According to the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Medical Association, using a program like SugarStats will reduce the complications associated with diabetes by as much as 40%.

Volcano, Hawaii - Marston Alfred, founder and chief architect of SugarStats.com, himself a diabetic since he was 9 years old, has developed a web based self-management application in which users can track, manage and monitor the most essential and important of their diabetic information online. Through a user-friendly web interface using the latest in web and information technology, SugarStats.com also enables the Diabetic to selectively provide friends, family, educators and health care professionals ‘read only’ access to their statistics. Primary elements affecting blood sugar levels including medication, food intake and physical activity are addressed in a manner that is not overly complex or too feature rich, enabling the end user to expediently self-manage via the Internet and Internet-enabled mobile devices. The core of this system will be available free to the public.

20.8 million people, approximately 7.0% of the U.S. population, have diabetes. Diabetes was the sixth leading cause of death listed on U.S. death certificates in 2002. The prevalence of diabetes is increasing at an alarming rate, as are the associated personal and societal costs, including long-term complications such as blindness, kidney damage, cardiovascular disease and lower-limb amputations. Further studies show diabetes and its complications cause substantial loss in quality of life, are the fourth most frequent reason for ambulatory physician visits, and incur $132 billion dollars in U.S. health care expenditures, directly and indirectly annually. There is now abundant evidence that complications of diabetes are preventable.

According to Dr. IM Stratton, Al Adler, HA Neil, et al, management of glycemia in diabetes is crucially important to the prevention of both acute and long-term complications. In general, every percentage point drop in A1C blood test results (e.g., from 8.0% to 7.0%) reduces the risk of micro-vascular complications (eye, kidney, and nerve diseases) by 40%. When programs like SugarStats were used regularly by the diabetic, they showed an average of a 1 point drop in the A1C levels.

Web-based tools have been emerging as effective methods for lowering HbA1C levels and several other key health markers in diabetics such as blood pressure however, to date, none have been available to the public. SugarStats.com provides a proven means to substantially lower these important health markers while also supporting the important opportunity to shift the focus of diabetes management toward patient self-management.

Alfred was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes as a child. He always felt dissatisfied and uninspired with the various ways to monitor and track his blood sugar levels and trends, finding them either over complicated and involved, or pedantic and & ‘boring’. Now 24 years old, Alfred’s professional expertise in the field of computers, networking and Internet technology/programming provided the foundation from which he developed for himself an engaging, informative, time saving and means to effectively address his diabetic management needs. From his personal quest, SugarStats.com has now emerged to support Internet-accessible diabetics the world over an alternative means to effectively address, control and ultimately improve their health.

Alternate Contact: Daerick Lanakila at dlanakila [@] sugarstats.com SugarStats POB 909 Volcano, HI 96785

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Need a screenshot of what a diabetic would see on their personal SugarStats page along with more info regarding SugarStats is available at http://www.sugarstats.com/tour

CONTACT: Marston Alfred at 619-573-4071
SugarStats
PO Box 909
Volcano, HI 96785
http://www.sugarstats.com

About This Release: If you have any questions regarding information in these press releases please contact the organization listed in the press release. Issuers of press releases and not PR Leap are solely responsible for the accuracy of the content.

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

Conduit: Conduit is the inventor of the community toolbar concept. Community toolbars are a great new way to engage users and drive loyalty as they put the best of any website directly on the users’ browser. Today’s Web savvy organizations are looking for new ways to connect and engage their users, beyond the boundaries of their Web site.

As an example, Major League Baseball launched a ‘Conduit’ for each team in the league so the fans can stay connected with scores, plays, team information, tickets and breaking news on their favorite team, straight from the browser.

Bottom line, a Conduit community toolbar delivers:

• More Traffic: Drive higher traffic through unprecedented face time, resulting in an average increase of two extra clicks per user, per day
• Brand Presence: Conduit allows publishers to put their brand directly on the user’s browser
• Lower Attrition: Retain customers through engaging content, community chat, contests, and more
• More Revenue per Customer: Monetizing users beyond the boundaries of the Web site. Drive higher spending with more targeted offers and more relevant services delivered via a ‘Conduit’

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

Conduit: There are several things, but most importantly there are three:

1. Hosted turnkey service approach which eliminates all the challenges of traditional software offerings.

Typical off-the-shelf toolbar building software requires technical resources, constant maintenance staff, and presents issues in regard to user support and security, not to mention their limited component offerings. In the past, these challenges have prevented the majority of smaller websites from building and launching their own branded toolbars.

