I came across Scottsdale, Arizona based Solomodels today. I’m writing about it because it has pictures of really attractive women on the site it is a textbook example of Ajax, search and social networking. It caters to models, photographers and agents.

Founder Hoss Etemad wrote to me to describe the service, and I must say I found it immediately intriguing. Participants can create profiles, upload photos, add members as friends, chat, etc. The search functionality is great – type in just about any physical attribute, from bust size to eye color, and get your model match.

They offer a seven day free trial for people interested in trying out the service. Solomodels is all business though. The site warns:

Our members are not here for dating.
Contacting our members for anything other than legitimate modeling related work is strictly prohibited and will result in immediate account cancellation. If you are looking for a date, please sign up for a dating site instead.

So don’t even think about it.

What a great site to demonstrate the awesomeness of web 2.0.

It’s been just over a month since I wrote about the last Ajax home page, and I thought I’d get through February without writing about a new one.

I was wrong.

Fold.com has entered private beta. According to the site, “Fold is the Web 2.0 application.”

I checked out the beta and Fold.com looks about as good as other Ajax home pages (an API to create third party widgets is in development). Fold.com only works with Firefox, at least for now.

I wish them luck. Blog is here.

Ok, who’s next?

Here’s the current list of Ajax and Flash homepages:

• Eskobo
• favoor
• Fold.com
• Google
• Goowy (Flash, not Ajax)
• Gtalkr (Flash)
• HomePortals
• Microsoft Live
• Netvibes
• Pageflakes
• Protopage
• Wrickr
• Zoozio

Microsoft continues to roll out new Live.com services today. In addition to Street-Side, Microsoft just took the protection off of its much anticipated Expo classified listing service.

See my previous posts on Expo for additional information and screen shots. Expo is centered on the idea that people will trust others within a group, and so is allowing classifieds networks within groups. Users can choose to search classifieds just within their immediate instant messaging buddies, or within an email group (such as anyone with a boeing.com email address), or “everyone”.

Microsoft’s Live.com is launching a preview version of a new service called Street-Side today (link will be live around 12 PST today). Street-Side will augment the Live Local service and give street level views of the entire city. Searches can be made by address or business name, and you can “drive” around the city using the arrow keys. See the screen shot below for a visual.

See Robert Scoble’s Channel 9 Video for his interview with the team.

The service will initially target San Francisco and Seattle only due to the massive number of images needed to support make it work (rumors are 10 million + images per city).

The Live.com team sent out an email to journalists that includes the following information:

* Today we are announcing our new street-side initiative for Windows Live Local and a Technical preview of the new street-side feature.

* The street-side initiative is a key part of our vision to deliver an immersive digital representation of the real world that enables users to know their surroundings, find what they are looking for and know how to get there.

* The new street-side feature augments the current map view, aerial view, and bird’s eye view that the Windows Live Local site already has today to provide users with an even more immersive way to explore their local environment.

Live.com continues to crush competiting ajax homepage competitors (see link for Alexa chart). Services like Street-Side will make it even harder for others to compete.

Screen shot:

Maxthon is in my view the best alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox and Opera are doing a great job (both in product and buzz) but they just don’t catch up with Maxthon.

Founded by the very young and brilliant Jeff Chen in 2003 in China (under MyIE name), Maxthon became very quickly popular in Asia (awarded last year in Red Herring Asia ) and all over the world. The big difference with other browsers is that Maxthon is based on IE code which makes the software very familiar from the beginning but with a few twists. Unlike IE, it is very fast, safe and very stable and brings a unique browsing experience as it enables you to customize nearly any part of the software. Like Firefox, Maxthon brings tab browsing, embedded RSS and podcast reader (a very cool one), search bar… but without necessity to add any extension.

The key strength of Maxthon is that it enables you to customize totally your browsing experience with extreme simplicity. A few examples: URL shortcuts. Instead of typing a URL or clicking a bookmark (ok it takes less than 2 sec but still) you can set up a URL alias (”2″ for instance) and type directly in the URL bar which will lead you to the URL of your choice (eg: your flickr page). You can change easily skins, a wide choice is offered. Mouse gesture is also great just like super drag and drop features to save an image or initiate a search on a given word within web page.

There are too many features to cover them all here. I believe you should play with it first (tip: use your right click nearly anywhere). All those I know who tried it loved it. It sounds maybe too much like FireFox in some way but again it is not. To better understand the pros of Maxthon read this article from Internet Week.

