The Great Thing About Software from Startups
July 8, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Have you ever gotten excited about a product from a new startup, used it a bit, and then wandered off when it didn’t quite do what you wanted it to, or perhaps you you were using something already that is just slightly better?
That happens to me all the time.
But the great thing about most startups are their agility and drive to succeed. If you take your eye off of them for a moment, when you re-visit them it seems like a whole lot of great new things happened during your absence. Contrast this to some big, established web application companies where you are lucky to get a great new feature once a quarter or so.
Here are a few examples. Please note: Clicking on the logo will take you to the product blog page.
Socialthing!
Here’s an app that is really trying hard to make itself unique in an ever-growing pool of social-aggregator type apps. When I first logged in to Socialthing!, right after SXSW Interactive this year, it was still struggling with performance issues, and services were being added and removed every few days.
In the interim, they have not been sitting still. Performance is great. Their interface has undergone some appearance improvements. A couple services have been added. You can view updates by user or by timestamp. You can now post to several services a la Ping.fm. You can reply to tweets from within their interface. Here’s a big one: They now have a public user feed page! Here is mine.
So they aren’t focusing on supporting every service out there. They are trying to get the big services integrated correctly. In a nutshell, their drive to make Socialthing! your social dashboard is starting to come together. Also, I apparently have 20 invites if anyone needs one. Just leave a comment.
Spokeo
I wote a lengthy article covering Spokeo on SheGeeks a couple of months ago. The core app and goal remains the same: you put in your friends’ email addresses, and Spokeo goes and finds them on social networks across the internet.
However, now it does it with a lot more style. Their interface used to be, to be polite, a bit spartan. The content was the focus and the interface was mostly left up to the user to figure out.
However, they have been polishing up their visuals quite a bit to the point that its now much more of a status dashboard when you login, sorting your friends by latest upates and the categories you have defined. Support for customizable keyboard shortcuts are till there and work great.
Spokeo is apparently being positioned for HR staff to use to ‘help’ vet a new employee, at least from their home screen.
BlogRize
BlogRize is still a fairly small single-developer site that was developed to be a social media meme-tracker. Still somewhat under-the-radar, it has nonetheless added a few new features in the past month or two.
The ability to notice if an article that is being tracked has been shared by one of the users in the database. This used to be a manual process, where you voted an article as interesting, funny, insightful or lame. Interesting seems to be marked automatically now, if you share an article.
I love all the memetrackers out there, but this one is fun and I’d like to see it become more public.
Shyftr
Shyftr is a new entrant in the social feed reading segment. It got into a bit of a bruhaha because it was taking full feeds and aggregating them inside the interface, and there was some worry that if advertising was added, it would take eyes away from the originating blogs. Shyftr to their credit quickly changed to partial-text feeds and I’m still not seeing any advertising, so I think the fears may have been a bit premature.
Shyftr has been working hard on its interface look and feel as well. It is responsive and easy to use, actually quite a pleasure to navigate. It reminds me a bit of the interface design in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with lots of white space and clear, two or three-color icons.
I don’t think this upstart is going to kick Google Reader out of its throne anytime soon, but the social features are better integrated and its fun to use.
Others
I have my eye on a few other services that are staying under the radar but continue to improve, like Whoisi (my entry), Noiseriver, Swurl (my site), and Aviary.
Tags: blogrize, shyftr, socialthing, spokeo, startupRelated posts
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As a side note, I really dig the design/layout of the site. Well done.
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I love Gnip, I missed the part where they said SocialThing was running with it, so that is very cool!
Thanks for the kudos.. this is actually a standard Blog Oh Blog theme called Silver Light, but I've modified it pretty heavily. I like it but I'm always scouting around for something better. Or, cutting my CSS teeth making an original theme.
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