Conduit dramatically changed the model from traditional software to a hosted, global, turnkey service that is very easy to use, and requires no maintenance or technical skills. This has resulted in Conduit’s community toolbars exploding in less than 18 months to over 5 million users in 112 countries, 125k publishers in 22 languages, and over 30,000 downloads a day. For more details, see our recent milestone news release here.

2. Conduit’s business model is powered by search, which enables us to be completely free to the publisher and yet empower the toolbar with the most required functionality – search.

Conduit monetizes user searches via its Google search partnership, thereby delivering superior user experience despite being a free service for organizations.

3. Conduit supports its customers with a full suite of solutions that walks the user through the entire toolbar creation process:

• Building (Conduit provides easy to use Toolbar Wizards that make building a snap)
• Promotion (Pre-made templates for toolbar promotion include banners and download pages)
• Maintenance (Changes made to the toolbar in the hosted environment are automatically reflected in the toolbar field)
• Analysis (Reports to help optimize the solution for maximum value to publishers and users)

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

Conduit: Conduit is free, hosted, extremely easy-to-use, completely customizable, ready in minutes, guaranteed to be secure, and available in 22 languages. The Toolbar Wizard is easy to use tool for any publisher, despite their level of programming expertise.

There are several key features that have contributed to our explosive adoption:

• Pre-defined components including customizable menus, news ticker, RSS reader, radio, chatroom, NEW video window, email notifier, weather button, and more
• Open environment that allows publishers to develop their own custom components using standard web development technologies
• A set of customizable search tools, powered by Google
• Cross-platform solution enabling publishers to provide instant availability in IE & Firefox
• Pre-packaged marketing templates for deployment and promotion
• Analytics and reports for management of the community toolbar
• Hosted solution enables seamless and dynamic updates of content, components, and updates
• 24/7 free support for publishers and users via email
• Fully localized by supporting 22 languages for the toolbar and its peripheral pages

TechAddress: Who is your target customer or audience?

Conduit: Any website with a passionate community of online users can benefit from a Conduit community toolbar. Our range of customers represents every industry including entertainment, event planning, music, gaming, non profits, libraries, business, news portals, forums, real-estate, legal enterprise and more. While we have leading brands such as Greenpeace, Major League Baseball and REMAX, the largest segment of Conduit customers are “Long Tail” publishers that come from a diverse cross section.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

Conduit: Our technology teams are working on exciting product releases that will transform user engagement and communication.

The first is the ability for a publisher to extend their presence beyond the current real estate of the toolbar. With an upcoming version, Conduit will transform toolbars from being a single story house to a skyscraper.

The second will empower a user to benefit from multiple toolbars without sacrificing the browser real-estate typically required, and by eliminating the need of multiple downloads. Users will be able to easily manage and control their toolbar library through this new product.

We are also looking to launch a “smart wizard” that will automatically detect community information and will build it into a community toolbar simply from a website URL. This is part of our commitment to making it easier to build and launch a toolbar.

Stay tuned for these and other exciting announcements coming soon.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

Conduit: We envision Conduit evolving into a global leader in marketing platforms for building user-centric applications that drive engagement and loyalty. To that end, we are focused on forging content and product partnerships to deliver the broadest array of content and components to our publishers. From a product perspective, we are focused on being an innovation leader with breakthrough new features regularly added to the roadmap.

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

Conduit: Historically, toolbars were perceived as a search device associated with search companies, and as such they raised the question of “Who needs another toolbar?” In addition many have a bad reputation for opening up users to outside threats from adware, spyware and malware. Conduit community toolbars are strongly associated with the communities they serve (vs. being a search device only) and address a wider cross-section of information needs which goes beyond the simple search function. In addition, Conduit, delivers a safe and secure user experience.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

Conduit: Publisher-focused value creation. If we help our publishers be more successful, then we will be successful. So whether it’s product development, marketing, or support, the company is completely focused on what drives a positive outcome for our publishers. We believe that publishers know what’s best for their users and they want to be able to offer them the very best solutions. Conduit provides them with the full-service solution they need to achieve that. As an example, we worked very hard to secure a partnership with Google, as we wanted to provide the ultimate search experience for our publishers’ end users while still enabling our publisher customers with the ability to embed their own site search into the community toolbar and the search page.

Outside of our dedication to products, our overall guiding principles are fairness and integrity. These are the cornerstones of Conduit. We treat everyone who interacts with the company with highest level of integrity.

