TailRank is another site that tries to bring us interesting news from blogs and other places (competes with Digg and Memeorandum). They just did a pretty sizeable redesign and, boy, does it make a big difference!
One wish for 2006…
January 1, 2006 By
Now that I have a sooppeerr dddoooppppeeeerr new cell phone (the Cingular 2125, it’s freaking awesome) I am looking at a lot of Web sites and RSS feeds.
One thing I wish is that Web site developers/designers would look at their site on a small screen with limited bandwidth.
So many sites suck really bad. I’m going to call these sites out with increasing frequency in 2006.
If your site makes you scroll for 20 minutes just to see your content, it sucks. It’ll get called out.
If your site squeezes a column so that it’s only one word wide, it sucks. It’ll get called out.
My wish? Please try your site on a cell phone (tonight I was comparing sites on a Treo, on a Blackbery, and on my phone. My phone was best, but there were lots of sites that sucked on all three).
Millions of Web users are out there with cell phones. If you don’t get your site to work properly with a cell phone, you’re turning away customers and that sucks. It’ll get called out.
Who should be first getting called out?
Oh, I got one. The Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen calls out trends that should die in 2006. One of them even talked about the same trend I do (that mobile is now hugely important).
Well, on my cell phone this blog has a column size of a few characters forcing me to scroll forever just to read the article.
That’s unfortunate because I totally agree with the other points that Philipp makes.
New shopping site opens: Longtail
December 31, 2005 By
Francis Shanahan just wrote me and announced Longtail.
Here’s what he told me — I checked it out and it’s pretty impressive:
Longtail is a sort of Web2.0 shopping site comprising of many features:
Through Longtail you can browse, search and purchase products from Amazon’s entire product catalog. When you search Amazon, Longtail will load eBay results in the background. When you view an Amazon item, Longtail will load Similar products in the background! You can create Product feeds through RSS for Amazon Product data. This allows you to stay up to date on any set of products and their prices so you never miss a deal. Longtail has a WML interface; when you’re on the move you can search Amazon’s product database using your Blackberry! You can comparison shop with eBay and Yahoo Products to find the absolute best price. As you’re shopping you can search Google for websites referencing the products you’re interested in, or ANY web result for that matter. You can query Flickr for photos of a specific product, or Technorati for people blogging about a product realtime! Longtail will also let you find Top Selling products and New Releases in a given category. Longtail supports Amazon’s Remote Shopping Cart so you can add and purchase items on Longtail, through Amazon without affecting your existing shopping cart at Amazon.
Longtail is built with Visual Studio Web Developer Express Edition 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, the .NET 2.0 framework and a bunch of other stuff like SOAP, RSS, WML, XML, XSL, C# and so on.
Francis is the author of the cool and popular LiveSearch for Amazon dubbed “Zuggest.”
Nice Web 2.0 start to 2006.
ZapTXT sends RSS to your phone via SMS
December 29, 2005 By
I just heard about ZapTXT (a Microsoft employee dropped by the cafeteria where I’m sitting and told me about it). It lets you point it at a specific RSS feed and it will send you an SMS. Gotta try that out, but my cell phone already has RSS on it, so not sure what the utility is. They give a few scenarios that sound interesting, though.
Kosso has a Flashy blogroll
December 29, 2005 By
Hey, Kosso, I want the blogroll you have built for your blog. Damn, that thing is cool! It’s Flash. Click on a node (er, folder) and watch the animation. It is a little OPML and RSS aggregator, I think. Am I right? Do I win a prize? I want it!
Windows Live adds support for Opera 9 Preview
December 18, 2005 By
Scott Isaacs posted the other day that the Windows Live team released an update for Opera users. Turns out he’s been working with the Opera team on that support. Glad to see yet another team working with non-Microsoft browsers.
