We’ve been having fun at e-Me looking at all the different expanding furniture YouTube has shown.
It got me thinking that we need to build software like this. It’s not that everything you write has to be the end all be all for every single application - but we need to be a bit more flexible when we build applications and especially web applications.
Now I’m sure Zuckerberg and the techs over at Facebook were not thinking expanding tables when they build “the facebook, but dang…it does seem to have some hidden expansion built in.
OK, I’ve got to go build a web innovation platform - now where did i put the table saw.
If you watch the beginning of this video, Ron Paul explains that his fund raising efforts are not being directed by “his people” - it is a grass roots group of people working in his behalf.
If we could do the same thing with newspaper and broadcast websites - we too could be champions of community. We need to figure out our message and stick to it.
I figured it out last night while watching “Last Comic Standing” - when I witnessed no less than 249 ads for the new “Bionic Woman”.
Seriously, do you think we could be looking at these ‘over’ ads for all advertising? Or is this is way that we can pack MORE ads into the same “space”? Do we think we could ‘keep’ more people engaged with no traditional ads and all over ads?
“Shiva Rajaraman, product manager for YouTube, said internal tests show more than 70 percent of people give up when they see a pre-roll. By contrast, less than 10 percent decide to close an overlay, which they can exit by clicking on an “X” in a corner.”
We need to take a close look at this as we move towards more video on the web.
It’s not that this will work for everyone - but that it is thinking beyond the classic “taking this off-site” or “adventure camp” style team building. Very cool.
It’s a love/hate relationship. These top (insert random number here) sites list can get out of control. Sometimes it looks like these websites are saying “Hey, look at me, we know what is cool. Let us prove it by tell you the coolest sites we know about.” Sometimes you want to say, if you know about it - it’s probably not cool anymore.
So - then there is the love part, I’m not sure if I’m trying to validate that I know what I’m talking about - or what. But this is an article from MSN/PC World that shows us the top 25. Highlights:
Yahoo Pipes
Like Popfly, Yahoo Pipes lets you create your own mashups or “pipes.” As with Popfly, you drag and drop prebuilt modules, and then create connections between them. But Yahoo Pipes is much harder to use than Popfly, and the way to go about building your own mashup isn’t always obvious. But if you’re willing to do some digging and learning, you can build very useful stuff, such as a mashup that uses Yahoo maps to show the locations of all apartments for rent in a certain neighborhood.
Pageflakes
The Web is just as chaotic as the world–but Pageflakes can organize both of them for you. This super-customizable version of a home page enables you to pick the news and information feeds you want to read, and to specify the “flakes,” or applets, you want to include. Flakes let you add all sorts of cool stuff to your page–movie times, to-do lists, a notepad, e-mail, a horoscope–even sudoku or a personal blog. If you’re looking for one-stop browsing, this is it.
PopURLs
If you’re an information hound, you probably spend lots of time jumping from Digg to Del.icio.us to YouTube to Fark to Google News to anything-dot-com. With PopURLs, you no longer need to waste time hopping around the Internet. An aggregator of all things informative, PopURLs features massive lists of headlines, videos, blogs, and content from all of those sites, as well as plenty of others. One nice bonus is that you can search some of the sites–Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia, among others–straight from PopURLs. It’s also easy to tweak the way PopURLs looks and works, too, including customizing the layout of the feeds so you can put the ones you view most regularly on top. The scrapbook is a particularly useful feature; just click the ‘Add to Scrapbook’ button next to any headline, and PopURLs will save it (and up to 19 other favorite items).
