BasBasBas.com’s Webfads

One of the reasons I started this blog, is because I believe the web 2.0 is giving us a glimpse of the future. Being quite the futurist, it appeals to my fantasy and imagination and thus provides something good for me to write about. Recently I heard about an online game platform called SmallWorlds (via TechCrunch?) and after using it for a while, I realized it’s giving us a glimpse of the future.

SmallWorlds is like The Sims and Second Life. It’s a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and uses the technologies of Adobe Flex and Flash. What makes it great though is that you don’t have to download anything (which they say can make you lose 85% of potential users), but because of not just depending on Flash technology, it can offer a far better virtual experience than a lot of the current online sims (eg. Habbo).

So you sign up, create your avatar, give him or her a pet (or not) and you join the world. This is where you pick your apartment/house size and shape. It’s your house, but since your character doesn’t have to sleep, you can turn it into a lounge, bar or club. You can do some missions to earn some credits that you can use to buy stuff… and there’s some really cool stuff.

• TV - the television in SmallWorlds is cool, because it’s based on YouTube. You can choose playlists or create your own using the search option. Is this the future for television? On-demand TV?
• Radio - if you buy a radio or DJ booth for your house, you can pick any Last.fm user’s playlist and play it in your house or club. One time as a promotional activity, I went to a forrest area in SmallWorlds, called some people over, made them follow me to a DJ booth and I put on my playlist. Then started promoting my club as the people enjoyed the music. Watch the video below to watch a SmallWorlds dance party.

• There are also radios that make use of several online music databases and they work like jukeboxes. They let users create a playlist and select songs by searching through a HUGE database. This system’s okay, but in some places with a lot of activity, people tend to argue over what music is playing, since anyone can just switch to another song or delete the playlist.
• Message boards - you can also put up a message board in your place. The awesome thing about this message board is that it displays Tweets from a Twitter user’s account.
• Flickr photo boards - you can also put up ‘paintings’ which you can then configure to show slideshows made by you with content from Flickr. How soon before this becomes a common gadget in every day life?

Besides that, I have to say that it’s pretty much what you’d expect when you hear about it. You can go around, talk to people, harass them, train your pet, play games (arcade, pool, chess, checkers, etc.), enter tournaments, dance, hang out in the pool, whatever. It’s just like the Sims, but multiplayer and web 2.0.

SmallWorlds has a few let-downs however…

• Credit system limited - at some point, it’s very tough to make credits. Missions end and you have to resort to games to make money. The problem with a tournament is only 1 to 3 people can win. Plus, I don’t feel like wasting my time training myself to be good at some game within a virtual world. Besides, I don’t even have the time to do that. Only other option right now seems to be inviting other people, but I honestly don’t know many people who’d be interested. Maybe when I was 14.
• Hard to finish all missions - if you’re playing the first time, chances are likely you’ll spend your bucks on something earlier in the missions, preventing you from completing later missions.
• Money, money - I expect the game to kind of suck when you’re not a premium user. Right now the game’s still in beta phase, so no premium usage yet, but I expect without investing your money in this game, it will not be very interesting. This means that even for the users who do pay, there will be less users to interact with. It would be interesting to integrate some advertising or marketing in the game so that one could make money of the big amount of people that would play for free. If the game becomes very limited for free players, they’ll be gone before advertising has a chance to get to them.

Having said that, I must list the things I like…

• Lightweight - my laptop’s not the greatest, but it seemed to be working just fine on it. Very accessible and rather easy to use and understand.
• Great character customization options - if you’re a member, look up my characters Zen Shpongle and Spartz Shpongle. Do go sign up yourself and explore how much you can do to customize your character and pet.
• Original ideas for ’stuff’ - by stuff I mean furniture and other things people use to stuff their houses with (pun intended). Especially the appliances with web 2.0 integration are very cool! I expect a lot of these virtual things to become reality in the next 5 to 10 years (on a bigger scale than they already are).
• Staff - the people working on SmallWorlds are great guys and girls and participate within the game. These people have a very pleasant, warm, welcoming and interested vibe.

That’s all I have to say. If you’re into procrastination, web 2.0, online games or the future, do check this one out. Visit SmallWorlds.

SmallWorlds on YouTube…

For all fans of photography, check out this amazing tool (read: plaything). Tag Galaxy is a fresh and fun way to explore the well-known photo sharing community Flickr. For those not familiar with Flickr (shame on you), it’s a site where users upload their personal photography and arts with many professionals as well as great amateurs on there. Those that are already familiar with Flickr would agree with me when I say that there are vast treasures of awesome pictures to be found on there.

Tag Galaxy let’s you explore Flickr in a new way. First you go to the page and enter a tag used for pictures. This can be anything, ranging from colours to locations, to subjects, etc.

