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MSN (Live.com) has just released a new web application pushing the concept of Google Earth to the extreme

Mixture between video game, map, and Google Earth really. It does look very cool. (in a nerd way I mean). In other words, your first impression is that this is going to change the way you contemplate the world. Hmm…sure. But then, your (or least my) second impression was more in the line of “what the hell am I going to do with this???”

I still believe Google are leading the “map” vertical…and by far. MSN / Microsoft are just trying to come back to the game…unfortunately it is not just about the “hey look at what we can do” factors

Time has come for Jeeves to withdraw
The Daily Telegraph (Business), 27 February 2006, p.1, Tom Stevenson
Following its $1.9bn acquisition by IAC/InterActiveCorp last July, Ask Jeeves is dropping its Woodhouse-inspired Butler, becoming simply Ask.com as it seeks to compete with Google and Yahoo.

Now, what difference does it make for the search engine? Amazingly enough, the interface now looks much cleaner. When I read that news this morning in the tube, I was thinking….yeah right, nice tried!. But in reality, I do believe this can help ask.com. It was about time they sack that useless Butler. The other great point is the url itself now. 3 letters, strategically well positioned on my qwerty keyboard…. It makes the search process even more streamlined.

So overall, I’d say well done to the ask.com team!

Designtechnica.com has just published its short list (a list of 10 is short!) of la creme de la creme in terms of web 2.0.  Actually no major surprises (almost disappointing…)

I am pleased to see that netvibes got such a nice review. Netvibes is a very slick interface, but somehow I did not realize it was that widespread already.

The rest was sort of expected really… flickr, del.icio.us, googlemaps…. stuff we all use every day now!

You can’t have it all, can you? Great communication tools, fast communication tools but no abuse? We are all aware of spam. Less aware of spit. Abusive emails cost key players such as Yahoo!, AOL or Hotmail a real fortune each year. The recent announcement from Yahoo! and AOL to partner with Goodmail (a leading player in email certification) is to me the evidence that there is room for an emerging business : authentication, reputation, certification. Yesterday for emails. Today for instant messages. Tomorrow for voice. No doubt one day, my Y! messenger voicemail will be stuck with tons of unwanted messages promoting virtues of viagra or requesting I wire some money to Angola. That’s where emerging companies such as karmasphere.com (still in stealth mode by the way) are rushing into. Email was and still is big. IM is huge. Voice is going to be a killer….so should those certification tools.

Google have just released a new tool called Page Creator. Simple interface to help end users build their own “website”. A sort of streamlined version of blogger or wordpress…obviously much simpler. As usual, Google are producing a very simple interface which is likely to satisfy users who could not be bothered with too much configuration hassles on other systems.

What is not that clear is why would Google spend time on this when they already have blogger???

Well…in the meantime, click here to review my own little test

wikio.com is very much expected by end of Feb early March 2006. Why is that? Probably because its father is the famous Pierre Chappaz, founder of Kelkoo.fr - the successful French shopping engine (price comparison) which was acquired a year or two ago. I have requested a beta account, just waiting for some feedback. I cannot wait to put my fingers on this “media search engine v2.0″. It aims directly at Yahoo! News and Google News. It is apparently inspired by digger.com. It will mix multiple sources of information ranging from official providers (I assume the likes of Reuters etc..) and the less official ones (e.g. the blogosphere).

netvibes.com could use that common slogan : “it does what it says on the tin”. So what does it say on the tin? Well, netvibes is a very simple site which works just like a myYahoo! or a myGoogle: it aggregates several sources of information (news, photos, email accounts, your del.icio.us etc…). It is extremely easy to set up, very slick and graphically pleasing. This is now my default homepage…. my take is that it will quickly become many people’s default homepage as well. netvibes.com was developed by 2 young french guys. Kudos to both of them for their fantastic contribution to the 2.0 generation!

I personally love it!

REDDING, Calif. - A 62-year-old woman gave birth Friday to a healthy 6-pound, 9-ounce baby boy, becoming one of the oldest women in the world to successfully bear a child.

