This post is part of Mashable’s Startup Review series, which highlights great unsung startups. The series is made possible by Sun Startup Essentials. Dailymile is a social training site for runners, triathletes, and cyclists. That race was great, but how do I stay in-touch with the people I just met? And how can I find people to train with in a new city? Providing an answer for these questions drove us to begin dailymile. We wanted to find a better way for athletes to sign-up for races, share workouts, and meet participants. Participating in a race doesn’t end after you submit payment. It’s the daily journey of training, learning, and sharing. As athletes, each day for us is an adventure filled with lessons learned and friends made. We share these experiences with one another through dailymile. Currently in private beta, Dailymile is a site for keeping track of your workouts, finding athletic events you can participate in, and sending motivation to others. The design is very slick and the features are well-organized, and while the event section dedicated to 10Ks and triathlons can be intimidating, there are tools that can be useful to just about any level of athlete – even if you’re just the type trying to stay in shape by going to the gym. Once logged in, the homepage of Dailymile is very Twitter-esque, allowing you post a short update about your most recent workout (which can range from running, to swimming, to weightlifting, etc.), as well as multimedia content like photos and videos. There is also a “You and Your Friends” timeline, an “Everyone” timeline, and a “My Training” log – essentially the same views offered on Twitter. Speaking of Twitter, your updates can be auto-posted to the service if you sync your accounts. Dailymile takes it a step further than other would-be Twitter clones though with some features very specific to the fitness niche. For one, there is the “Motivation” feature, which allows you to message other people on the site with a pre-set message like “Great Performance” or “You’re an Inspiration.” There are also discussion groups you can join like “40+ and proud of it” and “My first marathon,” so you can find people pursuing a similar fitness goal as yourself. The aforementioned event section is already seeded with lots of running, trialthon, and cycling events you can participate in, though most seem to be on the West coast (not surprising given the time of year). Ultimately, Dailymile has adopted a lot of popular features of other sites for the fitness niche and done a nice job with them. I think it’s more likely to be successful with serious workout nuts than weekend warriors, but there is certainly something for anyone that wants to put the time in - both in the gym and on the site. As mentioned, Dailymile is currently in private beta, but you can try it out using the invite code ‘mashable’. Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials
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Funny Because It’s True: The Simpsons Parody Apple and Steve Jobs
While I do own several Apple products, I’ve often joked about the cult-like nature of some of the company’s fanatical enthusiasts. The Simpsons captured this sentiment remarkably well in a parody of Apple aired last night on FOX.
Complete with “The Mapple Store,” a “MyPod,” a $1200 “MyBill,” and a Bart voice-over of a “Steve Mobs” keynote, the animated series completely nails the stereotypes of Apple products, employees, and users. Check it out in the video below:
Pownce Acquired by Six Apart, Serves Two Weeks Notice to Users
Pownce, the microblogging service often compared to Twitter, has been acquired by Six Apart. According to the company blog, the service will be shutdown on December 15th, while the main Pownce team – Leah Culver and Mike Malone – will join Six Apart. Users will have the option to “import [their] posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.”
The brainchild of Culver and Digg founder Kevin Rose, Pownce launched with much fanfare in 2007. But despite the early buzz and in many ways a superior feature-set, the service hasn’t been able to gain nearly the type of traction as the darling of short-form messaging – that of course being Twitter.
It doesn’t sound like Six Apart has aspirations to revamp Pownce and take on Twitter either. They echo the sentiment that this deal is more about acquiring talent from Pownce, writing, “we are very sorry the site will be closing … We’re planning on doing great things with the help and expertise of the Pownce team, and can’t wait to see all the results of their hard work.”
Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will also be joining Six Apart as advisers as part of the deal.
Tweetsgiving: What are You Thankful For?
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and activity is already dying out for the evening in most online communities and forums. Soon, it’ll be turkey day with football games in the backyard, followed by gorging ones self on the movable feast and the ensuing tryptophan-induced coma. Before you get all tangled up in that, you should probably check out an item trending high on Twitter at the moment: Tweetsgiving. It could best be described as one part meme, one part fundraiser, with the stated goal of “celebration of gratitude and giving .. to demonstrate the power of the social web by raising $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.” Tweetsgiving is run by a legitimate non-profit, so if you want to participate, simply tweet something your thankful for with the #tweetsgiving hash-tag, and donate in honor of that which you’re thankful. At the moment, they’re already 72% of the way towards meeting their fundraising goal, which should pay for one complete Tanzanian classroom.
Police Ask: Could Justin.TV Have Prevented the Suicide?
Recently, 19-year old Abraham Biggs Jr. committed suicide in front of a live audience on the popular web video streaming service Justin.tv. The event has caused public outrage, both at how something like this could happen at all, as well as the reaction of the viewers, many of which did nothing or even encouraged Biggs in his actions.
