Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
rick446 writes “In late 2009 SourceForge embarked on a plan to ‘reboot’ our developer tools on an open platform including Python, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and SOLR. The result was the Allura platform, and was released under the Apache License in February 2011.” Note: Slashdot and SourceForge are both part of Geek.net.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Snapgoods.com has just rolled out a 2.0 version of their website, improving the usability and interaction. If you recall, Snapgoods is an “acquaintance rental” or “Collaborative Consumption” service, which means you rent your stuff to people you may or may not know but, presumably, they live in your neighborhood. For example, a photographer needs a tripod, a jar of vaseline, and one of those old-timey photo-taking hoods for his DSLR. Instead of going out and buying those things, he can post a request to Snapgoods and receive a rental offer in a few minutes.
The previous version of the site focused on renters offering items to rent. However, there is more back-and-forth with buyers in this version and the interaction has been changed to more of a classifieds model. If you need further explanation think of it as sort of an AirBnB for gadgets. It breathes new life into items that don’t get much use and, as Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got until someone offers you $20 to borrow your air compressor.”
This is not a new idea, but it seems to have struck a chord with creative types unlike, say Neighborgoods.net. The site is popular with photographers and artists in Brooklyn and Manhattan who may need an iPad or a camera for a few hours on a Sunday. The system supports deposits and even includes a new guarantee that essentially says that any renter is safe for up to $5,000 in damages to their goodies.
The company has had two angel roundsone seed round of funding and is working out of a space in DUMBO. The new version is live today and the guarantee is active for all verified accounts. I just rented out my old USB turntable if anyone wants to rip Ladies Of The Canyon from vinyl.
Which bands performed the most gigs, and traveled the furthest, in 2010?
Concert information service SongKick has put together this infographic that shows a mixture of young upstarts like Mayday Parade and household names like Lady Gaga made the list. It’s good to see that at 77 years old, Willie Nelson’s still putting in the hours, playing 161 shows last year.
Click here to see the full size version.
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ChangeWave Research just put out a new report on consumer interest in tablets, and surprise, surprise, the iPad is the number one by a mile.
82% of the 3,091 consumers ChangeWave polled say they want an iPad. The second most interesting competitor? OTHER. Not the Xoom, not the Galaxy Tab, not the Playbook, but something else. Yikes!
At the time ChangeWave did this survey, the Xoom wasn’t out, but it had been announced. Maybe some marketing from Motorola will help?
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The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry.
A “social search” is one that ties a searcher’s social graph to his search queries. With social search, each searcher sees unique results that are shaped by the interests of his social network friends.
Google, not the company to often fudge with the appearance or function of its search results, turned on its version of social search more than a year ago. It has since gone on to more prominently feature social search results and blend them in with regular results.
One should not make light of these changes; they point to the company’s recognition that the average web user, who now spends more time on Facebook, may be not-so-quietly demanding a new form of search.
In fact, Facebook is more than a social network for many these days. It’s the center of our social graph, it’s where we go to find and read the day’s news, it’s how we comment on articles, and its ubiquitous “like” buttons help us refine our interest graphs and are becoming the de facto way for us to voice our approval for nearly anything on the web.
“Likes” have become so significant that they factor into Bing’s algorithm for social search results, and even have a place in Blekko’s human curated search engine. “Likes” also determine popularity: the more “likes” a piece of content or status update gets, the more that item is resurfaced inside and outside of Facebook.
The rise of Facebook and its hold over our attention begs the question, should we still think of search as an explicit query-driven practice? Or, is search in the traditional sense outdated?
Are social networks (or information networks) the new search engine? Or, as Steve Jobs would argue, is the mobile app the new search engine? Or, is the question-and-answer formula of Quora the real search 2.0?
The answer is most likely all of the above, because search is being redefined by all of these factors.
Because search is changing, so too is the still maturing notion of social search, and we should certainly think about it as something much grander than socially-enhanced search results.
The average Facebook user does not say to himself, “I want to search for the most popular stories among my Facebook friends.” No. Facebook does the work for them by crafting a search experience, without search, that highlights content of social relevance.
It’s for this reason that one-off social search engines like Sharetivity are not the future — look at Sentimnt, which has closed down its consumer-facing social search product. A social search engine that requires the user to think about surfacing content from social networks is one that misses the point.
Let’s embrace the notion that social search should be effortless on the part of the user and exist within a familiar experience — mobile, social or search.
What this foretells is a future in which semantic analysis, machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence will digest our every web action and organically spit out a social search experience.
This social search future is already unfolding before our very eyes. Foursquare now taps its massive checkin database to churn out recommendations personalized by relationships and activities. My6sense prioritizes tweets, RSS feeds and Facebook updates, and it’s working to personalize the web through semantic analysis. Even Flipboard offers a fresh form of social search and helps the user find content through their social relationships.
Of course, there’s the obvious implementations of Facebook Instant Personalization: Rotten Tomatoes, Clicker and Yelp offer Facebook-personalized experiences, essentially using your social graph to return better “search” results.
Then, there’s a crop of new startups that dig through the clickstreams of friends, all of which have plans to move into content recommendations.
We’re just now scratching the surface of what’s possible when one’s expanding social graph becomes intertwined with search. But as time goes on, the social search experience will be so fluid — it will seem more like discovering than searching — we won’t even know it’s happening.
Series Supported by SES New York Conference & Expo
The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry. Learn why more than 5,000 brands and agencies from the enterprise level to brick and motor businesses choose SES for their online marketing education.
– How Google & Bing Keep Spam Out of Search
– How Semantic Search Is Redefining Traditional & Social Media
– Why the Search Marketing Industry Must Adapt or Perish
– Why Quora Will Never Be as Big as Twitter
– HOW TO: Use Twitter’s Advanced Search [VIDEO]
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, shulz, and Flickr, PHOTO.WORKS
More About: bing, facebook, Flipboard, Future of Search Series, Google, instant personalization, my6sense, social graph, social search, startups
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