Nebul.us is a new startup focusing on revealing the online activities of users through the interactive visualization of Internet usage patterns in real-time. It aims to become a social site for sharing content with friends (or to the public at large), or a productivity enhancing site for figuring out how one is spending time online.

After installing a browser plugin, the service will start monitoring the browsing history. Typical Web2.0 profiles like Facebook, Twitter, last.fm or YouTube can be added as well to complete the view of online activities (note that the initial setting is set to 'private', and information about visits to individual sites can also be shared with 'friends' or blocked).

The visualization itself consists of a circular donut shape, with online types of media represented as rings, and visits or online service usages mapped as separate bands. The shape and position of these bands represent a standard clock face: the length and position of a band corresponds to the time one visited a particular website or online service. Users can navigate through the content rings and narrow down to a specific day or hour, or a specific web page, song or photo, to discover specific usage patterns, to check how much time they spend on a particular page, or to share any of this content with others.

You can watch an explanatory video below.

See also EyeBrowse for a very similar concept, and probably also Personas if you interested in online profiling.

Thnkx Levi! Via TechCrunch.

One of my favorite bloggers; Alexander van Elsas, has been penning a series of posts having to do with Social Media and People. Today he wrote something that sparked a lightbulb:

Instead, having instant access to information will drive a need for knowledge. A deeper understanding of the inner workings. And where is this knowledge to be found? It won?t be found at Google, or any of the aggregation sites known today. I doubt knowledge can be indexed or queried automatically. Microsoft disagrees, and they just bought Powerset to move into that direction. It can only be found in people. I suspect that having a unique expertise, experience, or a deep knowledge, will become a very valuable asset in this future of instant access.

For a moment let's step back though and look at this whole Social Media movement that is basically taking over the Web. No matter from where you look information is flowing faster than it ever has before, but unlike before, Social Media is being driven by both consumer and content producers. Unlike when Google came out with their secret sauce algorithm called PageRank where the power of popularity is no longer in the hands of content producers. PageRank, in its simplest explanation, ranks a Web site by the number of links that were pointed at it.

Social Media changes all that in that the playing field has been widened to include the very consumers who are visiting those sites and then passing that link to all their friends. With Social Media the consumer's voice is finally being heard as to what is popular rather than the closed world of content producers. Herein lies an idea that could very well make Google's PageRank obsolete or at the very least worth a lot less than it is now.

If we accept the probability that Social Media or its future version, is here to stay then we have to begin looking at the idea that, as Alexander suggests, it is the people - the consumers first and the producers second that are the real indicators of what is popular or important. Now what if some young whippersnapper figured out a way to quantify that popularity index/rank and built a new search engine around it and the Social Media sphere - where does that leave PageRank?

When you have startups like Gnip looking to be the gateway between social media content producers and the consumers of all that information you can begin to see that they would be able to quantify who is getting all the link love on a realtime basis, plus they could create an incredible meta database of content around which any ranking system could be applied against. Where Google updates its PageRank values when they feel like it, something like this Social Media Index would be a realtime beast that changes with every Twitter posting, every blog posting, every FriendFeed posting or any of the many other social media providers or comments made via third party commenting platforms like Disqus.

Granted many here might want to suggest that this is what Technorati does, but I don't agree. It could have; and maybe still can, but it has become a stagnated and aimless service that would need a radical shift in purpose to be able to pull something like this off. Google could do this because they have the power of search, but I would seriously hope they are happy to stick with their PageRank as I don't want them gaining any more power. No - this is an idea for a very smart startup who already might be involved in the Social Media arena.

Where once we had something like Google's PageRank dictating what is popular, something like a Social Media Index would change the game by letting the people decide what is popular. Isn't that the way it should be anyway?

[page rank image via]

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As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data?keyword search?will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns?as the slide above by Nova Spivack implies. Spivack is the CEO and founder of semantic Web startup Radar Networks and is pushing his view that semantic search will help solve these problems. But anyone frustrated by the sense that it takes longer to find something on Google today than it did even a year ago knows there is some truth to his argument.

