It’s the last business day of the year, which obviously leads me to think about last minute tax writeoffs. One of the best tax writeoffs, of course, is a charitable contribution. Then I remind myself that donating to charity isn’t just about the tax writeoff – it has the ancilliary benefit of helping others,too.

And that’s why I like Toronto-based Favorville, too. It’s a web 2.0 company that has the ancillary benefit of helping others.

The basic system is: register and post if you need a favor or have a favor to give. Things I see on the site now include a post for a free mattress, and a request for help writing a wikipedia article. After favors are completed, members are asked to make a rating of the other person. And if you help someone or are helped, the other person is automatically added to your network.

Favorville is young and has very little traffic. Usually I’d wait for things to develop a little more before posting on something like this, but given the feel-good angle to the company, I’m going to point to them now. Maybe we can do them a favor, and kickstart the network.

There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end.

What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day.

I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by?

So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web:

Bloglines

I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off.

Del.icio.us

I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon.

FeedBurner

I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page.

Flickr

I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect.

Measuremap

The Measure Map blog analytics tool created by Adaptive Path gives me incredible insight into who is looking at what on TechCrunch. They need to deal with the speed issue for larger blogs though (it takes minutes sometimes to pull up stats, or just breaks).

Memeorandum

Memeorandum is how I keep up on the blogosphere when I don’t have time to read all of my feeds. It has also changed what I blog about, and how. Memeorandum is a cultural phenomenon.

Netvibes

Yeah, there are a lot of Ajax desktops out there, but Netvibes seems to stay ahead of the pack on functionality. The flickr stuff is great. Plus, how can I not love a service that includes TechCrunch as a default feed?

Omnidrive

I’ve been waiting for something like this forever. I forsee a day when a service like Omnidrive comes packaged with a new PC, or is offered alongside web email solutions. I’ve only had it for a few days, but I’m smitten. And fair disclosure: there are some awesome competitors out there, too, that I am just starting to look at.

Pandora

I listen to Pandora whenever I write – sometimes for hours a day. I’ve discovered countless new artists from it.

Skype

What can I say? Along with Vonage, Skype keeps my phone bills down to next to nothing, and it is an integral part of my everyday business and personal life. I would trade application sharing for the new video feature in a heartbeat, however.

Technorati

I use it more than Google. No one has launched anything better, yet. And they’ve made great progress in search speed over the latter half of the year.

Wordpress

I love Wordpress. Actually, let me rephrase that statement: I love Wordpress 1.5. Version 2.0 makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window. But it is an amazing piece of software, and all of my blogs run on it.

Yahoo Maps

I use Yahoo Maps because it allows multi-point driving instructions, something none of the others offer yet. This was incredibly useful when I had to attend three or four holiday parties on the same evening.

Dave Winer announced today that he’s built a new RSS aggregator, built on his OPML editor platform. He’s released it to the OPML community for early testing.

Some details are here. The aggregator will have advanced podcasting/videocasting support and will also include a “reading lists” feature. The idea around reading lists is to allow people to subscribe to other people’s list of recommended feeds (in OPML format), and have those lists update as feeds are added or removed. Seems simple, but no one does it now.

The aggregator will be in the “river of news” format, as opposed to folder based like Bloglines. The reason? Dave likes it that way. I’ve argued with him over this issue but he assures me that he’s right. Looks like Robert Scoble may agree. This is a matter of personal choice, of course.

I’m looking forward to testing this out and doing a full review.

Magnatune, founded by John Buckman in 2003, is a music label with an associated website. Today was the first time I heard about Magnatune (thanks to Ajay Juneja), but I agree entirely with their business philosophy. I really think this is the music business model of the future.

There are two key business model issues to note that make Magnatune different.

The first is that Magnatude allows buyers to download music completely free of DRM and in the format (WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC and AAC) and quality of their choice (very similar to grey market allofmp3.com, but in this case with the artist’s express permission). As I’ve written before, I think this is the only way a label or artist can charge for music – no DRM and offering a choice of formats and quality.