Janise Wulf gave birth to her 12th child. She is also a grandmother of 20 and a great-grandmother of three. Family members said the delivery went smoothly, despite earlier concerns about the mother’s health. Wulf, a diabetic, experienced swelling and higher blood pressure earlier this week, prompting doctors to perform the Caesarean section a week early. Wulf and her third husband, Scott, 48, named the red-haired boy Adam Charles Wulf. He follows just 3 1/2 years behind his older brother, Ian. “I hate to raise one alone, without a sibling,” said Wulf, who was impregnated both times through in vitro fertilization.

The oldest woman on record to give birth is a 66-year-old Adriana Iliescu of Romania, who had a Caesarean section Jan. 15, 2005. The Guinness Book of World Records also lists two 63-year-old women who have given birth: Rosanna Della Corte of Italy in 1994 and Acheli Keh of California in 1996. News reports, however, list Della Corte’s age at 62 when she gave birth.

(source: yahoo! news)

Just got access to my new edgeio.com account. I guess I still need a bit of time to digest what one does… Yes, it’s that clear. It looks like edgeio.com works as a RSS feeds consolidator. Imagine you’ve got all your journalists/bloggers, well edgeio becomes the newspaper.

The site already tracks 28,954,323 websites, listing 511 items (that conversion rate would ring some alarm bells to me…) [source: their homepage as at publishing time]

The homepage dispays several categories (For sale, housing, other, autos, jobs, services) which are clear as mud to understand what the site is about. Other consolidates as various topics as “classifieds”, “for sale” (wasn’t it a category??), hamza yusuf (?), islam or web 2.0…. The best subcat is probably “uncategorized”

Well I guess it’s time for me to go through the “about us” section: ”

“edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services. Our goal is to give publishers of all sizes the means to control how their content is published, discovered, and consumed. By doing so, edgeio provides everyone easy, up to date, access to content from the Internet’s edge.” Hmm…that’s also what I understood (or sort of)

Anybody who better understands the concept is more than welcome to leave comments here. Much appreciated!

A colleague of mine has just forwarded this interesting cnn.com article (here). The article goes straight to the point. XFire is the new wizz product. Imagine, its VCs also invested in hotmail & Skype…..so it’s got to be good…Hmm. Let me think…

“If you’re a male online gamer aged 18-34, chances are you’ve already heard of Xfire

Well I am 18-34, I’ve heard of Xfire. Am I using it? nope.  Being aware of a piece of software is a great step. I admit it. However being a user is also part of the equation (uh? acquisition and then monetization. Doh!)

“The average user convinces five friends to join the first month. That’s what we call a viral business model. It’s free. As Cassidy says, the whole thing is “monetized” with advertising”.

Ah that’s what a viral business model is!! Now I get it…So where the concept of successful business model does not add-up anymore (in my humble opinion) is in those following ‘facts’

“Xfire, which only launched in January 2004, has three million passionate customers who use its PC software an astonishing average of 88 hours a month, according to Cassidy. More amazing facts: almost 300,000 new users join each month, and for two years the service has sustained a 2 percent-plus growth rate — weekly. Its users — in 100 countries (a slight majority are in the United States) — are online for 200 million minutes every day.”

…Well, it’s currently Friday 11pm GMT. I call that gaming time here! (well blogging right now, and gaming in 10 minutes)…and how many users are concurrently online according to Xfire.com? Current Users Online: 153,753. Sorry not 1.53MM, but 153K!

Even assuming an engagement ratio (concurrent vs user base) improving by +5% week on week (considerable achievement), with the entire user base increasing by +2% week on week, it would still take Xfire another 1/2 year to bring their number of concurrent users to the 1MM mark. (reaching an engagement ratio of 18%). This is just not going to happen!

It would be interesting to see who buys that company. The real asset is certainly not in the RTC model, probably more in the gaming path. Not sure any of the big internet players would be interested (certainly not MSN, neither Google nor AOL, Yahoo! could to boost its presence in gaming…and even….). As the article points it out rightly, Murdoch could well be the only one falling for this.