'Keyword search is okay,' he says, 'but if the information explosion continues we need something better.' Today, there are about 1.3 billion people on the Web, and more than 100 million active Websites. As more people pile on, the amount of information on the Web keeps growing exponentially to accommodate all those seekers, and they themselves feel compelled to put their own personal and social information onto the Web as well.

At a certain point, with billions and billions of Web pages to sift through, keyword search just won't cut it anymore. It's a needle-in-the-haystack problem, with the haystacks just getting bigger and bigger every second.

Spivack explains:

Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google's approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want?the 'needle' you are looking for?may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don't understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.

So how do we get beyond keyword search and Google's PageRank? There are many approaches being tried: social search, tagging, guided search, natural-language search, statistical methods, open search, semantic search, and (way out there) artificial intelligence. They all have their problems. Tags are too messy and inconsistent. Natural-language requires too much computing power, is difficult to scale, and doesn't deal with structured data well. Semantic search is perhaps the most promising, but it essentially requires every single Webpage to be re-written.

Spivack covered these issues during a presentation earlier this month at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. It was one of the clearest explanations of the semantic Web I've heard so far (I've embedded his full slide show below). The semantic Web is nothing more than a set of standards that, if broadly adopted, would help computers extract meaning from the flood of data on the Web. But instead of a brute software approach, it puts intelligence into the data. 'All you need to use that data is carried by the data itself,' says Spivack. Dumb software, smart data. That is an approach that scales no matter how many billions of Web pages are created.

The point, says Spivack, is:

To do for data what the Web did for documents.

You are turning the Web into a database, and your data becomes a part of it. Your data becomes part of the worldwide database. The semantic Web will let you move from data record to data record, just like you go from Web page to Web page.

There are many obstacles to the adoption of the semantic Web, but its goals are something worth striving for. What is certain is that search needs to evolve, and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft with it. Of course, they can adopt whichever approach or combination proves most effective.

The question is: Will they, or are they too wedded to keyword search to move beyond it?

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Making social networks work inside companies is a difficult task. Who wants to update their 'status' to tell everyone what they are working on, or have to tag things manually? We'll do that for our friends on Facebook, but for our co-workers on the terrible 'knowledge management' system the company installed? Not so much.

But the space is hotting up. BEA Systems launched a social network for enterprise platform recently and Oracle's AppsLab is working on a social network internally. But much of the intelligence in the system requires employees to so the heavy lifting, which is boring.

So at Web 2 Expo this week, Trampoline Systems, the UK-based enterprise startup, launched its new Sonar Dashboard tool designed to be a ?Facebook for the enterprise?. This allows employees to create profiles, watch a news feed of colleagues' activity and use a contacts list. Dashboard automatically tracks employees? everyday work activity, such as email. Their Sonar Server product analyzes the social graph, information flows and expertise hidden within the company, allowing users to work out who in the company can help them, across departments and geographies. Sonar Dashboard makes the network searchable, and gives visibility to the right people via a simple visualization tool that maps the user's social graph. Users can completely control what they share (the system automatically filters out blatantly personal material) and also lets them work out what they themselves are most preoccupied with. I haven't seen a product like it so far and the visualization tools are pretty amazing. See TechCrunch UK for a longer review. Trampoline raised $6.8 million from Tudor private equity.

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It's my own damn fault. I should have never listened to Mike. This morning I installed Twhirl on my desktop in a failed attempt to keep up better with Twitter and Friendfeed. I was hoping it would help me manage the never-ending flow of information from those two services?which, I admit, I've been increasingly ignoring. Instead, it took over my desktop and I couldn't make it stop (see image above).

Twhirl solves one problem (the need to constantly visit the Twitter and Friendfeed Websites), only to create another one (information overload that clutters your desktop). I'm sure there is some setting I could change to fix the issue, but this highlights a bigger problem with the Web today. There is too much to pay attention to and not enough ways to reduce the noise. Even Robert Scoble, the biggest Twitter whore on the planet who follows 21,000 people and receives one Tweet per second, can't deal with it anymore.

