Jinni, Flattr and Aardvark
One of my best long term prediction, last April, was: soon people will stop asking Google and will just start asking "Twitter". I say twitter to mean "the crowd", the people out there. I continue to procrastinate my article about what I called "unfriendly" social network, which is not proper definition but I think it makes the point.
Anyway, Aardvark launched private beta one year ago, is basically this concept: ask a question, someone out there will answer. Well, my idea is that "someone or something will answer" but it will take sometime before search engines will be nothing more than a Twitter account. For now Aardvark just forward your question to other people that claimed to be able to answer to a specific topic. You can browse the site looking for question to answer. Sometimes, if you like, Aardvark will contact you on your chat to ask questions. Sounds annoying? Well, it is not, and if sometime you can help someone else, you get satisfied.By the way, few days ago Aardvark has been acquired by Google, so this scenario is what we can expect: best developer will go away, site will receive no more further development and Aardvark will die :) But people that will leave aardvark will create a new startup with Google money, so Google will have a new startup to buy from them two years from now. Jinni is an interesting relatively new service, basically a Pandora for movies, with a "Movie Genome" classification behind the hood. When you do not know what movie to see, yo go there and browse by mood, plot, period and so on. Maybe does not seem so interesting described this way but give him a quick try to understand potential. Like they just tweet about, try "unlikely couple" as a search. You will be surprised. Flattr is the just announced micropayments system from Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, with the ambitious plan to solve the problem to pay artist for their work in a shared and sustainable way. We will see, there should also be some subtle implications in a a project like that but let's thing about it for some day. For now, watch the video and ask for invitation.
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