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

Conduit: Our mission is to democratize the building of connected communities, and to enable traditional Web 1.0 companies to become Web 2.0. We aim to provide every publisher with the solutions they need to connect, engage and build online communities quickly and cost effectively.

In terms of innovation, we are the first, completely free service for building a community toolbar, powered by Search. This is a significant value proposition for the market in general but more importantly, for the long tail of the Internet. Conduit is putting a powerful, free marketing platform, previously only available to large companies, in the hands of organizations of every size and capability. This is revolutionary – we are leveling the playing field and doing it with a free, secure service that is backed by a solid business model.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

Conduit: Conduit is currently fully funded and has no plans to raise additional capital at this time.

TechAddress: If your technology or service is not formally launched yet, when’s the launch date? If you have already launched, when was your launch date?

Conduit: The company was founded in 2005; however, we just recently launched an official marketing campaign in November, 2006. Incredibly, Conduit has grown virally from 0 to 125,000 website publisher customers and 5,000,000 users in less than two years.

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

Guruza: Guruza.com helps you get answers to the questions that bother you most. We connect you with experts that will quickly answer your question for a bounty. Interaction with live experts gives you more insight into your problem than hours of wading through search results could ever hope to provide.

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

Guruza: We have bounties to help you get your question answered faster than most other answers sites. We stress communication and interaction, not single responses.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

Guruza: Experts can search for questions to answer (http://guruza.com/searches/show/252) and then create a custom feed from their search (http://guruza.com/searches/rss/252). You can chat live with experts. You can provide a bounty for your question (http://guruza.com/question/431/reward-54.00). Experts can counter offer proposed bounties. We have a nice alert system that helps improve communication between experts and users. We keep comprehensive stats about users so you know more about who you are dealing with (http://guruza.com/users/show/2).

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

Guruza: We get a lot of questions about auto repair and about programming.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

Guruza: We are actually working on a new project (still stealth) that has funding. Guruza was bootstrapped and never received any investment. We are currently supporting Guruza, but additional development has ceased.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

Guruza: We hope to continue creating services that are useful and entertaining. We will stay in the social web space with more of a focus on entertainment.

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

Guruza: Guruza is not nearly as polished as we would like. This is mostly due to a lack of funds, not ability or desire.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

Guruza: Our goal has always been to create services that people love to use. We do it because we love it. If we were in it for the money we would have been attorneys or investment bankers

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

Guruza: I think our primary innovations to the answers space are bounties and improved communication through alerts and chat.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

Guruza: We have no funding for Guruza. We aren’t looking for funding as we are working on another funded project.

TechAddress: If your technology or service is not formally launched yet, when’s the launch date? If you have already launched, when was your launch date?

Guruza: We launched Guruza in late June, 2006. Please stay tuned for our new offering! We will announce it on Guruza as well as my blog (http://blog.richcollins.net/).

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

System One: We’re a 2 year old company in Europe, roughly around 20 people with a longer background to be found here http://journal.systemone.at/spaces/journal/nodes/2005-09-13-hello-world/. We offer a platform that merges enterprise collaboration and search behind a radically simple interface, so companies can tap the large and growing savings available in their daily information workflow and people can come home to their kids earlier.

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

System One: Simplicity of the platform, a bunch of additional benefits in your daily routines and strategic support to get things started.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

System One: Essentially it’s Semantic Web based Wiki that taps various data sources, searching and presenting related information in real-time without being intrusive.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

System One: We have a top-down marketing approach, so currently we target teams within large corporations in certain industries. By early next year, we’ll also offer a self-service solution for smaller teams, organizations and groups.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

System One: Better interfaces for dealing with (semi)-structured data, a bit like do-it-yourself microformats on steroids. Also some neat new approaches to search and interact will be released from our labs http://labs.systemone.at soon.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

System One: Obtaining a leading position in the ‘Whatever’ 2.0 in the enterprise segment. Beyond that, when every piece of information has its corresponding ‘user generated’ platform and all that has good API’s, algorithms will matter most. And our current setup gives us the chance to already work on that.

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

System One: Our current website needs to be less academic, so it will be soon. On a daily basis we’re often dealing with road-map defending IT departments and handling social objections, often fueled by enterprise Social Software projects that went wrong.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

System One: Bring meaningful cutting-edge approaches to the daily lives of knowledge workers. Interdisciplinarity is very important, and the chance to really have an impact without an “everything’s new and great and we especially” attitude. This brought us a company culture we’re proud of without framing it.