And it is not just Twitter. Lifestream aggregators like Friendfeed are supposed to make things simpler by consolidating the activities of everyone you know across the Web into one single view. But every day a new lifestream aggregator pops up to the point that it's gotten to be ridiculous. Now, desktop utilities like Twhirl and Alerty Thing are taking these services out of the browser so that they are always on your desktop.

But if you think it is hard enough to keep up with e-mails and instant messages, keeping up with the Web (even your little slice of it) is much worse. Putting Twhirl on your desktop and hearing the constant 'ding' of new messages coming in will make you realize that this is IM on steroids. (You will quickly turned off the sound).

Bringing all of this Web messaging and activity together in one place doesn't really help. It reminds me of a comment ThisNext CEO Gordon Gould made to me earlier this week when he predicted that Web 3.0 will be about reducing the noise. (Some say it will be about the semantic Web, but those two ideas are not mutually exclusive). I hope Gould is right, because what we really need are better filters.

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don't have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits.

So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help. We all do.

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I'm waiting for Facebook chat to become enabled in my profile, which gives me some time to think about what exactly I'm waiting for here. And, honestly, instead of being excited about a new feature, I feel kinda dumb.

The thing is, Facebook chat is not new in any sense of the word; it's just trying to convert you and pull you away from other similar services - Twitter, instant messaging - by leveraging the fact that Facebook has a lot of users. It's happening all the time: services often offer the same set of features in a slightly different package, but the real progress is nowhere to be seen.

Chat is actually a really good example. In the last couple of years, I remember reviewing chat widgets, web-based instant messengers, Twitter and its many clones, and now I'm waiting for Facebook to descend from the heaven and bring usâ?¦yet another web-based instant messaging/chat service.

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man, but none of these really bring anything new to the table. Those of us who were online in the early 90ies have fond memories of a chat application (protocol, to be correct) which is still, by far the best and most fully featured way to chat online. I'm talking, of course, about IRC - Internet Relay Chat.

IRC is, for some reason, almost abandoned nowadays. It's a place to get obscure warez; a mess of channels with weird names, filled with bots, fserves, and the occasional quiz bot for killing time while you wait for something to finish downloading. I visit it because it still feels like home, but in most cases, there's no one to chat with there anymore. We've replaced IRC with other stuff, mentioned above, and moved on, but have we made any real progress in the process? I, for one, think we've actually regressed.

I've got nothing against Facebook chat. But, the fact is, it's just another service that does the same thing as hundreds of other chat/IM services before it. It's just another application I'll have to get used to. Sure, the connection between good old IRC and Facebook's chat might seem far fetched, but the fact is they're not all that different - except that IRC is way more advanced. Are we trying to create innovation where innovation isn't needed? Are we wasting time trying to think of new ways to do the same old things? Sometimes, it really feels that way.

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Launching in Alpha today is Zemanta, the European startup which has developed a facility for Wordpress blogs to suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using an internally developed semantic analysis engine. Eventually they will also integrate tabs for third parties who provide vertical-specific suggestions (tech or SEO, for instance). The upshot? Start writing a blog post and Zemanta looks at it and then starts to add the most likely links to the text, which you can then edit (something a lot of bloggers would kill for no doubt). It also builds links to related stories. This kind of application exists a lot in academic and enterprise content management systems but hasn?t appeared on the Web very much to date as these tend to be very CPU/resource intense technologies. So Zemanta is a web service API not unlike Akismet in its ability to look intelligently at content and decide what to do with it.

You can now download a demo which works with Firefox and TypePad, Wordpress and Blogger. It's in alpha material, so don't expect it to be full-formed.

The Zemanta team emerged out of Slovenia and took part in Seedcamp (a London-based Y-combinator-style incubator) last year and was one of the six selected for funding. They recently announced a $1.5 million seed round, led by Eden Ventures with additional investment from Saul and Robin Klein through The Accelerator Group. The co-founders are Andra? Tori and Bo?tjan ?peti?, both hyperactive, smart young guys who I met at Seedcamp last year. They have since brought in an experienced CEO in the shape of Ale? ?peti?, a former O'Reilly author and CEO of an IT integrator in Slovenia. As it happens, the Zemanta story is quite typical of the European startup scene right now - very 'London meets New Europe'.

