| Subcribe via RSS

Add a little zing to your life with MessengerFX

| 2 Comments | Posted in browsing |Pali

One thing advantage of the Internet is that it brings the people of the world closer and one such example is the application called MessengerFX. The startup site comes from Bursa, Turkey. MessengerFX was built by a web messenger, web instant messenger, web msn, web msn messenger, messenger online, msn web messenger, emessenger, instant messaging
Turkish entrepreneur/programmer Yusuf Yildirim, who seems to want to remain unexposed to web 2.0 fame. On the MessengerFX website, you can not find any disclosure about where the company is located, or who to contact, or anything else. And on some websites, MessengerFX’s extreme anonymity has stirred some speculation about the security of the web based messenger, after all people have to provide their MSN username and password.

The other information that I was able to find about the service is:
Public beta
Funding: bootstrap?
Company Based out of Bursa, Turkey
Started: 7 months ago.
Domain Registered: 2006-02-08
seems to have 5 servers so far.
Alexa traffic ranking: 93Kish
Main Competitor: Meebo.com (venture funded)

web messenger, web instant messenger, web msn, web msn messenger, messenger online, msn web messenger, emessenger, instant messagingAccording to Google Trends, MessengerFX gets most of its users from Chile, Turkey, UK, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Spain, Australia. Alexa shows a strong 90 degree growth in traffic in the past 6 months. (the website launched about 6 months ago).

Also, it’s interesting to compare MessengerFX to Meebo. Meebo’s stronghold seems to be India, Brazil, Phillipines and Romania according to Google Trends and Meebo ranks #2000 on Alexa. Meebo also scores on other aspects as Meebo supports Yahoo, Google, AIM and ICQ platforms as well and it supports more than 50 languages.

I think MessengerFX shows how a bootstrapped startup can carve its niche in the marketplace, and stand up against a venture-funded rival… I’d be curious to see where most of Meebo’s audience and MessengerFX’s audience will come from 6 months from now. Small things seem to make a big difference in social networks even if they may Initially seem like clones. So let’s wait and see :)

web messenger, web instant messenger, web msn, web msn messenger, messenger online, msn web messenger, emessenger, instant messaging

I cannot vouch on the security aspect of the application but what I can tell you that MessengerFX is a nice change from the other MSN Messenger applications that have sprouted all over the net. MessengerFX supports Turkish, English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish … basically the main European languages. It also adds flash (sparkle) to your online chat behavior.

According to Yusuf Yildirim’s blog, he also runs Eskobo.com, an ajaxified start page a la netvibes.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

SMS and Chat reminders through Beeplet

| No Comments | Posted in web 2.0 |Pali

Beeplet, the newest perpetual beta, Ruby on Rails, super service that aims to simplify our increasingly busy Beeplet - Remider service in the web 2.0 spherelives. It goes a little something like this: Your Girlfriend reminds you that your second year anniversary is in a month, before you file that in the “not-going-to-remember” part of your brain simply log in to Beeplet.com and set up a reminder for a week before so and you’ll have plenty of time to get those edible underwear flowers and reservations. Doghouse…Avoided! I know what you are thinking, “Uhh, MS Outlook has reminders!” Not so fast! Beeplet reminders come in more 3 letter acronyms than you can shake a stick at: SMS, RSS, AIM and even a few more archaic methods like email. So next time you have an important date and want to try out some Ruby on Rails goodness checkout Beeplet. Beeplet also has a nice API that allows you to embed events on your site and have your users sign up for reminders right on your site!

Beeplet2

As mentioned before, Beeplet creates a feed you can subscribe to in your newsreader or publish to your Web site. Initially the users had reservations about using RSS as a reminder service because RSS feeds are usually set to get new feeds every hour and there are lot of content which is fresh content every time an update is there. Therefore, beeplet upgraded its application which allows to set reminders via email, SMS and chat applications. Oh, and since we’re in the Web 2.0 world, you can add the obligatory tags to your reminders as well. I’m sure that might be useful. I guess.

I’m hoping for more API in the future… Just think if you could not only receive the alerts via IM but create them via IM as well! How much would that rock? I’m thinking it would rock . Or, maybe if I figure out that API I, or someone brighter, could work out a “mashup” between this and Sabifoo… that would truly be straight into the nifty category. There is lot of potential and for that the folks at Stillpoint media should listed to their customers and be ready to upgrade the service frequently.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

| No Comments | Posted in web 2.0 |Pali

Twitter is a service that has got quite a few web 2.0 enthusiasts hooked. Twitter is a mashup of social Twitter, twit, web 2.0, service, popularnetworking, instant messaging and wireless communication that lets users post short (140 characters max) notes on what they are up to or thinking at that instant. Various users refer to their blog on Twitter as tumblelog (blog, with entries of 1 line).They can similarly check messages from other users in the network.You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM. A continuous steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Fans say it’s an addictive window into a social stream of consciousness.

What Twitter does, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

There are two major criticisms of Twitter. The first criticism is the triviality of the content. But asking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” misses the whole point of presence. The answer to this is that Twitter is to let your close friends and family know what you are doing and they do care. The second type of criticism is that updating on Twitter hampers continuity at work. For some people using Twitter has actually reduced the craving for the Internet and it is not necessary that you update Twitter after some time and you can choose to ignore it if you are really busy.