Maxthon 2.0 exclusive screenshots

We could get exclusive intial screenshots and news on next 2.0 version to come up soon. I believe Maxthon will become even better. They are building right now a better interface with greater possibilities of customization, data sharing, multi window browsing, cool blogging features and many other things kept secret for now.

Great quality leads to great popularity and Maxthon just passed 50 million downloads (announced on their blog but also on Daily OM)

Beyond a good product and critical size, Maxthon has great assets for success: first a great team including Netanel Jacobsson as SVP Bus. Development (ex AOL/ICQ guy). Second, strong shareholders including Morten Lund (a Skype early stage investor) and WI Harper.

Maxthon is not yet very popular in the US, but i bet it’ll change soon.

Now let’s see if this post can generate a debate just as hot as the one from the original post in TechCrunch France

Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo emailed Richard MacManus and me on Monday to give us a preview of what he calls “broad enhancement to our stats” that are being released later this morning.

I’ve had a chance to review the new functionality (screen shot below) and I agree that these changes are both needed and useful.

The key change is to give users more information on what items in feeds are actually getting “viewed” and clicked on. Until now bloggers could not get this information – analytics services like MeasureMap and BlogBeat give us good insight into what’s being done on the actual site, but unless a click through to the site occurs from a feed, there was little or no information on what was actually being read off site. FeedBurner’s new stats go a long way toward mitigating this problem.

They are also showing what they call “uncommon” sources which allow bloggers to see where their feeds are being read and re-used beyond the standard RSS readers like Rojo and Bloglines, and new tools for podcasters to track downloads.

Dick summarized all of the new features in his email:

The new features are:

a) Uncommon uses. We track 200k feeds and so we see everywhere feeds are used regularly. When we see someplace a feed is referenced or clicked that we don’t recognize as a common reference, we highlight it here in the dashboard and on the detailed uncommon uses page. Could be a cool little newfilter somebody wrote, could be a blog somebody assembled from feeds, could be a cool little web-based aggregator we’ve never heard of, could be blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers love to see these unique uses and references and that it’s very helpful to have something like feedburner that can leverage a broad base of common references to point out the uncommon ones. You can then “whitelist” or “hide” references you already know about (note that your own site will be an uncommon reference, whitelist that one right away), and you’ll never be Alerted to whitelisted domains on your dashboard again.

b) Better integration of item stats and feed stats, better clickthrough to items for more details

c) Reach! Now we start to give you an idea of what percent of your subscribers actually looked at or clicked on one of your items today. This is step one. We will spend a lot more time on reach based on how people react to v1 here. We know there’s much more to dive into on this.

d) Historical reach and subscription from the dashboard…..you can now click back through the days on the dashboard chart to see reach and item popularity by day.

e) Podcasters – better feed level download tracking. In addition to subscribers we now identify the number of people that actually downloaded a particular podcast. This will get even more robust in the future as we provide download numbers from the podcast on the site and sum that with the feed based downloads. This release is feed based downloads only.

This comes on the heals of FeedBurner’s 2 year birthday and announced funding from Union Square Ventures earlier this month. The company has raised a total of $10 million to date.

After much anticipation and a period of being available to a private audience the team at Edgeio took the covers off of their creation tonight and launched to the general public. Edgeio takes listings (classifieds) from RSS-enabled sources and organizes them in a central location for users to be able to browse and search. The Edgeio ethos is that content belongs on the edges, and that is where the name originates from (Edge input/output). Content on the edges means the content on the millions of blogs and other sites out there which Edgeio does a good job of aggregating and organizing.

From a seller’s perspective, to post an item you write about it on your blog and tag it ‘listing’ (along with any other keywords which are suitable to categorize the item for sale). Edgeio taps into the blog cloud via weblogs.com and other ping services (as well as its own ping server which is at http://www.edgeio.com/RPC2) to find new posts that have been tagged for listing. Once it finds your post, which usually happens very quickly, it will send a trackback to your post to make you aware that Edgeio has found it. Once you have posted, the first time you post an item you will need to go to Edgeio to claim your blog (a process that works similar to Technorati’s) from which point you can add additional metadata to your listing within Edgeio. The additional data you enter includes things like additional tags to categorize the item, your geographic location (which again you only enter once and is used when you search for items to buy as well) and the price of the item. It only takes moments from the time you post your listing to the time that it appears in Edgeio and is available for buyers to find.

