy export feature to take these with me (OPML would be nice).

I also want access to real time stats. The number of emails, type of subscription, how often they are opened and what things are being clicked on.

And users need a very easy way to stop the emails.

I’m willing to pay for this. Probably as much as $20 per month. A free version should be offered too that’s add supported and maybe doesn’t have the analytics.

I’m frankly amazed that Feedburner chose to partner with Feedblitz to do this instead of building it themselves. It wouldn’t be that hard to build. And the Feedblitz interface disaster wouldn’t be detracting from the Feedburner brand.

3. Portable Reputations

eBay’s Feedback system is arguably their biggest asset. Even with its flaws, it is one the biggest drivers of trust between two people buying and selling who’ve never met and never will. But it’s a closed system, usable only within eBay and only for eBay transactions. We need an internet-wide identity and feedback system that any reputable application can tap into, both pulling and pushing data.

A couple of companies have taken tentative steps in this direction, but they have until now kept the data in their own silo, demanding people come to their site to provide feedback. I reviewed iKarma, one of these, in October and practically begged them to change their business model. So far they haven’t. Opinity is much the same, although they offer partners the opportunity to tap into the data. These centralized data plays have no chance on today’s internet. Why even bother.

Here’s what we need – a referee and a scorekeeper. Open (I didn’t say free, mind you) APIs in and out, not just links to feedback scores. Figure out the rules (keep it flexible) and let other applications feed the database. Somebody please build this. Or eBay, open up your Feedback API.

I’m not alone in pleading for this. See what Rob Hof and others have to say as well.

4. Tailored Local Offers (via RSS)

Build a website. Let users give as much or as little demographic and personal information as they wish. Partner with a big sales force that already has access to local businesses (citisearch, yellow pages, whoever). Offer me (via email, website and RSS) special offers from local merchants. $5 off a pizza. Free first time dry cleaning. A cup of coffee. Whatever. I’ll eat it up (and so will everyone else).

5. Facebook, in other countries

Somebody’s gonna do it. Why not you?

6. Free Music

Music will someday be legally free. There is just no other way. Artists, label and promoters will need to make money in other ways.

Limited edition cds and dvds. Concerts. Tshirts. Whatever. Face reality and do it sooner rather than later.

7. Open Source Yellow Pages

YellowWikis is sort of on the right path, but drop the wiki aspect (as I’ve said before, wiki’s are hammers, but not everything is a nail), add tagging and make it open source. Or at least open APIs in and out. Make money from local ads and premium listings.

8. Podcast Transcriptions

Podcasters need transciptions. Many people don’t have the time or inclination to listen to every podcast they want to. Search engines can’t index the content. Transctiptions fix both problems.

Hire transcribers in a low cost country. Offer podcasters reasonably priced transcriptions (bonus: in multiple languages). I’m thinking $10 per half hour. Partner with the podcast directories, search engines and tool providers. Mint money.

9. Decentralized Review Aggregation

There are millions of passionate reviews of every product and thing you can think of sitting out there in the blogosphere. Don’t try to get people to re-write all this stuff. Leverage tagging, RSS and, eventually, microformats to aggregate it and make it searchable/findable. Wonderfully, chaotically decentralized. Ad supported.

10. Build Something Cool with SSE

Figure out how to leverage this before everyone else does and build something beautiful and amazing.

UPDATE: Richard MacManus adds a few ideas of his own.

UPDATE: Adam Marsh adds my startups into Nivi’s/Ethan’s matrix, using numsum. Wow, numsum is pretty cool.

Matthew Mullenweg announced today that Wordpress.com, the hosted (and free) (and extensible) version of Wordpress is now available without an invite. I’ve created a test blog, and other than the fact that you cannot set additional ping servers (an advanced feature that only matters to some people), its an awesome product. If you are looking for a free, hosted blog, check it out.

Wow, am I excited this morning to see Microsoft announce Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE), which turns RSS bidirectional and which is released under the Creative Commons License. I wrote more about this at CrunchNotes, but I want to mention it here because this is an incredibly important technology that will allow entirely new classes of companies to be built. Dave Winer’s excited too.