Here’s this week’s wrap up of Web2.0 companies and ramblings over at .Net:

Craigslist needs to update their graphics… Google Adsense will be available for RSS feeds, more money for bloggers.

Jobirn, a new type of job referral network launched. The Dot Com Boom history of miserable failures can be seen here including webvan.

Free Adsense stickers yey! Google gets sued for “crawling”. Track the most popular URL twitted about with Twitturly.

Viacom is suing Google and they are super greedy for money! Xoost search engine launched, looks very promising.

More innovative scam marketing on the internet…

Check out video of Twitter’s beginnings.  Techcrunch posts a post with NOTHING.  Pizza Hut launches their Adobe Flex app, very impressive.

Don’t know AJAX?  Check out AJAXDaddy, who can help you.

You can’t miss tour of Google’s San Francisco headquarters.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Well, I have to tell you the truth now. The truth? I did get to test all the Nokia 8800 series at the Nokia booth couple weeks ago at Web 2.0 Expo 2008.

The reason why I didn’t post my pics or videos is partly I didn’t have time to and also because the web browsers on the new Nokia are so horrible. They are not even recommended for any kind of web browsing as most sites will break.

However, I did find Nokia E90 had a great browser. Nokia needs to put that browser on their new phones.

I think all cellphone manufacturers should at least have a phone that lives up to the iPhone standards.

iPhone’s Safari supports Javascript, AJAX, and CSS among many other things Windows Mobile and Opera Mobile doesn’t support.

Now, if we can just get some WiMax to come through, that’d make perfect combo.

My suggestion? If you don’t care about the internet browsing capability, the Nokia looks great and you can get one but for me, it’s really “for show and no go” if the browser isn’t up to iPhone standards.

[via techeblog - phonearena]

Ever since the invent of iPhones, most other cellphone manufacturers have become obsolete in terms of “web browsing” capability.  HTC, usually based on Windows Mobile, have kept surprising me with their outdated mobile IE browser that does not support any of Web2.0 technologies including AJAX.

Well, as a previous owner of HTC, I hope they finally move onto another mobile OS platform like the Android from Google, or they will ultimately fail to capture attention of fast-movers like me.  Their sales still comes from 90% of Asian population or non-techies that don’t know jack about browsing on the go.

Looks are not everything, performance has to come with it.

The first “official” photos and specs for the HTC Diamond have been leaked, complete with a 640 x 480 pixel screen (twice the lines of the iPhone in smaller surface) and 3G connectivity. Could this be the most important product of the year HTC said it would reveal in London on Tuesday?

via techeblog

HeeKyong Yoon from SpringNote.com, was nice enough to chat with me on their cool “wiki” product, SpringNote:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

FYI, SpringNote.com is a subsidiary of NcSoft.com, the creators of legendary online game, Lineage.

Well, I tried out SpringNote, here’s a screenshot:

It’s very simple to use, just like a real notebook except you have unlimited number of pages plus you get bunch of already-made templates like Bookshelf, Monthly Plan, Recipe, and etc…etc…

What I found most interesting was that it is a “wiki” site but you don’t need to know any wiki markup language and start editing your online notes right away. You also have the option to share your notes or keep them private.

As far as technology goes, I love the fact that SpringNote has incorporated a LOT of AJAX. (probably mostly AJAX)

I might start using it more real soon. The only downside I saw was that SpringNote’s servers are hosted in Korea. Although the site does fairly fast, I measured, 168ms ping times from my PC in San Francisco.

FYI, Zedomax.com get 41ms ping times, 4 times faster as servers are hosted in San Diego, California.

Although they could keep running servers from Korea, I think they can grab much larger audience in the U.S. by simply serving their pages from servers in the U.S. (Besides, it’s probably much cheaper to host it here.)

Other than that, I find SpringNote as the next generation online note web app. I will have to dump my MS Outlook all together and start using SpringNotes, way simpler and easier for mass collaboration.

Adobe Flex, will it be the next generation technology for Web 3.0? It’s hard to tell at this point as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for flash or flex has not proven to be great. Although you could make an opinion that flash or flex can be embedded in an HTML page, that’s still no where close to RSS and tags that blogs offer.

Today, I met when Steven (Stephen) Harris from WebSpiders.com, a Global IT Outsourcing company that specializes in development of Adobe Flex and AJAX web applications.

Steven was nice enough to show me a demo of how Flex will change how people shop online:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

P.S. Excel Man was also spotted over at Expressocorp.com’s booth. (Now I think of it, there’s a guy inside it. Tomorrow, I will punch the Excel Man and see if I can get a reaction.)

What do you think of Adobe Flex?

I was taking a smoke break in front of Web2.0 Expo and saw these people marching with funky white wigs on. Well, at first I thought they were protesting but one of the protestors did reach out and speak to me about what’s behind their “guerilla campaign” as seen in the video below.

I also scored close beta invitations to SpinScape.com.
If you want the invite code for the private beta, simply watch the video here:

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

So, I decided to try out what this “protest” was all about by logging into their website with my “private beta” invitation that you can only get from Web2.0 Expo.

First I logged in and got a blank screen with bunch of tools such as “File”, “Node”, etc…etc…

I started clicking on “Node” and making bunch of “Nodes” like this:

If you double-click on any of the nodes, you can edit the node, enter information, hyperlinks, just like a Word editor.

Now, they had a export to PDF feature, so I figured what the heck, might as well find out what my “Nodes” look like in a PDF file.

As you can see below, SpinScape is something so new, I can’t even tell you what it is except that it allows you to write documents in a completely a new way. They even have options to add Google widgets and all sorts of other stuff you can do like “import” Excel files as “Nodes”, so you can see how all that data connects to each other. Not only that, this new type of “digital collaboration” tool allows multi-users to edit the “Nodes”, sorta like a Wiki morphed with some fancy Adobe Flex technology. It seems like a lot of companies are starting to use the Flex technology. Now, if you can incorporate a good way to get SEO with Flex, that’d be the killer Web 3.0 app we will be talking about over the next decade. (Mind you, Flex IS faster than AJAX. AJAX is better in terms of SEO though…)

Well, as far as I can tell, SpinScape.com’s guerilla marketing/protesting outside the Web 2.0 Expo is certainly working well. You should try it as the site has just launched. (Use the invite code shown in the video above!)

I might go back tomorrow to capture some more of what’s coming up in “Web 2.0″ companies. The greatest part about Web 2.0 Expo is that a lot of companies are using the event to launch their new products, such as SpinScape.com or TellMe launching their new Blackberry service.

Heck, we might even turn this blog into a big review site for what’s up and coming with Web2.0 and beyond. (Yeah, let me do that now…)

Well, if you try SpinScape, let me know what you think and leave a comment.

Here’s a cool AJAX plugin for Wordpress.
We are going to try to plug it into Zedomax today,
maybe it will speed up things a little.

If you are curious what AJAX is,
it’s:

shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.

Check out the full definition of AJAX on wikipedia.