Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Usually our Weekend Website article features a site that’s worth checking out whether it be an awesome online service or just a site that offers something useful.  To change things up, we thought today we’d “feature” five different web sites that you should avoid! Now, we didn’t come up with this list ourselves — Time Magazine actually came up with this list and published it as their list of the five worst web sites. Any guesses as to which ones made the list?

1. eHarmony.com
   About eHarmony: If you haven’t heard of eHarmony before, I don’t know where you’ve been living! They have commercials on TV all the time where they show all of the happy couples that have found true love.  In a nutshell, they’re an online dating service. While they may have a handful of success stories under their belt, and they claim 90 eHarmony members get married every single day, there’s got to be something about them that would land them on Time magazines list, right?
   

   According to Time, their main issue with eHarmony is their “power to cause utter despair.” They talk about the fact that every member of eHarmony ends up answering 436 compatibility survey questions which means people tend to have more “invested” into the site than other dating sites out there.  Combine that with the fact that users pay anywhere from $21-$60 a month to be a member, and they’ll feel like they lost out on quite a bit (money and time) if they don’t find a match.

2. Evite.com
   About Evite: Evite considers themselves to be “the top online destination for invitations.” They offer a lot of great planning tools like checklists for every event, a budget estimator that will help you calculate how much the event will cost, and more. Additionally, they offer themed planning pages and even have recipes that you can sift through. They offer so much, so what’s the issue?
   

   Time says that their problem is that it’s in need of an overhaul! It’s such a useful site but they’ve apparently put more focus into all of the features that they can offer instead of concentrating how they can present those features in an “easy-on-they-eyes” type of way. They also say that it would be nice if you could upload photos before the party (instead of just after) and the option to include music and video would be nice as well.

3. Meez.com
   About Meez: Meez, as the name suggests, is about expressing yourself online and creating an avatar.  Having an avatar to represent yourself on the Internet has become a fad over the last few years.  Meez helps you create the perfect avatar and you can do all of the typical avatar creating things like add a skin tone and body type, add a hairstyle, put on different outfits and add accessories. It’s simple, and Meez helps you get the job done.  So what’s the problem?
   
   According to Time, it’s not so much just Meez that is bad, it’s the “digital doodads created with the help of Meez and other sites” like it that are annoying to them.
   
4. MySpace.com
   About MySpace: Do I really need to tell you about MySpace? I think not. We all know that it’s one of the most, if not the most popular social network.
   

   Time’s issue with the site is that not only do most of the pages have terrible design, it’s also become invested with spammers and marketers who try to make friends with you.  They say that “Of course, there have always been loads of MySpace profiles of fictional characters, created to help market a movie or promote some other brand.  But it’s the bait-and-switch tactics from these leeches that have taken things to a whole new- and sad- level.”

5. SecondLife.com
   About SecondLife: SecondLife is an Internet-based virtual world that launched back in 2003.  It’s become a rather popular place for people to go on the Internet, and more than 20 million accounts have been registered.
   
   Time Magazine actually has several issues with the site which include:
   –  It’s notoriously slow to load
   –  It’s difficult to navigate
   –  Creating and personalizing the must-have avatar for the game is tedious
   –  Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag
   –  The learning curve is simply too high

There you have it, five sites that you could do without visiting. What sites. if any, would you add to the list?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 21, 2006 by CyberNet.

Just yesterday I had written an article on ThePirateBay.org selling themselves on eBay for a fundraiser technique to pay for their new $12,000+ server. The auction didn’t last long because eBay was quick to pull it. The reason why we think it was pulled was because in the listing they said “we’ve decided to go prostitutes on you and sell ourselves for money”. I would imagine that would throw up some red flags at the eBay headquarters.

They didn’t throw the towel in though. They decided to take a new approach to the eBay auction this time. Now they are officially selling a T-Shirt and “Anyhow, if you win this auction you will receive the ‘honor’ of paying your own fare to Stockholm, Sweden, and pay for all your own expenses (i.e. hotel, food, 1337, whatever you’re into). You will also get to treat the seller to a nice dinner in town with pleasant conversations about happy times and joy-joy feelings. And yeah, we need something to wash down the food with as well.”

The starting bid is at $2500, bud don’t forget, you have to pay all of the above fees as well!

View The NEW eBay Auction
News Source: Slyck

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

The team over at Netvibes have clearly been working hard at getting out new features that are both useful and intuitive. Just last week, we mentioned Netvibes2Go, their version of a personalized homepage for mobile devices. Today they’ve just announced new features in preparation for the new Coriander version of Netvibes.

One of the first things that you’ll notice is their new Coriander theme with rounded corners and shiny colors that make this theme my favorite so far. If you’re a Netvibes user, you know that you can have up to four columns to organize all of your content.  Now you’ll be able to set each of those columns to a custom width.  This means that if you have modules that are wider than others, just place them in one column that can be adjusted so that you can easily read them.