Zemanta Wordpress Plugin Teaser from zemanta on Vimeo.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It's my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well.

Why? Because it's focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It's one of the best places to find information on startups we haven't heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Like Digg and Reddit, users submit stories to the site, and others can comment and vote on them. But Hacker News is also a forum of sorts, where users can simply post questions for others to answer - see this one asking for advice on creating a demo video for a new startup. Popular stories and questions move to the home page over time.

Hacker News used to be called Startup News and was launched in February 2007 by Y Combinator. They say 'the most important goal of news.ycombinator was to create a place where founders and would-be founders can meet and talk.'

Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won't be lost.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

There are a bazillion social network aggregators out there (Mike attempted to round up some of the most notable ones here). FriendFeed is the most visible of them all for two main reasons: it was founded a group of ex-Googlers and, as a consequence, benefits from a clean and easy-to-use design.

But FriendFeed's going to have some serious competition from a TechStars startup called Socialthing!, which makes it even easier to get an overview of what your friends are doing on the web.

Socialthing! officially goes into private beta today and will let in the first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who use the invitation code 'TechCrunch' to sign up (you'll have to wait a few days to get your account, however). The service primarily differs from FriendFeed in the way it determines which of your friends to track. While FriendFeed actually requires users to create their own list of friends on FriendFeed, Socialthing! realizes you probably don't want to create yet another list of your friends. So instead of asking you to do more work, it automatically detects who your friends are on the social services to which you belong.

The distinction may sound inconsequential but Socialthing!'s method actually makes things a lot easier, both for initial set up and for longer term maintenance. When you sign up for Socialthing!, you only have to provide it with your credentials to sites like Facebook and Pownce. And as time goes by, you don't have to worry about setting up new friends on the service because it will automatically know that you've become friends with people elsewhere. In contrast, FriendFeed requires you to both explicitly designate friends during the initial configuration (either one-by-one or through Facebook/Gmail importing) and manually add new friends over time.

Another benefit Socialthing! has over FriendFeed is its focus on allowing users to send data back to social services (if you want to respond to someone's tweet, for example, you can do so directly from Socialthing!). On the other hand, FriendFeed is all about reading data from services but not about writing it back.

While FriendFeed generally takes more effort, its approach does have unique advantages. You can follow friends of friends on FriendFeed and see updates from services that you don't personally use, all because FriendFeed users have more independently-defined presences. FriendFeed also supports a wider range of services than Socialthing! (28 vs. 11, although Facebook updates are noticeably lacking from FriendFeed). Time, however, should narrow the gap.

In the end, whether FriendFeed succeeds more than Socialthing! will depend on whether people are looking for another community or just a way to easily track their existing ones. I suspect the latter will be the case.

What if a search engine knew who your friends were and delivered results based on their actions and content across the Web? Today at the DEMO conference, an Israeli startup called Delver (formerly Semingo) is coming out of stealth and announcing its upcoming launch as a semantic social graph search engine.

Delver is attempting to solve two key search-related problems. The first is that current search engines do not take into account the identity of the searcher. For example, a teenager and a senior citizen performing the same query will get exactly the same results. The second is that current search engines do not allow users to search for information created and referenced by their own social graph. This is an important point because, let's face it, social networking doesn't offer much functional value beyond allowing people to connect with one another. The fact that you have 300 friends on Facebook, 200 on MySpace and 100 connections on LinkedIn doesn't actually help you locate information. This is where Delver comes in. Search for 'New York,' and the results that will pop up will be blog posts from people you know that mention or are about New York, or Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, and the like.

The technology, which has been in development since 2005, combines search technologies, semantics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Delver begins by crawling the Web in order to map users' social connections. The information it finds on social networking profiles, blogs, bookmarks, photo and video-sharing sites is then cross-linked to the searcher's social graph, which is built on-the-fly. Delver then prioritizes its results based upon the searcher?s social graph, thereby improving the relevancy of the results. Since every person's social graph is unique?much like a fingerprint?the same Delver query will produce significantly different results for each person?as reflected through the collective experiences of each person's contacts.

