Swurl is a new lifestream service that can pull your latest activities from nineteen (currently supported up to 19) Web services into a blog-like format profile page. Upon you sign-up to this Swurl, you can straight away start to aggregate all of your online activities, even they didn’t require you to check your email for email verification. Playing around Swurl know that it play an important role in displaying all of an user’s Web life in a more systematically way and without any doubt, I think they’re in the middle in prospecting the bloggers that run their personal blogs with a focus on the personal life.

Since Swurl is relatively new on the Web, but they capture the opportunities not only supported pictures (Flickr), social network (Facebook), link (Digg), blog (wordpress), video (Youtube), review (Yelp), but they also supported the new frontier of social media such as FriendFeed. What is the main difference you can find on Swurl is the design, a blog-like format, with all the comments are systematically integrate to the user’s profile page. Although the first impression of Swurl profile remind me a lot of my previous blog theme, K2, but you can easily change the heading of the profile so that it suit your online identity. In many instances, social media aggregator like Swurl will help users to pull information through RSS feeds, but you’ll find it useful when you know the information obtained is usable.

One of the built-in features I think is very interesting is the “Timeline” view. From the Timeline view, I knew that I’m not everyday engaging on the Web, I’ve my off-Web real life too. However, the only thing I didn’t like is all the feed entries appeared on the Timeline have been reformatted to the Swurl URL link.

For the Web developers, there is an API of Swurl for them.

Xiaonei, the China’s Facebook clone is announcing the launched of its developer platform. According to CNet China, Xiaonei is the first China-based social network to launch its first-of-its-kind developer platform. However, don’t get Xiaonei wrong, this initiative is not its move in facing-off with Facebook, it’s just follow what Facebook’s market positioning in order to attract more users, and Chinese developers.

Like many others who came across Facebook, but never heard of Xiaonei, it’s exactly a Facebook clone. On the landing page, it looks pretty much exactly like the Facebook home page. The user interface, design, width and length of the layout, a small icon “your online friend(s) located in the bottom right looks the same as found on Facebook, but the only difference you can found is the language, i.e. Chinese Simplified. It is important to understand that Xiaonei is one of the top social networking sites in China, according to metric such as registered users amounted to 20 million. If you want to register as an user, you need to submit your personal details, that’s it. Unlike some other sites in China, you need to key in the China identity card number during the login authentication process. I’m not from China, I faced this difficult situation like this all the time. However, on Xiaonei, what you need to fill-up are the name, password, email address, as well as the country territory you’re coming from (currently you can only fill-up that you’re from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau). Upon you registered yourself into the Xiaonei system, you can find your friends through MSN, 163, 126, Sina, or Yahoo! Mail. Additionally, you also can search and filter your friends through your email clients such as Outlook or Foxmail. One little caveat from Xiaonei is please upload your photo as well as use your real name, if you do that, you’re entitled to be a so-called “Star” user, and hence enjoy unlimited storage space on Xiaonei.

Facebook platform has been key to Facebook’s positioning, but I wonder the forthcoming Xiaonei platform will also become the greatest asset to Xiaonei. Nevertheless, this might served as a mental shift to a China startup like Xiaonei as one open up its platform, it will thus open up its user base to the third-party developers. Traditionally, user base is being treated as a confidential and yet very important asset to a Chinese startup. However, it is interesting to see that MySpace China and 51.com have also both agreed to open up their platforms to the developers.

Currently, Xiaonei developer platform is open to some beta developers, and is not a production-ready platform. All the applications developed will be tested internally, before this platform is fully launch in mid of June. All applications are built using Xiaonei APIs that appeared on Xiaonei user profile page are not from the third-party developers, but served as the local own applications of Xiaonei. This include My Blog, Photo Album, Group, Share List, My Classes, My Club, Gift, Market, Movie, Sports, Sanguo (as shown in the below picture). Users are allowed to install or remove the applications if they want to. And all of these can be found on the left-hand sidebar. So, at least for now, there are few applications for Xiaonei users to play around with.

