Spend a couple of days at a conference and the world passes you by. Some headlines and brief comments for topics of (potential) interest…
- MSN Spaces has 7MM blogs and is growing at 100K a day [Blog Hearld]. Love it or hate it, it’s clear MSFT hit the sweet spot for newbie’s, and they deserve credit for that. The real question (about all these blog numbers, not just MSN) is about trial vs. adoption.
- Rojo is out of private beta and sporting a ton of (near-term) differentiated features in the Feed Aggregator category (namely social networking and tagging). [Software Only has a great write-up]. I was very flattered to get an invite to the Rojo preview launch, but ended up passing, as I’ve been giving free bits of advice to a small team up in SF that’s thinking along similar (but deeper) lines. No financial relationship, but as a consultant, your rep is all you’ve got, so best not to chance it. Hopefully the SF crew will launch soon…
- Target and Yahoo! team for photos [via PaidContent]; automatically transmit your photos developed at Target to your Yahoo! account. Target’s not known as a big photo finisher (Wal-greens and Wal-mart were bigger players last I looked), but the Target demographic is perfect for Yahoo!.
- Google launches My Search History [via Geeking with Grek]; while most coverage (rightly) seems focused on the potential for search result relevance improvements (i.e., personalized search, or, in my anaology, “active listening“), one shouldn’t forget the ad targeting implications (on and off network). This reminds me… we haven’t heard much from Eurekster lately; now that social networking is getting mashed-up with blogging (Yahoo 360) and Feed Aggregation (Rojo, above), will anyone seek out Eurekster’s learnings/IP?
- Feedburner more than doubles the number of Feeds it manages through partnership, and a private API. [via Feedburner] They also mention opening up a public API later this year; will Yahoo!’s YPN do the same?
- Ping-o-Matic celebrates its one year anniversary (congrats guys) and 100MM pings served. [Via Ping-o-Matic] Is there a future for this service… or will the powers-that-be actually cooperate on FeedMesh? Sounds like Google is supportive…
- X1, the Idealab company that powers Yahoo!’s desktop search offering (and their own branded offering) just took $10MM in funding from SV-based USVP and idealab itself. [via SiliconBeat] Very interesting to see Idealab bring in outside money to grow one of its seedlings.
- As I noted in my write-up of Udi Manber’s keynote at the Kelsey conference, Amazon’s A9 unit has launched five new cities for their Yellow Pages offering. It was shocking how many Newspaper and Yellow Pages execs hadn’t seen A9’s offering…