But, as always in an event such as this one, there’s also the question of whether Justin.TV and its administrators could have done anything to prevent the tragedy, and Florida police are looking into it.
Justin.tv has deleted the video and the related comments, so it’s hard to determine who of the viewers said what at this point. Biggs’ father told the Associated Press that he cannot believe that no one tried to help his son. Some of the viewers, however, claim that they tried to get help from moderators who basically did nothing until it was too late.
How much blame, if any, lies on the admins of the site is to be determined by the police. However, it is notoriously hard to decide whether situations such as this one are real or mere pranks. Death threats, suicide threats, and similar behavior is common on many web forums; I’d even go so far as saying that people who frequent forums (let alone admins) are desensitized to this type of behavior and are very unlikely to react to it. Hopefully, this case will bring some guidelines on how to react in situations such as this one, and possibly prevent further tragedies.
Irony Alert: Get Website Downtime Alerts via Twitter
Not too long ago, Twitter was constantly lambasted for its lack of reliability. Now, at least one developer is confident enough in the microblogging tool to launch a simple service that notifies users of website uptime/downtime via Twitter replies.
Ding It’s Up is about as simple a notification service as you can find. First, specify how you’d like to be notified (email, SMS, or Twitter). Then, enter your respective account information. From there, the site will send you a message when the site you want to monitor goes offline (or comes back online as the case may be). Conveniently, Ding It’s Up doesn’t require any separate account registration.
Typically, services like Ding It’s Up are used by webmasters who want to monitor their own sites, but increasingly, “uptime notification” is a useful feature for those that depend on services like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Last year, a similar service called Monitwitter launched, but it (also, somewhat ironically) seems to have disappeared due to an expired domain registration. In any event, if one of your responsibilities includes keeping a website online, it’s probably best to subscribe to multiple notification services as a fail safe. For that, check out our list of 13 Free and Cheap Website
Want a Better Way to Search Amazon and eBay? Try PicClick
Searching Amazon and eBay sometimes feels a bit archaic – the look and feel hasn’t changed all that much over the years, and the search results can be cumbersome. PicClick is a new visual search tool that looks to improve this process, offering a thumbnail view of dozens of items for a given search.
To use the service, you simply enter in a search term, a minimum/maximum price, and a zip code. PicClick will then search Amazon or eBay, presenting you a list of thumbnail pics and prices for products matching the search. Alternatively, you can browse by category, like Electronics, Home & Garden, or Sporting Goods. For more information on a product, you simply click on the thumbnail, which takes you to the respective product page on Amazon or eBay.
The site was built by Ryan Sit, the same developer who brought us ListPic, a similar tool for searching Craigslist that was shut down last year by the classifieds site. I asked him if he thought PicClick might meet a similar fate, to which he responded, “[it] shouldn’t, PicClick is an approved eBay compatible application, which means it went through some eBay certification and they checked it out. Plus eBay and Amazon both have open APIs so as far and I know this type of thing is encouraged .”
Assuming Sit is correct, PicClick is an elegant and simple tool that is more enjoyable to use than the built-in search tools on eBay and Amazon. If it’s at all successful, Sit should make a few dollars this holiday season too, as anything people buy after clicking through from PicClick will earn him referral fees through Amazon and eBay’s respective affiliate programs.
Gmail “Hack” is Nothing But a Phishing Scheme
There was a lot of fuss several days ago over a supposed Gmail hack that enables attackers to manipulate the victim’s Gmail filters without their knowledge. The hack, as it was claimed, has led to several domain thefts; the “temporary fix” as suggested by Geek Condition, was to install the Firefox NoScript addon. Now, Google has reacted. They claim they’ve investigated the issue, and found no vulnerability. The entire thing is a mere phishing scheme; the victims would give away their Gmail credentials to a phishing site, and then the attackers would be able to change the filters. To be safe from phishing attempts, well, all I can say is this: don’t listen to people you don’t know and don’t click on shady links. In short, nothing to see here, move along.
