Author: Sarah Perez

If you haven’t yet heard of Chatroulette, the webcam shuffle site that connects you with random people from around the world, then it’s time to crawl out from under that rock where you’ve apparently been hiding. This viral sensation, created by a 17-year-old Russian programmer, lets you flip through video chat sessions with anonymous strangers using a simple interface that anyone can master. You may end up having engaging conversations with someone thousands of miles away or you may connect with a curious voyeur like yourself, but you’re just as likely to come across the oddballs, the freaks, not to mention the downright disturbing.

Yet despite its weirdness, Chatroulette brings back an element of fun and surprise to vastness of the Internet, where social networks of friend lists and avatars has remained the norm for years on end. And now, thanks to the site’s popularity, the Chatroulette clones are beginning to appear.

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Dubbing the sites below “clones” implies that they’re unoriginal knock-offs. That wouldn’t be fair, actually. Instead, the sites and services, for the most part, represent those that have taken the inspiration of Chatroulette and what it allows for and have cultivated that into a new type of service – a niche service, a text-based chat, a funny web collection of imagery – that serves a select audience’s needs.

The Clones

Case in point: JayDoe and Zypyo, Chatroulette-type services created in response to this request from a Reddit community member who asked for a service designed just for fellow “redditors,” as members of the social news website call themselves. (Side note: Hilariously, Zypyo’s creator found that, despite the request for a “mature” version of Chatroulette, Redditors still wanted to see, well, more than just each other’s faces.)

Next up there’s CamCarousel, dubbed a “better Chatroulette clone” by its creator, Ralf Rottmann. Meant to be more as a proof-of-concept at first – an example of how to build an app using Adobe’s Flex platform – the site began to grow as soon as he launched it on its own domain, Camcarousel.com. He’s now considering open-sourcing the app and adding support for white-labeling, themes and premium accounts.

The Text Bots

Then there are the Chatrolette-like text bots like SomeoneRandom and Omegle.

Omegle is another Chatroulette-like text clone, but one that actually preceded the videocam site created by the Russian teen. This text-only chat site launched in March 2009 and touts itself as a place to “talk to strangers!” Also created by a teen, this time Vermont native Leif Brooks, Omegle may now gain more attention thanks to Chatroulette. A plus for this one: Omegle has an iPhone app for random connections on the go.

Another recent creation is text bot SomeoneRandom. Just add the account [email protected] on Yahoo! Messenger or [email protected] on Jabber clients. Send out a message (like “hello!”) to the bot to initiate a chat session with a random stranger. To end the session, type “bye.”

Popjam is a text-based random chat app that takes the conversation to Facebook by way of a Facebook application. However, as ReadWriteWeb blogger Dana Oshiro argues on her personal blog, chat services like Popjam and others miss the point of Chatroulette. Where the webcam-sharing site is boldy exposing people to each other’s real selves, chat site users are still able to hide their faces. That’s something that speaks volumes about our modern age. “I cannot help thinking that there is an entire generation who is fearless in the face of an anonymous crowd,” writes Dana.

The Spin-Offs

Finally, there are the spin-offs, like Catroulette, for example. This blog isn’t so much about real-time connections, though, just pictures of you and your cat. But don’t worry, it can still get weird, which, let’s face it, is the whole point.

And this is only the beginning, folks. Advertisements on various job boards have developers calling out for coders who can build Chatroulette-like sites or who are interested in buying ones that already exist. Prepare yourselves: the Chatroulette clones, variations and spin-offs will soon be upon us. Even Chatroulette itself is giving way to niche sites built around its service, like the MissedConnections site dedicated to those looking for romance via the webcam service.

Will any of the Chatroulette send-ups gain the notoriety and user base of the webcam-surfing oddity, though? Likely not. There’s something to be said for being the original, and, if nothing else, that’s exactly what Chatroulette is. And it’s a weird, odd, but addicting and wondrous original, at that.

Chatroulette image via flickr user wwwes

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ReadItLater, the company behind the Web browser add-ons and mobile applications that let busy Web surfers mark articles for later reading, has just released a new service that will make it easier for you to finally catch up on your saved items. Before, as you browsed the Web (either via desktop or mobile), you could use ReadItLater to accumulate a list of items you didn’t have the time for at the moment. This was especially helpful for when you came across longer, thought-provoking articles – the kind you really wanted to sink your teeth into by devouring them word-for-word.

Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy – perhaps too easy – that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you.

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Digest: Imposing Order on the Chaos of Unread Items

ReadItLater’s creator Nate Weiner calls the new Digest “Read It Later with a brain.” Instead of being presented with a simple list of headlines as you were before, the Digest organizes all your articles and groups them into topics.

Its layout is somewhat reminiscent of Feedly, the popular start page made up of your Google Reader RSS feeds and Twitter posts. Like Feedly, which organizes topics by Google Reader folder names and tags, the Digest also employs a categorization system of sorts. The difference is, in ReadItLater’s case, that filtering and organization is performed automatically with no extra effort required on your part.

Articles you saved about the latest gadgets would end up in one section, for example, and those about politics would end up in another. Even if you’re typically focused on just one topic – like, let’s say technology – the Digest is able to break down those similar articles by sub-category.

Case in point – my digest. All the articles are focused on tech but are broken up into categories like “mobile,” “Apple,” “business,” and “advertising.” The sorting algorithm slips up a little though and creates one page of “Technology” articles – well, that would be all of them, wouldn’t it? It also oddly categorizes a CNet article about Google Buzz’s privacy issues under “advertising.” Still, even with these small misfires, this new organized homepage – like a personal TechMeme of saved content, makes it much easier to know where to begin attacking your long list of unread items.

Interacting with Articles and other Features

When you click on an item to read it, it pops up in a separate overlay window on the screen. Options at the top let you see “more” or “less” of the article or you can click “original” to be redirected to the website where the article was first posted. And as before, you clear an item off the list by clicking the check mark.

Other Digest features include an “edit topics” option that lets you create your own categories and a sharing feature that allows you publicize your digest for others to read.