Using Delver doesn't require users to sign-in, they can just enter their names (and some additional identifying details such as city, in the case of a common name). An email address will also allow Delver to leverage the popular social networks to locate users' social graphs.

Registered users can claim their profile and authenticate the sources they want to associate with. This means that if I provide the username and password of my Flickr account, Delver considers this account to be mine and will not allow any other user to claim it. Placing authentication aside for the moment, users can indeed claim to be other people. The information Delver crawls is public so there's no privacy issue here. There is also no real benefit to users who would do such a thing, in fact, it would be rather pointless. For example, I can Delver Michael Arrington's social graph, but that would generate results that are relevant to him and not to me. However, as mentioned above, Arrington can easily claim his profile and that would be the end of that.

Founded in June 2007, Delver is currently based in Herzelia, Israel and is due to open a US office in the spring. The 20-strong team is headed by Liad Agmon who was co-founder and CTO of Onigma, a security company in the Data Loss Prevention space, and sold to McAfee less than two years after inception for $20M.

Delver will launch its private beta in March and we will make sure TechCrunch readers will be among the first to take it out for a spin.

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We've been looking at different ways of using video in relation to startup reviews. I've always told people pitching us that they should absolutely have an embeddable demo video because a demonstration speaks louder than any wordsâ?¦and they cant be edited and spun by us either. Another way of using video is for a direct to camera elevator pitch. Here's a few new startups pitching to camera as part of a small scale test. If you like the idea of direct to video elevator pitches, or hate it, let us know in the comments. I'd note that direct to camera like this is very raw, and hence they're not that polished, so try not to be too hard on those featured.

Blogonize

This is one very good looking hosted blogging solution that competes with Wordpress.com and TypePad. The founder is 16 as well:

(moreâ?¦)

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A heated debate between bloggers is currently taking place regarding a recent issue involving my good friend and fellow photographer Lane Hartwell.

Here's the backstory, earlier this month local a cappella group The Richter Scales created the video 'Here Comes Another Bubble', which makes fun of Web 2.0 and includes photos of many well-known people involved with Web 2.0. The problem is that they made no attempt at contacting the photographers regarding use of their photos and they didn't include any photo credits, either on the video or their website.

Lane Hartwell noticed that they had used a photo she took of Owen Thomas for Wired and contacted The Richter Scales. They added a credit to the YouTube description for the video, however they claimed the photo was covered under fair use, not a violation of her photo's copyright. Unhappy with their response and how they handled the situation, Lane contacted YouTube and had the video taken down for copyright infringement.

Last Friday Lane did an interview with Lewis Wallace for Wired and after the article was posted, the issue exploded online. Many bloggers are attacking Lane, saying that it is a 'fair use' issue and that she spoiled their fun by having the video taken down, others are defending her rights to protect her photography and still others as saying that if she puts her photos online, then they are fair game. One of the main questions yet to be resolved is if this was a clear 'fair use' issue or not. Hopefully some lawyers who specialize in this area will address this specific issue. [UPDATE: Attorney Jason Schultz posted his thoughts on the issue.]

Lane is currently in negotiations with The Richter Scales regarding this issue, which is why she hasn't made a full statement, but she has posted a brief update to her blog.

Here's more coverage of the issue from Shelly Powers, Brian Solis, Eric Rice, Tara Hunt and Derek Powazek.

Lane has had a long history of her photos being used with out permission or credit and recently she quit her day job to become a full-time photographer, so this is now her livelihood. Because of the problems she's had, Lane recently made her entire Flickr photostream private.

Side note: I've had my own fair share of problems with people using my photos without permission or giving credit, including recent issues involving local newspaper San Francisco Examiner and startup ZingFu.

UPDATE 1: Jack Schofield decided fact checking was no longer necessary when he wrote about Lane on the Guardian Unlimited Technology blog, saying that Lane was going to sue The Richter Scales. To clear up the additional confusion caused by his post, Lane to posted an update confirming that there is no lawsuit.

