I can certainly see that it has a huge potential for marketing spontaneity: if your target market is the shopping spree/spontaneous spender type, you may have a winning possibility with Twitter. Woot! has jumped on board, and I think it’s probably got fantastic potential for them. I’m less certain how valuable it may be for others…

The characteristics Woot! has which make Twitter so useful?

• Very short term of availability. If you want to Woot, you need to know what’s up NOW.
• Very technological market segment — Woot sells a lot to gadget geeks. Twitter ALSO appeals to gadget geeks. Match made in heaven.
• Woot appeals to a sense of immediacy: if you make a decision quickly, you can get a great deal. Twitter appeals to the same sense of immediacy in human interaction, by keeping constantly updated about the activities of your Twitter friends.

There are definitely other companies who could benefit from Twitter — any business which makes heavy use of limited time offers, limited inventory sales, or daily featured items could probably make use of Twitter fairly effectively.

Outside of these? I’ve got my doubts. However, with the amount of attention it’s currently receiving in the blogosphere (and the search marketing blogosphere in particular,) it seems likely that we’ll see it applied in numerous creative manners in the near future.
It’s worth watching, at any rate. There’s no question that there will be plenty of very unique applications coming from Twitter.

It’s similar to MyBlogLog, in that it tracks visits to your site. It’s like Technorati, in that it provides ranking of blogs on the basis of popularity and provides links to current and popular blog posts.

It looks interesting — it’s in Beta right now, but I’ve requested an invitation — see what happens and what I can learn!

As a note, the only reason I’ve noted this is because it’s currently at the top of Alexa’s movers and shakers list, having shot up to 5,969 today from a previous ranking of 247,451. On Technorati’s Where’s the Fire, it’s been
described as a “Trafficracy.”

From Spotplex:

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count.

In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works. I feel there’s some risk that what will essentially happen is that the site will show most prominently whatever article is currently being Dugg, Slashdotted, or otherwise barraged by traffic from having gained prominence in one of the other major social aggregators. Still, I do like the absence of a visible vote/bury option: it’s just traffic.

In short: it’s not whether people liked your story — just whether they visited it. (Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is open for debate.)

MyBlogLog has created a recent stir in the blogging communities by providing an easy way to connect bloggers with their own communities – essentially creating a community of blogs. This expansion of the two-way blogger/commenter relationship into a more three-dimensional interaction has a lot of potential. Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) recently wrote (in a comment):

This is a good example of the benefits of a blog community – not only can blog readers find out about me and my interests, but I have a way of finding out more about my blog readers. And, as I’ve found in this case, readers who are interested in what I am blogging about might themselves blog on topics which interest me.

Not every reader of your blog will comment. Not every reader will have a MyBlogLog account. However, the interesting combination of readers and fellow bloggers creates a unique collaboration. Rather than having pure statistics – knowing you’ve been visited by 48 people, 65 percent of whom used Internet Explorer and so on, you have a small insertion of real human data in your statistics. MyBlogLog can tell you that this person actually visited your blog and that person admires you enough to have added you to their contacts.

Really, it’s pretty cool.

I own a fairly large number of books. In fact, I own enough books that about four years ago I decided it was worth my time to build a database containing my library which I could keep on my PC and on my PDA. This little catalog provided about a half-dozen fields which I could perform searches on or sort by date, category, author, or title. It’s a nice little thing – but kind of a pain to maintain. The process of exporting the library back and forth between my PC and my PDA is a little awkward. The time to write in each item is a little annoying. Altogether, it’s not ideal. But, it was free.

The Web 2.0 phenomenon of bookmark sharing, image sharing, and social collaboration online has, unsurprisingly, also resulted in at least two (that I know of) online library sharing services – Librarious and LibraryThing.

What do I need from an online library service?

My priorities for such an online service are as follows:

• Make it easy for me to add to my library.
• Make certain I can add everything in my library.
• Let me use my library from a handheld browser – I want to check whether I already own something while I’m out bookshopping!
• Allow me to choose whether I’m going to share my library (or specific items in my library) with others.

In addition to these issues, which are important to me as a user of an online library, I’m also concerned about certain issues with these sites as I would be with any site.

• Good searching and sorting functions.
• Privacy and data collection policies.
• Web site accessibility.
• Web standards compliance.

Some of these could easily jump between lists, but I’ve split them up for ease of reference.

Critical Library Service Functionality

Make it easy for me…

Both services make it reasonably easy to add new titles. In Librarious, you have two options. You can search for books from the "add item" form, and add items directly from that form using AJAXian tricks and treats, or you can use the provided bookmarklet to add titles while browsing Amazon.com. The "add item" form is not perfect – there is no "Submit" button for the query. The search is performed as soon as the input box loses focus. This is easy – but not intuitive.

LibraryThing is even easier – it provides a side-by-side two-paneled interface where you can submit your search (with a submit button) and browse a list of results in the neighboring panel. You simply need to click on the title of an item to add it immediately to your list.