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

System One: Help companies to grow beyond structure and processes. Your daily work is becoming more and more unpredictable while being interdependent of too many things than you can cope with, more ‘graph’-like if you will, so you need tools to support that. Technically, it’s the Semantic Web back-end that lets us do many new things now and in the future.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

System One: We’re starting to bring our platform to the enterprise market now, with the self-service ASP offering following in a few months. Funding came from the founders with a huge commitment by the Austrian government (2.3 million EUR in total). That’d let us grow well organically for the next 12 months, but we’re currently planning an A round to fuel growth internationally.

They announced two new features, Mini-feed and News Feed. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder said these new features would change the “Encyclopedic interface” of Facebook into something more like an RRS feed of information about the user’s friends that appears on the user’s homepage and lets the world (or FacebookWorld) know what they are doing in real time; the mini is, as the name implies, a smaller version that appears on the profile page and shows information only about that person.

In other words, one’s personal laundry, clean or dirty would be hanging right out there for everyone to read. As Time notes, “{It} looks like a glitzy laundry list. It chronicles every action a user’s friends have recently taken on Facebook…the mundane…the boring…the juicy. And in case it matters, each action is time-stamped to the minute.”

According to Techcrunch, “Like everything on Facebook, both of these products are subject to the standard Facebook privacy settings. This means only people you allow to view this data will be able to see it. What appears is based on who

you are, who they are and what rules are set” The Facebook Blog noted that, “These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.“

And the reaction was quite different that anything Facebook had ever anticipated. “Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You,” was the title of the next Facebook announcement. I can only assume that these words were directed internally as well as externally.

A group was formed by Northwestern student Ben Parr, Students Against Facebook News Feeds (their Boomer parents should be proud) and by the day after the announcement they had 60,000 members; a Digg blurb says as of 9/7 there were 425,000 signatures…one can’t sign or even see the petition unless you are a member of Facebook, so I am only referencing Digg, not verifying the number.

Time Magazine reported that there was another online petition that is currently showing 108,290 signatures. Time ended their story with a comment that Gen Y had learned how to organize. Indeed. As Somewhat Frank noted, “There is also a call to “boycott” Facebook on September 12th“.

The next announcement from Max Zuckerberg started out with the following words: ” We really messed this one up….” It was a BIG apology and better still, he apologized and fixed the problem. With a bit of a face save, no less….

“This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.”

So, privacy wins, Facebook wins, transparency wins…laundry ownership wins.

Joshua Schachter, 32

Del.icio.us (Yahoo)

How tags exploit the self-interest of individuals to organize the Web for everyone.In 2001, a wonky Wall Street quantitative analyst named Joshua Schachter had a problem. In the late 1990s, he’d started a website called Memepool, which was a simple collection of Web links that he had found interesting, useful, or both. Over time, as Memepool’s users began sending in links they thought the site should feature, Schachter’s personal list of bookmarked Web pages grew to more than 20,000 entries, far more than any folder system could handle. To bring some order to the chaos, Schachter wrote an application called Muxway, which allowed him to manage his links by giving each a short label, or tag–enabling him to call up all the pages that were tagged, say, “Wi-Fi” or “math.”

People continued to view Schachter’s list of interesting links; but now, because of Muxway, those links were organized around tags. Pretty soon, about ten thousand people every day were stopping by. Schachter realized that even with (or perhaps because of) the deluge of information available on the Web, people were still hungry for good links, and they were interested in finding out what others thought was interesting. He also figured that if tagging was helpful to him, it could make storing and finding bookmarks easier for everyone else. So with that in mind, he rewrote Muxway, and in 2003 he launched it as a website called del.icio.us. Within a couple of years, hundreds of thousands of people were using del.icio.us, and it had metamorphosed into a system for organizing not just individuals information but the whole Web. Today it exemplifies the promise of what’s often called Web 2.0–websites and online applications that rely on user participation to achieve their greatest value.

At its core, del.icio.us is a bookmarking system: a place to store all those links that don’t fit in a “Favorites” folder. But it took off because it offers everyone what Muxway had offered Schachter: a way not just to collect links in one place but also to organize them. As people trawled the Web, they could tag interesting pages using whatever words they wanted, and del.icio.us would keep track of them all. “You bookmark for one of two reasons: either you think you’re going to need that page again somewhere down the road, or you don’t have time to read it now, but you want to read it later,” Schachter says. “The challenge is, once you’ve got all these bookmarks, how do you manage them? The problem were really dealing with is memory and recall, and using technology to make your memory more scalable.”