Future Plans: ReadItLater for iPad and Premium Services

For now, the Digest is free for all beta testers on a first-come, first-serve basis. However, in a few weeks, the new Digest option will transform into a subscription-based premium service. Those who use ReadItLater’s free service will be presented with just a simple list of headlines as before while the Digest will only be available to subscribers. Pricing for the service will be announced in the coming weeks.

Weiner says this represents “a very good taste of what to expect from ReadItLater on the iPad,” hinting at the service’s future offering for users of Apple’s highly anticipated slate computer.

Those interested in beta testing the Digest feature can sign up at http://readitlaterlist.com/digest to try the new service for themselves.

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Have you ever wanted to sync your Google Buzz “status updates” from Google’s new social networking service over to the popular microblogging network Twitter? At launch time, that isn’t possible using Buzz’s interface. It doesn’t allow you to sync your native Buzz posts to Twitter manually or automatically and you can’t reply to others’ Buzz updates via Twitter, either. However, there are a couple of new third-party tools that at least tackle the first part of the part of this problem – syncing Buzz updates to Twitter.

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1) Buzz2Twitter

The first tool we discovered (and one I use myself) is a web app from the creator of Reader2Twitter, the tool that automatically syncs Google Reader Shared Items to Twitter. His new Buzz sync service, Buzz2Twitter, uses the pubsubhubbub protocol so that the synchronization between the two services occurs in real-time. However, in our tests, there were some delays which the developer attributed to the particular pubsub hub he was using at the time.

The other features of Buzz2Twitter include:

• The ability to bind your bit.ly account to the service for link shortening
• The ability to format your synced tweets

For a longer review of Buzz2Twitter, check out Louis Gray’s post.

2) Buzz Can Tweet

The second service we came across that allows for Buzz to Twitter synchronization is Buzz Can Tweet. This service takes a slightly different approach than Buzz2Twitter. Instead of syncing the exact text from your Buzz update over to Twitter, Buzz Can Tweet syncs your Buzz post with a link that directs your Twitter followers back to your Buzz update itself. This is especially handy for Buzz posts that are longer than the allowed 140 characters available in Twitter. If you’re looking to encourage more discussion over on your Google Buzz profile, this may be the tool you want to chose.

In addition to bit.ly integration, Buzz Can Tweet offers a few more customization options, too, including:

• Selective tweeting – that is, only tweet buzz with keyword #twitter (customizable)
• Exclude text after keyword (customizable)
• No link back to Buzz when under 140 characters (customizable)
• Access settings via the control panel.

Those are the only two services we’ve found so far that integrate this often-requested functionality with Buzz. In the future, the Google Buzz team plans to offer Twitter synchronization as an option, but for now, they have to focus on bug-fixing and design issues. When all the glaring issues have been addressed, they can then worry about adding new features. (In other words, it may be a while!)

If you’ve tried either of the services above, let us know about your experiences in the comments.

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Do you like social aggregation and tracking services like FriendFeed, Google Buzz and Cliqset? If so, there’s another startup launching today that wants your attention: Strings. This service is focused less on social content sites like flickr and YouTube (although supported) and more on traditional online activity like clothing purchases from JCrew or Saks, groceries from Amazon Fresh, beauty products from Sephora and a slew of other purchases from web-based shopping sites.

But before you rush to sign up with yet another activity aggregation service, it may be time to pause and think. Do the benefits of seeing your friends’ purchases on sites like Strings and the online shopping tracker Blippy outweigh the risks of handing over login credentials to these third parties?

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Social Tracking and Beyond

There are more than a few services out there today that allow you to share your activity with the world at large. FriendFeed and Google’s new Buzz service, for example, are popular playgrounds for social sharing. Their aggregation capabilities offer combined activity streams from sites like Twitter, YouTube, flickr, Google Reader and much more. These social activity trackers aren’t too risky except for the fact that they make you more of a public persona than you may have intended – something not everyone is comfortable with as was apparent by the recent Google Buzz privacy backlash.

However, some tracking services go beyond simple social activity aggregation. One of the more puzzling launches of late is Blippy, a service that tracks your “favorite purchases” made with any credit card used at a selection of online stores. Similarly, the web activity tracker Glue lets you share the results of your day’s web surfing when visiting both social and non-social sites including Wikipedia, Amazon, NewEgg, eBay, BestBuy, Zagat and dozens of others.

The concept for the newly launched Strings fits it in nicely with the others of this genre. At this time, the service tracks 25 web sites from the more social Hulu and YouTube to more traditional sites like Nordstrom and Tiger Direct. And like its competitors, you can follow others on the service to see what they’ve been doing, where they’ve been shopping and what they’ve bought.

Strings: Let’s See Where You Shop

Unfortunately, in Strings’ case, the execution is somewhat lacking. The design leaves a lot to be desired with small, light-colored text and a slightly confusing flow. Should I add trackers first? Do I need the Firefox extension? Is the desktop app a necessary component? All these options are thrown at you on the front page with little explanation as to why they’re needed.

More importantly, for every site you add, you’re asked to provide your username and password. Obviously, for online shops like JCrew, this makes some sense – there isn’t exactly a public stream of your purchases there. However, for social apps like YouTube and flickr, there’s simply no need to request a password. Your account activity can be imported into your stream simply by providing your username. That’s how FriendFeed and Buzz do it and that’s how Strings should too.

In fact, tracking services should make every attempt not to request your credentials unless absolutely necessary. Every time you provide this information to a third-party service, you’re taking a risk. If their servers were compromised and their database of account information was accessed, the attackers would have your login information to a number of online sites – sites where you’ve often stored credit card information, phone numbers and addresses, too.

But is this risk acceptable? , you may ask.

Is Aggregating Your Credentials Too Risky?

Before we pick on Strings alone, though, it’s worth noting that their request for your online shopping sites’ login isn’t unique to them. Blippy, too, requests your login credentials for the sites you want to add to their service. They also want your credit card information so they can track other purchases.