Picture 1: Application Page

Picture 2: Xiaonei Sangou

CityIN, a new social network launched in last month that targeting the Hong Kong and China people is joining Google’s OpenSocial. As you know, OpenSocial is Google’s first plan to take on Facebook, with a goal to release application programming interfaces (API) that allowed developers to build variety of applications for a range of social networking sites. And the most notable high-profile partner was MySpace.

With the participation of CityIn in OpenSocial, it probably the first Chinese social network that opens its platform to the developers mainly China Web developers. Strengths of the participation in OpenSocial will help to increase the worldwide profile of CityIN, this can be viewed from all the reporting from the top blogs in the blogosphere. As a new startup, it’s probably the best way for them that draw attention to it. CityIn’s challenge will be to build a different social network as there are many among them in China, or throughout the world. As a new startup, that co-founded by young talents, it is currently undertaking the differentiation strategy and was nearly very brave to try out all the new things and developed a lot of new features on their site.

CityIN, co-founded by Simon Chan and Alex Tam, was first incorporated in Hong Kong, and later setup the main operation office in Guangzhou, China in 2007. Simon Chan, 26 and Alex Tam, 25, seemed to be the Internet enthusiasts. With their passion on the Web, and work experience (Simon Chan is a former E-Trade software engineer, reported by VentureBeat), they planned to make CityIN the best ever social network in China. The site is easy-to-navigate, vividly presented content such as latest users, latest events happening in Guangzhou, and a second-edition of recommendation engine, which they’ve planned to apply for the patent in the US, Japan, and Hong Kong in the later stage. Recommendation engine is broad in scope, but it is enough to build a strong bridge from its users of the site that belong to a same group of leisure interest to some friends reside in local areas they might interested to interact with. If they continually improve its recommendation approaches, it might make a lot of potential users to have that compel feeling to join.

Additional interesting feature found on CityIN is the automatic face detection for photo tagging. As one of the hyperlinks they’ve sent to me, as shown in the below picture, it showed how a hassle less feature for CityIN user to play around with. At present, CityIN wasn’t comprehensive yet, with the English proficiently level of its co-founders, it’s no surprise that they’ll launch a brand new English site to cater to the US, Europe, or some countries whereby Friendster is strong at, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

Also, in pertaining to its participation on OpenSocial, CityIN still does not have the resources to build proprietary add-on yet. In other word, CityIN will going to be 100% OpenSocial at the beginning stage. However, they’ve received some favorably response from the industry players in casual game sector.

CityIN currently has 11 employees and they’ve been angel invested for a undisclosed sum by Dr. Samson Tam in early 2007. Dr. Tam, who invented the first electronic Dictionary Device (Chinese-English), is the chairman of a listed company in Hong Kong.

Well done, Simon.

Picture: Automatic face detection for photo tagging

Source: available at http://static.cityin.com/images/screenshots/facedetect/steps123.png, accessed at March 22, 2008.

Dimdim, a startup provides a free, hosted Web conferencing service where anyone can share their desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via Webcam is announcing its public beta today. As of present, there are over 200,000 downloads on Dimdim’s open source version, and its beta users are growing in a substantial pace throughout the world, with the number of 375,000 people from 165 countries. When consider Dimdim before using and deploying it, it is appealing to most of the potential users because it is free, open source and Dimdim’s product is GNU Public Licensed.

However, Dimdim’s business operating model is based on product versioning. While the free Web conference service can only have 20 users/attendees, but its Professional version is scalable up to 100 people, with an annual fee of $99 to $495 per year. These two are the most popular and widely used, with the functionality of 100% Web-based, hosted version, and compatible with Windows, Mac or Linux. Additionally, Dimdim also offered its Enterprise version, which suitably for a very large-scale Web meeting purposes and the onsite software can be hosted in customers’ own servers. As stated on Dimdim’s home page, its Enterprise version is based on commercial streaming and media components, i.e. Adobe Flash Server.

Perhaps how this Dimdim continue to work and thrive is how it solve the integration issue when comes to integrate with some open source content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, Coranto, etc. It should be noted that they’ve already integrated with the popular learning management systems like Moodle and Claroline. Meanwhile, they also released the API to encourage the development of additional functionality and integration.

Dimdim was founded in Feb 2006 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. They have offices in New Hampshire, Canada and India. Dimdim is being backed by venture capital firms which include Nexus India Capital, Index Ventures and Draper Richards.

