Online & Web Services

You may remember the first time you saw Hampster Dance or Peanut Butter Jelly Time, but this site visually charts over a hundred internet memes into a timeline, list, flipbook or map. Each meme is given a short description and a link to the original site if it’s still around. It is a collaborative effort run through Dipity.

Noticing that there were no standard protocols for communicating between mobile phones and desktop computers, Heysan! is a mobile web based service that enables people to use any Instant Messaging service to chat through their mobile device. The service is not only free, but works with any phone and on any network.

Gustaf discusses some of the popular devices amongst their young, urban users that are typically overlooked by the mobile industry and explains the unique relationship this audience has with the mobile web.

Heysan!

Carrying on with our Bay Area Innovators series, where we chat with Bay Area-based entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they turn a profit, we bring you Ben Finkel.

Ben Finkel is the CEO of Fluther.com, a community question and answer site where you can ask questions about anything and the community will help answer those questions. Ben discusses how they connect users questions to experts and what inspires complete strangers to help each other out.

Fluther

A few weeks ago we stumbled on an innovative approach to web browsing that utilizes site navigation through movements picked up on your webcam. As webcams become standard we’ll hopefully see more sites taking advantage of their use. Of course, while the site is beautifully rendered it is sometimes frustrating to headbutt your way through choices when keyboard and track pads lie tantalizingly close. Web design by Publicis & Hal Riney.

We’re all for inspiring ideas - even when they’re just scribbles on the back of napkins or messy drawings on a legal pad. Campfire points us to a simple yet telling sketch of what was to become the social microblogging giant known as Twitter - as it was first mapped out by its creators. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey shares one of the original drawings of the idea behind Twitter on his flickr and includes an interesting explanation of how the concept came about.

Upon further investigation, we found some more photos of inspiring early sketches of ideas that have since become successful ventures, including Flickr Places and Vimeo. Check them out at Deeplinking.

[via Campfire]

37signals has an interesting article about how they successfully launched a product to their target market after building up a strong base of fans. It serves as an market compass on how to transition from design to market. The article continues:

We built up an audience that turned out to be an invaluable headstart when we eventually launched Basecamp. It’s a lot easier to market a product when you already have thousands of fans — ones who are the perfect target market for what you’re trying to sell.

It’s also worth reemphasizing one thing that’s been there from the beginning: Our philosophy. By knowing what we stood for, we always had an internal compass to guide us. We knew which clients were right/wrong for us. We knew which projects we wanted to spend time on. And we knew what we stood for.

The Early Days: How 37signals Built Buzz Out of the Gate

Some of you may have noticed a few recent changes at PSFK. Simply we relaunched our IF! marketing subscriber-only site as Marktd the free-for-all site. I did this for a number of reasons:

• Mainly because IF! stopped being good. Yes, we had several hundred paying subscribers but in the end it was several hundred. When anything you wrote on PSFK.com could be read by to 10,000 readers on a given day - it was hard to dedicate a lot of time on a site that might be read by hundreds (despite Henry Lambert’s great support).
• It was hard/embarrassing to interview people or write exclusive content for a site that wasn’t read by many people. It was even more difficult to find new writers for IF!
• As folks were paying, we felt that everything we wrote on IF! had to be serious and helpful. We missed the quips, the anger, the projects, the digs, the random crap.
• Too much content on PSFK was/is about advertising and marketing. I know some people have a hard time distinguishing the difference between the two but it should go like this: PSFK covers trends and ideas that are culturally relevant. Advertising / marketing is very rarely culturally relevant.
• This actually is the second version of Marktd. Our trial with Marktd 1.0 ended with a deluge of spam and somehow Google didn’t care. The Digg like site attracted a lot of folks in Indonesia and India intent on hitting with it with links to crap. Oddly, it’s Google Ranking improved with the absence of marketing content.
• The Digg like community aspect of Marktd 1.0 didn’t appeal to marketers. See what I wrote about this earlier here.
• We still think there is a lot to be improved with creative thinking. We launched IF! to suggest ideas and stimulate advertising and marketing thinkers. Marktd will continue to do so.
• I think there is a lot to be improved with advertising and marketing trade press. We launched IF! to suggest ideas and stimulate advertising and marketing thinkers. The trade press continues to fail to.
• I think Marktd is going to be a little more memorable than http://if.psfk.com. It also can live by itself one day if needs be.
• I want Marktd to become a leading voice in creative ideas in the same way PSFK.com has become a leading voice in trends and inspiration.

So, I need some help. We need content for Martkd. Great content not “here’s the latest campaign” type content. Check the contact details over on Marktd for information.

Marktd

HongKiat has compiled a list of hidden website creativity in the form of the infamous Error 404 page.  In the hopes of brightening an otherwise frustrating dead end, these websites have come up with humorous twists to guide users back to the intended place.
[via HongKiat]

We haven’t seen a lot from Second Life lovers recently. Imagine our surprise then, when we found that Google has actually jumped on the bandwagon at this late date, and launched Google Lively, a ‘virtual space where you can chat and interact with your friends in rooms you design’.