Next you click go and you’re presented with a galaxy (surprise surprise). This galaxy has planets in it that vary in size. The planets are related tags. If you enter red, you might get planets labeled ’sunset’, ‘autumn’, or other colours. The planet of the tag you entered is always in the center of your galaxy and is the biggest. You can shift around your galaxy for a better view too. Really cool! The planets size is determined by the number of photos that are tagged with both the tags already selected plus the tag of this particular planet.

When you click one of the planets it’s added to your main planet. Once you’re satisfied with the combination of tags and the number of results, you can have a look at your planet. The planet for Web 2.0 looks something like below.

These pictures can then be clicked, enlarged, enlarged further and be found on Flickr via a simple link. I suggest you go over to Tag Galaxy now and play around with it for a while. You can also check out the video below for a different look at Tag Galaxy. This nice little 3Dimensionalisation of Flickr obviously goes into the archives as COOL!

Recently I came across a mashup called Lasttube which cleverly combines YouTube with Last.fm. By now everyone in the modernized world knows YouTube, even people without internet know it. Last.fm is not as well known, but if you listen to music on your computer and/or an iPod, you really don’t have an excuse not to be a member. Last.fm is fun! It creates a database of what you listen to and builds a listening profile (with charts and everything, fucking amazing!). There are millions of users and based on all this information, it learns and can recommend you things that other people liked, based on your and their musical tastes. Pretty sweet, huh? It’s also fun to get a bunch of friends, your parents, girlfriend, colleagues on there, because it’s real easy to see the compatibility of your musical tastes.

Lasttube is a combination of Last.fm and YouTube. It’s very simple.

1. Go to the Lasttube site.
2. Enter your own or someone elses Last.fm name - or that of an artist you like.
3. Now Lasttube will start playing music videos it thinks you like (if you inserted your own Last.fm name), or music similar to that of the artist’s name you typed in.

Pretty nifty. Your own MTV, except not as crappy… and it actually plays music, unlike MTV nowadays. Another reason why I like it is because with Last.fm, you have to buy a membership to listen to your own (or others’) recommend stations. It’s cheap, but still. With Lasttube you have your own recommended station with videos!

The main downside I see though is that it doesn’t Scrobble the songs it plays. In other words, if you look at videos on the side, it doesn’t record it into your database of listened music. This also seems to be the number one complaint in the lasttube group on Last.fm. I imagine it would be hard to code that in though. Something else that would be cool is if people could embed the Lasttube player into their websites.

Okay, now it’s time to go have fun!

• Lasttube
• My Lasttube channel
• My Last.fm page
• Register at Last.fm and start scrobbling!

Okay, it’s still in its beta phase, it’s still rather young, but when I come across something I like, I just have to review it. A few days ago (maybe it was yesterday, maybe longer, who knows… or cares) I saw a post on TechCrunch about Scoutle. Seeing a Dutch concept on TechCrunch (provided it doesn’t suck) of course immediately peaks my interest, being Dutch myself.

So what is Scoutle?

Scoutle is a new form of social networking we refer to as Automated Social Networking. You do not have to do anything, nor do you have to know each other and there is no need of communication in order to connect, on the contrary. Automated Social Networking is all about networking without all that. It is a way of building a network of your own choice with no real-life obligations.

At least, that’s how they would describe it. Now let’s do it my way. On the right side of the page, you can see a Scoutle box. You see so called ‘Scouts’ walking by each other. This is called a meeting. How often your scout has meetings with other scouts depends on the categories you’ve placed your website in, connections and networks you’ve let your Scout join.

It’s a great tool for meeting other bloggers within your niche and maybe subscribe to each others’ pages, comment on each others’ sites, or even exchange links. The widget you install on your website also functions as a banner. Leave a good tagline and you might attract visitors from other websites straight to yours.

Scoutle has an automated rating system for Scouts and the websites attached to it. Valuable sites, with Scouts that are active on Scoutle (making connections, joining/creating networks, etc.) are thus noticed more often than Scouts with less value. Scoutle also aims to tear down one of the main problems they see in social networking. Are  you important when you have a 1000 friends, or are you important if you offer good quality? Scoutle aims for quailty, not quantity. Although arguably, people with a lot of connections have a big social influence and are thus more interesting for networking purposes.