Albums sell for $5 and up (the buyer decides if he or she wants to pay more). Sales include downloadable cd art and inserts. CDs may also be purchased for delivery.

The second business model difference is how Magnatune treats its artists. They share a flat 50% of gross proceeds (before any costs) from music sales with artists. They also share 50% of merchandise sales profits, although they have not started selling merchandise yet.

Magnatune doesn’t take on any artist that applies – only about 2.5% of those that apply are accepted according to an article by Stereophile.

Magnatune also gives the buyer the legal right to share the music with three other people, even allowing those people to download the music directly from Magnatune (a great viral marketing feature, by the way). Of course, without DRM, the music can be shared anyway, but giving people the right to do this is a nice touch.

And if you lose your music, you can re-download it from Magnatune at no additional cost (Dave Winer will love this).

Yes, there are no high profile artists currently signed. But if Magnatune can get even a single big artist to move to them, they’ll be on the map permanently, and the artist will make a lot more money.

I’ve been testing Omnidrive’s very early beta product over the last few days. Omnidrive will be launching in January, 2006.

I’ve spent hours with it (and previously posted a brief mention) – significantly more than I spend with most products. The reason? This is a product that I and millions of others really need – a pure and functional online storage product with key web 2.0 features. Omnidrive is based in Australia, but is as good or better than anything else I’ve seen out of silicon valley recently. It has been in development for 12 months.

Access & Features

Users have two ways to upload, view and interact with files.

The first is a web interface that allows for fairly easy file uploading. Users have three main folder options to start – private, shared and public. By placing a file in the shared folder, other people you’ve allowed in can see and download the file. If placed in the public folder, everyone can access the file.

Omnidrive is also releasing a toolbar to assist with the web interface.

The second way to access files is via a download (they support PC and Mac now, pocket PC later) that creates a virtual Omnidrive drive. This is THE way to upload or download big batches of files at once. Drag in a multi-gigabyte folder and Omnidrive will work away at it in the background until its fully uploaded or downloaded.

The other features, some of which are still being built, include:

• built in media player to access media files
• set upload and download speeds to work in the background
• Omnidrive will pick up where it left off after rebooting computer
• RSS for folders
• tagging of files
• permanent URL for each file
• syncing of folders on a hard drive to the Omnidrive
• each Shared folder has separate access controls

Pricing

Pricing is a tough area for Omnidrive. They face storage and, more importantly, bandwidth costs that can be significant on a per user basis. In a post I wrote back in November (when I first heard of Omnidrive), I wrote that these services needed to give some storage for free, and “lots” for cheap. Founder Nik Cubrilovic responded in a post that my pricing needs were crazy, but agreed that there needs to be a compelling price point to get mass user adoption.

Their current pricing reflects this thinking. They will give a gig or two of storage for free, and sell 10 gb bundles above that for “not more than” $70 per year. That’s pricy, but way below the industry standard right now.

And of course there will have to be bandwidth throttles. Since files can be public, outgoing bandwidth can be a massive cost for them.

Pricing

I’m saying this flat-out. Omnidrive is in a position to dominate a market with tremendous pent up demand. I’ve looked at a number of competing services and no one is doing anything close to what they are in functionality and usability.

This service, or a white label version of it, should be built in to every new computer and operating system, and many web applications. With an appropriate API in and out, and rock-bottom pricing, Omnidrive can own a very large market niche.

The cost problem is not trivial, and for a self funded startup taking an up front cost with the promise of long-term customer loyalty is difficult to say the least. But the opportunity is there. This company needs to get funded and start acquiring users, immediately.

We’ve switched TechCrunch over to Wordpress 2.0. Not everyone is interested in the feature set of the Wordpress blogging platform, so I’ll keep this brief.

To see a good overview of the new features, see Asymptomatic.

A big change is the ability to create categories on the fly, from the post page, with Ajax. This was previously a multi step process. Since Technorati and other blog search engines view categories as synonyms to tags, this is a quick way for most users to quickly and easily tag their posts without adding additional code.

