Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

Kevo, which launched last week, is a social network for fans of celebrities. The site is based around user-generated profiles of TV and movie stars, which can be edited ala Wikipedia. Kevo also features a Digg-like karma system: if you add some more information on, say, Jon Stewart, your edit will be rated by other users. If you receive enough positive votes, your changes will appear on the site. Once you have enough karma, you don’t need to have your edits approved by other users. However, the amount of karma needed varies depending on how popular that celebrity profile is - the more famous a person is, the more karma you need to make changes. That sounds complex, but it makes sense when you try it. Kevo is also a Friendster-style social network: you can create a profile, build a list of your favorite celebrities, add other users to your network of friends and send messages. Users can be ranked by the amount of karma they have, or the number of contributions they’ve made. It’s kinda neat, but I think Fanpop, which appeared on Mashable last week, has the edge here. The problem is that Kevo requires too much from the user: you have produce all the content yourself. Fanpop, meanwhile, auto-populates your page with news headlines, a list of fans and links to YouTube, Flickr and other sites (see Mashable’s Fanpop page here). Additionally, adding a link to Fanpop is much less effort that making an edit to Kevo. So while the design is sweet (despite a few typos) and it’s fun to use, I think Kevo would be better if they made life easier for the users.

Got Kevo?Mashable’s Kevo account is here - if you sign up for a Kevo account, feel free to add Mashable to your friends list.

Greg Marlin here blogging live at the WordPress WordCamp 2006 gathering in San Francisco that Really Big Networks was happy to sponsor.

Some useful tips from the SEO and WordPress session. Still no answers for the problem of getting your backlinks tracked quicker, sorry everyone. Here are the key tips:

1. Add Head Meta Description Plugin

2. Don’t worry about no-follow links for comments on other blogs. Google doesn’t count the link but Yahoo! and MSN do.

3. To get valuable in-bound links give first to sites that are relevant to you.

4. Submit to sites like Del.icio.us and Digg.

5. Check out Yahoo! Site Explorer for measuring your in-bound links.

6. Check out Reporters without Borders

7. Like always, create good content that is updated regularly.

8. Add tags / categories that are relevant to your content.

9. Use the Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress to ensure “spiderability”.

30Boxes, the online calendar service, soft-launched their new people search engine today. The822 helps you to find more about a person by entering their email address - it returns information from social sites including your blog, Flickr account, Webshots photos and buddies, MySpace blog, Digg, EvokeTV and 30 Boxes itself. The name is a play on 411 (411×2=822) and the aim is to bolster 30Boxes’ efforts in the identity space. They also want to encourage outside developers to make use of their web services by building tools that fetch info about your 30Boxes contacts and buddies. I’m always concerned about these tools because you may have separate identities that you don’t want to merge - to use the obvious example, you might not want your employer to see your MySpace page. To give it its due, the822 does let you control the information that appears, but you’ll need to register for 30Boxes to do so. In many ways, this is similar to ClaimID and Naymz, giving you more control over your digital identity. Nonetheless, it’s a nice extension of the brand, and a good way to promote the company’s web services platform. See also Webtop, the ajax startpage from 30Boxes.

In what’s becoming a heated battle between the social news site Digg and Netscape’s virtually identical service, it seems that the new Netscape.com has been hacked, presumably by fans of Digg. The hack exploits a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability, which the hackers have used to inject their own javascript code snippets into pages. The behaviour is fairly tame for now - users see an irreverent message and get redirected to Digg. However, the site could still be vulnerable to more malicious attacks. This is just the latest episode in the ongoing saga between Digg and Netscape, with Jason Calacanis of Netscape offering to pay $1000/month for the top Digg and Newsvine users to switch to his site, and Digg founder Kevin Rose hitting back yesterday. Even the Diggers seem to be growing tired of the story - if Netscape fails, it will fail on its own.

We’ve seen hundreds of Digg clones springing up in the last few months (including Digg for cars and a controversial effort by Netscape). But newcomer Folkd has the rare privilege of actually being a half-decent attempt. The site, which began inviting new members over the weekend, provides social bookmarking for webpages, news stories and audio files, as well as the ability to post notes. The audio section is particularly good, allowing you to play the files without leaving Folkd. The interface is nicely designed, although obviously copied from Digg - registered users can hit “brand it” to bump a story up the rankings. And of course you can explore the bookmarks based on popularity, recency or by tags. You add content to Folkd using the Firefox/Internet Explorer extensions, and explore the most recent content within the extension itself. This is more than a bookmarklet - the Folkd folks are happy if you don’t visit the site at all, but simply use the extension. While Folkd is a nicely put together site, the obvious problem is that it’s a year too late. Digg and del.icio.us have won here, and Folkd is unlikely to make a big impact. Likewise, StumbleUpon has had years to build an audience around social browsing and discovery. It all comes down to network effects - Digg has all the users and all the traffic, so why go anywhere else? See also: BlueDot.