UPDATE 2: Tara Hunt wrote a great follow-up post to clear up some of the rumors and mis-information that has been spreading around this issue.

UPDATE 3: Lane has just posted her statement regarding video dispute.

People have asked me why I?m taking this action. When I find someone using my work without my permission, I ask them to remove it or pay a fee. They usually remove it and we are finished. The band did not remove the image from the video when I brought it to their attention and instead they told me they had the right to use it. They could have easily apologized, removed the video from YouTube and re-edited without my image and reposted.

UPDATE 4: Here's Derek Powazek's excellent write-up on the situation, including his take on Collaborative Media and ethics.

UPDATE 5: A new TechMeme thread is forming on the issue, based on Lane's recent statement.

UPDATE 6: Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Samuelson Law, Technology, & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law School and former EFF attorney, posted his thoughts on the legal aspects of this issue, specifically as it relates to 'fair use'.

It's only been about a month since Google launched OpenSocial, its development platform for social networking applications. But already developers are frustrated with how half-baked the whole thing is. Russ Whitman, the founder of MediaPops, a startup that launched at TechCrunch 40, reports to us in an e-mail:

While we were initially very excited, we have learned the hard way just how limited the release truly is. My dev group has been discussing the issues in the Google forum trying to figure out how to build our service through OpenSocial. From our experience its not even a beta platform. The concept of 'write once, distribute broadly' is not accurate and core functionality components are missing.

Its clear we are pre-Beta at this point, with Google telling developers they are hoping to launch 1.0 early next year. Any company hoping to leverage Open Social as a means to grow its user base similarly to the Facebook growth model will need to wait at least until February to get started, if its ready then. In the end my hope is that Open Social becomes more than just hype to compete with Facebook.

In our opinion the fundamental problem lies in the core value of Open Social - it's a unique partnership between Google, Containers/Hosts, and Developers. Getting all on the same page is going to be a ton of work. The opportunity is clear, but the path to get there will be difficult for sure. We remain excited about the vision, but are disappointed with the current state of the union. It's clear that they announced too soon, and clearly Open Social is NOT Open for Business. (sigh)

Whitman is not alone in this assessment. Even as Google was preparing to launch OpenSocial, back when it was codenamed Maka-Maka, developers were telling me that Google needed 'more time' and that the launch was 'a challenge for them.' More recently, here is a developer thread on Google Groups about the problems with the 'write once, run anywhere' part of OpenSocial. And just last Friday, Google quietly acknowledged how much work it still has to do to get OpenSocial up and running in a meaningful way when a Google employee posted this lengthy to-do list on Google Groups titled 'What's up with OpenSocial?'

The post is an attempt to address developer concerns. But it is clear from the laundry list that Google has a long way to go before OpenSocial can be taken seriously. The post addresses issues with security, navigation, privacy, basic user-interface features, standardizing profiles across all apps, timing of the more-baked 1.0 launch, versioning, API specifications, and the lack of an application directory. Google has yet to determine such basic things as 'what features a container supports' (container is Googlespeak for a site that hosts OpenSocial applications), standards for passing data between profile and canvas pages, or even how to reserve a name and URL for an OpenSocial app.

Given all the uproar around Facebook's Beacon project and how it sends data about members willy-nilly across the Web, Google should make sure it doesn't fall into the same trap as well. Might as well add it to the list.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

A New York City-based startup called Snooth just raised $1 million in angel financing, on top of an earlier $300,000 round. Snooth is a social wine recommendation site that lets you search for more than 300,000 different types of wine. It has 1.9 million reviews, both professional and drinker-generated. Hic.

You can see what wines your friends have reviewed, or send recommendations directly to them. The site also offers recommendations through collaborative filtering techniques, and there is a Facebook app as well. The way the site makes money is by hooking you up with about 600 (going to 1,000) online wine merchants nationwide on a pay-per-click basis. Competitors include WineLog, TasteVine, Vinorati, and the very 1.0 WineSearcher.

The site Launched in June, and is getting between 200,000 and 250,000 unique visitors a month, says founder Philip James.