From a buyers perspective, you can go to Edgeio and then find items that are for sale a number of ways. The first and most obvious way is to enter terms into the search box. This will display results which are item summaries sorted in chronological order. The other way to find items is by browsing through the tag clusters that are located on the front page and working your way down to items that interest you. The last way in which you can find items is interesting, as Edgeio has lists of most popular items, the latest items and the most active weblogs posting items. The popular items list and the latest items list have feeds available for users to subscribe to or use in other applications. One cool thing you notice is the geography slider widget that is persistently in the sidebar while you are looking through items. If you are looking at search results and would like to filter them down to just the state you are in, or the zip code you are in, then you just slide the slider. I have been told that this slider will be even more fine-grained in the near future by giving ’slide points’ which are certain distance radiuses around the current points (eg. Within 10 miles of your current post code). The way the slider works and refreshes the results or the page automatically has been very well implemented and makes a lot of sense. The interface has been very well done, it is clean and easy to understand (I tested this by handing over the URL to a non-tech user and they were able to find listings the may be interested in).

Throughout the search results, listings from blogs that have been claimed gain precedence over unclaimed listings. In the future sellers will have the ability to highlight their listing for a small fee. Reputation is currently handled via third party sites, the seller has an option to associate their listing with their Flickr, eBay or LinkedIn account so that their credibility can be traced back. It appears at the moment that a lot of the transactions on Edgeio will be face-to-face transactions, where verifying credibility is different as opposed to when you are sending payment to somebody you don’t know in a foreign country or another state.

The whole point of Edgeio is to connect the buyer and seller through its platform that aggregates listings, so there are no payment options at the moment nor can you see any account history from buyers or sellers on what they have purchased or sold before. It is currently being left up to the buyer and seller to close the transaction. Edgeio also offers a lot of social controls as a means to keep the listing relevant and current. Users are able to mark a listing as being ‘bad’ by telling Edgeio that the item is spam, that it is no longer current, that is hasn’t been categorized correctly or that the publishers information is not accurate. These forms of social controls and filtering work well on sites such as Craigslist and their effect on Edgeio and how well they work to prevent spam will only be known over time.

On important aspect to Edgeio is the availability of feeds for every part of the system. With standard RSS feeds (Dave Winer is an advisor to the company) developers of other applications or webmasters are able to include items for sale on Edgio into their own sites or applications, or take the listings further in some form of a mashup (I am guessing we will see the first mashups – potentially with Google Maps, shortly). I like the idea of being able to subscribe to a feed that will display new items that may not be available now but I wish to purchase – so I will see them as soon as they are posted.

I subscribe to the theory that the publishing and control of content belongs to the user and that we are heading in that direction. There are a few reasons for this, the first and most important is that the user owns his or her data, even if it is something as simple as a classified listing, so the user should be able to have effective control over the environment where this data is contained. With centralized services such as eBay and Craigslist the buyer and seller are left to the mercy of the platform provider. Blogging has enabled users to create content and publish it on the web easily, so using that platform for listings is only one of a number of potential services that can be built on top of what we have today. The short-term barriers I foresee are the size of this market today and how effective Edgeio will be in promoting itself as the standard place for listings. In terms of scalability, only a much larger inventory will be able to test the theory of having tags and tag clusters as a directory as opposed to a rigid directory structure (which is very hard to maintain and expand). Edgeio is putting categorization and the categories themselves into the hands of users with self-monitoring in place that will attempt to assure that things don’t get out of hand. While having 1,300 or so listings at the time of launch is a good start, the size of the market and the number of listings on blogs will not compare to eBay or Craigslist any time soon (though Edgeio can also use other directories as sources as well, making it a classifieds meta-site).

In the long-term there is a fantastic opportunity, especially since publishing to the web on your own terms is something that is becoming more and more available to ordinary web users (and with services such as MySpace and MSN spaces the number of users is getting really big). Edgeio is a very open platform, they want others to build applications and use the listing content in other sites and applications. I am sure that regardless of the success of Edgeio that its more traditional competition has had to think about their own policies with providing feeds and other openness measures and I hope that the launch of Edgeio may spur change with other platforms.

Edgeio was founded by Keith Teare (easyNet and Realnames) and Micheal Arrington (Techcrunch) along with the founding technical team consisting of Matt Kaufman (There and Realnames) and Vidar Hokstad (Yahoo! Europe). Edgeio have raised $1.5M in angel capital from a large list of investors with names such as Louis Monier, Frank Caufield, Auren Hoffman, the RSS Investors Fund, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway and Michael Tanne.