A much-anticipated Facebook chat service has been launched in this week. As most of the social networking platforms have not developed their own set of chatting tool, Faceboook is unveiling its own chat service, which eventually would not let any third-party instant messenger (IM) applications to lure their users into using their apps. From the Facebook’s blog, Josh Wiseman, engineering lead said there are many notable features can be found on this Facebook chat, no installation nor buddy list is required to run this chat service, but if you’re lucky enough, you’ll be one of the first batch of users to experience this. To check whether you’ve been selected as one of them to use this service, simply notice are there any chat icon appeared on the below of your Facebook profile.

Chatting with your Facebook friends is nothing new now. I came across few third-party apps such as FriendVox, social.im, or Babuki that allowed you to do so. All these apps have been successfully integrate to the Facebook platform, and there are not niche apps anymore. When looking at the Babuki’s features, it allowed an user to go beyond the simple instant message, by offering the SMS and mail service that are accessible inside the Facebook profile.

What I was told about this Facebook chat was that it can’t be removed. For users who log-in to their Facebook profiles once, less than 10 mins in a day, when they see the incoming chats, they’re expected to spend more time in chatting with their friends, which in turn help a Facebook user to stay a longer period of time on Facebook. However, an option of “go offline” is provided if she choose not to chat through the Facebook platform.

I heard Facebook chat might also add chat APIs and Jabber support in the future. I’ll go into it in my future post. Stay tuned.

Source: Facebook Watcher

The other day I came across a new micro-blogging platform called Poodz. This startup was originally launched in France last year and in recent months, it shows steadily increasing its user base, mostly the French-speaking users. Poodz, in the first glance, functions like Twitter in which allowed users to post latest updates, but have great potential for improving the user experience in terms of richness such as the likes of Pownce (updates, files, conversation, and etc.) as well as Twitxr (Micro-blogging with image). Instead, Poodz allowed their users to use their mobiles or PCs to post messages with videos, pictures, sounds and publish them anywhere. For the mobile users, they can simply send their ideas, or latest news to share with their friends by MMS or emails. Or for the PCs users, they can record their messages in video clips by using the Webcams, or audios using the microphones and record them on Poodz’s platform. Too many options can be used on Poodz, as Poodz’s team believed that one of a key drivers behind a good user experience is the flexibility of using various tools in posting the recent updates.

The recent development of Poodz showed their seriousness in this field, as now they are compatible with CamTwist, a Mac software package that let users add special effects to the video chats. In addition, Poodz also migrated their database to a new and better server, and released their public API.

If you want me to pick the hottest news in February other than the Yahoo! bid, I would agreed that it was MySpace Developer Platform and its social platform war. MySpace, as the top social networking site, has widely reported that lagged behind in building a truly social platform, whareas Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster have all expanded to this social platform territories. It is common sense to assume that MySpace did not started its serious incursion into this territory because of the second-mover strategy. They have reported more than 200 million user accounts, without being the early leader in the social platform arena, they still owned the largest number of users throughout the world. However, the launched of a platform that enables a range of social software solutions will make their technology appreciably more easy.

On 5 February 2008, MySpace announced the MySpace Developer Platform and released application programming interface (API), it became a huge opportunity for Web 2.0 startups to build applications based on MySpace API and from there, directly engage with the MySpace’s 200 million users. Currently, MySpace Developer Platform is in sandbox phase, that mean documentation, capabilities, and end-user features are slowly adding to their developer site. Meanwhile, MySpace users would only allowed to access all the applications on MySpace Application Gallery in early next month. Given the brand name of MySpace, Slide, the world’s largest personal media company, has announced that it will launch several new applications, including Slide FunWall and Slide SuperPoke on MySpace.

via [CNET]

Today Google is launching a directory of iGoogle themes, comprised of all different design of themes that iGoogle users can add to their Google personalized home pages. In the meantime, Google also announced the release of a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that developers can use to develop themes for this iGoogle. To make it easier for users to add theme, Google has prepared an “Add it now” button below each theme that you like, click on any one of the buttons and the design will instantly appear on the page. There are 18 themes in total at this moment, and many of those themes are developed by Google, only few of them are from the third-party developers.