Twitterholic is a service that is based on Twitter. Twitterholic basically scans the Twitter public timeline for new users to watch. A few times a day, they calculate individual statistics for each user user in their database and compile a “Twitter Top 100? list based on the statistics tracked.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Personal expenses managment with Buxfer

| No Comments | Posted in web 2.0 |Pali
Buxfer is a web 2.0 social networking website that, like many others, was expense sharing application Buxferdeveloped to manage the developers problems. Fed up with haggling over shared debts, Carnegie Mellon University computer science graduate students Shashank Pandit, Amit Manjhi and Ashwin Bharambe three years ago created Buxfer, short for “bucks transfer.” The social-networking site with a personal-finance focus allows users to form groups of friends or housemates and track who owes what for utility bills, dinner tabs, day trips and other shared expenses.

Buxfer helps you in managing your expenses as it can track who owes what part of the joint gift, rent or dinner bill for a group. Buxfer also tracks personal transactions with tags. One of the good feature of Buxfer is the ability to sign in using an existing Google, Yahoo or Facebook account (it doesn’t force you to create yet another login!) and the ability to SMS transactions to your account.

Expense sharing application

Since its launch which was three years back, Buxfer has grown to about 3,000 users who have completed transactions worth more than $875,000, said Pandit, 24. Most users are university students, some from as far away as India and Australia, he said. The site allows users to set the default currency to dollars, Euros, pounds, yen or rupees. But it doesn’t offer a conversion feature.

Buxfer automatically e-mails the user and other account member in the users groups about new transactions and payments. And when a user logs into Buxfer, icons on the home page show him how much he owes or is owed. The users can leave messages for other users of the account which are shown when any user logs into Buxfer.
Buxfer’s creators acknowledged that many users have asked for online debt settlement. They said they’re exploring options such as working with an online payment service like eBay Inc.’s PayPal or a bank. Doing so might incur the site fees. Pandit said he and his friends are determined to keep access to the site free.

They would consider allowing ads on Buxfer to help defray any costs but are loath to adopt a two-tiered model where, for example, paying members might receive extra services like online debt settlement that nonpaying members would not.

When the developers were asked how would the make profit from this venture they said “Of course these days you don’t have to make money. There’s YouTube after all,” he said. “I think the plan for Buxfer probably is to build it up for nine months, get acquired for tens of millions of dollars and then move on to the next thing.”

Some of the features that have recently been added to the Buxfer service are

  • Download transaction history: You can now download all (or some) of your transactions in a CSV format. After all, it is your data.
  • Delete contacts: Deletion of contacts with whom you have no shared transactions has been enabled.
  • Delete groups and group members: It is also possible to delete groups with no transactions, or members who are not involved in any transaction within a group.
  • Track amount paid: You can now easily see what is the amount you paid in each transaction - extremely convenient for verifying that you have reported all transactions appearing in your credit card statements on Buxfer.

Buxfer is definitely worth a look at and it can be useful for everyone.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

links for 2007-01-20

| No Comments | Posted in web 2.0 |Pali
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

links for 2006-11-30

| No Comments | Posted in web 2.0 |Pali
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Chat on all protocols from one login!

| 1 Comment | Posted in browsing, web 2.0 |Pali
Mabber is a web 2.0 application that allows you Mabberto integrate all your profiles on the popular IM services namely AIM, ICQ, MSN, Google and Yahoo. I know there are some existing services which allow you to log into your identities on different IM’s but Mabber plays a little different though when compared to other Instant Messaging software or web applications, like Meebo. Since it uses Jabber it does support Google talk and will also support other messaging services that use Jabber. Mabber supports all the protocols in-line, meaning that once you have the account setup you see your contacts on that network along with your other contacts from other networks and the primary mabber network.

There are two parts to the mabber application. The first is the web application which can be accessed from any browser. As with Meebo, these guys have spent a lot of time on refining the user Mabberexperience. The first thing I noticed was that the chat windows did not have any re-draw effects and seemed to work seamlessly – no weird delays with the client polling the server, just instant reactions. Second what I noticed is all the rich features. They have extended through all the popular features of desktop IM clients such as chat history (which can be fully searched later), grouping (and group chat), and context menu’s to bring up the options.

The web interface on it’s own will give Meebo a run for it’s money, but the magic with Mabber is on mobile devices. To install the mobile application you go to the site and enter your mobile number, you in return receive an sms with a download link, you follow that, it installs, executes, you enter your username and password and you are online. From that point you are able to access all your IM contacts and communicate with them using a standard mobile keypad. This will save people a lot on SMS costs (which are just blatant robbery in most countries at the moment) and allow people to communicate more effectively. I know that this is not the first mobile IM app, but the combination of this team, the protocol they have chosen, their simple application and both mobile and browser based interfaces means that Mabber stand a strong chance of success.

So go on and get chatting!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Newer Entries »

  • Categories

  • Visitors information

  • Sponsors