Schachter deliberately avoided imposing any rules about how people could use tags. He knew it wouldn’t work: “If I went in there and said, Hey, you’re using that tag wrong, people would just tell me to fuck off,” he says. He also knew that letting people use their own tags–instead of choosing them from a menu he provided–would make del.icio.us more likely to be genuinely useful. Each person who uses del.icio.us is effectively coming up with an idiosyncratic system for classifying the Web: an article about, say, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban might be tagged “Mavericks” by one person, “crazy” by another, and “Mavericks” and “crazy” by a third. (Del.icio.us allows users to pin as many tags on a page as they want.) “If you’re trying to tag a page in a way that’ll get you back there someday, you want to use your vocabulary, not someone else’s,” he says.

Though del.icio.us has become a way for users to collectively organize information across the Web, it did not begin as anything so grand. Rather, it emerged as a way to help individuals manage their own information. “For a system to be successful, the users of the system have to perceive that it’s directly valuable to them,” Schachter says. “If you need scale in order to create value, it’s hard to get scale, because there’s little incentive for the first people to use the product. Ideally, the system should be useful for user number one.” This makes del.icio.us different from systems that rely on what economists call “network externalities”–meaning they’re valuable only if lots of people use them. It was hard to get the first person to buy a fax machine, because a fax machine is useless if you’re the only one who has one. But even for the first person to use del.icio.us–Schachter–it worked.

As it happens, lots of people found del.icio.us valuable right from the start, making it a proverbial grassroots hit. Schachter did no advertising, no marketing. But the site was so successful that in 2005 he quit his day job at Morgan Stanley, raised some money from outside investors, and launched del.icio.us as a regular business. Less than a year later, Schachter sold del.icio.us to Yahoo, where he now works in the Groups business, running the site full time.

Schachter’s original focus on the individual user has never wavered, and it remains essential to the way del.icio.us works. But as more and more people started to use the site, something interesting happened: when aggregated, all those individual tags created a useful system for categorizing Web pages. On the surface, del.icio.us doesn’t seem designed to do this, since each person makes his or her own tags, and there’s no overarching authority to maintain order. But even with no one in charge, the product of all the individual decisions of del.icio.us’s users is surprisingly well organized–and surprisingly intelligent. That is, if you do a search on del.icio.us for all the pages that are tagged with a particular word, you’re likely to come up with a remarkably good–and well-rounded–selection of related Web sources. In other words, although del.icio.us didn’t need lots of users to be useful, once it had lots of users, it became valuable in an entirely new way. Almost accidentally, it became an excellent tool for making sense of the Web.

What del.icio.us’s users were creating–without necessarily knowing they were doing so–was what technology blogger Thomas Vander Wal has dubbed a “folksonomy,” a flexible system of organization that emerges organically from the choices users make. We’re all familiar with the alternative, the kind of rule-bound, top-down classification scheme that Internet theorist Clay Shirky calls “ontological” in nature. The Dewey decimal system is an example: every object is assigned its place in a hierarchical system of organization, and every object is defined as, ultimately, one thing: a book goes in one place in the library and nowhere else. In a folksonomy, by contrast, definitions are fuzzier. With del.icio.us, the same Web page has many different tags, which often aren’t even related to one another, and no explicit rules are being followed. Web pages are therefore listed not in one place but in many places, and sometimes pages aren’t quite where you might expect them to be. So folksonomies are messier than “ontologies” are.

What del.icio.us has shown, though, is that folksonomies’ imperfections are outweighed by their benefits. In the first place, folksonomies are dynamic rather than static. A Web folksonomy thus allows us to reclassify content according to our changing interests. An academic paper that’s interesting today might be equally interesting a decade from now–but why it’s interesting, why people care about it, might be very different. A traditional categorization system has a hard time dealing with this: once the essence of an object is defined, it’s supposed to be defined for good. In a folksonomy, the reclassification happens almost automatically–as people start tagging the paper with new, more relevant tags, for example. Web folksonomies are also better at capturing the multiple meanings and uses that a given site has, rather than constraining the possible range of meanings. It’s useful, after all, to learn that many people have tagged stories about Mark Cuban “crazy,” in addition to indicating everything else that’s important about him. Finally, folksonomies are cheap. Imagine the labor and the time it would take to construct a traditional organizing system for all the pages on the Web, and then to maintain and update it. Then recognize that del.icio.us is producing a ceaselessly revised organizing system–at almost no cost.

The real magic of folksonomies–and the reason sites like del.icio.us can create so much value with so little hired labor–is that they require no effort from users beyond their local work of tagging pages for themselves. It just happens that the by-product of that work is a very useful system for organizing information. This distinguishes del.icio.us from other high-profile Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Digg, which people contribute to without reaping any obvious personal benefit.

