Thursday, September 4, 2008

Web 2.0 NY MEET UP

People think up web applications for fun and for profit. Sometimes the creations conceived from the spirit of fun are more impressive than those driven by the profit margin. Joseph Campbell's "Follow your bliss" directive is all the difference.

At the August 2008 Web 2.0 NY Meet Up, six apps were presented by PR-smart techies. They didn't let no access to the Internet stop their show. Sailthru.com and GetConnect.com were products for email marketing. Online email services like MSN, Hotmail, and Gmail have very vigilant spam filters. Marketers using e-newsletters or just websites requiring registration authentication get caught in the filters. Imagine someone wants to join an online community or registers for a web conference but a Marine of a spam filter grabs the email. Sailthru handles that. GetConnect facilitates migrating email address books from one database to another; however, it doesn't handle address books stored on hard drives.

Drop.io is a site that keeps things private. It's classified as social media but it does away with registration and many other identifiers to allow people to have a space in the clouds to share photos, audio, video and text in private. That way the day you decide to send photos of your freaky Roman toga party won't become public information. Drop.io may be more of a pandora's box than a blessing when predators use it to trap prey.

Pop17.com is a sophomoric vlog about pop culture. Following MyRagan, RocketBoom, and DSSimon, the young woman presenter does shorts on what she sees as "the most hip now." She just needs to work on her stage presence. She often looked at her teleprompter rather than into the camera or the person beside her. Julia Allison , featured in Wired mag's August 2008 issue, could teach her a thing. Her presentation was bad and that's why she was last at bat.

Dailymugshots.com is a site to post daily pictures of yourself, baby, pet, plant--whatever. The key is uploading a photo daily. How many are so consistent? You look at other people's galleries and link to them. They're thinking of making coffee mugs and calendars emblazoned with the images. For now, they offer pocket size albums of your 365 head shots. This site was just whimsy of two friends; then again most of the displayed product are creations of two people, just kickin' it.

Edopter.com is all about being an influencer of fashion, entertainment, thought--you name it. Register, set up a profile and then, say what you believe is hot. You can invite others to yay or nay your observations. The point is tracking how many people will join your trend and where are they located. Does anyone on the bandwagon make a modification to your trend or submit a new 'cool' thing? This app was probably conceived with the marketing and advertising worlds in mind.

The Meet Up crowd was young, though there were old heads hanging tough. Primarily vanilla ice cream, sprinkles of caramel, chocolate and banana slices made this dessert bowl interesting. There was a Rastaman wearing a knit tam sidled up to a Russian lass. As the roving African Web Queen I long to see the day when I encounter a tech event where there are black presenters standing before an ethnically diverse crowd. So far, Small Biz Technology editor Ramon Ray is the one making waves on and offline.

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