Now, one can argue that the fear of sharing your credit card info online is unfounded. After all, if you do any online shopping, then you’ve already shared this info with a number of companies, some of whom may operate servers with far less security than Bippy’s.

That’s definitely a valid argument. But there is something to be said for the increased risk due to the aggregation of your online accounts. While you may only store one or two credit cards at Amazon.com, Blippy lets you track all your cards. If their infrastructure was compromised not only would the potential hacker gain access to this information, they would also have your username and password to quite a few online web sites too. And if you’re like 99% of the world, that’s probably the same username and password you use elsewhere…like on your webmail account, your computer sign-on and maybe even your bank account or corporate VPN, assuming the password is complex enough to meet their security requirements.

Also, the risk in using these services doesn’t necessarily have to come from an outside malicious attack – the services themselves may not have your best interests at heart either. Take for example, this text from Blippy’s Privacy Policy:

Blippy may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy. You will have the opportunity to opt out of any such transfer if the new entity’s planned processing of your information differs materially from that set forth in this Privacy Policy.

Most people would prefer their personally identifiable information to remain private. But if Blippy crashes and burns, it’s up for sale unless you take action to opt-out.

Strings’ privacy policy is different than Blippy’s, but not much better. In their case, your personal information may be collected so you can be marketed to from other parties:

…we may invite you to participate in surveys, questionnaires or contests, contact us with questions or comments or request information, provide us with feedback, participate in chat or message boards, or complete a profile or registration form. Due to the nature of these Services, we may collect personally identifiable information such as your name, address, email address, phone number, age or date of birth, gender, and other contact information that you voluntarily transmit with your communication to us…

And they may use that information to contact you about:

software and/or Services that you may wish to contact and for targeted advertising.

Do the Benefits Outweigh the Risks?

For some people though, this new openness is the future of online sharing. By allowing others to peer into our lives this deeply, we’re becoming, as a society and a culture, more transparent. And that’s a good thing. Notes pro-openness blogger Louis Gray, “instead of keeping all my data internal to me, it opens it to the world for discussion.” He also notes Wall Street Journal’s review on Blippy which concludes that the biggest risk for people in using Blippy is that “their purchases are totally mundane and you’re really super boring.”

We would argue there are a few more risks than “boringness” to be considered here, but for some, those risks may be worth it. So whether you believe than aggregation sites are hacker goldmines, marketers’ dreams or simply new stores of data that will enhance our understanding of the web and its users, they services are likely to stick around for a little while. The only question now is: will you be using them?

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Are people who they really say they are online? Conventional wisdom tells us that social networking sites, blogs and other social media outlets have allowed people to carefully craft online “personas” – essentially idealized versions of who they are in real life. Are you wittier online? More outgoing? More social? Friendlier? For those hiding behind the keyboard and computer screen, personality traits like these are easier to fake. Or are they?

According to a recent research study, maybe not. Psychologists found that “faking it” online is tougher than previously imagined. In fact, the results of the study show that people are much more likely to reveal their true personalities online and not the idealized image of who they want to be.

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Idealism? Not on Your Online Profile

To conduct the research, the psychologists examined the social networking profiles of 236 U.S. and German students ages 17-22, both on Facebook and MySpace. They also had the same students take multiple personality tests in order to determine both their actual personality and their idealized personality.

Prior to this study, if you had to guess, you may have suspected that the online versions of the participants matched up more closely with the idealized personalities, not the real ones. In fact, that assumption is shared by modern-day psychologists – it even made its way into psychology journals where it was dubbed as the “idealized virtual-identity hypothesis.” However, the researchers conducting this new study thought that this was a hypothesis that needed testing. “There has been no research on the most fundamental question about OSN (online social networking sites) profiles,” notes the report. “Do they convey accurate impressions of profile owners?”

As it turns out, yes. The surprising conclusion uproots the previously held assumption that we are our idealized selves online. Instead, we are displaying our real personalities. “There was no evidence of self-idealization,” concludes the report. “These results suggest that people are not using their OSN profiles to promote an idealized virtual identity. Instead, OSNs might be an efficient medium for expressing and communicating real personality, which may help explain their popularity.”

On Facebook, We’re All Real People

Although the researchers in this study looked at both MySpace and Facebook profiles to come to this conclusion, we suspect that Facebook is home to even more genuine personalities than MySpace. Instead of allowing its users to set up accounts using fake names or internet handles, Facebook only allows the use of your legal name, a policy that has led to some occasional mistakes when oddly-named real people were caught up in a Facebook purge. This up-front requirement that you “be yourself” on Facebook has had a trickle-down effect on how people use the network. Active users typically only connect with friends, family and other real-world acquaintances as opposed to strangers and other pseduo-friends as was done back in the MySpace days of “he whoever collects the most friends wins.”

In addition, the privacy controls Facebook had in place at its beginning (now completely eviscerated, but that’s another story…), provided its users with a sense of safety, security and comfort – they could be themselves – their real selves, flaws and all – without the world watching. The end result was the web-based equivalent of the user’s offline social network where no one is all that different than they are in real life.

But What About the Older Social Networkers?

The one complaint with have with this latest research study is that it focused only on the youngest demographic of social networking users – those aged 17-22. While this digital generation may have grown up accustomed to openly sharing online, those belonging to the prior generations – especially the baby boomers and older – may be a bit more guarded when it comes to posting to Facebook (and assuming they use it, MySpace). Although the study does reveal some interesting findings about Gen Y/Gen Z and their use of the Internet, more research is necessary to determine if the conclusions span all age groups. 

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A couple of years ago, the new launch from Webwalks, a universal inbox, news aggregator, password manager and kitchen sink-type application would have caught my eye. I’d rush out to try it, merging my multiple accounts under its one roof then wait to see how well my life improved, how much time I saved. But today, I’m more ambivalent about these sorts of applications. The concept of a universal inbox for tracking everything under the sun now leaves me cold.

