Sexy Widget

Just like some disease...

Lyric from a song that I like by Voxtrot:

...Why don't you go and spread the word just like some disease, just like some disease...

Seems sort of relevant to what we're all trying to do.  Here's the track:

Rapleaf's Address Book API

Before there were exposed social graphs to blast out notifications and invites to, there were social networks that provided this functionality through… wait for it….the Internet.

Perhaps the defining feature of the viral growth that has characterized the social media era is the ability for users to access their email address books via a social network and invite more friends.

A while back I wrote about Plaxo’s free tool that lets web publishers provide this functionality without building it themselves.

Now Rapleaf has released a full address book API that lets you configure this same viral functionality to your site with more flexibility.   The API currently supports Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo! mail services.

Rapleaf differentiates its offering from Plaxo as follows:

Plaxo’s Widget works great for people who don’t know how to code. Rapleaf’s Address Book API is great for people who can code and know what a REST-based API is. Additionally, the PHP  and Perl client libraries make Rapleaf’s API easy to use for coders with even the most basic skills.

Rapleaf is quietly accumulating an enormous database of consumer interests, friend relationships, and demographics by crawling publicly available information.  This information can then be called up by email address, allowing Rapleaf partners to get a pretty robust view of their user bases.  An address book API is a logical extension of this core competence.

Sites using the Rapleaf Address Book API include Bitsrips.com and eVelvetRope.

Notes from PlugAndPlay Expo

I was invited to pitch at PlugAndPlay Expo on Tuesday - an event where 48 start ups gave two minute elevator pitches to a room full of entrepreneurs, press, and investors.  As luck would have it, I pitched 47th - meaning I was able to lock in and enjoy everybody else's pitches.

Here are the ones that stood out:

ProjectPlayList - This is another one of those "biggest companies you've never heard of" stories.  While us Silicon Valley geeks show off our Last.FM, Pandora, and Imeem widgets, the "rest" of the Internet is using Project Playlist's (soon to be just Playlist) music widgets.  I first noticed these guys when RateItAll users, who are not overly web savvy, began embedding them into their profiles.  PP claims 25M users, and announced a partnership with Yahoo.

Caachi - Distribution for independent film makers.  Cutting out the studios.

TeamRankings - One of the best pitches of the day - they aim to be the Bloomberg of Sports Betting, providing information and tools for gamblers to make wise picks.  Solid team with revenue already.

TipJoy - Micropayment company that attempts to decouple the action of promising payment with actually giving the money.  Tries to enable spontaneous tipping, with billing later.

SuperCoolSchool - Ning for online classrooms.   Build your own online learning environment.

Muvee - Turns home video into music videos algorithmically.

Phonetag - Voicemail to text / email conversion.

AllBallers.com - Originally a social network for hoops players, have built a cool platform that allows any site to extend to any social network.

RateItAll - "A distributed Yelp for everything."  Awesome presentation and I hear the guy writes a cool blog too.

Fred Wilson on Distributed Polling

This quote caught my eye from A VC on how embedded polls on multiple blogs can act as a single service:

I love this concept. We can work together to figure stuff out. Instead of each of us hosting a small poll on our blogs, we can collaborate on one large one.

This sounds like another excellent example of cross domain web services to me.

The Value of a War Chest

The "Featured Apps" at the top of the MySpace app gallery are meted out through a combination of sponsorships and CPC.  The sponsorship (top left slot) goes for $75K a week.

Looking at the current sponsors, can you tell which widget publisher has the biggest war chest?

Check out our Plaxo Pulse Integration

You can now include your RateItAll reviews into your Plaxo Pulse newsfeed.

FIrst, choose the RateItAlll icon from the selection of feeds:

Then enter your RateItAll nickname.

And this is what the output looks like.

Very cool, and thanks to Joseph Smarr for helping to make this happen.

WidgetWebExpo

I just bought my plane tickets for WidgetWebExpo in NYC in June.

I'm going to be speaking about Hub & Spoke / Cross Domain Strategy.

Hopefully I'll catch up with a bunch of you folks there.

