By Invitation Only

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Sam Harrelson has put together a nice post detailing the buzz surrounding the GrandCentral acquisition. Sam discusses the activity with GrandCentral before the acquisition and then after. Once GrandCentral was acquired, Google then locked down the system to new users by making it an invite only service. Because of the acquisition and the move to an invitation only service, the interest in GrandCentral has skyrocketed.

Sam makes an excellent analogy between GrandCentral and the recently launched service, Pownce. Pownce, Kevin Rose’s new startup has become the hot commodity to be invited to. Everyone and their mother is seemingly still trying to grab an invite to the service, although it is not necessarily brand new.

Whats the moral behind this story? If your a Web 2.0 startup, lock down your service. Invite a couple of big name web sites to review your service and give them the ability to hand out a number of invites. Those who read the reviews will then have an opportunity to sign up to your service and in return, invite their friends. You can see where this is going. Although the invitation only technique only works for a prolonged period of time, it is hard to argue against it’s effectiveness. I suppose being part of a locked down community gives users the impression that they are special, that they are among a group of elitists.

I asked my dad if he thought that perhaps there would be some sort of business opportunity surrounding invitations to these new services. Allow people to bid on an invite or pay a low price. My father responded by saying “people won’t pay for something that is free, or that they could obtain by some other means.”

Whatever the case may be, the strategy of being an invite only service in the beginning appears to be a winning one!

Web 2.0 Icons

Ray Cheung recently published a link to a download pack which contains 21 PNG+PSD Web 2.0 icons. The icons were created by ilemoned and miniajax. Application developers or widget developers may find these icons handy as they are crisp and of very high quality. To download the social-media-icon pack, click on the image at the bottom of this post. The following icons are included in this pack.

Blinklist

Blogger

Bloglines

Box

Del.icio.us

Digg

Engadget

Feedburner

Flickr

Lifelogger

Netscape

Newsgator

Newsvine

Performancing

Reddit

Rojo

Rss

Stumbleupon

Technorati

WordPress

Zhuax

Social Media Icon Download Pack

*UPDATE* I know there are quite a few people finding this post via Google. The link to the download pack has been taken off line. After contacting who I believed to be the creator of the pack about the link, I have yet to receive a reply back. In the mean time, please visit a more recent post which contains a link to icon packs similar to the ones that are showcased in this one. 20 Awesome Free Icon Set

My Rant Against Defining Web 3.0

Apparently, web 2.0 won’t be around for as long as 1.0. During a conference held at the Red Herring East building in Boston, panelists gathered around to discuss Web 3.0. According to the panelists, web 3.0 would be a period where users generate content for fervor, not for cash.

The economic structure of Web 3.0 will rely on advertising, said Michael Jones, chief executive of Userplane, a provider of communications software for online communities that was acquired by AOL in 2006. But unlike the scattershot approach of much of today’s online advertising, users will be served Web. 3.0 messages tailored to their interests and location.

“Advertising money is shifting to the Web because of targeting and direct response,” Mr. Davis said. “In the next couple of years you’ll see a big shift.”

Who are these guys to say what web 3.0 will be? Sure, their is the O’Reilly web 2.0 definition which everyone seems to cite as the premiere definition but quite honestly, most people have come up with their own interpretation as to what web 2.0 represents. It’s ok to look into the future, but please don’t define what Web 3.0 will be. For Pete’s sake, let web 2.0 sink in before you begin to mention web 3.0.

Click Here To See My Source Of Frustration

Is IM That Big Of A Threat?

In response to S.M. Schrama’s post on IM Forms A Security Risk To Companies I too believe that, IM should not be stopped on a corporate network. I think the company in question should definitely put together a list of guidelines for using an IM protocol on a corporate network but it shouldn’t be banned. If Pownce is a sign of the future in instant messaging, I don’t think we will have to worry about malicious code attacks via the IM protocol.

Social Networking Land Masses

ValleyWag.Com Silicon Valleys Premiere Gossip SourceOver the weekend, Valleywag posted a pretty interesting graphic which showed which social networks were being used the most (by country) across the world according to Alexa.

According to the graphic, the U.S. primarily uses three different social networking services, Friendster, Myspace and finally Facebook. Myspace seems to be the service of choice for Australians while Canadians prefer Facebook.