That’s not to say that merging of social networks with the inbox in and of itself is a bad idea – Google Buzz, Xobni, and Outlook’s new social connector all offer innovative ways to augment the inbox experience. But there’s a key difference between these apps and those promising a “universal inbox” – they come to you, in the inbox you already know and love.

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The Sad State of the Universal Inbox

The idea of a universal inbox is smart. On paper, that is. In our “information overloaded” modern age, messages come at us left and right from multiple email accounts, instant messaging programs, SMS on our mobile phones and from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And yet, none of the “universal inbox” applications have ever really taken off.

We’ve seen some worthy contenders though. Fuser, NutshellMail and Inbox2, for example, all merge messages from multiple platforms into one unified service. The more clever of these programs provide a way to make Facebook the interface you use to check your mail instead of forcing you into some new web service. However, even that option hasn’t attracted a large following.

Inbox2’s Facebook app “emailstream” only has 245 active users. NutshellMail’s does a little better with just over 5400 users. But when you think of the hundreds of millions of registered users on Facebook (400 million at the last count), these numbers aren’t even a drop in a bucket – they’re more like a grain of sand on a long stretch of beach.

The sites’ web destinations do a little better, but only a service called OtherInbox is doing well, with 67,000+ visitors last month. NutshellMail seems to be hanging in there, too – even growing its traffic a bit lately – and yet it attracted just under 24,000 uniques last month (according to Compete – not always the best source of statistics but good enough for this quick glance). An article on Digg’s homepage often get more hits than that! And it’s an understatement to say these numbers fall short of the millions who routinely log into online email accounts from Gmail, Hotmail and the like.

So what’s wrong? Why aren’t these services more popular?

People Want to Use Their Own Inbox, Not Some 3rd-Party Service

The answer to that question has its roots in what people expect from an email application. Email services from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and yes, even AOL, among others are designed from the ground-up to provide that company’s vision of the best messaging experience. The applications are feature-rich with advanced options like POP3 and IMAP support, forwarding, filters, labels, auto-replies, vacation responders, spam filters and more.

Third-party aggregation-type applications don’t always have the same feature set. Plus, they typically have their own very un-email like interface – the applications tend to treat your email like activity streams on a social network, not critical messages that need to be filed, forwarded, replied to, or turned into tasks and calendar appointments. The exception here seems to be OtherInbox – they offer a real inbox complete with calendar tie-ins, stars for saving messages, spam filters and other typical email features. Not surprisingly, they’re the one doing the best out of all the other inbox applications listed here. However, they’re not actually a “universal” inbox. They don’t claim to merge all your messaging services into one – they simply help you better sort and organize your mail. So, really, they don’t count.

Socializing as an Inbox Layer

A better solution to the merging of messaging and social is, interestingly enough, exactly what Google has just launched with Buzz. Sure, that service has gotten off to a rough start with bugs, missing features and of course, the privacy issues, but the concept is solid. In Buzz, social networking becomes an additional layer to your inbox – one click and the display changes to a stream of social activity; click again and you’re back to your email. Important “social” messages (those you created, commented on or liked in Buzz) grab your attention by re-appearing in your inbox proper.

Other companies have similar ideas about socializing email. Xobni, for example, offers a plugin for Outlook that extracts social information about your contacts (among many other things). Microsoft, too, is just now launching its social layer for Outlook – the Social Connector which optionally lets you integrate LinkedIn and soon Facebook and MySpace into your inbox.

These programs all have a better shot at unifying the inbox to create a truly universal email application. They provide you with your “real” inbox and all its features while layering it with a social element. You don’t have to migrate to a new service entirely. Meanwhile the standalone universal inbox applications available today probably won’t last. They would be better off developing their service into a plugin or add-on for the webmail and desktop programs that people use now instead of trying to convince people to start checking their email elsewhere.

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Is there any business Google doesn’t want to be in? Despite the fact that there are already plenty of excellent mobile shopping applications for the Android smartphone operating system, Google has decided to launch their own. Via an announcement on the Google Mobile blog, we’re introduced to the search giant’s latest creation: Google Shopper. If you’re at all familiar with mobile shopping applications, then you can probably guess what this app does. It scans barcodes and retrieves prices. It can also find product information using photos snapped with your phone’s camera. You can do voice searches, too. Apparently, Google didn’t want to make just another mobile shopping app, they wanted to make a better one. 

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With the new Google Shopper application, currently for Android only, you can scan a barcode or snap a photo of a retail item and the app will return a list of search results for that product, complete with prices, ratings, photos and descriptions. And where do these results come from? Google Product Search of course. You can star your favorite items for later retrieval, access your browsing history and share items with your friends via Gmail, IM, Facebook and Twitter.

Another bonus: if you’re not actually in a store doing some shopping, you can use the app as a custom interface to Google’s Product Search portal. With the provided search box, you can either type in a product name or just speak into the phone’s microphone and Google Shopper will retrieve results – much like how Google’s standalone mobile application does with web searches.

Why Does Google Need Another Mobile App?

If you own an Android mobile phone, then you’ve probably already installed one or more mobile shopping companion applications. ShopSavvy, for example, was one of the first barcode scanners on the scene. Designed mainly to scan high-end goods like DVDs, CDs, books, and consumer electronics, after scanning a barcode, you’re provided with a list of both local and online prices for that same item.

Amazon, on the other hand, wanted to go beyond the barcode. With its Amazon App for Android, you can scan barcodes but you can also snap a photo of an item using the phone’s camera. Amazon then searches through their inventory for that item and displays either the item itself or a similar product if the catalog doesn’t have that exact item available.

Then, of course, there’s Google Search for mobile and the related downloadable application. From either web interface, the Shopping vertical is easily accessible – only a tap away under the “More” section. So what prompted Google to release a dedicated shopping app like Google Shopper? Perhaps they saw the success of Amazon and ShopSavvy and wanted to redirect mobile users back to their engine and their search results?