Sprout is Cranking

So yesterday Mathew (RateItAll's CTO) and I were cruising around San Francisco looking at offices.  One of the offices that we're looking at is on 22nd and Mission, which is a mildly sketchy part of town - I can say this, as it's also my favorite part of town, and I live there.

The sketchiness is still a bit concerning, however, as I wouldn't want to put up any obstacles that might prevent talented folks from joining our team.

I had heard that widget maker Sprout was sharing offices on the fifth floor of the building, so Mathew and I decided to drop in on them and ask about the building.

We didn't know exactly where they were, but fortunately we ran into a nice young woman on the way up to the fifth floor who was with the company that was sharing the space with Sprout.

"Sprout?" she said.  "Yeah, we share offices with them.... they're so busy!!!"

Talk about a wonderful impression to be leaving on folks who share an office with you.

And true to her assessment, we walked in unannounced and Sprout was in fact cranking.  Heads down over huge monitors, folks lined up shoulder to shoulder in a cool open space.  These folks were in lockdown mode on whatever it is they were working on.

Carnet from Sprout said a few glowing things about the building and neighborhood, and that was it - we left and let the Sprout folks get back to work.

I love seeing small teams just getting after it, and the Sprout folks made quite an impression on me.

Catching up with Watercooler: The Biggest Web App You’ve Never Heard Of

Unless you closely follow the Facebook economy, you’ve probably never heard of Watercooler.  Watercooler bills itself as the world’s largest TV and sports community.  Its community is spread across multiple SNS platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster), and across thousands of individual apps.  Unlike its rival Mesmo.TV, Watercooler has chosen to break each interest group (sports team, tv show, etc.), into its own app.

For now, Watercooler exists solely as distributed apps.  But according to founder Kevin Chou, a destination site is in the works so that they can join the Hub & Spoke club.

Since its launch in 2007, Watercooler has amassed 20M users who have installed their various apps.  Monthly pageviews are in the hundreds of millions.

So how have they done it?  Well it certainly hasn’t been through paid promotion.  Kevin Chou says that they have spent about $6500 in app promotion during the life of the company.

Watercooler’s approach has been to focus on building content creation tools (as opposed to creating or licensing content), and mastering the social aspects of how discussion happens around sports and TV programming.  100% of Watercooler’s content is created by its users.  Polls and quizzes are created, photos are uploaded, things are rated, blog posts are published, etc. – all around an area of interest such as a sports team or a TV show.

As readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of cross domain web apps (see my posts here, here, and here).  Watercooler is all over this aspect.  If I create a piece of content via one of the Facebook Watercooler apps (e.g. a poll or a blog post), the content immediately becomes available on the corresponding MySpace Watercooler app.  If I comment on a piece of content on a Facebook Watercooler App, a MySpace Watercooler profile is created for me so that my voice is represented on MySpace as well.

It’s a single, unified, cross domain, user experience, fueled entirely by volunteer created content and participation.

But wait, it gets better.

With so much content being created, the moderation tasks associated with these apps could quickly get out of hand.  Watercooler manages this potential spam issue entirely via volunteer moderators, whom they recognize on the corresponding app, and to whom they provide tools to flag content.

Users creating interactive content, users participating on that user created content, users sharing the content, and users moderating the content.  And the content is not confined to a single domain.

So what, you ask, do the paid staff at Watercooler do?  They build tools (half their team are devs), manage the volunteer community moderators, and focus on monetization.

Watercooler claims a three pronged monetization strategy consisting of 1) advertising; 2) media partnerships (say, delivering video content); and 3) transactional (selling tickets).  The big pitch on the advertising side is to be able to reach targeted users across all the major Social Networking platforms.

To me, the most powerful thing about the platform economy is the unprecedented cost efficiency of user and content acquisition.  Watercooler appears to have found a nice formula for enabling both.

Watercooler is based out of Silicon Valley.

An Offline Widget?

I was walking around the exhibition floor at Web 2.0 Expo and I saw this at the Yahoo! booth - a paper badge advertising that they had been one of the winners of the Webware 100.  I didn't see a Webware booth, but they certainly had a distributed presence.