Another big improvement is the enhanced “view post preview” function. This shows the post exactly as it will look on the blog, with all formatting and CSS that will be applied. This is a welcome feature.

They’ve also added a wysiwyg rich text editor. I disabled this immediately, although many users will like it.

Now for the bad. The new image uploader is a train wreck. Yes, they’ve moved it to the post page which removes a click. However, what took a couple of steps before now takes five or six because I format images in a very particular way which the uploader doesn’t support. It also has default settings, like thumbnails, that require extra clicks to get This needs to be fixed or I will literally go crazy. At the very least, just showing me the URL string for the uploaded image will get me back some of the functionality lost.

The image URL folder is now reset every month as well, and so I can’t easily find old images, either. They didn’t think through this very well, or at all.

Transition took a few days (yes, days) before comments and images were showing properly (thank you, Bryan, for doing this) The support site provides some help, but the depth of questions and obvious user frustration shows that many, including me, should have tested it out before transitioning our entire blog there.

Getting on to the home page of Digg (profile) sends a site a lot of traffic, and some folks will do just about anything for traffic. I know a lot of people who claim to have multiple Digg accounts to give their posts a lift, but it appears that the practice has become more…professional recently. Richard MacManus has done some research on the issue and posts on his findings. Bottom line – at least for now, gaming Digg is exceptionally easy.

Hugh McGuire’s goal is to make all public domain (expired copyright) books available free online in audio format. He’s created LibriVox to reach that goal, and it is a terrific open source, public domain project.

Volunteers suggest public domain books and record chapters. Finished books are cataloged and podcasted

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

I think this is a terrific project, and the content will be very welcome on my long drive back to the bay area this week from Seattle. I also plan to volunteer and read chapters (I promise not to sneak in plugs for TechCrunch either).

Check out examples such as Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol.

Jon Gordon has an interview with the founder. Thanks for the tip Dave.

Diigo, which stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”, is a social bookmarking site that allows users to highlight multiple content areas, including pictures, tag the page, and bookmark it. Users can also add sticky notes to a highlighted text area. It has other good features as well – see the flash demo for a good overview.

Many of the bookmarking sites are starting to blur together for me. I like Diigo and the founders are politely efficient in getting the word out. The company has also executed well and released a polished product. But at the end of the day I’m not sure how many social bookmarking sites can make the cut.

I will say this, though. I like the idea of public and private “sticky” notes on a website (Activeweave promises this, and I saw a really great demo two months ago, but it hasn’t launched yet). And I also like the ability to highlight multiple areas of a website in my bookmarks (Kaboodle does a great job of this).

But, as you can see, for just about every feature, there are multiple companies already attacking the space with vigor. Good luck to all. It’s going to be a long, hard fight. With perhaps as much as a $30 million payout at the end of the day.

I generally don’t write about Firefox plugins, but Hyperwords is one that’s gotten my attention. Like Om says, it’s a must-have product to aid the browsing experience. And I see a business model here, too.

Hyperwords gives users a number of choices whenever a piece of text is selected. The options simply pop up – right click functionality remains unchanged.

Options include searching various engines, looking up text in wikipedia and dictionary.com, emailing text, searching on Google Maps, translation, and searching on Amazon and other commerce sites. The search and commerce traffic will generate revenue (my guess is a dollar or so per year per active user). The translation service is incredibly useful.

If you’d like to beta test Hyperwords, email beta@gethyperwords.com.

I’ve been talking to Nik Cubrilovic, the founder of Sydney, Australia based Omnidrive, since I posted about the need for a good online storage service in November (see no. 1 in that post).

I’ve had the chance to test it over the last few days. It’s pre-beta but will be launching soon. They’ve solved a lot of the problems associated with storage away from the network, and has both an online and a desktop interface.

Omnidrive will have a free version with a gig or so of storage, and paid plans after that. The feature set is awesome – it has everything you could ask for, including dealing with massive file uploads in the background. Full review coming soon – sign up for the beta announcement on the site.

