Lat34.com is the latest social network to hit the web. I’m not exactly sure when they went live, but I would assume it was recently. Lat34 is a partnership between AOL and Fusion Entertainment that is a community hub (myspace for xsports)for extreme sports fans. It’s currently in beta and will continue to add new features which will include on-demand video and photos. Looks like a good niche to be into and I’m sure with AOL being behind it, they’ll make a good go at it. That demographic is fickle and will need a lot of coaxing to participate in a AOL community.

Lat34.com

technorati tags: aol, Lat34.com, community, socialnetwork, skateboarding, sports

I just came across this site today and felt the need to help spread the word. Wefeelfine.org has been around since August 2005 and is a exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Go check out wefeelfine.org to see what’s up

technorati tags: wefeelfine.org

Thanks to Lifehacker, they posted the following cool hack. This is great for those of you that can’t get away from the office.

To watch any World Cup game, use the following URL template:

http://espnevent1.espn.com.edgesuite.net/FIFA_June22_Czech.asx

Just change the date when you want, and make the country the home team. So today’s Ghana vs. US game would be:

http://espnevent1.espn.com.edgesuite.net/FIFA_June22_Ghana.asx

I tried this out today for the Brazil vs Japan game. It worked great but it took me a few tries to figure out the country name. It was Japan, not Brazil or Brasil. Another thing I noticed was that there was about a 15sec delay from the tv broadcast.

technorati tags: worldcup, soccer, espn, lifehacker

I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) a while back about Nike and Google joining up to start a social network for Soccer lovers called Joga. Now, it looks like Adidas and Myspace are upto the same thing. Well, except, the adidas soccer page is built within Myspace. They currently have 37,223 on board, as “friends”. That seems kinda low to me. Anyway, if you’re a soccer fan, then you might want to check it out.

technorati tags: adidas, soccer, worldcup, myspace

The relatively new phenomenon of online social networking is exhibiting the behavior that new, Internet-generated activities have exhibited from Day One of the commercialized web: super-fast acceptance and wild growth. Retailers have been particularly interested in social networking as a way to market goods and attract new customers.

Industry leader MySpace.com grew 230% year over year from 15.6 million unique visitors in May 2005 to 51.4 million in May this year, comScore Networks Inc. reports. Facebook.com, a site popular with college students, grew 102% from 6.9 million a year ago to 14 million in May. MSN Spaces sites grew 205% from 3.1 million to 9.5 million.

ComScore is working on compiling numbers for social networking as a category, but has not done so yet. It believes that the growth of the popular sites can be viewed as a stand-in for the category.

“The popularity of social networking is not expected to wane in the near future,” said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. “This is a phenomenon we`re seeing not only in the U.S., but also around the world. The challenge for social networking sites will now be monetization and how advertisers will respond to the global marketing potential of these sites.”

ComScore reports these leading sites in May, their unique visitors (in millions) last May and this May, and change from a year ago:

MySpace.com, 15.578, 51.441, 230%
Classmates.com Sites, 16.968, 14.792 -13%
Facebook.com, 6.964, 14.069, 02%
YouTube.com, N/A, 12.669, N/A
MSN Spaces, 3.140, 9.566, 205%
Xanga.com, 8.397, 7.146, -15%
Flickr.com, 0.923, 5.163, 459%
Yahoo! 360°, N/A, 4.936, N/A
LiveJournal.com, 7.394, 3.904 -47%
MyYearbook.com, N/A, 3.048, N/A
HI5.com, 2.959, 3.013, 2%
Tagged.com, 0.456, 2.078, 356%
Bebo.com, 2.013, 1.752, -13%
43things.com, N/A, 1.586, N/A
Tagworld.com, N/A, 1.293, N/A
Friendster.com, 1.269, 1.083, -15%
Linkedin.com, 0.196, 0.519, 165%
Orkut, 0.113 0.210, 85%

Via Internetretailer

technorati tags: socialnetwork, myspace, community, comscore

Tourb.us, is a great way to keep track of your favorite bands and find out about upcoming shows.

They only have four cities to chose from for now ( Boston, Seattle, Austin and the Bay Area), but i’m sure more will be added soon. The name is pretty cool. Great use of the .us domain. Go to tourb.us and check it out.

technorati tags: austin, seattle , boston, sanfrancico, music, bands

With the World Cup going on right now, and most every country is full of excitement, well, except the USA. So there is no wonder that Joga is climbing the charts. If you’re not familiar with Joga.com you can check my earlier post here. Check out the Alexa stats (from alexaholic)

technorati tags: joga, socialnetwork, worldcup, google, nike

A few weeks a go Josh Kopelman wrote a really popular post on his blog that expressed his concerns about web 2.0 entrepreneurs marketing to too small of an audience.

