Written on 5th May 2009
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Tweetmeme is a Digg-like site for popular links on Twitter.
Rather than Digg’s however, it ranks tweets based on the number of retweets. The site has risen up the twitter app ranks fast, showing impressive growth and popularity since its relaunch just over two months ago.
Today sees Tweetmeme launch two new services that sees it continue to develop into an effective tool and prime destination site in itself.
The first, login via Twitter OAuth, makes retweeting a breeze by letting you retweet without even having to visiting Twitter.com itself. By simply pressing the retweet button on Tweetmeme.com or partner sites such as ourselves, Tweetmeme will automatically retweet in the background for you. If you fancy testing it out, feel free to tetweet this post but be prepared for it to auto-tweet, there’s no option to edit the tweet before its sent off to your followers.
The second feature is the new Tweetmeme bar.
If you’re anything like me, your sick of them and just want sites to open as normal. The good news is Tweetmeme lets you ensure you never see the bar – if you so wish – via a simple change in settings.
However, despite my initial pessimism, I am rather impressed with the Tweetmeme bar. It’s fast, cleanly designed, you can switch categories of content, stumble to visit other interesting content and above all retweeting is scarily easy.
Although we tend to receive a number of emails from enthusiastic and passionate entrepreneurs, raving about a new release, sadly often it doesn’t live up to the hype. In this case, I’ve got a good feeling it will.
It’s interesting to see that so much attention is going to the iTunes Application store, don’t you think? When ‘experts’ stated that applications, email and games moved to the web, I never imagined something like the Itunes Applications Store to happen with such impact. With Android coming up, we can only expect more potential for application designers, good news! Granted, we discussed a number of amazing applications for the Iphone in the last few weeks but haven’t really touched upon handheld-ready websites here. Reason for that is that the browsing experience on these new handhelds are SO good – We never had the urge to find ‘n list optimized websites for the shiny gadget. When I got my device, I started looking for links to good websites but couldn’t find that much, actually they are hard to find. Here are some applications for you to discover new websites on your shiny gadget, and please while you are at it, leave your favorite mobile website in the comments! (more…)
Do you like looking at photos? Who doesn’t? Especially when they are beautifully made! So far, browsing photos has been quite boring, no matter which photo website you chose. Most of them have a linear browsing style which isn’t fun if you just want to look at pictures (if you browse for other purposes, like finding pictures for your website or buying, then the linear style is more appropriate).
I’m guessing that many readers use StumbleUpon. It lets you browse websites in a random manner and leaves room for plenty of surprises. Last.fm offers the same type of service. People like surprises, right?
Introducing Photoree, the Stumbleupon for photos
Now the same concept is applied to photos by a service called Photoree. The Romanian service was launched in December 2007 and founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Racovitan (other services he established: Colegi.ro – the Romanian version of Classmates.com sold to Neogen.ro, Ghidoo.ro – a social bookmarking service like Reddit, Cafeneaua.com – an online discussion community). He’s one of the Romanian Internet pioneers creating several other services which were among the first in Romania at that time.
The service is bootstrapping so far and has several thousands users a day. But if it takes off more clearly then probably they should look for financing to grow it.
The photo selection
Photoree has a recommendation engine based upon your personal settings. Once you are registered you start rating pictures and the engine starts to learn your taste. It needs about 100 ratings before figuring what you like and don’t like and displays pictures accordingly.
At the time of this writing, it has over 1,000,000 pictures indexed in its database and most of them come from Flickr (using the Flickr API). Almost all are under a Creative Commons license so you could use them if you want. The owner plans to add other images repository sites like Zooomr, PicassaWeb, Devianart and maybe others as long as those sites offers an API.
Open up, please
One drawback of the service is that you can’t do anything unless you are registered. It would be better if they opened up a bit and let people explore without the need to register. They could also implement a cookie or session based recommendation system, which would eliminate the need for registration for that session. This could give a boost to their number of visitors. You know, it’s nice to get a sample of what you might buy..