Edgeio will need to overcome those barriers, as well as have more and more sellers adopt the model that they are pushing (ie. The ‘listing’ tag). They are going the right way about it, with a very nice interface and some very cool features, along with the will to make this happen and the right people to see it through. The launch is also being reported by Om Malik amonst others.

Disclaimer: Mike Arrington, a founder of Edgeio is also the Founder of this blog. All the opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer (Nik Cubrilovic)

Google announced last week on their blog that they will begin to facilitate payments on Google Base in the near future. The blog post from Google pointed out that Google are already accepting payments on their video service as well as when users purchase software such as Google Earth and that this will be extended further in the near future. The latest updates to Google Base, which we have been able to take a good look at, is to compete directly with eBay by not only allowing sellers to post items to base, but also by facilitating the transaction through Google Payments (see this blog post on purchasing via Base from the Google Base team).

To see some items on Google Base that are accepting payments via Google go to base.google.com and search for either ‘xyzzy‘ for a list of items with payments enabled, or ‘magic unicorn beanie‘ for a particular item. The first thing you see is that a price has been set and you can see that the payment method that is accepted is ‘payment through google’. While ordinary users now won’t get an option to purchase these items, we managed to get some screenshots of how the process will look and work. The next set of screens show the items that had a big ‘buy’ button on them so that the user can purchase them:

The payments site currently redirects to your Google account details but upon public launch, and available on very few select accounts at the moment, the user will have the option to specify or update their credit card details as well as their delivery address details. This means that as a user of Google Payments you won’t need to re-enter this information when making a purchase on Base, or any of the other services from Google that will be taking advantage of the new system. In addition on your account page you will see a history of items that you have purchased and you will be able to check the delivery status of items being delivered, as well as information about the seller of items you have purchased.

Our understanding is that Google is currently testing this service further internally and are in talks to potential sellers on using Google Base and their new payment system to sell items. From the users point of view, it makes purchasing items on any Google property extremely simple. The checkout process is extremely quick and much faster than Paypal’s (page loading times are Google fast) – it also has a much nicer interface making it easier for a user to navigate their way through a checkout and purchase. Overall with Google Base and payments the experience for a user is much nicer than what it is on eBay, a very nice interface and many search features while maintaining the very minimal yet functional interface as expected from Google. I can see that they will be able to maintain this nice interface even as the inventory of items for sale gets much much bigger – their choice of using tags for items as opposed to categories makes it much easier to find items and to fine-tune search results.

What Google does lack at the moment, and something they are working on, is a reputation system so that you can authenticate who the seller is and how trustworthy they are. Building a good reputation system is a very big problem, one that eBay has yet to completely solve so it will be interesting to see what Google will do about this. I don’t know if launching without a reputation system is a good idea, their short-term solution may be to restrict sellers using their payment system to more trusted sources.

What we are seeing here from Google is a direct shot at eBay’s market, as well as other services such as Craigslist - though they have some way to get there. The new payments system means we should see many more services and offerings from Google in the future that cost money, it has made Google Base a lot more interesting and also started up a much needed additional source of revenue.

Mix open instant messaging protocol Jabber with mobile phones and you get Mabber, a new product from a team based in Cologne, Germany. The team at Mabber were early adopters of the Jabber protocol and with the lower mobile data charges in their home country decided to develop an application that would allow mobile users to communicate with each other using the protocol, thus save on SMS costs. Mabber is a product of New Media Management, a German company that runs some of the countries largest web properties such as neu.de and pkw.de,

Mabber have put together a very experienced and solid team that totals six people, starting with Nico Lumma who runs the team and directs the business (he is also a very popular blogger in Germany). Other members of the team include Florian Holzhauer (who is a member of the Jabber foundation), Stefan Strigler, Jens Ohlig, Oliver Lauer and Christian Horchert.

Mabber primarily uses the Jabber protocol but they also have support for the other networks such as MSN, Yahoo!, AIM – this is so that you don’t need to lose contacts or functionality with your existing IM provider in switching to mabber. Mabber supports all these protocols in-line, meaning that once you have the account setup you see your contacts on that network along with your other contacts from other networks and the primary mabber network.

There are two parts to the mabber application. The first is the web application which can be accessed from any browser. As with Meebo, these guys have spent a lot of time on refining the user experience. The first thing I noticed was that the chat windows did not have any re-draw effects and seemed to work seamlessly – no weird delays with the client polling the server, just instant reactions. Second what I noticed is all the rich features. They have extended through all the popular features of desktop IM clients such as chat history (which can be fully searched later), grouping (and group chat), and context menu’s to bring up the options.

