December 5th, 2005
New Web 2.0 services of note
I receive a lot of emails about new services and products, so I thought I’d share some of the recent ones.
Drag Drop Site Creator is being billed as "first AJAX based site builder". It is intended primarily for web hosting companies, to offer Drag Drop Site Creator as an additional service to their hosting customers. It claims to push AJAX "a step further by allowing users to build entire web sites within their web browsers." It sounds kind of like a Homestead for the Web 2.0 era? I haven’t reviewed it myself, but it got mixed reviews at digg. I know there are a lot of IT people who read ZDNet, so I’d be interested in your comments in the Talkback section.
Atlassian is an Australian company that provides enterprise software solutions. The reason I’m mentioning them is a tip I got from a reader, who said " rumour has it they are doing more business than JotSpot and Socialtext combined but with no VC and not much coverage as I can tell!" That’s impressive, but note that it’s unverified. Atlassian also have a number of blogs.
Strategic Board is a search engine that aggregates IT related blogs and commercial RSS feeds. Every search result has an RSS feed and it’s a free service. Founder Dudu Mimran says that "you can use Strategic Board to easily track competitors, technologies and even specific people in the IT industry." In my testing, it reminded me a lot of existing blog search engines Technorati and Feedster.
ScoopGO! is another example of a ‘roll your own’ search engine, like Rollyo and Eurekster Swicki. It’s a search engine that enables you to search through feeds you choose. Incidentally I noticed Rollyo got mentioned on BBC’s Click Online program, so it’s a hot company currently.
Jigsaw is a marketplace for business contacts. Its members buy, sell and trade business contacts ("think eBay swap meet for Hoovers corporate data" according to the email I got). Business 2.0 magazine called it "virtual schmoozing", which seems an apt description.
Glypho is an interesting site that offers "a fun new way for everyone to participate in novel writing." It’s basically a collaborative novel-writing app. Someone posts a story idea and then others contribute character and plot ideas. Anybody can write chapters and the best are voted in by the users.
Inform is an online news platform getting a lot of attention. It recently added audio and video content, as well as new RSS syndication tools. TechCrunch, which was originally unimpressed with Inform, now thinks it’s "an excellent resource and continues to improve dramatically."
That’ll do for now. This is just a small sample of all the product emails I get and it shows just how much innovation is going on currently. I’m sure many people will wonder about how viable some of these things are as businesses, which is a fair question. But for now it’s fun to get a taste of what’s being built out there in Web 2.0-land.