While that’s obviously a major factor in the decision, it’s notable that Google Shopper is only available at launch time as an Android application. If there was ever any doubt that Google plans to favor their own mobile platform over rivals from Apple, Windows Mobile, RIM and others, we can put that to rest now. Whether Google is or is not working on a version of the app for other mobile platforms is almost besides the point. If they are, then how clever of them to launch the Android version first instead of waiting until everyone could use it, and if they aren’t…well, then specialized Google apps for Android just became a huge selling point for the phone, didn’t it? If we had to guess, it’s the former – after all, as much as Google wants to promote their mobile OS, they’re more interested in search traffic and multi-platform mobile applications are the way to get more of that.

For Android owners, Google Shopper is available now. You can grab your copy from here.

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Remember POGS? Don’t feel bad if you don’t – you’ve just dated yourself, that’s all. These round collectible discs were used to play a children’s game (also called POGS) back in the 1990’s. Thanks to the incredible popularity of these little tokens, collecting POGS became a generation-defining fad for the demographic group known as the millenials. Where baby boomers had baseball cards and Generation X had Garbage Pail Kids, the young members of Gen Y had their POGS.

Now prepare yourself for POGS’ return – POGS 2.0, if you will. Except this time around, the chips have been wired for the digital age. And today, the “game” is a social network called FaceChipz instead of a old-fashioned variation on marbles.

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FaceChipz: If POGS Was a Social Network

FaceChipz is a new social networking site designed just for kids. Intended primarily for the “tween” set who’s outgrown children’s websites but hasn’t quite aged into Facebook yet, FaceChipz merges real-world networking with an online component. After purchasing a starter set of five chips, the child has their parent register an account for them on the FaceChipz website. Then the game begins.

The child registers all their chips online using the unique identification code found on the back of each token. When all the chips have been registered, they can be distributed to friends. In return, the child’s friends will hand them their FaceChipz. When the exchange is complete, the child returns to the computer to register the new codes from the chips they’ve collected. The end result is a social network of friends with a physical counterpart in the real world – a brightly colored collection of FaceChipz that can be toted around just like POGS were decades ago.

Social Networking Training Wheels

Parents will appreciate the fact that the FaceChipz network offers a more secure and private environment for their kids than traditional social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. No strangers can solicit friendship requests here – the child’s only online friends are those they’ve connected with in real life. There isn’t even a search mechanism for friends to find each other without first trading chips. While that design decision is obviously meant to keep FaceChipz sales steady, the company claims it has another goal as well: to prepare children for the online world of social networking. Reads the company website, “FaceChipz wants to help kids stay safe, but also enable them to communicate using today’s technology platforms…If your kids are savvy enough to make appropriate real world friendships, we believe that those relationships will be suitable and appropriate for the digital network they create.”

Other privacy protections are offered too. For example, the code on the back is only valid upon first entry. Afterwards, if a lost chip ended up in a stranger’s possession, they couldn’t use the code to connect to the child. Also, FaceChipz profiles are designed so kids are only permitted to post a limited amount of information and their email address is not stored. FaceChipz makes sure that none of their site’s pages are indexed by search engines. Finally, when the child is ready to graduate to a more adult network, their account can be permanently deleted.

Will FaceChipz Become the New POGS?

All the elements are there that could make FaceChipz a success: collectible tokens, an online element and parent-friendly company ethics. There’s another bonus, too: the chips are cheap. A five-pack is just $4.99 at ToysRUs and the one-time site registration fee is only $1.00. If anything, the fee is only there so mom or dad get involved and are made aware of the child’s online activities.

However, in this day and age, FaceChipz may be too innocent a portal to attract tweens. On a web filled with insane YouTube videos and the (often disturbing and occasionally pornographic) webcam-hopping service, Chatroulette, will a “your first social network” site even have a chance? Will today’s youngest generation take to a modern equivalent of POGS or have they seen too much already? Only time (and sales figures) will tell.

Thanks to Springwise for spotting this.

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One of the features that Google’s online office program Google Docs lacks is a cloud-based version of Microsoft Office’s “clipboard” feature. Although you can copy and paste when using Docs, it’s a much simpler procedure. The keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + C” copies and “Ctrl + V” pastes, but it’s a one-time process. You can’t accumulate a collection of copied items for later pasting as you can with the Office clipboard.

Some may argue that’s by design – Google likes to keep things simple. However, it appears that may not be the case, after all. As spotted by the Google Operating System blog, a new server-side clipboard looks like it may be close to launch.

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A Real Clipboard! Google Docs Business Users Will Rejoice

Considering Google’s continuing advances in the enterprise space, it’s not surprising that the company is interested in implementing a cloud-based clipboard to rival the one in Office. Although this may not be the sort of feature that everyday consumers and users of the free version of Docs care much about, it’s a perfect example of the sort of feature that a business user needs. When crafting long documents, the ability to store a collection of text, images and other media for re-use throughout a particular file is a time-saving feature that many cannot live without. It’s arguably even one of the top reasons why some feel they can’t make a complete switch from their desktop office software, be that Microsoft Office or Open Office or something else, to an online service like Google Docs.

Beyond Docs: A Clipboard for YouTube, Picasa and More?

According to the blog post that uncovered this feature (still in testing it appears), the Google Docs clipboard looks like an implementation of a service called Google Cloudboard, revealed back in fall of last year via an accidentally publicized internal feedback form. Cloudboard was described as a “server-side clipboard for Google Apps.” Like Cloudboard, the new clipboard works within Google Docs and other Google services including Gmail and Calendar – at least that’s what has been spotted so far. However, when the Cloudboard feature was discovered, it was described as working with services outside of Google Apps, too. For example, copying from Picasa, YouTube, Maps and even Google Image Search were cited as use cases for the Cloudboard.

The Cloudboard/clipboard Google has in mind could be handy for heavy Gmail users, especially if it became a feature of the Gmail service itself. It also somewhat brings to mind the Windows Live Mail Quick Add feature which integrates Bing searches, images and video into the online webmail program via a sidebar panel. Google’s clipboard could easily do the same and more.