Both systems have advantages and disadvantages, and it’s not clear to me that there’s any need to discuss this particular aspect further, since there’s no clear winner. There will be on the next point, however.

Make certain I can add everything in my library

I own some rather obscure books – things I’ve picked up from library discard sales, at used book shops, etc. Librarious has a major flaw in their library system. You can only add items which appear in Amazon.com’s catalog. There’s no free hand entry, and no alternate database to query. A couple of the more obscure items in my library were simply not available.

LibraryThing, however, not only offers the ability to manually input a book, it also provides searching against library catalogs and Amazon.com. You can specify your search against libraries in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, or the Library of Congress. In this area, LibraryThing provides a vastly superior capacity to Librarious. (You even have the ability to view the MARC records!)

Mobile Browsing of my Library

Well, at the moment I don’t own a mobile browser. However, on the basis of tests using Opera’s small screen rendering and their Opera Mini simulator, I’m able to come up with some general appraisals.

LibraryThing, in general, performed better than I expected. Opera’s small screen rendering does a pretty phenomenal job of managing the table-based design. Although there are some limitations to the simulator, I found the site pretty easy to navigate. I was able to quickly access the search function, and fairly easy to browse my own collection of books. It’s not been designed with mobile navigation in mind – but does manage fairly well.

Librarious, although using a more contemporary CSS-based design, is actually less usable when linearized in Opera Mini. Unfortunately, the code is ordered such that a panel containing news announcements and another panel containing a Librarious-wide tag cloud precede your library listing. With no internal page navigation provided, this makes for quite a lot of scrolling to get to your own books. In general, it’s OK – but painful because it COULD be so much better.

What if I don’t WANT to share?

Well, as far as I can tell, neither service provides any means to choose NOT to share a particular book. There will be no need for the government to acquire a search warrant for my library, alas! LibraryThing does offer the option to keep your entire library private; but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I do like the social aspect of the online library.

General Functionality

Searching and Sorting

On any site, the ability to search is absolutely critical. On a library collection site, this simply becomes MORE critical.

I hate to say this for any site, but Librarious has a HORRIBLE search function. The search box is located well below the fold in the right panel of the 3-column layout. The search function does not appear on every page – in particular, it does not appear on the home page. Given that a search is quite likely one of the first things I’d potentially want to do on visiting, this is a MAJOR flaw.

Not only does the search function fail to appear on every page – it is not actually the same SEARCH on each page. Depending on the section of the site you are currently browsing, you will be searching a different data index. Perhaps the creator felt this was a neat advantage, but to my sense of usability, this is a huge mistake.
If you have navigated to your collection page, you have the ability to sort your list according to five categories – title, author, rating, date added, and popularity. You also have the ability to search your collection or browse by tag.

However, if instead you’ve navigated to the "Users" page, you are presented with the ability to search all media. (Actually, you are presented with a search of a non-existent index "medias" – but this is clearly a typo.) On navigating to the "books" page, your view is that of the most recent books added with the same sort options – and the search is of all books.

The variability of the search feature is moderately intuitive – not always, but mostly. However, the site has only that single one-book interface for search (no advanced search) and I feel that the box, in order to be helpful to visitors, should really remain consistent.

LibraryThing has a much more traditional search interface. It also has no search tool on the main page, but unlike Librarious (with no link to a search function at all), it provides a prominent link to the search page at the top of the screen. They provide 7 separate searches, for books and tags within your library, and for books, tags, authors, users, and user locations for all libraries. Although not inspiring, this offers a quite reasonable degree of functionality.

Privacy and Data Collection

It’s important to always be aware of what kind of data you are offering up to a service. And when you’re providing such extensive personal data as a multi-thousand item library, you should definitely consider who will have access to what information.

On privacy, once again, LibraryThing wins hands down. First of all, it actually has a privacy policy. Not only this, but it’s privacy policy seems very reasonable and honestly concerned with your privacy. With LibraryThing’s ability to keep your entire library private and profile private, you’ve got good reason for confidence concerning your data.

Librarious, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to provide any kind of privacy policy. Nor can you make your library private. So, no benefits there. It’s not that I believe their untrustworthy – I seriously doubt that they’ll be selling library lists to the government, for example. However, it’s very comforting to have everything written out and explicit.

Neither service, however, actually requires any personally identifying data at all in order to use the service. You only need to provide a username and password to use both services. So it does appear, despite the lack of an explicity privacy policy for Librarious, that you could sit reasonably secure if you’re bothered.

Web Accessibility and Standards

This review has gotten a lot longer than I originally intended – so I’m going to let this pass with a cursory glance. Suffice it to say that neither site has done anything of significance to consider accessibility, and neither site successfully validates. In fact, both sites failed validation quite badly.

