Review: Dandelife
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Thursday, 24 May 07 - 01:34 PM (GMT -06:00) By Jeffrey Copeland in Review |
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Dandelife brings together various elements of your web life into what they refer to as LifeCasting. The concept is a feature rich implementation of lifestreaming. The site provides a way to put events from your life into a timeline with stories, photos and videos, as well as streaming in information from other sites you use.
There are 3 main sections to your user page: My Life, My Streams and My Network.
My Life provides your console for posting stories and viewing your timeline. Once you have posted your first story many other features open up like finding stories you have marked as a favorite, seeing a blog type listing of your posts, and accessing you friends list and inviting others to the site. You can also view a gallery of the photos/videos you have added to your stories and find the code for the timeline widget like the one you see on my sidebar. From here you can also make public or private notes.
Once you write your post you can add photos from Flickr or videos from YouTube. These are the only two available from the interface, although they are working on adding sites like Zoomr and Vimeo. You can always insert images and video links from other sites in the post editor but the Flickr/YouTube integration interface is nicely done and hopefully will extend to other services. By using the Create link near the top right of the interface you can find an option to import all or some of your Flickr photosets in their entirety as well as RSS feeds and TypePad posts.
Some of the cooler features on the My Life page is a nice photo slideshow/timeline of all the photos a person adds to the site in a side scrolling bar above their post history and stream info. There is also an integrated Last.FM radio player if you are on the Last.FM buddy list of the user whose page you are viewing. The My Life page is also where you can find a RSS subscription link.
The My Streams section is a collection of your posts and actions on Dandelife as well as other sites that you can specify in your account profile. You can add sites like Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Last.FM, Twitter, Plazes and even Netflix queues and Amazon purchases. You can also add RSS feeds which would be good for seeing when friends update their blogs. I do wish there was a timeline view for your streams similar to the one on iStalkr. Hopefully this could be something that is being worked on for a future update.
My Network is a quick overview of when the people you add as contacts update both to Dandelife and to the feeds they have set up on their My Streams page. It is setup similar to LiveJournal's friends page. This is great for quickly seeing who has posted without having to go to each individual site to look for changes.
The site is nicely designed, from the color scheme to the layout. The interface is intuitive and easily usable. All the AJAX elements are well implemented and update quickly. Features such as when you want to add photos from Flickr to a story you are writing a little window pops up that allows you to search your photos on Flickr by various criteria allowing you to easily select the ones you want to add to the post without having to open a new browser window or manually upload or link to the files. There is also an option from this window to search all of Flickr by tag, not just your photos.
Clicking the Wander link in the upper right hand corner of the interface lets you look around at other people's stories, photos, videos, streams, most favorite stories and much more. Also up in this corner you will find the previously mentioned Create link as well as a link to invite other people to the site. Inviting is very easy, it allows you to invite up to 5 people at a time and to set a custom invite message for the outgoing email.
There is a very nice help system via a forum (though it currently requires a separate login account from the main site) where you can get technical help as well as ideas on things to write about. They provide screencasts to get you started with the various parts of the site. Also , when you are in one of the three sections you can click the Tips link in the top right corner to get some tips on how to use that section. These tips come complete with screenshots that pop up in a nice mid-screen window.
Anyone interested in trying out lifestreaming should give this site a try. Signing up is quick and free with no invites required. Overall Dandelife is a fun, easy to use site with a large feature set that is being added to regularly. Here is an excerpt from the site creators blog outlining some exicitng new things they are working on:
“First, a few of you have asked for me to make auto-biography tool 'magically' write itself. That is, to find ways where you didn't actually have to write anything in order to fill in your life's details. At first I thought a wizard would do the trick - but that still takes some effort on your part. Then I thought about it some more. What I came up with was a way to 'automatigically' suck in your photos, videos, SMS messages, and music that you play into your dandelife. So you can keep posting your photos, videos, blog, twitters, and music online - Dandelife will go out and collect all of that content into an archive for you. That's just the first step. Any of the content you create on the 'net that you want to turn into a more detailed story, just click on it and we'll convert it from a "droplet" in your "stream" to a story in a jiffy. There are more cool things the streams will do, but I'll save those for the official announcement.
Second, Twitter integration. Twitter is the hottest thing on the 'net right now. I've personally been having a lot of fun twittering my friends. And soon, every time you publish a story here on Dandelife for all to see, we'll send a twitter in your behalf announcing it. And no matter if your twitter buddies are at a computer on their phones, we'll serve a page that's appropriate for that device. Neat! But that's not all, every time you twitter something while you're out and about, we'll pull those messages into Dandelife. If you want to write about them in more detail when you get back home (or work) it's as easy as creating a story is today.