Overall I’m very happy with the service and expect it to be developed wonderfully. It seems like the makers are putting a lot of time and effort into it. I’d like to highlight some things I’ve experienced that, when improved, would make Scoutle great:

• Too many emails. I woke up this morning and found 10 emails from Scoutle. Although I like email updates, 10 in one night’s just too much. A daily activity digest would be nice, I’ll stay up-to-date from moment to moment with the personal RSS feed offered by Scoutle.
• Not enough members, yet. Although I think things are really starting to roll now. I expect that within the next few weeks a lot of people will start joining (and I think the makers of Scoutle think the same, since they’re installing new servers so the service can run faster and more efficiently).
• After registering I found myself losing overview. I created my scout and I figured “now what?” I had to push myself to make something happen. I think a good service invites you and guides you through it, but not obtrusively.
• When browsing profiles, at first it wasn’t clear how to make connections. I was looking for an Add Connection button, but it took a little while to realize the button I was looking for was actually called Control Connection.
• Networks have no comment wall. I just thought that would be a nice addition. Right now all the communication you can do is basically your tagline, website description, joining networks, and one on one communication. It would be nice to be able to post a comment where more people could see it.
• Make networks searchable.
• I prefer a tag-based system as opposed to a category and sub-category system. I had to pick a category for my scout, and so I did. The sub-categories were quite limited though and I saw sub-categories within other categories that really suited my scout well. Same goes for networks. Some networks fit into multiple subcategories which are part of different categories.

I urge you all to go and join Scoutle. It’s a great service and I think if you jump in now, it will be a lot easier to keep your head above the water when the site will be swarming with scouts. Go build your value. A trick to build your value is to start looking for networks you’re interested in and if there isn’t one: create it! For anything! You want to be the first. You want people to notice your name first when they join a network. Just create it before someone else does. Oh, and start connecting!

Below is an introductory video to Scoutle. Explaining their philosophy and concept in an easy way.

Visit my scout!

Now FoodFeed is something that I’ve been using for a while now and I must say that I immediately fell in love with the concept. The idea behind FoodFeed is quite simply telling the world what you’re eating. This can be your friends who are tracking the RSS feed via Google Reader, strangers browsing the FoodFeed website looking for recipes, your mom who’s trying to see if you’re eating healthy (you’re not), or the visitors of your website. For a while now, I’ve had a FoodFeed ‘badge’ on the main blog where you can track what I eat. Go and have a look, it’s on the right side of the page.

So how does it work? First of all, you need a Twitter account. Then you choose to follow a particular account and that account automatically follows you so that you can send messages to it. You send a message to the account with whatever you’re eating, just ate, or are going to eat and that’s it. Next thing, it’s on your FoodFeed page for the whole world to see. It’s VERY simple. Registering is done in a jiffy!

Right now, FoodFeed is still in the beta phase. This means, according to the 20 year old Brazilian creator Vitor Lourenco, that features are still going to be added. Which is a good thing, because after a little while of this, I’m getting bored. Maybe I’m just fed up with eating the same thing over and over again though.

Quick run-down of what makes FoodFeed great:

• Very simplistic!
• Great design.
• Very effective and good-looking badge.
• Builds a way around Twitter’s limits as far as RSS goes.
• Discover recipes.

Another run-down of what makes FoodFeed not so great:

• I liked the idea initially, but now I’m left wondering: why am I doing this? What’s the point really?
• It’s very limited and does just one thing.

What would make FoodFeed a better site? (this is for you Vitor )

• It would be cool if you can look at the trends of certain keywords like icecream, corn, pancakes to see how often they’re mentioned. If an official FoodFeed blog was created, it could report on this.
• Something else this blog could report in is FoodFeed user of the week. Someone who’s just eating interesting stuff ALL the time. In this way you’d stimulate more users to use FoodFeed, because it might drive traffic to their websites if they’re discovered.
• Incentives for interacting. It would be nice if FoodFeed had a little bit of a community to it.
• Tweets (Twitter messages) are often very short. It would be good if you could go to your FoodFeed page, click whatever you just submitted and add details or a recipe to the post. Whatever you send via Twitter would thus become the title of a potential post.

Just a few things that come to mind.

Overall, FoodFeed is a cool idea and the simplicity of it is great, but I feel that it’s a bit boring. This is why I’m filing it under Cool, as well as Crap. I seriously can’t decide. I do expect Vitor to come with great concepts in the future. He’s one to watch!

So you might have heard about File Swap, a site where you can upload a file and randomly get one in return from a stranger who has also uploaded a file. You might upload a picture and get some music in return, or anything else. It’s always a surprise. Two guys, called Dominik Schmid and Philipp Lenssen, were inspired by this idea and created Sketch Swap.

So, what is Sketch Swap? It’s really quite simple. You make a drawing (a sketch) online, on their website. You click Submit and then someone else’s drawing appears on your screen. What I find interesting however, is that it doesn’t just appear, it’s drawn for you a second time (a bit faster than the original version). This is very cool, because it gives you the opportunity to see how people go about drawing certain things. It’s a way to learn!

Besides that, it’s simply fun and maybe a good pseudo-spiritual practice. You create something, say goodbye to it and hand it over to the world. In return, you get something from someone who has done exactly the same thing. I suggest you just hop on over and try it out for yourself.

An image I received.