You’ll also notice that your feeds can be read beyond the display limit to view older RSS items.  To do this, they’ve added a ‘next’ button so that you can easily scroll through your feeds and read all of the content. Feed navigation is a great addition to Netvibes, and one that I’m surprised they haven’t offered all along. And for Mac users, they’ve added the .Mac mail module which will be offered alongside the mail modules already available for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, and others.

Netvibes also took an important step recently by unveiling their Universal Widget API.  It’s really good to see that widget standards are forming, which makes the job for developers that much better. This means that building widgets will be easier, and you’ll be able to make them instantly available for other widgets out there like the Google Homepage. It will even work with Vista, Mac, and Opera Platforms.  Cross Platform Widgets are something that people have been requesting for a while now, so it’s great to see Netvibes taking the step towards doing this.

I’ve seen a few comments saying that some of the modules are not working, so if you come across a problem, be sure to let them know.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Today marked the death of two great startups: AllPeers and Ezmo. AllPeers is the Firefox extension that originally emerged as a way to share files between your friends and family, and later on they started to support BitTorrent transfers. Having this integrated into your browser is pretty convenient, but it didn’t take off quite like they hoped that it would. They didn’t get the user growth that they were shooting for, and that’s understandable. The extension didn’t last long on my system because it was difficult to find other people willing to install it, which is required if you want to share files with them.

Here’s a snippet from what the AllPeers blog had to say about shutting down the service:

It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.

Ezmo actually sounds like a pretty nifty music sharing service, but I hadn’t heard about it until today. They would let you upload your music to their servers so that you could listen to it no matter where you were at. The software worked with iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player for uploading your tunes, which you could then share with your friends.

They ran into problems when trying to work with the music labels who weren’t very cooperative:

It has always been clear to us that Ezmo had to be a free service for all users. Our revenue model is based on music sales (and promotion), for which one needs at least some sort of cooperation with music labels. We have had repeated meetings and contact with the major labels, but their willingness to cooperate in finding innovative solutions for music sales seems non-existent. Their terms were not compatible with the conditions a small start-up operates under. We still feel absolutely confident that services like Ezmo will have a major significance in the future, but the lack of cooperation and even threats of lawsuits from the labels and their organisations has made intermediate financing paramount in order to secure a necessary time horizon for the company. Without that financing in place, Ezmo has no alternative but to shut the service down and close the company.

So here we are burying two great startups today. The AllPeers site has already been taken down, but the extension is still available on the Firefox add-ons site. Ezmo will continue running until March 14th.

Thanks to Emil for the tip on Ezmo!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 30, 2008 by CyberNet.

Have you ever been working in Excel and you knew there was a complex formula you could use to makes things easier but you just couldn’t think of (or didn’t know) how to do it? Or maybe you were designing a brochure and you needed some help with the graphics or formatting. Where would you go to get the help for either of those situations and would it be worth paying for? Microsoft is hoping you’ll turn to their new Task Market, a site currently in the “Preview” stage that will allow people who have a task they need to accomplish, find people that will be able to help them with those tasks. In a way it reminds me of the former Google Answers and Rentacoder.com, both sites that accept(ed) money from people who need(ed) to get something done with the help of someone else.

The key things that tasks have on the Task Market site include:

• something that can be done for $20 to $500
• something that the task poster could use help doing
• something that can be delivered electronically, like a Microsoft Office document

If you take a look at the site found at www.taskmarket.com, you’ll notice that it’s actually got a pretty nice interface, and it’s easy to find jobs, post jobs, and if you’re working on completing jobs, viewing the ones that you’ve accepted.

Microsoft says,

For every person who throws up both hands at the prospect of creating a complex formula in Microsoft Excel, somewhere in the world there’s another person who can make it look easy. For every poor proofreader, there’s an expert one out there who wouldn’t mind making a few extra dollars. For every small business owner who doesn’t have time to do background research on a new business prospect, there’s a talented researcher who could quickly put together a dossier.

The big idea with Task Market is this: create a viable market to get them together and things get done.

Those people who are “solvers” are able to create profiles that list the skills that they have and when someone posts a task that needs to be completed that fills their skill-set, they’ll receive an email. Each member on the site, both those who post and solve jobs, have a “reputation”, a system based on five stars where people can rate the jobs that they posted, and those that they solved. For task solvers, their profile will display how long it typically takes them to solve a job.

Because it has just launched into a preview, there are not too many jobs available(it’s free to post a job) but with time, we think this could turn into a place where people will willingly go, to get help with what they need. It could also be a great place for those who have the skills, to make some extra money.

Go check it out and let us know what you think. It’s at www.taskmarket.com.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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