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Posts Tagged ‘Stumbleupon’

Macworld 2010: Flook app brings urban exploration to your pocket

Filed under: Macworld, iPhone

Among the unusual and innovative iPhone apps we saw at Macworld Expo was Flook, a location-based search tool for urban discovery that turns your walk through town into a multimedia adventure, complete with audio and image annotation and growing popularity for the most intriguing spots.

The idea is to create “serendipitous discovery” of the interesting and novel places around your neighborhood — “a bit like StumbleUpon for the world around you,” as the Flook site says.

We got a chance to chat with Ambient Industries co-founder Tristan Brotherton, who provided a quick demo of the app and a few words about the Flook approach and philosophy. Catch the video below.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Flook app brings urban exploration to your pocket originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Inspired” By Formspring, Tumblr Launches Nearly Identical “Ask Me”

Remember Formspring.me, the service we covered two days ago that makes it easy to conduct your own online Q&A with the web at large? Popular microblogging service Tumblr has just launched a new feature called “Ask Me” that does the exact same thing.

The new feature is simple: if you have a Tumblr blog, you can now add a form that lets your readers ask you whatever they want. They can leave their questions anonymously or submit them alongside their account name. Then, you can pick and choose which questions you want to answer and post your responses to your blog.

Of course, that’s exactly what Formspring.me does. Tumblr users have actually been building their own Q&As for a while using generic HTML form builders, which is what drove Formspring (a form builder itself) to build a dedicated service for Q&As called Formspring.me. Formspring.me has since gained quite a large following on Tumblr, so it isn’t all that surprising that the blog platform decided to bake it in. CEO David Karp says that the feature was “inspired by the Q&A posts that our community had been hacking together with Tumblr Submissions, Wufoo, and Formspring.”

All is not lost for Formspring.me, though. CEO Ade Olonoh says that while Tumblr served as a good incubator for Formspring.me, the service has since grown well beyond that site. He says that in the past few days only around 3-4% of questions answered on Formspring.me were syndicated to Tumblr. I suspect those figures are skewed by the fact that Formspring.me has been covered by a number of large tech blogs recently, but the appeal of these Q&A services clearly extends beyond Tumblr.

Tumblr hasn’t exactly shied away from drawing “inspiration” from other sites before. Back in August the site launched a StumbleUpon-like toolbar called TumblUpon (seriously).

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MySpace Close To Spinning Off Photobucket

News Corp., via MySpace, acquired photo/video sharing site Photobucket back in 2007 for $250 million, plus a $50 million earnout. We’ve now learned through a source with knowledge of the deal that MySpace is in the process of selling at least a majority interest in Photobucket. The likely buyer? Disney-backed Ontela, a Washington state startup.

Photobucket has grown steadily since the acquisition, and currently brings in 54 million worldwide users each month (Comscore). But MySpace never integrated with Photobucket, keeping their own separate photo and video platforms.

It’s been little more than a side show ever since the acquisition, and the founders have left to do other projects. With News Corp. scrambling to fix up its digital division, it’s no wonder Photobucket has been on the chopping block.

Best of all, the deal will bring in new cash to News Corp.

It’s not clear that the final terms have been worked out. But our source tells us that News Corp. will sell a majority stake in Photobucket, retaining some equity. If Ontela is the buyer, the merged company will take a new round of financing, with most of the cash going to News Corp., and part of it going into the new company.

Presumably this deal won’t look much different from eBay’s spinoff of StumbleUpon earlier this year, except on a larger scale. News Corp. gets a cash injection and retains a portion of Photobucket. And the service, combined with Ontela or another buyer, gets a new start.

Ontela didn’t return a request for comment. MySpace isn’t answering their phones or email. Everyone is being very quiet about the deal in general, in fact. We’ll update as we learn more.

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Youtego: Making Friends Through Self-Visualization

Some of the most viral experiences on the internet are also self-referential. Users spend hours on sites like StumbleUpon and Redux simply to build up their profiles and re-establish their status as coolhunters. While these sites exist as social tools for external exploration and discovery, Youtego offers a quiet approach to self-discovery.

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In the past ReadWriteWeb covered Lunch.com – a friend-matching community service powered by a similarity network engine. While Lunch prompts users to answer specific movie, book and food-related questions, Youtego encourages users to upload photos that best represent them from Flickr, Picasa and their hard drives. Users add information about their job and work history, knowledge base, capabilities and loves. A complete user profile encompasses a series of images and meta data and friend recommendations are determined by similar tags, images and common concepts.

While the approaches are slightly different, Lunch and Youtego share a common goal in establishing better relationships by reconnecting with our wants and needs. And if you believe in self-actualization as the final stage in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then perhaps Youtego’s self-visualizations are a map to achieving our highest potential. The first 500 ReadWriteWeb readers to visit youtego.com/reg/readwriteweb receive early access to this closed-beta site. Check it out and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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Collecta Now Lets You Share Your Search Results In Realtime

Realtime search for the most part is still mostly about searching Twitter. So it is probably a good idea for fledgling realtime search engines to make it easy to share specific Tweets found in the search results back on Twitter. SInce most of the results are Tweets, and search is just another form of navigation and discovery when it comes to the realtime stream, you want to be able to retweet directly from your search results.

OneRiot already does this, and today Collecta is adding a similar sharing feature. Although, Collecta also lets you share any result on Facebook, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, and Stumbleupon as well (but, oddly, not on Digg). Collecta launched last June.

You normally wouldn’t think about sharing regular search results other than as a link, but realtime results operate under a different dynamic. Collecta’s results also now include a little avatar in front of each one, giving it more of a social feel, and making it more familiar to Twitter users. Is this search or a new way to navigate the stream?

With realtime search, you are mining the conversations around the Web, tapping into the collective consciousness. So each result should be a jumping off point to start a new conversation.

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