When I came across a list on Ditto via StumbleUpon, I saw a concept I liked and decided to become a contributor. Ditto describes itself as “a platform for fans to create and browse definitive entertainment lists for the purposes of discovery and debate”. The idea is that one person creates a list with all kinds of stuff that they like that lie within the scope of this list. Then other people can come and vote particular items in that list up and down and contribute new items also. Based on this, people can discover new stuff, network with other people and create a community of recommendations. Cool idea, right? Too bad it has been so poorly executed.

Stop… hammertime - because I’m going to smash this one waaaay down!

We don’t know what you’re talking about

Having a quite eclectic music taste, I love to explore the unknown. I often listen to little-heard of artists and this provides a problem. When you want to add an album to a list, you search for either the album name or the artist. You then get a list to choose from. Sometimes, whatever I am looking for is simply not there, because it’s not that well-known. It wouldn’t be that bad if it would just let you insert album information and upload the cover art, but it doesn’t. Instead you have to EMAIL the admins of the website. No webform or anything, you really have to email them. Holy shitfuck. It doesn’t matter that much anyway, because…

Ditto is filled with the same old mainstream items we already know

I tried to find some things that I didn’t already know or hadn’t already heard of. I succeeded, but didn’t find anything that my father wouldn’t have heard of. If more people would make specific lists, maybe we could discover something. So I did. I created a “best psychedelic albums”-list. The problem now is that specific lists don’t get much attention, traffic or input. So it’s me and some other guy that have contributed to the list. Great. And look, again no artists that my dad wouldn’t have heard of, except for the ones that I contributed.

Oops

Then something else happened. Even though I’ve written the word a million times, I always have trouble spelling dissapointment disappointment. I made a mistake in creating a list and I wanted to delete, edit, or flag it. All of this is impossible and you would have to email them, which is just way too much trouble. As a sidenote: I would have added Pendulum’s new In Silico album to that list, but guess what, it wasn’t in their database yet and social media users (like me) are lazy, so I didn’t email them.

Tastebuds

Then there’s the option of making taste buddies, cleverly named Tastebuds. This is kind of an interesting idea, because you can easily see on what items both of you match, but I feel there are not enough incentives to get Tastebuds, plus there is no room where people can actually get to know each other a little bit. The lists are too anonymous for that. So, in desparate need of social validation through Web 2.0 like half the Facebookers out there, please add me as a Tastebud. Don’t bother signing up for it though. It’s not worth it, because Ditto bores fast!

Lesson

There is one thing I did learn however. I found this site via StumbleUpon. When I looked at the reviews of the main page, there were quite a few negative ones, but when actual lists on Ditto are Stumbled, I only see positivity. I found Ditto by Stumbling onto a list and joined it to check it out. So they’re good (easy) things to Stumble and generates publicity for the site (in a better way than their frontpage does). The same goes for SoapBoxxer, which I reviewed previously. When Stumbling upon user-generated content websites, people often complain if they can’t participate without signing up. Ditto and SoapBoxxer creates a separate page per opinion or list and these pages are rather powerful to Stumble. The incentive SoapBoxxer creates for that is that if you create an opinion and other people comment on it, you get ‘authority points’. Creating a traffic friendly opinion (which you yourself can agree or disagree with) thus is rewarded, which is essential in the beginning stages of a new Web 2.0 project.

The Best of Everything?

Ditto claims it’s “your guide to the best of everything”. True? Maybe. If you have an extremely average taste. I like to discover new things though, so I’ll just resort to Last.fm. Oh, and Ditto certainly wouldn’t appear in my list of the best of everything. Good thing it’s a beta. Time to revise, guys!

For as long as the internet has been around, people have used it as a tool to communicate their opinions, but a more proper label would be to argue. And why not? It’s fun. It offers a new dimension to discussions that you don’t have in live debates. You can look up facts right on the spot and you won’t get beaten up by people that are bigger than you.

Over the years I’ve been part of many platforms for debates and discussions. The most convenient I found simple discussion boards, but sites like Rethos were very refreshing, although usually not ideal when it comes to user-friendliness. The new service SoapBoxxer offers a very easy to use platform for discussions and is bound to set a trend.

The idea is simple. One of the users sets up a SoapBoxx which is an opinion they might or might not agree with. This is displayed on the main page of SoapBoxxer and users can then indicate if they agree or disagree. Once they’ve chosen, a form shows up where they can leave a comment - often leading to interesting discussions. These discussions differ from the lengthy essay-like debates I’ve seen on forums though. Long replies usually consist of about 200 words, so discussions are very fast-paced and the short replies are usually very powerful statements.

The big fonts, quick-pacedness and simplicity of the platform really make SoapBoxxer a site to keep an eye on. Go and have a look, experiment and discuss. Oh, and check out my profile.

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