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

Visible.net is a new provider of state-of-the-art ecommerce and online marketing services.

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Veerendra Shivhare, who developed Amazon Tree that we covered previously, has released Tagbulb. Tagbulb offers a mashup of search engines for tags allowing searches against just about any web 2.0 site you can think of. You can search via tag using services like Youtube, Flickr, Technorati, 43Things, and many of their competitors. The interface is well done, and uses popup windows well (which is rare). I did find the autocompletion to be a bit over eager, though - it kept wanting to complete "ajax" as "ajax atlas". Its also frustrating not to find a way to get a link to "all blog posts tagged with foo", as everything seems stuck to the one "bulb.php" url. I'm not sure about the practical use of something like this, but its definitely a fun experiment. I asked Veerendra about his experience while developing Tagbulb in more detail: on users and usability: Users should be empowered to choose the source and type of search. I have seen lot of similar sites which search multiple sources like youtube and yahoo video. In particular there was a site called tag fetch. It hardly gave any control to end user. Once searched there were multiple async requests which goes and fetched results from various sources. In this case - there is a long delay before you get the information. Secondly users don't get any control on choosing what they want. I intend to evolve TagBulb on user feedbacks and make it the de-facto tag search engine. on language used TagBulb was conceptualized 9 months back. I developed it on J2EE. Faced issues with finding a good affordable hosting provider. A few weeks back someone suggested I release TagBulb, and all I had to do was to re-write it in PHP and choose from "n" number of hosting providers. I am happy with PHP though I am an expert at J2EE. on frameworks Prototype (I just love this library). Its balanced to give developers all the freedom they need and provide easy OO capabilities to JS. There are many so called AJAX libraries which takes control from users in return of providing out of the box widgets. For guys like me most of these frameworks are "good for beginners", but they fail to impress the experienced guys. Used behavior for image effects, YUI for tabs and pop ups, Wordpress for Blog, and Zend as PHP backbone.

Google has released Google Image Labeler, a streaming Ajax app that makes it fun to label (tag) images apparently built with GWT (via TechCrunch). It’s a real-time collaborative app, where you work with an online partner, assigned by Google, to look at the same image and decide on some labels together. It works like this:

• Google assigns you a random online partner.
• You’re shown an image. Somewhere else in the world, your partner will see the same image.
• You come up with as many labels as possible, until passing. Your partner is doing likewise.
• When both of you come up with the same label, you both move on to the next image. You may also both pass.
• Continue labelling images for 90 seconds. At the end, you’ll get a score based on how many labels you made. Scores are persistent if you’re signed in - there’s a table of high scorers.
• Google now has tons of label data.

This is another example of streaming /Comet, in this case a novel application as well. However, there’s not a single, long-lived, connection. A little Firebug session shows a sequence of POST calls occurring, possibly one call for each label you make and one each time your partner makes a label. The calls are persistent in the sense that they stay open until something happens, but (in my case at least) there are many of them rather than a single call. Also, it looks like the entire interaction, including even the High Scores section, is delivered in a single client-side application, no page refresh. Looks like this is built with Google Web Toolkit (Google’s first public GWT app?). One surprising omission is keyboard shotcuts - right now, you can click Enter to submit a label, but you have to pick up your mouse and click to pass. SearchEngineWatch dug out this excellent 51-minute presentation by Carnegie Mellon’s Luis von Ahn (also of CAPTCHA fame), who talks about ESP Game, which Google subsequently licensed to create Labeler. If you’re wondering whether the Labeller will help Google catch up on Flickr’s tags, here’s a salient stat from the video (8 minutes in): in one year, 9 billion people-hours are spent playing Solitaire; it took 20 million human-hours to build the entire Panama Canal - no wonder the professor talks about finding ways to optimise human cycles :-). Also, note that a single 90-second game will probably yield somewhere between 50 and 200 labels - admittedly some of them are rushed, but how long would it take to gather that info in most web apps? The professor speculates that Google could label all of its images in two months.

Tagged.com hasn’t received any coverage on Mashable yet, largely because it caters to the pre-MySpace demographic of 13-20 year olds. However, today they announced some page customization features that are worth a mention. First off, they appear to have followed MySpace’s lead, providing users with customizable URLs. But more importantly, they’ve added the ability to personalize your page. Users can choose between a selection of 21 themed “styles” or create a whole new style using the AJAXy editor. This provides a high level of customization, allowing users to change the background image, colors, fonts and edit the individual modules. Tagged also allows you to edit the html of individual modules and embed Flash widgets from a select number of external sites including YouTube, Photobucket, ImageShack, Meez and RockYou. A bit of tweaking reveals that many unauthorized Flash widgets can also be made to work (eg. MySpace slideshows), but it’s a bit hit and miss. The site still lacks the wide open possibilities of the market leader, but I assume they’re treading carefully: giving complete control to users could open them up to vulnerabilities (see the MySpace hack), which would be a PR disaster for a site that sells itself on being safer than the rest. San Francisco-based Tagged announced a $7 million funding round back in February, and the corporate site claims 3.3 million users. The other stats fairly look good, too: they’re reporting 2.7 million visitors and 391 million pageviews per month. What’s more, 20% of members visit Tagged every day - at the time of writing, 7000 members are online. Those are decent figures for a site we hear virtually nothing about.

Karaoke is a very social hobby. Going out with the gang on a Friday or Saturday night and belting a few songs out while you’re more than mildly toasted is great fun. Even people who have home karaoke sets that play the CD+G format tend to do it in groups, rather than alone.

But Web 2.0 is also supposed to be about social networking. Can a Web 2.0-based karaoke site work, when you’re effectively singing into a computer microphone, alone?

SingShot turns out to be surprisingly fun (well, not that surprising, if you’re the type to sing in the shower or the car). You have to sign up and it’ll be $9.95 US a month or $59.40 a year after the initial 14-day free trial.

Once you set up your profile to tell folks a little bit about yourself and your music stylings, pick one of the many songs in SingShot’s library. They’re categorized by title, artist, and genre, as well as tag.

That’s where the Web 2.0 aspects start to come in. You can tag your own recordings, and search for others by tags (”Don’t You Forget About Me”, my debut hit, was tagged ‘breakfastclub’ by someone else, so I decided to add that tag).

You can also comment on others’ recordings, and rate them. The good singers are supposed to rise to the top, where you can see them on the most popular, most rated, and most listened to charts.

Now, on to the singing!

All you need is a microphone and Flash (note, I didn’t add singing ability to this list). SingShot uses a Flash app that displays the lyrics and records your warblings:

As with any karaoke system, as you sing, the lyrics are highlighted. In this example it got a little ridiculous…

You can choose to listen to an instrumental version or a demo vocal so you can get a feel for the song lyrics if you’re not sure of them - a nice touch. You can also see the lyrics full-screen, which makes standing and singing at a mike an option.

The big question: What did I sing? Well, check it out.

I like this service. I think I’d have to be dedicated to karaoke in order to subscribe to it, but I can see how it’d be fun to have at parties, and you’d be able to provide attendees with links to their songs.

If nothing else, you should try it one slow Friday afternoon at the office. We livened things up here and I swear my co-workers will never look at me the same again. Actually, I’m not sure if they’ll ever look at me again at all.