”A good review in Techcrunch can get a company their first 5-25K beta users very quickly. However, I’d strongly caution entrepreneurs from taking their initial consumer adoption metrics and extrapolating them too far into the future. I believe startups will find it difficult to cross the “Techcrunch chasm” between the Web 2.0 geeks and Mainstreet USA.“

Techcrunch has over 50k readers and he thinks that those 50k + readers are not a “mainstream America audience”. Well, he’s partially right. Those 50k + readers are not your typical casual internet user. That audience, is what I would call, power internet users and early adopters. They are the people who can make or break a product. They are also the best beta test audience, for several reasons, mostly because they are willing to give quality feedback. But, the most important attribute of that groups is that they are influencers. That makes them a very important group of people to market to. If you’re building a new web product or service, that potentially, will have “main stream” appeal, but you don’t have a budget to “blow it out” from the beginning. Then, why not market to that Techcrunch group for a lot less dollars. If you have a good product, they will evangelize for you. If your product is not so good they’ll tell you that also. Either way, I think the best way to launch your new web product is to market to that group of 50k + users. They will add value to your product or service.

technorati tags: marketing, startup, techcrunch, redeyevc, joshkopelman

I was going through some of my old business plans today and was shocked and amazed of how much things have changed in the web world. One section of my business plan caught my attention more than others; Technology. You can read it below.
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3.4 Technology
Our technology investments will be concentrated in four areas, ERP systems for e-commerce fulfillment and business automation, CRM for customer relationship management, profiling, and site customization, site hosting, and Web Design/Development.

Our first phase ERP and CRM technologies are currently being implemented by eQuarius, Inc. in Seattle, Washington. The platforms for ERP and CRM are Great Plains and Onyx respectively. EQuarius is one of the top e-business implementers of both Onyx and the Great Plains products in the country. Both Great Plains and Onyx lie on top of the Windows NT operating system, and both software vendors have very strong ties with Microsoft. The site itself will be hosted on Microsoft’s Site Server platform. Equarius has conducted many successful similar implementations, and the risk of cost overruns due to technical snags is minimal.

The site and all critical applications will be hosted by Futurelink Corporation of Irvine, California. Futurelink will be responsible for all hardware, backups, security, upgrades, and ensuring the proper functioning of all applications. They will maintain a redundant copy of the site at another one of their hosting facilities in Canada. In the event that local conditions have a significant impact on the performance of the California site, the Canadian site will act as a backup.

Our first phase architecture will consist of a hybrid 2-tier/N-tier architecture. Great Plains has developed a series of COM objects enable a robust and cost-effective 2-tier implementation with Site Server. Our initial implementation of Great Plains will make use of these standard objects. Equarius will build an middle tier on the front end of Onyx as part of the Phase I project. Phase II will expand this middle tier to Great Plains. The creation of a comprehensive middle tier reduces the likelihood of site downtime, eases the integration with drop-shippers’ systems and other systems, and speeds up the response time from the consumer’s perspective. Assuming adequate financing, we expect to have this tier in place and tested prior to the Christmas shopping season. We estimate that the total cost for implementing Phase II will range between $500,000 and $700,000. This includes approximately $200,000 for integrating suppliers’ warehouses. This will cover the integration of anywhere from 2-7 warehouses, depending on the state of their existing systems.
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This is definitely one of those hindsight things. If I knew then what I know now, well, let’s just say, I would have done things a whole hell of a lot differently. What were we thinking; ERP, CRM, N-tier architecture. Even then we could have gotten by with much, much less. Today, I could certainly build a robust e-commerce (front and back end) web site for next to nothing. Live and learn.

technorati tags: erp, crm, ecommerce, greatplains, onyx

There is a new music discovery site, appropriately named, musicovery. It looks to be in French but you can easily figure out the functions. First off all, it’s all in flash and looks really nice. Unlike other music players, musicovery shows you a visual reference of what song and band is coming up next and what song will come up later. The sound quality is not so great, I assume because the bit rate is pretty low. However, it’s still pretty fun to play around with. One really cool thing is that they have a slider type bar displaying years from the 50’s – 2000’s. You can pick a specific year or a spread of years and musicovery will play music from that time period. I would love to see a feature like that on Pandora. Overall, like I pointed out before, musicovery is fun to play around with, but it probably want be a daily user.

technorati tags: musicovery.com, music, last.fm