The web interface on it’s own will give Meebo a run for it’s money, but the magic with Mabber is on mobile devices. To install the mobile application you go to the site and enter your mobile number, you in return receive an sms with a download link, you follow that, it installs, executes, you enter your username and password and you are online. From that point you are able to access all your IM contacts and communicate with them using a standard mobile keypad. This will save people a lot on SMS costs (which are just blatant robbery in most countries at the moment) and allow people to communicate more effectively. I know that this is not the first mobile IM app, but the combination of this team, the protocol they have chosen, their simple application and both mobile and browser based interfaces means that Mabber stand a strong chance of success.

I have been using Mabber for almost a day now and I am currently evaluating if this is my Meebo replacement. Nico has been talking about a few features they have due during the course of this week including tabbed chatting windows, content delivery to mobile devices and other improvements. These guys are releasing very frequently and their private beta has been going well to date. They intend on going out strong in the German market and I am sure they will do well in other markets especially if ordinary consumers find the service as easy to install and use as I did.

Use Mabber Now: Mabber have been kind enough to give away 50 beta invitations for Techcrunch readers. If you would like to check out a really cool IM app that works on mobile devices then send through an email to info@mabber.com with the subject line of ‘TECHCRUNCH!!!!!’ and you will be sent an invitation in return.

Although there has been no official announcement yet Google have released the long awaited and long-rumored Google Pages (which has nothing to do with cloning Larry Page). Pages allows users to create a webpage using an AJAX interface that removes a lot of the ‘pain’ associated with creating pages with HTML and other desktop design applications. If you have some time on your hands and would like to try this out, then head over to http://pages.google.com to signup. If you have an existing Google account (they snuck that on us, didn’t they) then getting a pages account is very simple.

Once you are in the application you are presented with a WYSIWYG interface displaying your page and some editing controls. The interface in terms of what they have done with client-side Javascript is impressive, and what Google has done in terms of putting up simple pages is cool but overall it is an underwhelming gimmick that may have some potential if they focus. Google Pages allows you to upload files, create many pages that you can link up, and select from a smorgasbord of templates. The website which you can then push out to publish can then be found at username.googlepages.com.

I went through and created my own page which can be found at http://cubrilovic.googlepages.com. The retro look demonstrates the problem with giving your content creators too much control and not wrapping them up more tightly into a nice template. The way it usually works with real website design is that the design wraps the content creator up completely simply so they don’t mess things up – only because we aren’t all creative types. Google Pages does let you upload any file though, and gives you 100MB of space, which some may find more useful for sharing files or distributing SNL video’s.

For instance, this is not going to be a threat to the younger crowd who are all creating pages on MySpace, nor to the audience of millions of bloggers who already have their online presence, nor to the players in the CMS space who offer a whole lot more in functionality and power. I am not sure who this is targeted at as the small business owners and non technical folk sure aren’t looking at Google for a website solution and considering there is no domain mapping at the moment being a business and handing out a googlepages.com domain is just, well, embarrassing.

I don’t think we will see a huge swell in the number of serious websites hosted on pages, but this may be a step towards a CMS suite for small businesses that would include some form of super-blogger, along with free domain registration or some of the other features that Office Live will be offering. I just can’t help thinking that this product feels unfocused and underdeveloped – especially coming from a company such as Google.

Update: A few minutes after I posted this Google took the site down. I hope I didn’t lose all my work.

Over the weekend I spoke to Martin Wells, the founder and CEO of a startup from Sydney, Australia called Tangler. I had a look at the application they have been developing for the last 18 months now which is an instant messaging and communication app that is based around a concept they call ‘instant grouping’.

Instant grouping means that any number of people can take part in conversations around topics of interest they find on the web or in other applications. The application allows users to subscribe to a group – which can then be linked to any number of blogs, websites, music files (in iTunes or other apps), a point on a map or anything else. The conversations are persistent so you don’t need to be there when other people are and the desktop application will notify you when something new happens in a group.

This alleviates the problem some have seen at the moment with instant messaging applications tied to blogs by making each group an actual destination where users can make comments and have conversations. Tangler does a good job of uniting people around a common interest and letting them take part in conversations. This is where instant messaging has been heading for a while now, but Tangler looks to have gotten it right.

