There have been simple, browser-based website creation tools available on the market ever since the WWW turned mainstream, but there’s clearly still a significant demand for this type of services, especially with the way the web is evolving.
SynthaSite is one of the players in the DIY website / blog builder field, and they’ve just gotten a huge vote of confidence from their investors: the company has announced a $20 million Series B round from Luxembourg-based Reinet Fund and plans to use the money to grow both organically and through selected acquisitions (they made a first small one past December when they bought Clickpass).
This is actually the same investor as the $5 million Series A round it raised in November 2007, but then then-called Columbus Venture Capital was recently restructured into Reinet, which is now a listed entity on the Luxembourg & Johannesburg Stock Exchange with over $2 billion in market cap.
Widgets are the most consumer-friendly means toward data portability. Users who want to establish a “centralized me” – whether that be on a blog, personal website or favorite social network profile – often just need a simple way to highlight their identities as maintained elsewhere on the web.
Webjam’s new profile badge is remarkable in how well it enables users to do this. Unlike other badges, which tend to show only basic information (names, headshots, birthdays, etc), Webjam’s badge streams your most recent activity, lists your networks, and displays your friends.
Compare this widget to the profile badges found on other social networks, such as Facebook:
The Facebook and Multiply widgets can be set to point out recently contributed items like photos and posts, but beyond that they’re pretty static representations of one’s presence there.
Surprisingly, MySpace doesn’t even have a profile widget, and it’s an empire built on widgets. The Data Availability initiative appears to be a way to provide widget-like functionality through APIs (see the mockup to the right). Why they’ve decided to skip over embed codes is beyond me.
Other social network sites like Vox, KickApps and Grouply also lack profile badges.
If the smaller social networks (and social networking platforms) are going to compete with the likes of Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect in the long run, they’ll need to beef up their data portability initiatives – and widgets are a good place to start.
Perhaps they could look at the widgets provided by social media sites like Last.fm for inspiration:
Of course, we here at TechCrunch love widgets. Just see below.
London-based WebJam, a community of openly editable personal pages, just raised $2 million from French early-stage VC I-Source Gestion. You can see our earlier coverage here.
WebJam lets you create as many personal pages as you like by using their ajax editor to drop specialized modules onto your page. It’s a little Ning and a little Netvibes or Pageflakes without the open module standards. Default pages start you off with modules for blogs, personal profiles, or personalized start pages. WebJam makes creating or modifying your own page easier by letting you to copy modules or even entire layouts from other WebJam pages to your own page with just one click.
Modules include personal publishing (blog), community (friend lists, bulletin boards…), media (photos, music, rss feeds…), and productivity tools (notepad, search, gmail…). Each of these modules can remain public, visible to friends and registered users, or kept private. Each of these pages also has a community attached to it, which you can invite other users to join. You can use this feature to emulate Ning to a degree by first creating a central group page with the community modules installed, and then inviting friends with profile page modules to join.
A European company called Webjam launches this weekend at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. It is a personal Web aggregation tool with a heavy social networking component.
At first, I thought Webjam was like a fancier Spokeo in that it allows you to customize your profile page with RSS feeds and your personal content from sites like Flickr. On both sites users can share their pages within their network but Webjam takes that function one step further. With Webjam, users can replicate other pages they find within the Webjam network. They can create a new page with someone else’s content and change it however they like.
For example, imagine you find a Webjam page promoting an upcoming movie. You decide you want to share it with your friends but think some of the content is offensive or lame or for some reason not worthy of sharing. If the page is public, you can duplicate that page and now the page becomes yours to change however you want. You can change the color, the layout, the content. You can add movie reviews from another site. It is a new page under your Webjam account with a new URL.
If you create a site you don’t want anyone to edit or duplicate, you can set it as private but Webjam thinks that most people will keep their pages public. After all, imitation is the best form of flattery.
For private use, Webjam is useful if you want to set your homepage to feed various social components such as your sister’s Flickr album or your friend’s recommended Web pages of the day in addition to the standard home page elements. You can easily duplicate those elements of others’ pages into your own home page. As soon as you push Edit, each component of the page becomes a module, or a widget, editable by drag and drop. The only component that is not movable or deletable is, of course, the advertising module.
The pages within Webjam are organized by tags. The founders said that they anticipate people will start to build communities within each tag.
“It’s very powerful because it’s bringing the power of communicating to the next level,” said Yann Motte, co-founder and managing director of Webjam. “Sharing is fine, but so what? We will make people better by allowing them to build on the communities of what Webjam is doing. If you have no clue on how to run a Web site, you can go to Webjam, pick one you like, and just replicated it.”
I didn’t find Webjam to be the easiest site to learn. There are so many tools and functions, which is not a bad thing but it did take longer than most social networking sites to figure out. But the tutorial is well written.
Webjam unofficially launched a week ago but they wouldn’t tell me how many users they’ve had sign up so far. “We want to keep that information to ourselves but we will say that we did not expect to see this many users from the beginning,” Motte said. The company is in the process of completing its first round of funding.
There have been simple, browser-based website creation tools available on the market ever since the WWW turned mainstream, but there’s clearly still a significant demand for this type of services, especially with the way the web is evolving. 