I gave the site a quick run-through and like the Ajax interface. There are sliders to narrow your search by price and vintage. And there is natural-language search, so it knows what a 'spicy cab' means. The ratings for wines I know seem to be on the money. (Okay, I only tried three). Check it out and tell us what you think in comments.

Here is the press release.

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Protesting on college campuses is back. The object of this generation's rebellion? Traditional jobs. In an era of widespread disenchantment with the often bureaucratic, scandal-ridden world of big ...

Not so fast, Mike. The anti-Facebook coalition piling onto Google's OpenSocial platform does not constitute checkmate for Google just quite yet. These are developer announcements. No actual consumers have changed their social networking habits because of OpenSocial. Facebook still has all the momentum with consumers (and, thus, with the developers who want to reach them). It can afford to wait and see how this whole OpenSocial thing plays out.

It just cannot wait too long before deciding its next move. And the very best move may very well be, as you suggest, Mike, to join the coalition itself. (Not that Google has asked it to). Otherwise, it risks becoming the Apple of the social networking world (the old Apple of the 1980s, which always offered a nicer, more controlled experience than Windows, but ceded application momentum). Because if apps are easier to develop for OpenSocial, and those apps can be spread across all the OpenSocial partner sites (including MySpace) in a write once, run anywhere fashion, developers will end up writing for both OpenSocial and Facebook. And if their OpenSocial apps start to gain more traction because they have more functionality, they may just start to put those Facebook projects on the back burner. (With OpenSocial, for instance, full applications can run on members' profile pages, whereas on Facebook there are substantial restrictions on what developers can do on those profile pages).

Facebook may have started the ball rolling, but OpenSocial could very well win over developers rapidly. As Marc Andreesen, whose DIY social network startup Ning is an anti-Facebook coalition member, puts it:

Open Social ' by making this exact same kind of opportunity available to any other social network or container and every app developer and site on the web, in an open and compatible way ' will prevent Facebook from having any kind of long-term proprietary developer lock-in. Developers will easily write to both Facebook and Open Social, and have every reason to do so ' in fact, 100+ million reasons to do so.

If you're Facebook, you'd probably prefer to have that proprietary lock-in, and so this announcement may not make you that happy. However, all is not bad for Facebook, because a big part of what's happening today is market expansion, and Open Social will definitely help fuel market expansion, which is in everyone's interest, including Facebook's.

Finally, note that Facebook can easily support Open Social any time they want. They probably won't do so right away, but in the long run, it will probably be a no-brainer for them, because then they will pick up whatever Open Social app developers who aren't also Facebook developers.

Make that much more than 100 million reasons. MySpace alone had 107 million unique visitors globally in September (compared to 73.5 million for Facebook), according to comScore data (see table). Six Apart had 39 million, Hi5 had 35 million,and Bebo had 20 million. There is some duplication there, but you get the idea.

Joining OpenSocial could actually be a brilliant move for Facebook, especially if it can become the advertising network of choice for social apps. If Facebook can make it easy for Facebook developers to port their apps elsewhere and power those apps with Facebook ads, why wouldn't it do so? Checkmate, indeed.

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If a Facebook application supporting Stephen Colbert can get 1 million members in nine days, then perhaps Save An Alien, an Israeli Facebook-only startup, can reach their goal of 10 million users in six months.

I sure hope they do, anyway. Otherwise a bunch of cute little aliens are going to die.

The plot line is straightforward: a meteor is going to strike an alien planet in six months and kill the entire population (10 million aliens, each uniquely generated by an algorithm). We're asked to adopt these aliens. When you've selected the one you like, you adopt it and the alien is transported to safety in Antarctica. You can then do a few other things - download images of it, use a tool to add images of your alien into your own photos, etc.

And if you really like your alien you can buy a tshirt with it on it. I imagine other revenue generating merchandising opportunities may be thought up later, too.

Good idea. We'll see if people's altruistic tendencies extend to fictional aliens. If they do, this company could make a few dollars along the way. 14,000 aliens have been saved so far, so go do your part (or perhaps donate your time and money to a real charity instead).

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