Schachter thinks the fact that del.icio.us does not rely on the selflessness of its users makes it more robust than it might otherwise be. “Im not a big believer in expecting a large number of people to act in an altruistic fashion,” he says. “You want to rely on people to do what they do.” The echoes of Adam Smith are unmistakable: del.icio.us is a system that, like a healthy market, turns individual self-interest into collective good.

Del.icio.us now has more than 300,000 registered users, and it generates as much traffic in a single day as it did in its entire first year. But even as tagging has become an industry buzzword that businesses are straining to associate themselves with, Schachter is confronting the fact that the vast majority of people on the Web don’t tag at all–and probably have never even heard of tagging. So how does he expand his sites audience? “You have to solve a problem that people actually have,” Schachter says. “But it’s not always a problem that they know they have, so that’s tricky.” He remains more focused on the site’s value to the individual than on its folksonomic aspects, because to him, helping individuals store and recall information is far more important than classifying the Web. And it may well be individual value that’s most likely to keep del.icio.us growing.

Regardless of what happens, Schachter has already shown that out of the seeming chaos of hundreds of thousands of independent and eccentric judgments, order and wisdom can emerge. And if you think about del.icio.us in terms of his idea of making memory scalable, he’s also helped create a rather remarkable social memory system, in which all of us are able to find more and better information than we would on our own. As Schachter puts it, “The one who stashes a page doesn’t have to be the one who ends up recalling it. Del.icio.us is a storer of one’s own attention. But it also means you can share it with others.” And that ability will only become more valuable over time. “The better you understand the world, the better you’ll do,” Schachter says. “I really think that in the end, more understanding wins.”

–James Surowiecki

Take, for example, the following two instant message (IM) platforms: Meebo and eBuddy. These are just two or many IM platforms that claim very similar features but both have their own dedicated user group. Both IM platforms have web versions that enables you to chat with your MSN, AOL and Yahoo buddies without having to install a program. However, Meebo does have Jabber and Google Talk while eBuddy allows you to chat with your friends using a mobile phone or PDA.

Now, I am not saying that eBuddy and Meebo do not offer interesting and valuable services and that their users are not happy and eager to continue utilizing their solutions. However, I am saying that there’s a new and very exciting IM platform that will soon be launching called Wablet.

Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat says, “Wablet is a new instant message client that builds in new identity features so you can better decide whether you want to talk with people visiting you.” He continues to state that, “You register at Wablet, and you get a little Web-based console that you can drag anywhere on your computer screen. That Wablet console, in turn, is intelligent. It keeps track of all the places on the Web where you have a sites or a profile (which you have also registered at Wablet). Wablet looks like a Yahoo or MSN IM box, but runs in a browser. It lets you message within all your existing IM accounts, but also lets you chat with people at other sites you own.” Here’s an image of what your console would show, showing the main person you are conversing with, and then a bunch of other people on the top bar waiting to talk with you.

This platform is still in a private alpha phase so I have not had the opportunity to personally test it out but they claims to supports MSN, AIM, and ICQ currently with Jabber and Google Talk support for to come. These features sound similar to eBuddy and Meebo but hold on it gets better. Narasu Rebbapragada of PCWorld.com wrote today that, “Wablet works with Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers on the PC and Safari and Firefox browsers on the Mac. A public version should be ready over the next few months, according to Wablet CEO David Foote.” Rebbapragada continues to say, “You [can] also control which identities appear online and when. During business hours, for example, you can choose to be available for your Web site customers but not your MySpace friends. Wablet is developing ways to qualify Wablet members with thumbs up/thumbs down ratings and badge-type affiliations with other networking sites.”

Wablet (based in the U.S. but has developers in the Philippines) certainly sounds exciting and holds the potential of becoming a major player in this place. Interesting enough, Wablet has had to only raise a seed round so far and has been operating secretly, whereas both Meebo from the U.S. and Ebuddy from Europe have have raised VC funding from top tier firms. Meebo having received money from Sequoia Capital in December, as reported by TechCrunch and eBuddy receiving money from an undisclosed, but top tier, VC firm.

With everything said, lets keep in mind that the proof is in the pudding and even though Wablet seems pretty darn exciting eBuddy, which formally launched on May 1, 2004, is already profitable thanks to advertising revenues, (in part from their relationship with Eurekster has around 30 million users and claims it is growing by as much as 100,000 users a day.