The selected pictures are very beautiful (most seem to be HDR pictures which not everyone will like). I don’t know why, but during the period of time I had to rate 100 photos (you can’t escape that) only landscapes and women pictures were recommended to me. Is this a universal behavior of the service or the engine just guessed my taste :)? A look at the online forum proves that I was not the only one who was getting this selection.
Nudity can be turned off if you desire and I think they could serve more diversified genres, besides just landscapes and women (could become boring after a while).
Even a 100 votes is not enough
During the learning period the engine keeps notifying you about how many times you have voted (you can skip some photos but the pop-up notifier will show up after a while). After you vote 100 times these notifications hopefully will go away (Oops! Even after 100 votes that pop-up still didn’t go away ot at least to come less often).
I tried to turn off the nudes but it seemed not to work (I also unsuccessfully tried to change the Current Method of showing pictures). Maybe I still have to make up those 100 ratings so I can do whatever I want after that…this rating it’s a bit of a burden, I should be able to browse pictures without any conditions if I want that. After all, it should be fun to get surprises, right? They could have a Surprise Me! page with totally random pictures being shown. Another idea is to display the number of votes I have done in real time on the browsing page so I don’t have to view the Stats page or wait for the notifier to tell me. Now, I’m just thinking about usability. Other than that, the layout is simple and clean. You don’t get lost in tons of options.
The service has very crude social networking options (no profile pics, no personal details, no sharing with friends, no messaging). You can only add a user as a contact. Sometimes the loading can be slow (I don’t know if they use some kind of caching system but if not then they should – caching the next 5 images for example and that requires some kind of prediction calculation based on what the user voted so far).
Make it more viral
Overall, Photoree could be a good service, but it still need some more work to reach the status of StumbleUpon. I hope the developers will improve the site and make it more viral (send a picture or a bunch of pictures to a friend, send emails invites to friends using the address books from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, make it more social, etc). Otherwise, if they don’t move fast enough, somebody else with a better and faster execution could take their place.
Here is Garrett Camp’s keynote from The Next Web Conference 2008. After a short summary of the history of search – from directories, to algorithm, to social networks and social media – and types of search – page, query, image, visual, video, people, product and music – Garrett Camp shared some thoughts on the future:
social search is on a roll
collaborative annotation becomes more important: use tags!
taming the wisdom of the crowds: expertise is more important than popularity.
trust becomes more important than authority. You want to know the people who recommend stuff to you.
As every ambitious web publisher does, I’m trying out some alternative ways to attract more visitors. The most important ways are still to offer great content and strive to address the information needs of readers as much as possible – yet it doesn’t hurt anyone to experiment with the possibilities digital media offers us. Of course there’s the SEO card, for which I gladly refer to Yoast, and then there’s that other popular option, social media.
The long term benefit of Digg
In the early days of this blog, Boris wrote a post about the long term benefits of Digg. Back then, we got a fair share of our visitors found us through Digg. According to Boris, this was caused by two trends:
People use alternative ways of searching, like social media.
Deborah Schultz reported that 61% of your visits go to posts older than a month, presumably through Google and.., social media.
We still welcome around the same amount of visitors via Digg, only the percentage is much lower now (around 1 percent of all referring links from the last thirty days). As you can tell by the screen shot below, this isn’t really impressive. Although there’s a long tail of two pages, these top 5 results give an idea of the number of referrers.
Top 5 Digg articles of the last thirty days
So apart from the frontpage mentions, Digg hasn’t be really useful. The long term benefit is quite marginal.
Well, here’s an alternative
Another service did prove to be very useful when it comes to finding new readers: StumbleUpon. Clicks from this service account for 3,2 percent of all our referring links the last thirty days (by the way, most referrers are other bloggers and Google). In a way, this makes sense, as StumbleUpon is all about discovery. When people want to search, they go to Google, when they want to find popular articles, they go to Digg, yet when people want to discover interesting content, StumbleUpon is the place to go to. Partly because of that, it has been the second most popular social media site the last thirty days (Reddit was no. 1 because we hit the frontpage). Here are the top five results:
Top 5 StumbleUpon articles of the last thirty days
Some more fun facts
For this blog, an article on Digg brings in roughly three times more traffic than on Reddit (10000 compared to 300)
Hacker News is the no. 3 social medium for us, these guys from Ycombinator bring in 3 percent of all visitors who came here via a referrer.
