Passwords are a little bit more secure now that Google added OAuth support to its iGoogle Gadgets. Developers can now use their gadgets to easily grab data from OAuth-enabled APIs. Using OAuth, users do not have to give their passwords to developers. Instead, if a developer wants data from a service, the user enters the password into the service itself, providing the developer permission to access their data. MySpace updates, AOL Mail and Google Book Search are the first gadgets to use OAuth. Finding the MySpace gadget via the iGoogle search is difficult, as there are pages of results...
Where is that friend of mine? Who else likes to go there? Where is that place on the map? It's simple, useful questions like this that location based social network Shizzow aims to answer and the service just opened up today to users outside of beta location Portland, Oregon to now include users anywhere in California. There are lots of location based social networks available, but this one is refreshingly simple. Is that enough to effectively differentiate Shizzow? It's going to have to be, because there's not much else about the service that's unique. Most features are easily reproduced, however,...
Shizzow is a new location-based social service, most similar to BrightKite. The bootstrapped startup is also a side project. The four team members have full-time jobs outside of Shizzow. Webmonkey got together with Shizzow CEO-by-night Ryan Snyder. Read on to find out why he won’t make an iPhone app, Shizzow’s relation to Google Calendar, and that the original name rhymed with “kazoo.” Webmonkey: How does Shizzow compare to other location-based social networking sites like BrightKite, or a platform like FireEagle? Ryan Snyder: We think of Shizzow as much more of a social service than a location-based service. The primary action...
After months of private beta testing in Portland, location-based social network Shizzow has launched in the tech-friendly Bay Area. Now the coffee shop working laptoperati can easily let their friends know whose WiFi they’re soaking up today. Like the location granddaddy Dodgeball, Shizzow is focused on connecting people in real life. To “shout” from a place, you first search for it by name. Shizzow does not let users broadcast an address or city as a location, in contrast to other services, like BrightKite. Your dashboard shows recent shouts from your friends–the users you’ve chosen to “listen” to, a feature similar...
Like many entries in the world of SaaS, Bizroof, a company offering a steadily growing CRM package, practices the art of incremental improvement, a concept popularized by Google, et al., which takes a semi-experimentalist approach to product development. This past July, for example, Bizroof had its official launch, and only a month later implemented support for Yahoo’s location-based service Fire Eagle. This week the company is introducing users to new cash-flow analysis and sales automation tools; a whopper of a bonus for managers seeking that all-in-one fantasy. And users will be content to know that the money management options provided...
We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world. In fact, millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, add a review to Yelp, Tweet about a specific place, or use any of the dozens of geo-aware social...
From FireEagle to iPhone apps that use your current location, everyone it seems is racing to get on the geo-aware software bandwagon. So far most geo-aware features have been opt-in and offer reasonable privacy controls (FireEagle is a good example of this), but Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 plans to offer developers location tools at the operating system level and the company doesn’t seem to think users care about control or privacy. Before you freak out at the thought that Redmond will soon be tracking your every move, keep in mind that the new features will be disabled by default. That’s...
When Yahoo! launched its live video streaming service, Y! Live, to the world earlier this year, it was admittedly an "experiment in live video" designed to elicit feedback from the market. Today, Yahoo! has decided that the experiment has received enough feedback - or perhaps too little. They're going to be closing the service down on December 3. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've remained proponents of live streaming video, claiming more than once that it is "going to be huge." If that's the case, why is Yahoo! pulling the plug on Y! Live so quickly? Sponsor One answer might be the...
Remember Yahoo Live? Probably not. It’s Yahoo’s attempt at doing live video streaming over the Internet. It got some buzz when it launched back in February as Yahoo was the first of the large Internet companies to step into the space. But since then, it’s just lingered in obscurity and today, the company is announcing its death. From the Yahoo Live blog post: Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make...
While Firefox 3.1 will include geo-location support, that version of the browser is still in beta. Until then, you can use the Geode concept extension to your current Firefox 3 software and experience some of location-awareness benefits on your notebook. Geode works with Skyhook's database of WiFi locations and triangulates your general area based on the WiFi networks your device can see. There's certainly a privacy factor here and for some people that will be understandably difficult to overcome. Your IP info and location are sent to Skyhook, but the company doesn't store personalized info; instead, they keep it...
If you've been looking for a tool to connect what you see in your Web browser at any given time with other stuff on the Web and in your social networks, Headup, a new Firefox extension announced yesterday should be something you spend some time with. Headup gives you what could be called the "back story" on people, places and things you see in your browser, unobtrusively and quickly. For example, let's say you're looking at your page in FriendFeed and see an item by someone - who is LouisGray? Click the small yellow plus sign headup adds to the...
Brightkite, a geo-aware social network from the TechStars class of 2007, has given us a peek at the site’s upcoming iPhone application, due to appear in the App Store in the next few weeks (pending Apple’s approval process). Brightkite’s featureset will be familiar to users of similar applications like Loopt. The app allows users to syndicate their current location to their friends, meet nearby Brightkite users, and lifestream with the equivalent of geo-encoded Tweets. The application is tied to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, which allows users to manage their location from a number of other services. The site also uses...
There’s a new phenomenon going on out there in the world of search, and we’re seeing it more and more here at ASE. As we reported with KallOut, search teams are now beginning to forgo the traditional browser-based approach. Where KallOut lets you search using a separate program that tags into any text you’re using on the web or in any MS Office document and gives you the information you want in little bubbles without having to leave what you’re doing, headup, by SemantiNet is out to do something similar. I just spoke with SemantiNet co-founder Tal Keinan last...