30-Day Retention Policy: This Clipboard Stays with You

In Google’s case, clipboard content wouldn’t just remain in the program while your Docs/Apps session was active – it would actually remain on Google’s Servers for an entire month. According to a now-public Google Help Article:

Content you copy to the server clipboard is stored on Google’s servers and remains there until 30 days have passed since you last took action on (for example, copied) a given content selection. Even if a document is deleted, anything you copied from that document to the server clipboard will still exist on Google’s servers for that 30-day period. You can delete all items stored on the server clipboard by clicking the drop-down menu and selecting Clear all items.

The article also reveals how the Clipboard content is tied to your Google Account as opposed to one particular computer. “That means you can copy more than one selection and then choose which one to paste later, the page reads. “It also means you can copy something on one computer and then paste it on another.”

Although the Google Docs blog hasn’t formally announced this feature (as of the time of writing), we’re confident that it’s more than a rumor at this point. Usually when Google gets around to creating Help documentation, the feature is near launch…sometimes even hours away. We hope that’s the case here, too.

Image credit: googlesystem.blogspot.com

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How badly do people want Google Buzz fixed? Enough to submit over 7,000 votes in the first 24 hours since the launch of a Google Moderator page called “How to Fix Google Buzz.” Google Moderator, for those that don’t know, is one of the unsung heroes of Google’s online services. Launched back in 2008, the tool offers a simply designed interface that lets participants vote ideas up or down. In this case, suggestions for Google Buzz features and bugs in need of fixing are the fodder for this new Moderator site.

The irony of the situation is that the new “How to Fix Google Buzz” site was created by Jyri Engeström, a former Google employee who was at one time tasked with “making Google more social.”

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Before Buzz, There was Jaiku

If Engeström’s name rings a bell, it’s probably because you remember him as the co-founder and chairman of a social networking startup called Jaiku, acquired by Google in fall of 2007. Jaiku was a formidable microblogging service and one of the few that could have ever truly given rival Twitter a run for its money. With this service, you could update your status from both the web and your phone as well as aggregate and automatically publish stories from your other activity streams including blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, even yes, even Twitter updates.

If anything, Jaiku was a “proto-Buzz.” It was a FriendFeed before there was FriendFeed. It was FriendFeed mashed up with Twitter. It was one of the first to stream your social activities from around the web in an easy-to-read format that people could follow and reply to. It even had comments! And IM! In fact, you could argue that Jaiku was a better Buzz than the half-finished service Google launched just last week.

Unfortunately, Google let the original Jaiku service languish until eventually stopping its development entirely and open sourcing its code over on Google App Engine. Afterwards, in October of 2009, Engeström moved on to greener pastures. However, despite no longer working at Google, Engeström still clearly cares about Google’s social networking issues. This led him to create the “How to Fix Google Buzz” site.

“How to Fix Google Buzz” – Submit and Vote on Buzz Ideas

Using the new site is simple. Sign in, read the issue on the screen then vote “yes” or “no.” If you don’t have an opinion on that particular idea, you can click the skip button. As of right now, the number one request is an option to hide comments. It’s followed by other popular requests including lists, blocking improvements, filters and more. Plus, the nice thing about Moderator is that each idea has its own permalink so if you want to rally support behind your top feature request – like, say, the whole messed up, broken Google Reader integration, you can do so. Ahem, cough, cough.

Although Google Moderator makes aggregating and voting on Buzz ideas and issues simple, can we believe that anyone at Google is actually watching? Of course, we can’t know for sure, but when we asked Engeström if Google would look at this page, he only coyly responded, “trust me, they will.”

Image credit: ZDNet

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You can get paid to tweet. Average, non-celebrity users are making some decent pocket change using Twitter ad services like Twittad, Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and Ad.ly. And while reports of $10,000 tweets abound, average users are pulling in much smaller amounts, usually three figures at most.

But aren’t these programs rewarding scam artists who boost their follower count through artificial means or sneak in ads that look like regular tweets? Surprisingly, for the most part, the answer is no.

This is part 2 of a two part series on paid tweets. See part 1 here.

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Paid Tweets: Not a Gold Rush for Most Users

Janet Thaeler only has around 7400 followers on Twitter which puts her far from celebrity status. Occasionally she’ll tweet a relevant ad to her engaged followers, averaging around two per month. They’ve never brought her big bucks, though. The most she’s ever been paid is $20 per tweet.

Tim Kissane is in a similar boat. With only around 6000 followers, he’s not tweeting to a massive crowd. The least he’s been paid is $2 per tweet; the most is $38.50. Tim says that none of the services he’s tried, which include Sponsored Tweets, Magpie and Twittad have earned him any “significant revenue” and dubs his payouts “chump change.” Tim says that’s he’s disappointed with the services. “Unless I drop my price significantly, I will receive no offers,” he laments. “For instance, Twittad estimates my ad value as ~$471/month.” However, “the few offers I get average $8-$12/week. And even those are scarce.”

But perhaps Tim, like many others, was expecting paid tweets to serve as a steady source of secondary income when it is, in reality, no more than the Twitter equivalent of an online display ad similar to those you would see on someone’s blog.

In fact, that’s the very model that Ad.ly hopes to reproduce with their system. Instead of promoting the whole “conversational marketing” mumbo-jumbo which purports that people will buy from companies their friends recommend, Ad.ly says their system is the Twitterized version of the already successful display ad model. As with bloggers hosting ads on their site, Ad.ly thinks that Twitter users should be able to monetize their content too. However, unlike display ads, Twitter CTRs (clickthrough rates) are much, much higher. Five times the industry average, says Ad.ly CEO Sean Rad.

Other Twitter advertising companies report similar high levels of engagement. Magpie even claims their average clickthrough is the unheard of 2%. Twittad says their click to conversions (aka “call to action”) is well above 8-10%.