Third, I've added another two ways to write stories. I find that I'm often at my desk working and suddenly I think of a story I want to write, but don't have the time to really do it justice. So what I've always wanted is a way to quickly send a message to myself to do that later. So to do that in the future, you can simply IM to our jabber/gtalk robot (he's named Earl, btw) or send a quick email to the site and we'll post it for you. The robot has some cool real language capabilities too. So if you start a story with "May 2002" he knows that the story takes place in May 2002. Cool!”
Joost invites
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Monday, 21 May 07 - 10:58 AM (GMT -06:00) By Jeffrey Copeland in Invites |
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If you are interested in testing Joost leave me an email address in the comments and I will send out as many as I can.
Review: IndieKarma
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Monday, 21 May 07 - 09:54 AM (GMT -06:00) By Jeffrey Copeland in Review |
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The idea behind IndieKarma is that small independent blog authors need a way to generate income. There are many more ways to do this of course but most are intrusive and annoying to the visitor. This makes the visitor feel the blog is there as a way to generate revenue and not some ones personal space they want to share with the world.
Of course some blogs out there are designed for revenue generation and are usually consist of large endeavors to provide professional writing, contests and exclusive content. But for the most part blogs are somebody’s attempt to reach out and share their interests with likeminded individuals.
What I think IndieKarma may be better suited for than an income generation platform for small blogs is just as a way for people to tell you they like what you are doing. Of course you can post comments, emails and other feedback for the authors saying how much you like their site. But the donation aspect is just another nice little way to show them you appreciate the effort they are putting into their site.
The IndieKarma site is very straightforward and easy to use. Signing up takes only a few second and the first 5000 people to sign up get their first dollar (the minimum required to open an account) for free. Which I think is a great and also a necessary move on their part to get people using the site.
As of now they only accept PayPal as a payment method which I hope to see opened up to other payment methods in the future. Seeing as how I think a large part of their user base will be younger people who may not have access to a PayPal account or a credit card by locking into only one payment method they may severely cut their potential for growth. You can easily change your info and check the history of sites you have donated to as well as add more money to your account via PayPal.
The donation aspect is handled by you going to a site that has their little javascript widget embedded on the page. If you are logged in to your account (login is persistent on one browser at a time as long as you don't manually logout) then one penny is donated to the site. The donation is automatic when you visit a page. A visit is considered one hour after that hour has passed if you revisit the site another donation is made. After the first donation to a site you can then set whether you want it to donate each time you visit the page after an hour has passed or if you want to click to donate when you decide to also you can set it to a higher amount per donation.
At first I had issue with the fact that it donated automatically when you visited a site but after thinking about it a bit longer I see how this is a good thing. First off, it would become a bit annoying to have to remember to donate when you visited a site. Also, if you are a regular visitor to a site, then you would probably want to be donating more to that site and doing it automatically just takes some of the hassle off of you. Since you can set it to not donate each time you visit a site, you do have the option and control to donate only when you want.
In case people are wondering IndieKarma makes money by taking 25% of each penny donated or .25 cents per donation to cover their costs and to keep the site going. This doesn't seem like a huge fee when you think of the cost of PayPal overhead, hosting, design and the other costs associated with the service.
I personally plan to use any pennies that are donated to THIS site in turn to donate to other sites I find within the network that I like. Kind of a pay it forward mentality I guess. I did not put the widget in the sidebar to make money to finance exotic vacations to sandy beaches (wi-fi enabled of course) but to support what IndieKarma is doing as well as support other sites within the network when I run across them.
Of course it would be great as this site grows in popularity that if enough pennies were donated to not only use them on other sites but to cover the modest $5/month fee Terapad has for expanding the bandwidth/storage this site is allowed, but that is not even an issue at this point.
If anyone is using this service or signs up for it after reading this please let me know in the comments if it is working correctly. I don't know if I can use my account to donate to this site and wouldn't want to abuse the service this way so I cannot test it myself.
List of sites to be reviewed
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Monday, 21 May 07 - 09:30 AM (GMT -06:00) By Jeffrey Copeland in General |
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Here is a list of the sites I am currently signed up on and planning on reviewing. These are in no particular order.
Two Point Oh: Beta launches
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Saturday, 19 May 07 - 10:45 AM (GMT -06:00) in General |
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... More items are available in my News Archive
