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Source:Mashable!

MicasaStyle is a social network for home owners and interior design aficionados who like to share information about their personal taste. Emerging from its beta test period this week, the idea behind MicasaStyle is to create a space that inspires others when it’s time to decorate their homes, along the same lines as other networks like Curbly.

This happens through a series of users that take the time to share images of their space and tag items in these photos. Think of the Facebook image-tagging capability that allows you to outline additional details in a given photo, providing viewers more data to work with beyond the actual image itself. In fact, MicasaStyle likens its service to a Facebook for room interiors, and its photo-tagging feature is central to its overall service offerings.

There’s a rather involved upload and tagging process that you go through in order to share images of your own space, layering in additional information like the budget of the room, what type of room you’re sharing, and descriptive tag words that will help others find your space. And since MicasaStyle is so apt to become like a Facebook for home owners, I’d actually love to see some image import options from existing photo albums across the Web, like Facebook and Flickr, so that this sharing process can be simplified a bit for users.

One good thing about the tagging process on MicasaStyle is the fact that retailers you add to your shared space will be auto-completed by MicasaStyle, providing links to that retailer so others can visit their site. What’s missing from this particular portion of the sharing process is the ability to add in a retailer’s link on your own, so if a particular retailer isn’t in MicasaStyle’s database yet, there won’t be a link readily available for other users. Additionally, links created by MicasaStyle’s auto-completion feature redirect to the retailer’s main website, not the page with details on the particular object that’s been tagged.

Having a bookmarking tool for MicasaStyle users could help with specific information-sharing on this end, but it would also veer away from the room-specific way in which personal taste is shared on MicasaStyle’s network. To this end, I’d say that the approach MicasaStyle is taking with this site is very niche, as it limits its users to share photos from their own homes, and relies on a pretty good memory for a home owner, based on price, retailer and retailer information for any given piece on their home.

I know that many home owners do in fact remember most of the information about the pieces in their home, but converting all of that into a cohesive, heavily-tagged network for sharing inspiration is a time commitment for participating users, and MicasaStyle would do well to diversify the type of users it attracts as it moves forward.

Source:Mashable!

Most Twitter and blog integration tools aggregate all tweets to a blog and post them exactly as they are, verbatim, which can produce less than desirable results. TweetRemote is a new open source way to integrate Twitter with blogging platforms that aims to give bloggers more control over this process. You can pick and choose which tweets to publish to your blog and how they will look. It accomplishes this by only posting relevant tweets and formats them in a blog-friendly format.

How does it do that?

TweetRemote is able to do this by recognizing hashtags in tweets such as #text, #link, and #image, then pulls those tweets into separate RSS-style feeds and then formats them accordingly. Thus, everything appears on your blog in a more aesthetically pleasing format. The other key ingredient is the use of an RSS aggregator of choice such as FeedWordPress. Here’s the full installation documentation.

At what cost?

There might be a small price to pay for this benefit. In order to make your blog prettier it requires making your twitter stream a little uglier. For example, if you wanted to send a nicely formatted hyperlink to your blog via twitter with TweetRemote then you would have to send the following tweet: #link http://tweetremote.com Cool new twitter/blog integration tool! While the end result will look good on your blog, you might lose some followers on twitter because of what some call Tweet stream pollution. Quite simply, there are many people on Twitter that just don’t like hashtags and the way they look. So, it’s your decision if it’s worth potentially losing a few followers or not.

Conclusion

TweetRemote is intended only for bloggers that host their own blogs because it requires uploading files and some manual configuration. That means bloggers on free services like Worldpress.com and Blogger are out of luck at this point in time. Still, even if TweetRemote doesn’t accomplish this in the easiest manner, it has developed a better mousetrap for this process. Ultimately, that’s a good sign for things to come for anyone that wants to integrate Twitter with their blog.

Source:Mashable!

There has been a lot of brouhaha over Ma.gnolia going open source and I’m not sure most of it is justified. There are certainly features that work to Ma.gnolia’s advantage, but even though embracing open source and data portability (among other features) improve the service, they are unlikely to make it competitive.

Not only is Ma.gnolia minuscule compared to Yahoo’s Delicious (recently relaunched to version 2.0), but compared to Yahoo’s Buzz and Digg, even Delicious itself is minuscule and that’s not about to change.

The times, they’re a-changin’

The launch of Yahoo’s Buzz was a somewhat controversial move on the company’s part. First, many thought that it would cannibalize the Delicious user base (which I’m now sure it will to an extent), second, it launched with an incredibly exclusive beta and several severe limitations in social capabilities (most of which still exist today), and third, it was yet another large corporation taking a shot at the house that Digg built.

Regardless, it was also a brilliant move and not just for the reasons I’ve mentioned before. Traffic figures and user acceptance have been excellent, (already surpassing Digg by some measures), and recent reviews have been generally positive. Apart from displaying Yahoo’s ability to enter and dominate a space within a matter of months, it also shows that they understand the changing landscape of the social bookmarking space.

Even after the launch of delicious 2.0, the service no longer grips the imagination (or even fleeting fascination) of the digerati, who have already moved on from social bookmarking to social news and networking, and perhaps the launch of Yahoo Buzz in advance of the Delicious relaunch was Yahoo’s way of hedging its bets.

All that is to say that bookmarking as a social activity is soon to become a thing of the past. In fact there is already interest in non-social bookmarking with services like Instapaper (my personal favorite) popping up everywhere you turn. As people move away from the rather passive activity of sharing bookmarks to actively participating in the submission, promotion, and propagation of news and networking on the basis of their interests, social news and networking sites are bound to replace bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia and Delicious.

The only reason to make bookmarking social was so that you could find new sites from people that share interests or activities with you. StumbleUpon has done such a par excellence job of doing exactly that, it further diminishes the importance of sharing bookmarks in the traditional sense.

But that’s not all

Even if there was hope for the social bookmarking space, there are several other points to consider.

- Open source without a willing community means nothing. Developers, developers, developers! Going open source allows people freely to interact with and build for/on your platform, but you need people who want to do this, for it to be fruitful.

- Social news and networking is already open source. We’ve had pligg for a very long time now, plus there is Meneame and more recently Reddit has also gone open source.

- Just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. You don’t have to look much farther than mixx to realize that you can do everything right, have all the right partnerships in place, and still not get the following you deserve. Success rarely comes easy and almost never overnight.

While Ma.gnolia’s efforts are commendable they don’t predict a very bright future for the site and the ongoing decline in use and impending obsolescence of social ‘bookmarking’ is partly to blame.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow him on Twitter.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under web 2.0, web, social-bookmarking, bookmarking, Opinion, magnolia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.