Individurls: Design Your Own Popurls
Ari Herzog (@ariherzog) is a social media strategist to business and government, and an online journalist. He writes about new media and online marketing at ariwriter.com. I run into a brick wall when attempting to share RSS feeds with friends of mine who don’t use feed readers. While I can create a Google Reader shared view, that’s only for selected posts, not entire feeds. It’s not much better with Alltop and Popurls where content is moderated and hand-picked by someone else. Individurls solves that problem by combining the layout of Popurls with the manual feeding of Google Reader. “I wanted something simple and clean that I could customize. I couldn’t find a service that did this, so I built my own,” said developer Daelan Wood of Canadian web design firm revolved. Here is a screenshot of individurls.com/myfeeds/mashable, displaying RSS feeds for Mashable.com, Mashable Jobs, and Mashable’s Twitter stream in a single page that can shared with the world: With three feeds per row, others can be added under the fold. Signing up for an Individurls account is easy by providing a username, password, and email address. The site is built with PHP, MySql, Javascript, and SimplePie, an open source RSS parsing tool. Once logged in, you can copy and paste RSS feeds or blog addresses into your dashboard one at a time. Wood elaborates: I built Individurls originally for myself. I am a big fan of Popurls but I found that I was really only interested in a few of the sites that they pull content from. I loved the format and thought it would be great if I could easily create my own version and make it customizable so that I could choose the sites that I wanted to read. Of special interest, there is a javascript bookmarklet you can drag to your browser toolbar. The site reads smoothly on a BlackBerry, but even better on an iPhone-optimized version: Since Individurls launched in early October, Wood says feedback has been overwhelming for his fledgling effort, with nearly 750 registered users today. “Most of the traffic comes from direct visits, telling me a lot of people are using it to get their feeds on a daily basis which is really cool.” And if nobody likes the service? That’s fine with Wood. “I use it everyday and that was really the reason I built it in the first place.” I bet Wood will be very busy in the coming weeks as his user base grows.
Meezoog Really Understands Your Relationships
Upon first glance, Meezoog seemed like just another dating social network to us, but the developers insisted that we should take another look, claiming that it’s really different from the rest. They’re right: it’s different, and it’s interesting, although I’m not entirely sure that real life can ever be translated to a social network in the way they’re trying to achieve. The premise behind Meezoog is that relationships aren’t simple. All - or most - other social networks don’t differentiate different types of relationships much; you “friend” people and then they’re all your “friends.” Meezoog, however, lets you define relationships in detail: Ann, for example, can be a close childhood friend, whom you’re meeting with at least once a month, while John can merely be a neighbor you’ve met 6 months ago and whom you occasionally bump into. That’s not all. Meezoog has employed an algorithm that calculates “trusted paths” between people. When you do a search, you get results ordered by “social proximity” - the ones that deserve your trust the most will be on top. Finally, it’s important to understand that Meezoog is not the most important product here; it’s just one social network that employs the technology called TROS, which is a cross-platform “social layer” that can be used on other social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. In practice, this means you don’t have to leave Facebook and join Meezoog if you like the concepts I’ve just described; you’ll be able to do it through a Facebook application. Now, all of this sounds like a lot of fancy talk for something that won’t be done very soon: havingmachines understand the complexity of human relationships. However, the developers behind TROS and Meezoog point out that these technologies are aimed to be used for dating purposes. I have never seriously participated in a dating social network, but I can imagine that trust is a very important thing in such a network. If Meezoog can help you better understand who you can trust - even to a moderate extent - then it’s useful. Meezoog is a startup founded by Israeli company TROS Interactive; the company has raised initial funding from private investors, and has launched Meezoog as an alpha product in March 2008, recently moving into beta stage. Support for additional social networks should come soon.
Google Ads for Terrorism Spotted on Mumbai Stories
These may be the most offensive Google Ads ever seen. Spotted in two separate incidents next to stories about the Mumbai attacks on the site IBN Live, they’re a typical example of the tactlessness of automated ad targeting systems.
We’ve seen Google ads go wrong before, of course, but do you recall a worse slip-up in recent memory?
We know it’s not Google’s intent to offend, nor their fault that these mismatches happen…and yet we’ve got to ask our readers: surely something can be done to prevent instances like these?
[top image: Notes from Earth, bottom image: Sanyam / Flickr]
Related: Broadcast Terrorism Yourself
Facebook Connect: The News is the News
The New York Times has an extensive story about Facebook Connect and its imminent expansion to new services: Digg, Hulu, Discovery, CBS and several others. However, looking back at the initial announcement of Facebook Connect, there’s really nothing new here; we’ve known the names of these partners from day one, and the story in NYTimes merely states that Facebook will start expanding Connect in the weeks to come. The real news, here, is the fact that the NYTimes is running a huge story about Facebook Connect in its printed edition. To the majority of the general public the concept of Connect - a two way platform which enables web sites to connect with Facebook and allow their users to communicate with their Facebook friends on these sites and away from Facebook itself - is probably quite vague. However, social networking is obviously now mainstream enough that a platform connecting social networks is big news. Incidentally, Facebook currently doesn’t work for me: I can’t login, and I’m annoyed - too annoyed. Being connected with my friends on Facebook or some other social network soon might become a crucial part of my Internet experience; social networking is shaping up to be the first really, really big thing that came out of the web 2.0 phenomenon. Through platforms such as Connect it will become truly ubiquitous, an invisible layer covering the entire world wide web. Whoever controls the biggest piece of the user data/identity pie will be on top of the socnet food chain, and Facebook seems to be doing everything right lately, and this includes getting big press coverage.
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