Rewarding Engagement, Not Just Numbers

A consistent factor among the majority of the companies is the use of systems and algorithms that take into account not just raw follower counts, but the engagement levels of those followers. Ad.ly’s algorithms, for example, look at the quality of someone’s followers to determine what prices to pay. Too many spammers and bots following you and the payout goes down. And if you’re a spammer – in other words, tweeting out too many ads yourself – the price goes down even further. So far, in fact, that you probably won’t even find using their system worthwhile. Magpie and Sponsored Tweets, too, say follower counts are not how they determine success. Twittad’s formula also looks beyond follower counts to see how active a certain Twitterer is before determining their payout amount. In other words, you can’t simply turn on auto-follow via a third party service and boost your follower count to high levels and then expect to start earning money. Only real, engaged users communicating to a real, engaged following are rewarded via these programs.

Disclosure: Are Ads Sneaking into Your Stream?

Another surprise is how strict many of the companies are about following the rules of disclosure – that is, making sure tweets are labeled as ads in some way, shape or form. Each company involved has their own method for this, however, some are more obvious than others.

Magpie requires their users to choose between #ad, #advert, #sponsor, etc. until a definitive recommendation from either the FTC or WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Assoc.) is established. Sponsored Tweets uses a disclosure engine that makes their users choose from a set of options, too, which includes #ad and many others. Ad.ly users have “(ad)” placed in their tweets for them and, even better, their ad messages can’t be rewritten by their users – the system automatically sends out the tweets, disclosure and all. Twittad, on the other hand, doesn’t require disclosure but uses a “sponsor URL” of http://spon.in. Click through on any Twittad link and a banner at the top of the page appears reading “providing disclosed sponsorship in updates.”

However, there are still ways around some of these disclosure systems. For example, prolific Twitterer John Chow notes that with Sponsored Tweets, you can reword the ad however you want. Since they allow you to use “brought to you by” as one of the disclosure mechanisms, you could write: “Hey guys! I found this great $1.99 web hosting deal bought to you by bluehost. Go check it out. URL” and get away with it.

This tricky workaround to the disclosure requirements, not too mention the various methods employed by the companies to meet disclosure requirements, are one main area that needs improvement. Consistent guidelines for paid tweeting should be established and adhered to by all companies involved. Without standards, it’s a lot easier to mistake an ad for a regular tweet if you’re not paying careful attention.

Companies are Paying, but Issues Remain

Despite the grumblings in the Twitter community about how paid tweets will start mucking up the stream, advertisers haven’t been afraid to get on board and give pay-per-tweet ads a shot. The Twitter ad companies have all worked with major brands including Sears Holdings (Twittad), Hershey’s (Magpie), Sony Playstation (Magpie), LG (Sponsored Tweets), Volvo (Sponsored Tweets), Talbots (Sponsored Tweets), Sony Electronics (Ad.ly), Ralph Lauren (Ad.ly), Bing (Ad.ly) and Bookrenter.com (Ad.ly), just to name a few.

Still, not everyone is happy with their results. Deborah Blake with IntroSpectrum has just started using Sponsored Tweets and Magpie. With Google AdWords, she’s seeing right around $.50 CPC (cost-per-click) but through Magpie she’s seeing about $3 CPC. Sponsored Tweets is about the same, she says. Also, Magpie reports 0.65% CTR for the campaign, but the company’s own analytics indicate a much lower rate. She can’t be sure if their internal analytics are missing some clicks or if Magpie is over-estimating, though. However, the CTR is much lower than Magpie’s claimed average of 2%.

However, even Blake is willing to give the Twitter ad agencies the benefit of the doubt. “I want to emphasize…this is a pretty small sample size so far, and besides that our AdWords campaigns have been optimized over the course of many months…,” she notes. “We can’t draw any firm conclusions yet, but my expectations are that quality traffic through Twitter advertising will be significantly higher cost than traditional online channels.”

In the end, it’s probably still too soon for advertisers to truly get a grip on whether the quality traffic from Twitter ads is worth the price. While it’s one thing to track clickthroughs and conversions, it’s much harder to track the positive or negative feelings generated by ads that may impact sales further down the road. For now, though, it seems some advertisers are willing experiment, some Twitter users are willing to tweet for pay and surprisingly, some Twitter users are willing to follow those that do.

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Here’s a little secret about Twitter that you may not know: some people are getting paid to tweet. We don’t mean it’s their job to Twitter as the PR front-end for some large corporation, either. They’re actually getting paid to post advertisements to their Twitter stream. When their followers click though, the end result is cold, hard cash.

The Twitter ad industry, an experimental playground where new ideas about making money on the Internet flourish, is made up of a handful of companies who work with advertisers to run in-stream Twitter campaigns. Surprisingly, it’s not as unseemly as it sounds. For the most part, tweets are disclosed, backlash is minimal and the so-called “publishers” – the Twitterers, that is – are making a decent bit of pocket change. Just don’t count on banking 10K per tweet like Kim Kardashian allegedly did.

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This is part one of a two-part series. Stay tuned for part 2 later today. Part 2 is here.

Diluting the Stream?

Twitter ads are 140-character missives posted to Twitter that link to an advertiser’s product or service. Some companies allow their users to craft the ad’s text itself while others insist on the advertiser’s own wording. But the end result is the same: someone clicks the ad, the Twitterer gets paid.

When first introduced, the concept of in-stream ads was met with backlash and disgust from many in the Twitter community. Advertisers were charged with “diluting the stream” with these irrelevant, unneeded posts. But these days, the backlash seems to be nearly forgotten. Anyone who was offended by someone tweeting ads simply unfollowed them and went on with their life. In fact, that’s the beauty of the Twitter system – if you don’t like what someone says, they’re gone with a click of a button. And when it comes to ads, the reality is that enough people don’t mind (or perhaps don’t even notice) to make the occasional promotional tweet worthwhile for publishers using these systems.

Beyond Kim K: Real Users are Making Money

There a good handful of companies where a Twitter user can sign up to start advertising to their friends and followers including Twittad, Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and Ad.ly to name a few. Since the influx of celebrities to Twitter, these companies have become more prominent – Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets even list some of their celeb publishers right on their homepage. Those lists include everyone from reality stars like Audrina Patridge to artists like Soulja Boy. Take a quick dive through their publisher lists, and it almost seems as if there isn’t a single celeb who hasn’t signed up somewhere to monetize their fanbase.

