4 Webby Things on My Mind

Here are four webby things I wanted to share with you all this morning.

  • Alternative search engine Cuil.com has officially launched today. You gotta love anytime someone re-imagines the search space (like Mahalo.com), as it's hard to think we'll have a better option than Google. Will Cuil be that better option? It's hard to say, but with ex-Google employees at the helm and an index that is allegedly bigger than Google's (121+ billion pages), they're off to a good start. And while my blog is not at the #1 spot for my name as it is in Google, Cuil is pulling up all kinds of other stuff...specifically my social networking profiles. Also, my LinkedIn page is #1 (just in case you needed another reason why you shouldn't neglect your LinkedIn profile). Cuil.com
  • I've been really excited to get an invite to 12seconds.tv, the new video-based microblogging/updating service. Since the videos are not streamed live (like with Kyte, Qik, or Stickam), it feels like a short attention span version of Seesmic. But with 3G iPhones proliferating across the world, this is great way to embrace the swelling real-time social web. And hey, moving pictures are worth 10,000 words - for, you know, when those 140 characters at Twitter just aren't enough! www.12seconds.tv
  • I love Twitter, you love Twitter - we all love Twitter. Well, now there's identi.ca, an open microblogging service using an API that jives with Twitter. This is big, because now the massive Twitter developer pool can work its magic on identi.ca with very little additional work (this works fine for Twhirl). And since identi.ca is hooked in with OpenID, this could get interesting. www.identi.ca
That's all for now. Please enjoy these webby things, and have a webby week!

 

Posted: Jul 28 2008, 08:44 AM by Chad Norman | with 2 comment(s)
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Comments

Marc Pitman said:

Hi Chad,

I wasn't impressed with Cuil at all. For starters, I didn't come up in the first page but the obscure movie actor with my name did. I've worked hard over the last decade to make sure I'm in at least 50% of the top results. So it's weird to not be in it at all.

And for fundraisingcoach? Not even my own site www.fundraisingcoach.com came up! It comes up with obscure link farms and other questionable URLs.

So much for indexing billions of pages. And it's slow too.

As for identi.ca, are people migrating from Twitter? Or simply using both?

# July 28, 2008 3:49 PM

Chad Norman said:

I agree Marc - Cuil may be a larger index, but I'm not sure it's more helpful. I'll attribute the slowness to massive traffic, but that can't explain the lame results (there, I said it). I'm not sure what they are basing their algorithms on, but it's certainly not relevance.

Identi.ca isn't really a play for migration (yet), but rather a different way of doing things. It's open nature (in all ways) sets the table for an interesting meal. I'm not a hardcore IT geek, so I can't really say how the data will work across platforms, but it certainly sounds promising.

# July 29, 2008 11:12 AM