The guys have been spending some time in the valley recently while they prepare the company and the product for a public launch. Tangler has been privately funded to date but Martin has indicated they have investment interest from the USA at the moment which they are considering.

Tangler are planning to open up the private beta in 2 months – in the interim you can register your interest in their product on their website. I am eagerly awaiting the launch since I have seen many attempts at trying to make communication around a topic or website on the web easier and it seems that these guys are approaching it the right way and doing it well.

Google recently indicated that they are taking blogs and measuring blog statistics very seriously with their acquisition of Measure Map. Measure Map had not yet made it into the hands of most bloggers and had been in a private beta at the time of acquisition. A new blog analytics tool that is similar in functionality to Measure Map is BlogBeat. The different with BlogBeat is that it is available to everyone now.

A few days ago I installed BlogBeat on my own blog – the installation procedure involved copying a snippet of HTML into the footer template of my Wordpress install (it will work with any blogging application where you can edit and access the template). The process of signing up and installing took no longer than a minute, and I was able to instantly see who was accessing my site along with all the other statistics the service provides. BlogBeat will read information about your blog, as well as derive post statistics, from the RSS feed URL that you need to specify.

The front page of BlogBeat displays to the user an overview of their traffic stats and highlites trends. You will need to have the code running for a few days to get meaningful data from this front page – for example the monthly summary does not mean much unless you have been running the package for a month (perhaps something that should be hidden until then). The interface to BlogBeat is very simple and clean, not as attractive as the interface for MeasureMap but at the same time very practical.

BlogBeat being blog-specific can tell you statistics such as which posts are the most popular, which categories are popular and also tracks comments to tell you which posts are most commented and what the most recent comments are. With post statistics it also displays trends, though with most statistic packages shows you that the fastest growing posts or pages are the most recent (since they didn’t exist yesterday the ‘growth’ is always 600%+) – something else that should be accounted for if the intention is to make clear older posts that may have become popular again for whatever reason (something that is common on my own blog).

Further there are areas that describe where your visitors are coming in from, how they have found your blog or a specific post and what keywords have been used to find your site via search engines. The last section describes which outbound links are the most popular and from which points users are leaving your page. One simple feature that BlogBeat doesn’t show me that others do is what browsers my visitors are using, though this isn’t the most useful stat it is good to know. I am sure that we will see this feature shortly. They are also working hard on FeedBurner integration (its there already, see my update at the end of this post) and have cool features like being able to subscribe to your stats (BlogBeat will also have an API).

I found overall that BlogBeat is a much better way of tracking my sites visitors (though I am not surprisingly a stats-obsessed blogger, I know a lot who are) over Google Analytics (overkill). The concerns I have with the javascript include method of tracking stats is that first it can slow down page loading if the tracking app is experiencing heavy load (something that visitors to blogs which are being tracked by Measure Map have probably experiences) and second that using Javascript may not be a true representation of all visitors since some browsers wont execute it and others may not be able to (the developers still need to make sure the tracking code works on all browsers such as Safari etc.) . The alternative is to use a statistics package that can access server logs directly, but with that you sacrifice ease of installation and not all bloggers have such access to their servers.

BlogBeat is free for the first 30 days and thereafter it is $6 per month (limit to 500,000 page views per month, not sure what happens if you exceed). They currently have around 400 users and the performance is good, only time will tell if that will hold up. It is good to see more competition in this space and some good offerings. I will stick with BlogBeat for now and decide before the trial expires if I am getting $6 a month worth of value out of it.

Update: John from BlogBeat emailed me to say that they do have demographic and browser stats (I just didn’t see it because it was at the bottom), and Feedburner integration is there now. This is a great solution already with a lot more to come

Huntington Beach, California based Foldera’s goal is to organize all of the chaos surrounding work based documents (email, calendar, office documents, instant messaging, etc). It is a very big idea.

The company is in private beta right now, with a full launch on the way.

Foldera’s approach to productivity is in direct conflict with the way we use applications like Outlook today (just think about how much time we all spend organizing our inbox, filing emails, etc.). Foldera has a better approach (one that seems rather obvious now that I’ve seen it) and they have a chance to seriously disrupt upcoming product launches like Office Live from Microsoft.

Most of us are used to working with email folders today, where an email message can simply be pulled into a folder for easier discovery later. The idea around Foldera starts there. They’ve created an Ajax rich web application that includes email, calendaring, instant messaging, document storage and versioning, tasks and other features into a single web application. Everything is folder-centric:

How does this work?