What I find interesting about this data is that, some of the social networking services that failed to gain any traction in one country, ended up being cultural icons in others.

Check out the data set including the full image here.

CNN Hops On The 2.0 Bandwagon

CNN Redesigns Their Site With A Web 2.0 LookCNN.com launched their redesigned web site over the weekend. The new site features one-page integrated story-telling, the largest Flash video player of its kind, local coverage, better weather, blog links, commenting, and free live video for breaking news.

Judging by the comments on the BehindTheScenes CNN Blog, quite a number of people do not like the redesign. Not surprising, considering people do not like the idea of change, especially after they have become accustomed to a certain way of seeing things.

The new CNN site definitely has a clean look but I am not too keen on the amount of gray and white used through out the site. I think if CNN wanted to really impress their viewers, they would make CNN an editable start page. Using Ajax and all sorts of other Web 2.0 goodness, CNN could of allowed users to disable or enable widgets which contained different sections of the news. By using this method, CNN probably could of pleased the majority of people by allowing the customization of the main page so that users would only see items that they were interested in. At the very least, they could of created a minimize/maximize feature on the different modules located on the front page. With that being said, I must also add that the video player on CNN is very nice! The video area is large and the quality of the video footage seems to be pretty good.

Visit CNN.com to check out their new design. When your done, come back here and leave an opinion.

Web Script Labs – Ideas Into Scripts

Turning Ideas Into ScriptsWeb Script Labs takes an Ajax loader generator, Favicon generator and a Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator and places them into one, nice location for you to generate some Web 2.0 goodness.

 

The Ajax loading GIF generator provides users with a wealth of different indicators to use as their animation. Aside from the indicator, users can select the background color, whether or not the background will be transparent, the foreground color and finally the speed of the animation. Using the 3D rotation indicator, this is what I came up with.

3D Rotation Indicator

The Favicon generator does exactly that, generates favicons. This particular favicon generator will take any image you upload and turn it into a 16X16 or 32X32 favicon. If you want to create a transparent favicon, make sure you use a .PNG file or a .GIF file. While Photoshop requires you to install a .ICO plugin in order to save images as .ICO files, this generator automatically saves the images in .ICO format. Here is what I created using the 16X16 and 32X32 settings respectively.

16X16 Favicon 32X32 Icon File

Last but not least is the Web 2.0 Domain Generator. This one is fairly simple. Click the Generate button and after watching the flashy ajax loader animation you’ll receive what could be the name of your next startup. On the first try, I ended up with the result of Blognation. However, it appears as though Blognation.com and Blognation.net is taken. My second attempt landed me the name Skita. Skita.com is taken but Skita.net is available. Not sure I like that name anyways.

TAKEN!

There are quite a few generators out on the web if you look hard enough but what I would love to see is Web Script Lab take all of those other Web 2.0 specific generators and lump them into a single page/product. That would be pretty cool. Although most of the generators were created as a joke, some of them are actually quite useful such as the striped background generator and the Web 2.0 color palette generator. Head on over to http://www.webscriptlab.com and start generating stuff!

FaceBook Having Trouble Staying Up

Facebook.comThird party applications may be hammering away at the Facebook API. According to Mashable, Facebook has reportedly gone down for extended periods of time today. Looks to me as if the applications combined with the enormous amount of popularity is causing Facebook to stumble a bit.

As far as I can tell, Facebook is back to normal as I recently created my own Facebook account which can be viewed here Be sure to add me as a friend if you get the chance.

Job Titles 2.0

In the latest issue of PC Magazine there is a list of job titles that were spawned due to Web 2.0 These job titles include:

Chief Evangelist
Head of a company’s sales and marketing team

Virtual World Bureau Chief
Head of a news bureau in Second Life

Brand Champion
A PR person for a particular company’s brand

Senior Interface Hacker
Writer of code to build applications and create user interfaces for podcasts

Web Product Demigod
Creator of open-source content management systems

Online Audience Development Manager
Head of effort to get a company’s site to the top of a Google or Yahoo! search results

I decided to do a little more research to see if I could come up with any more and as it turns out, I did. Here they are.

  • VP of Emerging Media
  • Chief Risk Officer
  • New Media Specialist
  • Chief Diversity Officer
  • Chief Interruptor Officer (Jaffe: This means you.)
  • Instigator
  • Content Analyst

Can you think of anything else to add to this list?