Emily Chang's eHub is a good place for new Web 2.0 services to announce themselves. But if you're like me, it's hard to keep up with them. Thus I'm trying out a practice of summarizing my favorite items from eHub each week. It's just my option, though, and I missed the week before this one - so for goodness sake go check out eHub yourself. This week saw 28 items in eHub. After the jump are my descriptions of my favorite 8 of them.
Atlas - Mashed up Microsoft's Virtual Earth with local search, driving directions, blogs, events, gas prices, movies, traffic, wifi hotspots, and more. Also has a freely available API for realtime GPS device tracking. By Fresh Logic Studios.
Couldn't get many features to work, but perhaps that's because I wasn't logged in. Great idea though.
Opsdo - uses bittybrowser to display search results on multiple engines you chose. Great idea. Firefox only. Pretty proof of concept for now, but it's a great concept. Give me a browser search bar plug in and a bookmarklet to search any highlighted word on the page and I'm there. Lots of search engines included.
Share Your OPML - I love it and have loved it all week. I know not everyone does, but I do. Check out this super charming interview with Dave Winer by Dan Farber about Share Your OPML. Farber doesn't grok the power of Share's simplicity for awhile, it's a funny but great interview. One for the history books, really - we'll be listening to this one after Dave is dead. And I say that as a guy who sent him two emails this week that he didn't respond to - I know not everyone likes Dave Winer.
Anyway!
CellSwapper - Find some one to take over your cell phone contract. Great idea. Not sure what the business model is, but I can imagine using this.
WorkCircle - geek job listings and CVs searchable by tags and more. 300+ listings under consultancy, you'll note. Looks like fun. Not sure how this is differentiated from other options besides by niche, which I don't imagine will be enough. People seem to be using it though.
Pearl Comments - make notes about a web page for your team members, highlights page section linked to each note. Firefox extension now available. Could be good.
Musichawk - brings together social networking, Wikipedia bios, reviews in Pitchfork Media, tour info, Google news search, Technorati search, affiliate links to buy. Seems like a good enough idea.
Tagground - tag search in one place for yahoo my web 2.0, del.icio.us, raw sugar, flickr, You Tube and more. You can search to see how a URL was tagged or what URLs have been given a certain tag. Drops the ball on URL search in del.icio.us - but del.icio.us probably doesn't help much. No RSS feeds available, a shame. Not as slow or ugly as some other options, but hardly fast either. This is a very important class of tools and it would be great if Tagground gets it right. Right now it's akward and still not fast enough. I'd really like to use someone other than Technorati for this. Tagground seems to want to be AJAX, so there's no URL visible for a search's results. Thus no blumlet is possible. Oh well, it's a nice idea.
Don't you worry, they'll keep coming on eHub!
This Week's Highlights from eHub
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. For the record - Dave Winer has cleared up all the concerns above. And he's in great health, it turns out.
Posted at 8:30PM on May 11th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
3. Thank you kindly for the positive comments and for choosing opsdo as one of the websites you curated from eHub.
Re the "browser search bar plug in," are you referring to something along these lines: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=opsdo&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search ?
If so, it is already available, with its (admittedly still somewhat clunky) usage explained here: http://www.opsdo.com/popupa.html .
If you are thinking of something more complex (and along the lines of a full-fledged toolbar), this is coming... How soon, I myself do not yet know :-), but it *is* already in development!
Re the bookmarklet - thank you for the idea - it is not something I had until now considered. Certainly, it will now be added to the to-do list. Upon first weighing, the bookmarklet seems a tad difficult to useably implement without first giving users the ability to customise their own opsdo page (and concordantly the usage of the bookmarklet), so my feeling is that the bookmarklet will have to follow the appearance of accounts, but I promise to see what I can do...
Re the proof of concept you are absolutely right, though to my defence, I am still alone, poor, and burdened by other commitments (and a bit of a whiny bum looking for excuses), but I figured the earlier I start getting wise feedback (such as yours) the better the better the ultimate service will be...
Once again, thanks for picking opsdo!
Posted at 9:12PM on May 11th 2006 by Rei (of opsdo.com)
4. Thank you kindly for the positive comments and for choosing opsdo as one of the websites you curated from eHub.
Re the "browser search bar plug in," are you referring to something along these lines: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=opsdo&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search ? If so, it is already available, with its (admittedly still somewhat clunky) usage explained here: http://www.opsdo.com/popupa.html .
If you are thinking of something more complex (an along the lines of a full-fledged toolbar), this is coming... How soon, I myself do not yet know :-), but it is in development!
Re the bookmarklet - thank you for the idea - it is not something I had until now considered. Certainly, it will now be added to the to-do list. Upon first weighing, the bookmarklet seems a tad difficult to useably implement without first giving users the ability to customise their own opsdo page, so my feeling is that the bookmarklet will have to follow the appearance of accounts, but I promise to see what I can do...
Re the proof of concept you are absolutely right, though to my defence, I am still alone, poor, and burdened by other commitments (and a bit of a whiny bum), but I figured the earlier I start getting wise feedback (such as yours) the better the better the ultimate service will be...
Posted at 9:13PM on May 11th 2006 by Rei (of opsdo.com)
6. Thanks for mentioning Tagground. We think its a nice idea too - and although you brought up some great criticism, it's still in beta and I am working on making the product better and better. This weekend I added 7 more social bookmarking services to the mashup - and now the app is integrating a total of 12 social bookmarking engines. I update the roadmap to provide insight to whats coming down the road and I'm updating the blog almost daily to keep users up to date as to where the product is going. Thanks again.
1. I'm not planning on dying anytime soon.;->
What email address did you use?
Posted at 7:33PM on May 11th 2006 by Dave Winer