In news that certainly is not making the existing RSS Aggregator companies happy, Microsoft Outlook program manager Michael Affronti has soft announced that RSS will be integrated with Outlook 12.

This will not only hurt the NewsGators and Attensas of the RSS space (those that have Outlook plugins to display RSS feeds). It will also impact Bloglines and others as users inevitably move their reading habits to the email client. The ability to drag stories right into subject folders, that may or may not contain emails as well, is just too useful to ignore (and that’s why I liked Yahoo’s integration of RSS with email so much a few weeks ago).

Robert Scoble also wrote about this, and brings up a very important point. Users want RSS in many different ways (mobile, web when they are away from their home computer, etc.). Syncronization is extremely important and this may be the niche that allows existing players to survive.

And I also agree with Robert when he says that RSS integration with Outlook will get millions more people using RSS.

I’m a little late writing about this, but TalkDigger 2.0, which launched a week and a half ago, has really evolved since the original version that I wrote about back in July.

TalkDigger queries major blog (and other) search engines on a given URL and returns relevant results. Since all of the search engines vary in their results, this is the quickest way to see everything. Enhancements include more search results, more search engines, pagerank for each result, and more. I found an interesting RSS feature in the tools section, for example. And, the results UI is much more user friendly and looks like normal search results.

Frédérick Giasson, the creator of TalkDigger, give a full feature overview on his blog.

I first heard about Browsr in a comment to one of my posts. In some ways it’s a standard bookmarking site, but at this point lacks most of the advanced features of Del.icio.us, Shadows, Wink, etc.

But Browsr does have one feature that is interesting. Bookmarks are categorized, and others can rate the usefullness of the bookmark. Browsr then creates a home page directory of the most popular categories and the highest ranked bookmarks within each category. The result is a very nice directory.

I like products that take aggregated user data and do something interesting with it. In an indirect way, this reminds me of memeorandum, digg and other useful services that do the same. User date + algorithms (even simple stuff like this) can be incredibly useful.

The PostSecret book that I ordered back in October arrived from Amazon.

I spent some time going through it last night and I really like it. PostSecret is one of the more interesting Web 2.0 companies (if you can call it a company). It certainly creates conversation, evokes emotion, and merges the online and offline worlds beautifully.

If you’d like to buy the book, it is available at Amazon.

And speaking of books, check out Om’s free “best of” ebook. Wow, great design by Arno Ghelfi.

The Wink user-enhanced search engine, in private beta for the last few months, launches Thursday morning to the world.

Wink has evolved substantially since my October 12, 2005 review.

Wink is, at its core, a combination of traditional search with feature-rich social bookmarking. Bookmarked/tagged results appear above normal search.

Search results can be bookmarked, tagged and rated from Wink. The same functionality is available via a bookmarklet that works with Firefox, Safari and IE. As a twist, users can also block “bad” pages. Lots of functional Ajax is built into the interface.

Users can easily browse tag results (either their own, or all users).

There are three key additional features.

First, Wink has added two way synchronization with del.icio.us bookmarks. And they’ve added a “Keep Sync’d” feature that, as the name implies, maintains a constant one or two-way syncronization with del.icio.us. No word on whether they will add in other social bookmarking services over time or not.

Second, Wink allows the creation of “collections”, which is a tag group (tags of tags). Collections are controlled by one user but can be shared with anyone.

Third, and this feature really appeals to me, Wink has added a “Wink Answers” tab to search results. The text is a wiki – meaning anyone can edit it. For queries that have complicated results, a number of options appear. A lot of data has been pre-populated, and I believe this will be a popular feature. Like Wikipedia, it begs for user interaction, but with a lower intimidation factor.

Wink is also finalizing a nice blog widget that includes additional links (that point only to bookmarks created by the blogger). See here for an example. I have not had the opportunity to test this myself yet, but it looks interesting.

Congratulations to Founder Michael Tanne and the entire Wink team.

Flock has gotten a lot of criticism lately.