You create a dedicated Activity Folder for each distinct project or activity. Email, instant messaging, and all your other applications are now accessed from within this folder instead of their original disconnected and unstructured state. This organizational structure also keeps everything in context; for example, all your email conversations and instant message dialogs stay right inside that specific Activity Folder, so everything related to that project stays grouped together. Doesn’t that make more sense?

Do you work with other people?

To truly appreciate what Foldera can do, try using it with a team. Everything you create with Foldera can be shared or kept private, delegated, owned, or distributed among one, several, or all members of a team. Unlike some collaborative applications, Foldera is easy to use and requires virtually no learning curve. If you can send email, you can use Foldera.

Richard Lusk, Foldera’s CEO, met with me late last year to show me an early demo of the product. The idea is that you create a folder around any new project. Share that folder with others or keep it private. Documents can be uploaded to the service and associated with a folder. Emails started from within the folder are automatically associated with the project. Same with Calendar entries. Foldera also includes an instant messaging application (it works with MSN Messenger, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), iChat, and Yahoo Messenger).

The notion of taking emails, IM transcripts, office documents, calendar items and more and automatically organizing each document into shared or private folders is a big deal. Having one place to see every related document will save time. And as deadlines approach, users can simply focus on the project folder and ignore distracting emails and IMs that deal with other projects.

Pricing has not yet been disclosed, but there will be a generous free option.

Foldera has raised $13 million since its launch. Last week it completed a reverse merger into an existing (shell) public company, raising an additional $8.5 million. It is now a publicly traded (OTC) company with a market capitalization of $70 million. Yeah, its crazy – they haven’t even launched yet.

Screen Shots

At the Mashup Camp pre-conference dinner tonight there were a number of demos, all of which were interesting. A non-public service that stood out was flyspy, a search engine for airline tickets that will change the way we all travel. Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.

Tonight I got a look at the service, and while it is still in it’s early stages it is very cool. The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.

If I am trying to decide which destination is cheaper, I can overlay another airport on the graph and then compare the results. In the screenshot you can see that it has plotted the prices for arriving in both San Francisco and San Jose. The end result is that in very little time I can find the best day to fly out, the best price and also the best destination.

Flyspy has all the right elements – a good idea, a simple user interface and an immediate value proposition for the user. Even better, it takes an industry that is stuck in the old times and shakes it up (I was going to say blown to bits).

Flyspy was founded by Robert Metcalf (no not that one) who has been working on the problem for 2 years after experiencing frustrations with the airline booking system (someone pissed off the wrong programmer). Even though he had no previous experience in the industry Robert was obviously very knowledgeable on how it all worked and how to build a business from what he has built so far.

Flyspy will have an API that will allow other developers to tap into its technology and to integrate it with other services. Robert is expecting to move out to the valley sometime soon and has been self-funded to date (though he is in the process of seeking investment). Overall a very cool service that epitomizes what the new web is about. Flyspy should go public in a few months – you will hear more about it here and probably feel the distruption.

Since launching last year, Meebo the web-based instant messaging application has had phenomenal growth and great user adoption. This week they have announced a new set of features and upgrades to their application, the first since they announced their funding from Sequoia capital.

The best of the new features are that you can now create an account with Meebo and have access to all your instant messaging accounts with a single sign-on. The problem I have had to date with Meebo is that I do have a number of different accounts on different networks but the single sign-on and having a Meebo account solves that. They have added some cool features to it such as being able to sign in with a default status of invisible, see all your contacts across all networks in a single list, and having as many accounts as you wish. Single sign-off is coming shortly I am told.

I was at a dinner with Meebo co-founder Seth Sternberg during the week and he talked about these new features, the continuing growth as well as Meebo’s plans for the future. These guys are working on some exciting things and are now handling their large load of users well with more servers. Their growth is still extremely strong: they hit a new record of 396,000 connections in a day last week.

I am using Meebo as my full-time instant messaging client from today – and it is working well so far. Many of the incremental improvements have made the experience enjoyable for the user. It will be interesting to see how the competition responds to what Meebo are doing and if they will be able to sustain this growth over the next few months and beyond.

I am leaving tonight on a long overdue vacation. Nik Cubrilovic has accepted my my invitation to guest blog for TechCrunch in my absence over the next ten days.

Nik is the founder of Omnidrive, a company I have written about here on TechCrunch, and also has his own popular blog at nik.com.au. He’s promised to keep things controversial, but he will not be writing about anything even remotely competitive to his Omnidrive.

