Zimride is a carpooling system that allows you to search for people to share a ride with. You enter your starting and ending destinations and a date and can either offer a ride or look for a ride. Zimride started as a Facebook application called Carpool for college students and aims to attract more universities to use the system. The safety feature of looking for a carpooler on Facebook was that you can see who the friends of that person is and can determine whether that person is trustworthy and safe. The Zimride system can be embedded into any custom homepage and is working with companies, universities, bands, and municipalities. Using this system for internal companies should work well since there is one destination and safety is less of a concern. Zimride was also recently featured on ABC News and was only launched less than a year ago but has attracted 300,000 users.
Delicious 2 was finally released and is suppose to be easier, faster, and better. The search engine has been revamped to perform smarter and return quicker results. The user interface has also been updated to improve usability and to add some new features. They also moved the main URL to delicious.com to avoid spelling confusions.
Wetpaint makes it easy for anyone to create an online community based on a common interest. It is based on the wiki concept of allowing anyone to contribute content much like a twiki while also incorporating the features of blogs, forums and social networks. Wetpaint makes it super easy to create content and contributions so that those with no technical skills can be able to create a website for people with similar interests.
The company was founded in 2005 and is backed by Trinity Ventures, Frazier Technology Ventures, Accel Partners, and DAG Ventures and is based in Seattle. There have been more than one million free social websites built using Wetpaint in over 177 countries.
Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of Loopt gave this demo presentation of the Loopt Iphone version at the Apple 2008 WWDC. I went to the Loopt Lunch 2.0 last year and it was one of the better Lunch 2.0 events because two of the co-founders actually performed some songs for the crowd.
Loopt is an application that shows you where all your friends are on an interactive map, what they are doing, and can also tell you what cool places are around you. The main purpose is to connect you with your friends if they happen to be in the area while also allowing you to keep a journal of everywhere you go. Of course it gives you the option of being listed on the the website only if you choose to or else this would be a dangerous tool for stalkers.
The demo above by Demogirl is for 12seconds, a video lifestreaming service that lets you post videos that are only 12 seconds or less. It is yet another new trend that we can add to the A.D.D. generation. It is basically a video version of twitter that allows you to use your webcam or cell phone to record your clip. I am not sure how they came up with 12 seconds as opposed to 15 seconds or 30 seconds but the website says that anything longer would be boring. The website is currently in public alpha and the only way to sign up is through an invitation at Techrunch, Center Networks, Webware, VentureBeat, Mashable, bub.blicio.us, ReadWriteWeb, LA Times, and StartupMeme. I am personally not into the whole Twitter phenomenon but I feel that 12 seconds is too short. I guess it is short enough to get your point across but not long enough to encorporate details into a video. I personally don't think that this wll be very successful because there are quite a few video sharing sites on the internet already. There isn't anything in particular that makes this website stand out more than the other ones besides the fact that it limits your video time which I think is more of an annoyance than a positive feature. I also don't like the fact that it sort of encourages short attention spans. But then again, you can also say that this could be helpful in saving time since I am sure plenty of people spend a lot of time writing on blogs and now they can just express themselves in just 12 seconds.