The reason for this particular round of naysaying is the launch of the impressive Performancing Firefox plugin that allows extremely easy blogging, from Firefox, for Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger. Performancing is getting extremely good reviews from top bloggers like Paul Kedrosky, Om Malik and Steve Rubel.

But the attacks didn’t start with the release of Performancing. They go way back. Flock even has its own hate blog (flocksucks.wordpress.com) (although this one substitutes common cruelty for actual insight and humor).

My guess is Flock is suffering from a bit of backlash over its early hype. And my further guess is that Flock, backed by an impressive group of founders and investors, has a few massive tricks up its sleeve that will be announced (or leak out) sometime soon.

Until now Flock has done little to fuel all the hype, and have likewise refrained from responding to the criticism.

Tonight, however, Flock’s Chris Messina, supported by CEO Bart Decrem, takes issue with some of the bashing.

I like this post, and not just because Chris at one point says “jack-in-the-box assclown” or calls web surfing with Firefox extensions “Firefox and Duct tape”. Chris gives a passionate, if not entirely fact laden, speach on what the hell they are trying to accomplish over at Flock.

But no, see, that’s where Flock comes in. Or I don’t care, don’t call it Flock. Whatever you want, but that’s where the thing we’re building comes in. That’s why we exist, that’s why we matter, that’s what the point is.

Yeah, Firefox and Duct tape, it’ll help. Sure sure. It’ll get you some of the way there. But hell, when I’m talking to someone, engaged in a conversation that threatens my very existence, or that threatens to change the way I flip my omelettes, man, I do not want my mouth to fall off at the jaw because it wasn’t tested, wasn’t built right, didn’t have a million beedy eyes boring down on it while it was being fastened to my head, making sure the stupid thing would function in the real world without needing pliers or a tireiron to get it to work right.

My last post on Flock, covering its beta launch, is here.

Disclaimer: I like Flock and the Flock employees. I get excited about big ideas. And I believe Flock can be a big idea.

Maybe it’s because it’s the holiday season, but it seems impossible to me not to like San Francisco-based GoodStorm. It’s a competitor to Kleiner-backed Zazzle, and CafePress – basically they let you set up shop and sell items with your logo on it.

As with all of these services, they do all the hard work – producing and shipping the item, and collecting the money. All the seller has to do is market the shop, set prices and collect their share of the money.

GoodStorm was founded by Yobie Benjamin and August Capital’s Andy Rappaport in October and launched on December 14, 2005 (there are good pictures of the team at that link as well). Their business model is designed to cater specifically to nonprofits. They keep only 30% of the profits on a sale (giving the rest to the seller), and also donate a portion of profits to charity. Like I said, it’s hard not to like this company.

Currently they are working with sellers one-one-one, but will eventually launch a self service store creator.

The company is built on the Drupal open source content management system. GoodStorm says they will be donating chunks of code back to the project as well.

Stefanie Olsen at CNET wrote about Goodstorm earlier this week and has additional information.

I wrote about this last week – and Oodle now has officially added events and tickets as a category.

This seem to be primarily a combination of meetup events and tickets from a number of ticket brokers, including stubhub. There’s lots on money in this space from affiliate fees, so it’s a smart move.

Gravee soft launched tonight. It has an interesting business model. In addition to pulling in search results from Google, MSN and Yahoo (Alexa coming soon), Gravee also allows publishers to claim their site and, theoretically, get a piece of Gravee’s revenue.

Here’s how it works:

With Gravee’s AdShare program, when a user clicks an ad on Gravee, up to 70% of the ad revenue generated as a result is divided between the 10 sites included in the natural search results on the page (i.e. 70%/10 = 7% of ad revenue to each Web site on the page – for every ad that is clicked). Register your site now to start collecting your share of Gravee’s ad revenue.

Gravee also shares up to 35% of revenue with publisers that join their affiliate program and place their search box on their site. This will be an interesting way of driving traffic to their site.

Site claiming is done via whois information – meaning you must be in control of your domain name to claim the blog. Another way for them to accomplish this would be to ask the site owner to put a piece of code on her/his site, which I imagine they will add at some point.