I wouldn’t see that either site is a nightmare for accessibility, when it comes to basic navigation, but they are both AJAX-ian services – and it is inevitable that a significant degree of functionality is lost without the use of Javascript. However, it must be said that LibraryThing does maintain a significant level of functionality even without JavaScript, because it is not, infact, an AJAX service. It has made use of iFrames and other tricks which look very similar. Although this technology is less "Web 2.0", it behaves much more successfully when Javascript is not available.

To sum up:

Both of these projects are the results of very dedicated work from individual programmers. LibraryThing was developed by Tim Spalding, a web developer and publisher based in Portland, Maine. Librarious is the project of one person who appears to go to a great deal of effort not to provide his name anywhere. In my hour and a half writing this and half an hour explicitly searching for it, I failed to find a name. Regardless, Librarious is certainly the more recent project – still in Alpha, the project was begun, apparently, around January of 2006. LibraryThing dates at least back to August of 2005, which is the earliest entry of it’s blog. In addition, LibraryThing requires a $25 lifetime subscription or a $10/year fee to maintain a library greater than 200 books. This gives it the advantage of an income.

At any rate, I have to favor LibraryThing as my online library of choice, given everything I’ve looked at above. Although neither project is perfect, LibraryThing has fewer flaws – and a lot more project transparency.

Recently I ran across SimplyExplained, a web 2.0 edition of sites like About.com. These "web 1.0" successor sites feature glossy new designs, but also have a core interactive functionality which makes them more attractive to the web-savvy next generation.

Where About.com is constituted of a huge collection of articles and documents provided by subject knowledgeable experts, SimplyExplained.com consists of user-contributed questions and answers. A given question may have any number of answers, which can be rated according to your satisfaction. A democratic interpretation of fact and knowledge.

Like Wikipedia, a user-editable compendium of knowledge is inherently flawed. It’s dependent entirely on the honesty and ethics of those who contribute. On the other hand, it is also constantly undergoing oversight from many thousands of people. Inevitably, some people will receive incorrect information and believe it; others will see incorrect information and correct it.

Regardless of the precise "truth" of any resource, these community editable sites do provide a level of humanity which, I think, is very effective at drawing in traffic. The human factor does a great deal to great a passionate community.

My take? Well, I have mixed feelings. To explain edgeio is pretty simple – the service crawls RSS feeds searching for posts which have been "tagged" with the word listing. Having found these pages, it aggregates them into categories of items being listed – for sale, wanted, housing, jobs, etc.

The advantages: edgeio offers an easy way to publish your classified ads without needing to go to the site for each item and list it manually. Instead, you can do this through whatever other software you choose if it produces an acceptable RSS feed. You don’t need to be registered with the site or ever even visit the site – just apply the tag to your blog post, and there you go. Publishing your ad is very easy. For the user, finding ads is also quite easy – you can search for additional tags for items, locations, etc. The design is reasonably user friendly and certainly more attractive than Craigslist.

The disadvantages: edgeio requires a fair amount of technical knowledge to get it to really work for you. First of all, they give preferential treatment to ads by registered members; so you probably want to register if you’re going to use the service seriously. Second, the site seems highly susceptible to spam. RSS tools for scraping blogs are becoming easier to find, and there’s little reason they can’t be put to the use of creating fake sales listings to try and pull a bit of traffic. Edgeio has an option to report a listing as spam, but, if this service is like most others, the bigger it gets the harder time it’ll have catching up.

Last, the service doesn’t incorporate anything at all in the way of payment services. It’s just a listing of classified ads – all interaction arranging payment and shipping must be handled personally between the buyer and seller. If this is what you want, I don’t see why you don’t just stick with Craigslist or Ebay! Grabbing listings from RSS feeds would be great if you could incorporate automated buying schemes, as well. However, the "ease of publishing" for the ads advantage is largely voided by the lack of tools to simplify the actual exchange.

I think that the service has potential, but it doesn’t quite seem ready for prime time.

I registered for both engines, and after checking off my various interests for StumbleUpon, one of which was liberal politics, I was greeted with a very entertaining Bush-bashing video which gave me an adrenaline rush so that I soared through my afternoon work with vim, vigor, and vitality! My initiation to PreFound was a bit more traditional in that I was greeted with a standard-type search page.

To use Stumbleupon, you must join it, a process that takes about 5 minutes. You install a toolbar on your IE or Firefox browser, and then pick your interests from a vast selection. Once you have done those things, you are then ushered to a site such as the Bush-basher that thusly invigorated my afternoon. Then, you can search the database to your heart’s content, and here’s where some users say their spouses are ready to deep-six them. The other neat thing about StumbleUpon is you can vote on sites you like, and those you don’t.

Although you can register with PreFound to become one of the official community members and participates, you don’t need to join to search.

What is cool about both sites is that by registering, and then voting upon sites, you actually participate and have a say in this vast cyber-universe; as well, the results you get in return will be more useful and rich than what you would get off machine-generated searches.