Delicious only accounts for 0.6 percent, even though we got featured in the popular section. It seems like this service is really all about self-reference.
So I hope Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbeUpon, uses Slideshare since he has just summed up all the hot topics of the web in thirty minutes. It was hard to keep track with. No kidding! All the important questions the web community struggles with, were discussed by Camp. This would have been a really interesting presentation for a less tech-savvy crowd, but most people in the audience probably didn’t hear anything new. Although it was interesting to see an overview of the emerging Web 3.0.
So after a short summary of the history of search – from directories, to algorithm, to social networks and social media – and types of search – page, query, image, visual, video, people, product and music – Camp shared some thoughts on the future:
social search is on a roll
collaborative annotation becomes more important: use tags!
taming the wisdom of the crowds: expertise is more important than popularity.
trust becomes more important than authority. You want to know the people who recommend stuff to you.
search will adapt to the device you’re using.
Camp also described the personalization trend. “One-size-fits-all is history”, he said. Google made some first steps with Google Personalized. So the audience wants recommendations, and one way to get those is by asking input from your users – as Wikia Search does. Another way is helping your users create the best query possible by suggesting search terms and sources.
The third option is social search: what are your friends searching for? Which sites do they like? Before Camp climbed the stage we saw andUNITE, and they seem to focus on this social searching by matching your search terms with those of your friends.
The fourth way to get a personal recommendation is collaborative searching, so if you look at the example of andUNITE, the service would then compare your search terms with people you don’t know, but do have similar interests. Thus human intelligence is combined with an algorithm.
I think it’s a pity Camp didn’t talk a bit more about discovery, since that’s what his service is all about: exploring random cool sites. I’m sure he’s a visionary guy, so I hope that the next time he’ll share more of his views on discovery instead of just summing up the latest developments.
Written on 25th March 2008
2 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
From an inside source we’ve heard that Garrett Camp, founder and Chief Architect of StumbleUpon, is preparing a speech on “the Future of Search and Discovery”.
This must be exciting. Think about it for a second, most of the people use the web not even close to its potential. Apart from google and their social network, people have a lot of trouble of ‘what sites to visit’ while surfing.
If you know what you’re looking for, search (Google) is the solution, but what if you don’t know what you’re looking for?
What if you want to be surprised, what if you want to know what is out there, what you can do, see, play or read on the web. The huge success of stumbleupon (compete stats) proves that discovery of new websites and content is an important aspect that is often overlooked when talking about the web. My hunch is that discovery can be at least as big as search, especially if you start in the discovery mode in can switch to search once you’ve stumbled upon a topic or website you’re interested in. (more…)
Written on 5th May 2009
6 COMMENTS 
Tweetmeme is a Digg-like site for popular links on Twitter.
The first, login via Twitter OAuth, makes retweeting a breeze by letting you retweet without even having to visiting Twitter.com itself. By simply pressing the retweet button on Tweetmeme.com or partner sites such as ourselves, Tweetmeme will automatically retweet in the background for you. If you fancy testing it out, feel free to tetweet this post but be prepared for it to auto-tweet, there’s no option to edit the tweet before its sent off to your followers.
Written on 16th October 2008
It’s interesting to see that so much attention is going to the iTunes Application store, don’t you think? When ‘experts’ stated that applications, email and games moved to the web, I never imagined something like the Itunes Applications Store to happen with such impact. With Android coming up, we can only expect more potential for application designers, good news! Granted, we discussed a number of amazing 
Written on 6th October 2008
Written on 19th August 2008
Written on 2nd July 2008
Written on 25th March 2008
From an inside source we’ve heard that Garrett Camp, founder and Chief Architect of 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