See you all in March!

Pluck demo’d a new product called BlogBurst at our party last night. The service is live but Pluck has not pushed it out for publicity yet.

BlogBurst is a service that takes topical content from pre-approved blogs and provides it to publishers (online newspapers, etc.) for republication. Blogs that apply and are accepted are categorized (TechCrunch would be “science and technology”. BlogBurst editors choose great content from those blogs for republication. For more information on how BlogBurst works with publishers, see this page. Bloggers must provide a full text RSS feed to participate, with no included ads in the feed.

Participating publishers have “workbench” tools to map content to specific areas of their site. Integration is “via simple JavaScript calls or robust SOAP or XML APIs“.

BlogBurst charges publishers for this service. They do not share revenue with bloggers, although each post has a byline and attribution/link back to the blog. For most bloggers, this extra traffic and attention will be very welcome.

BlogBurst already has a number of top publishers signed up, including the SF Chronicle, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle and San Antonia Express-News.

Disclaimer: I am an unpaid advisor to BlogBurst, and have done paid consulting work for Pluck in the past.

The Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party is now officially over (except for Stowe Boyd and Jason Roberts who are passed out on my couches). The pictures are here and here (tag: “techcrunch5″).

Bonus: Check out Emily Chang’s video (at bottom of post) and John Furrier’s Podcast of the event.

Thank you to everyone who came. My guess is that we had at least 400 people in the house over the hours of 5 pm – 2 am. Good news: the police never came and Laguna, my dog, is still alive. All that is left to do is clean up the mess tomorrow…

People I want to thank:

• Shel Israel and Robert Scoble for choosing to have their party here!
• Our awesome sponsors
• Tom Conrad and Pandora, who wired the party and played music all night
• Jennifer Myronuk, who arranged for door security and cupcakes and took video all night
• John Furrier and team, who podcasted
• Amy Adams, Gabe Rivera, Nivi and Jack Arrington who helped out with all the work
• Everyone who came and made this a really special party

I also want to specifically mention Stormhoek, who donated ten cases of their premium wine to the party. It is incredibly good wine, and their generosity in sending it has made me a lifetime customer. Hugh Macleod, who is leading their blogger attack, is adding incredible value to them as well. Somehow a full case of the wine disappeared into my closet before the party started, so anyone visiting in the next couple of weeks will be treated to a glass.

Blogs discussing the party:

Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Scott Beale, Dave McClure, Tracy Sheridan, Alex Moskalyuk, Robert Anderson, Dan Farber Pictures, Nik Cubrilovic, Jeremiah Owyang, Mark Jen, Rafe Needleman, Renee Blodgett, Chris Mullins
Mike Davidson, Brian Oberkirch, Jeff Clavier, Joseph A. di Paolantonio, Jeff Clavier #2, James Gross, Alexander Muse, Oliver Starr, Rick Segal, Podtech, Max Kiesler, Dion Hinchcliffe, Narendra Rocherolle, George Nimeh, Om Malik, Dan Farber , Susan Mernit

I’m pretty excited about the Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party tomorrow night starting at 7 pm.

We’ve been working hard for weeks to get the event together and, thanks to our sponsors, this should be the best one so far. A huge tent is up in the back yard, food and drinks are on the way, and there will be plenty of people to help out with the event.

Attendees have been limited due only to space restrictions in my house. The final list of attendees is here. If you are not on the list, don’t worry, we’ll be having TechCrunch 6 soon. Please note, and I apologize for this, RSVP’s will be checked at the door and if you are not on the list, you will not be able to get in.

I want to take this opportunity once again to thank Robert Scoble and Shel Israel for having the party here, and to thank each of the sponsors of the event:

Eurekster Flock Kaboodle Pandora Pluck Rojo Zazzle

If you are attending the party, please use the tag “TechCrunch5″ on any publicly posted pictures. Thank you.

Campfire, the new 37 Signals product, launched yesterday. It is a dead simple way to create a robust, permanent (with URL) group chat.

Key features include embedded images, permanent URL for chat, no client to download (chat is in the web page), and easy file sharing. I’m basically thinking of it as a real time wiki or an easy to use IRC product with enhanced features.

They claim it takes 10 seconds to create a new chat, and they are correct. It is dead simple to use and has an incredibly intuitive interface. It’s a great addition to the 37 Signals product suite.

Pricing ranges from free to $50/month based on number of chat users and storage desired. To learn more about how Campfire works, take the tour.