Chris Gilmer , Thursday, July 31st, 2008

In the works ever since Yahoo! acquired the company, over two years ago, Delicious drops the periods and refreshes its look. For real! And for all the people that still bookmark online (you have to be out there somewhere), these changes are impressive.

We got to take a sneak peek and play around with an early version of Delicious 2.0 last September, and we very much enjoyed it. The interface was more visually appealing, and it seemed like a highly polished tool and not so much like a basement build. Not that anything was initially wrong with it, the functionality and benefits to using it were there, but it did need some freshness. Almost two years later, we are presented with the rollout of Delicious 2.0.

So whats new? First off, no need to remember where all the periods went. This domain is simple, delicious.com. As for your bookmarks, they will all still work. The team has concentrated on three main items, speed, search and design. So lets evaluate:

Speed - Sure, it seems like the new servers are working. Bookmarks and pages load fast and things seem pretty acceptable.

Search - Search is ok. Nothing notably special. It does return expected results (quickly) that make me happy, and maybe that is all it should do. The search interface on the other hand, just don’t think its as user friendly as it could be. Searching ones own bookmarks requires selecting from a dropdown on the search button. It was still not that evident that I had selected to search my own bookmarks. I would like to see the Search button get changed to “Search My Bookmarks” when i select that, instead of grayed out text in the search field.

Design - V1 was good. Nice and clean feeling and uncluttered. I was worried that the Delicious team might make the mistake of adding unnecessary “things” to the page. But was happy to see that they had not. The design is kept simple, and easy to navigate. Being that money has to be made, Delicious now displays ads. Boo. But hey, if they have to in order to keep the service free to use, then I will support their decision. They dont stand out and I’m sure I wont mind overlooking them.

In all, good update. Only one question… why did it take this long?

Chris Gilmer , Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

The king of videos, Google owned YouTube, has been heading the stale route ever since the media giants have stepped in to crush it by banning videos and flashing lawsuits in Mountain View, California. This could really start to change with the acquisition of Y-Combinator funded Omnisio.

Omnisio lets users mash up content, and annotate videos. The service had only hit the streets in March 2008 before getting snapped up for $15 Million in cash by Google today, and is well on its way to adding some much needed freshness to the online video leaders toolbelt. YouTube users, what do you have to look forward to? The ability to stitch together video clips, extract clips from the likes of Blip.tv, YouTube and Google Video, and put them together in a custom embeddable format.

No news yet as to when the Omnisio toolset will get added to YouTube.

Chris Gilmer , Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Microsoft tried to buy out Facebook, but that didnt work out to well. The kids decided to run things on their own and Microsoft got turned down but got to invest a little chunk of change in them ($250Million). So what is the next best thing to do? Build your own!

Microsoft TownSquare is a Facebook type social network that is currently only running inside of the company. The prototyped application provides feeds and updates to colleagues about what their co-workers are up to. They layout is supposedly similar to Facebook, with enterprise news feeds that are using web services to that hit up SharePoint for public information, such as promotions, company anniversaries and employee information.

Word has it that even some of Microsoft customers are using the application secretly. The TownSquare application is being headed by the Office Labs research team. With many corporate IT teams shutting down access to social network sites like Facebook for employees, TownSquare might be their only hope to straight up office gossiping.

Chris Gilmer , Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Imagine knowing how much your competitor pays for your counterparts position? Maybe want to do a little research before you start sending out applications to a potential employer? Or maybe you just want to know how much your neighbor is racking in? You can find it all our at Glassdoor.com

Glassdoor is a salary database and community where we all can find and share reviews and ratings as well as salary details. Site participators basically open up and tell there salary, if you tell them yours. From Google employees to Apple employees, everyone seems to be doing in. Why? So job seekers can evaluate a potential offer, and current employees can see how there pay relates to their peers.

Chris Gilmer , Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Totspot is new to the social network type space, offering up a way for parents to get their kids information up front and center to family and friends. Its a way to share photos, create a diary, and tell a story of your child’s life as it unfolds.

We’ve moved from MySpace land to Facebook land and away from the me me me, and into the social network we are building for our children, even before they can type or use a computer. Is this right? Well, almost. Its a secure brag book of sorts. One where parents share stories with one another privately instead of putting private materials out on a blog or website. Allowing only the ones they trust to comment on photos, write posts and see materials. Pictures and video can be imported from such popular sites as Flickr, YouTube, SmugMug and Vimeo.

The Totspot service is free to use.