I sure hope Ether works outside the US. At the risk of going off on another CoComment-style declaration of awesomeness, I must admit that this service could remove a huge, huge, HUGE pain-point for me. From the site: We all have something valuable to...

A few days ago I got invited to test ClaimID, a new service that supposedly helps you take control of your online identity. The value proposition appears to be that the search engines don't always give accurate information about you, but Claim ID can...

I'm so glad that Newsvine has finally launched - I must have received about 400 requests for invites to this thing, even after I updated the post to say I'd long since run out. So today the email arrives to confirm the good news: Newsvine is ready to...

Over the last few weeks I've spent a lot of time talking to Chris Matthieu, founder of ESBN. ESBN is extremely interesting because it might help solve some of the big headaches we've been having with blog piracy, sploggers and getting attribution for...

As a quick followup to my last post about ESBN and splog prevention, you probably noticed that Feedburner rolled out some new features on Tuesday. The best one? The ability to check for "uncommon uses" - this can tell you if a splogger is reprinting ...

How about this for some Friday fun? Coastr is aiming to be the "del.icio.us of beer". That's right, folks - social beermarking! From the site: Coastr is an experiment in social networking for beer snobs (meant as a compliment, of course!). The basic ...

Amanuel Tewolde just gave me the lowdown on his new site Otavo - it's pretty darned interesting. Otavo lies somewhere between your search history and a question and answer service like Yahoo Answers. It's in private beta right now, but you might be a...

There's been plenty of speculation about which Web 2.0 company Fox Interactive has acquired. I personally think Goowy would make a great acquisition. Why? Well, Goowy is dominated by the MySpace set already and adding email and storage to MySpace wou...

Ahmed Farooq just emailed me to let me know that iBegin, his local search startup, has now launched. Ahmed gave me a sneak peek of the service early last week, but I didn't have time to write it up on Mashable (I did put up a Weblist entry). From the...

Woah! Another Web 2.0 company with an actual business model? Admittedly, SpyMedia isn't strictly Web 2.0 compatible (what, no tagging?!), but it is an interesting remake of the traditional stock photo marketplace. Unlike iStockPhoto, Fotolia et al, S...

Popist is an edgy new social network that will likely appeal to 16-30 year-old trendsetters. It's pretty good, but I think strategically-speaking they could do better. From the site: Tell the world about you. Your interests, hobbies, your school and ...

Update: Pixoh recently became "Snipshot". Although I've moved most of these cool little web apps over to Weblist, Pixoh is so brilliant that it deserves a mention here too. So what does it do? Well, Pixoh is an astoundingly responsive ajax-powered im...

Location-based bookmarking has been around for a while, but Flagr makes it really straightforward. The service allows you to send a text or picture message with your location and plot it on a Google Map. You can also explore bookmarks from other user...

Reviewing a service that you haven't tested yet is rarely a good idea, but Eyespot looks so interesting that I'm happy to hype it up a little bit. (And at least this time there's a nice tour to enjoy, instead of yet another email submission form!) So...

Geez, I just got yet another spam comment from a Web 2.0 company trying to hype up its product. This time the culprit is Kosmix, a search engine for health, travel and politics. This morning they left this overly-enthusiastic spiel over on my Weblist...

There are 2 types of web-application that seem like a bad bet - calendars and free online startpages. Why? Because it's virtually impossible to make money from these things without decent reach and because Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can wipe you out...

I love all this wisdom of crowds stuff. Communities, networks and markets - they're all fascinating (far more interesting, in fact, than the non-social web applications that increasingly fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella). Although rarely mentioned, pr...

So the rumor was true: Google buys Writely. I've been using Writely for a few months, and I've got to say it's way ahead of the competition. What's more, this is a great, great decision by Google. Why? Because they've finally admitted that they can't...

I've just been testing out an early version of a service called Boxxet. The site allows users to create their own pages on topics they're interested in, but this isn't another Squidoo - if anything, it's more like Wink. From the site: Boxxet (pronoun...

Well, this is unusual: a memetracker that doesn't make your stress levels go through the roof. Unlike the current crop of memetrackers, Cloudee has a calm and relaxing interface, with some nice metaphors thrown in there too - hot topics are "storms" ...

Wow! Just wow. Crazy Egg will absolutely blow you away. Remember when ajax started getting popular, and some advertisers were concerned that they wouldn't be able to track pageview stats anymore? Not so! Ajax gives you the ability to track visitors r...

It seems that Digg has inspired a whole new genre of people-powered sites, but as Kevin Kelly points out, we don't have a name for them yet. For now, I'll call them memediggers. So here's the thing: I've noticed a few people using the word memetracke...

The cool kids are all talking about the impending release of MySpace Messenger (screenshots below). The story appeared on Digg yesterday, and the commenters are impatiently trying to make it to work. No official launch has been mentioned yet. So is t...

This is the kind of thing I was concerned about when I wrote that memedigger post yesterday. The huge success of Digg has led to the creation of hundreds of near-identical memediggers that fail to take the idea forward. To give it its due, LiveLocker...

I can't write a blog about peer production and revenue sharing without mentioning Podbridge. The company is part of the ongoing saga to find better podcast statistics. From the site: Measuring downloads for podcasts is like counting "hits" for Web si...

Although I agree with Greg Linden's reservations, I genuinely believe that Amazon's S3 is a real game changer - the service will dramatically change online storage and provide new opportunities for application development. Looking back at their last ...

Crazier and crazier. Fox has snapped up NewRoo, the as-yet unlaunched memetracker, reports Mike A. Interestingly, they have a Squidoo-type system that allows you to set up your own memetrackers. NewRoo also plans to embrace revenue sharing (as I've b...

OK, so I gave 3Bubbles a bit of a hard time, pointing out that live chat on blog posts is virtually useless. Tim Hibbard just invited me over to his live demo of Gabbly - a broadly similar service but with a nice draggable chat window. From the site:...

I'm not sure how long it will last as a business, but CastingWords is remarkable for a simple reason - it's build upon both Amazon's Mechanical Turk and their new Simple Storage Service (S3). The podcasting transcription service sends your MP3 over t...

Tagworld's new music recommendation engine just went live , and it's pretty darned good. Like Pandora, it streams music and can recommend new choices based on some pre-programmed criteria. What's more, it has Last.fm-style social recommendations. I h...