But a celebrity and their 1.5 million followers isn’t the average user of these services. Instead, the average user is relatively popular within a niche crowd. For example, Magpie reports their average user has follower counts in the three or four digits. Sponsored Tweets says their average user is right around 2500 followers. Obviously, these folks have more than a handful of close friends watching their streams, but they don’t come anywhere near celebrity status.

Yes, but How Much Money do People Make?

But the real question everyone wants to know is what do people make? Real people? The answer to this question isn’t as simple as quoting an industry average figure. Reports of the $10,000 tweet from Kim Kardashian have people salivating, yet this is far from reality. (Side note: Ad.ly, the company behind that tweet, doesn’t actually disclose what their users make per tweet. Sean Rad, Ad.ly’s CEO, will only say that publishers “can make as much as five figures.” Sponsored Tweets, meanwhile, boasts of a $20,000 payout.) However, outside of Hollywood starlets, musicians and other famous figures, tweeting for cash isn’t some get-rich-quick scheme.

Sponsored Tweets says their average payout is $10 per tweet and a user usually gets just a couple of offers per month. Magpie says their users can earn three-figure amounts per month, most in the $100-$300 range. Twittad says their average payout is $15-25 per week. None of these payout amounts are enough money to quit your day job over, but they can easily add up to tidy second income for their users.

And if you grow your Twitter following, you can earn even more. John Chow isn’t exactly a Hollywood celeb, but he does tout a follower count of over 50,000. While nowhere near Kim K. numbers, it was enough for his first tweet to earn him $1000 when he signed up with Ad.ly. But simply boosting your follower count isn’t enough to be the next John Chow or Jeremy Shoemaker who claims he earned 14K in a month – it all depends on who follows you back and how engaged they are. Without active followers clicking through on your ads, you’ll be lucky to earn a dollar.

Stay tuned for Part 2 coming later today Part 2 is here.

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Today at the Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced several initiatives designed to cement their company’s relevance in a world where Apple, one of the top smartphone players, has banned Adobe software from inclusion on all mobile devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon-to-launch iPad. Without Adobe’s Flash runtime, thousands of websites don’t work, streaming videos won’t play and a number of online casual games are broken. Apple, of course, is fine with this, having worked around the issue thanks to the 150,000+ iPhone applications that deliver the same functionality…although sometimes for a fee.

Adobe, meanwhile, is focusing on the other up-and-coming smartphone platform, Google’s Android OS, with the launch of their “AIR for Android” offering. With this and the newly announced Flash Player 10.1, wannabe mobile developers don’t need to learn specialized code, but can instead leverage their existing development skills to build Flash and AIR-based applications. They can then have those apps run anywhere: PCs, Macs, Linux and mobile…including, surprisingly, the iPhone.

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AIR for Android

The AIR for Android development platform allows designers and developers to use their existing skills in coding for AIR on the desktop to build standalone applications that run on the mobile Android operating system, found on devices like the Droid, the myTouch 3G, and the G1. With AIR, developers can include mobile-specific functionality in their devices including multi-touch, accelerometer input, GPS, screen orientation and gestures.

Already, Adobe has several developers on board. A company blog post today shows a selection of some of the first AIR-built Android apps, all games, including iTunes App Store classics like Alchemist, FickleBlox, Gridshock, Chroma Circuit, Red Hood, South Park Avatar Creator and Su (iTunes links).

Flash 10.1

In addition to the AIR for Android announcement, Adobe also debuted the Flash Platform 10.1 beta, now available to developers and content providers worldwide. With Flash, developers can not only build mobile applications for Android, but can build apps that run anywhere: desktops, laptops, netbooks and smartphones. All the major smartphone players (save one) will support Flash, including Android, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm’s webOS and Windows Mobile. It will now also be available on LiMo devices, an independent and open smartphone platform with a Linux-based operating system at its core.

Flash isn’t just about the apps, either. It’s also used for website content display and HD videos, like those found on the popular U.S. TV portal, Hulu. Sling Media, makers of the Slingbox hardware, devices that let you watch live TV playing in one location on a remote receiver, also use Flash as part of their three-screen solution which delivers video to TVs, laptops, and mobile devices.

Flash for iPhone: the Workaround

Despite all the announcements, which lay solid ground for Adobe’s continued relevance and importance in the ever-changing mobile world, the company has not forgotten about Apple. Although sour grapes could have easily had the company turn their back to the popular iPhone OS platform, Adobe did just the opposite: they made it easy for their developers to build for iPhone too. Using the Packager for iPhone software, announced previously at Adobe MAX 2009, developers can export Flash code as iPhone apps.

With these tools, developers can essentially write once and deploy anywhere – as AIR or Flash creations for the desktop or mobile web or as apps for any mobile device including Android or iPhone.

Will Apple Cave?

Apple’s standoff against Flash has gained more public exposure with the recent announcement of the Apple iPad. Even consumers who don’t pay careful attention to technology news will soon discover the iPad’s shortcomings when iPad-launched websites don’t include streaming video, content doesn’t display as expected and video portals like Hulu are inaccessible.

While purists may feel the same as Apple CEO Steve Jobs when it comes to Flash’s expulsion from the iPhone/iPad platform, (notably that it’s “buggy” and will soon be replaced by HTML5, an upcoming standard that can provide streaming video, too), the reality is that the new HTML5-enabled web won’t be built overnight. In the meantime, developers and consumers alike want solutions for the content they expect to access when mobile – that being the web, the whole web, the fully functioning web. It’s here that Adobe intends to deliver. Their goal is to have every platform but Apple supporting native Flash and AIR, while still supporting iPhone through a workaround. Will Apple eventually concede to this power play where everyone supports Flash but them? It’s impossible to tell, but Adobe certainly isn’t afraid to lay the pressure on thick.

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