Webware's Rafe Needleman and I are big fans of Woot.com. Since the introduction of the one-deal-a-day sales site, there have been several clones. However, none have caught my interest like Hoopstick. The site, which currently operates on weekends only, sells just one item a day. The big catch here is that the price tag is constantly changing, meaning patience or pure, dumb luck can get you a deal.

Today's item is a USB headset. When I started writing this, the price tag was hovering around fifteen bucks. Since then, it's come down to $12, jumped back up to $16, then dropped again to $10. The change happens every 15 seconds based on supply and demand. The hotter an item is the pricier it gets, and as soon as a user chooses to buy, it locks him or her into that price--even if it fluctuates post-sale. The one catch here is that you've only got 45 seconds after hitting the buy button to go through with you purchase and five minutes total to go through checkout, otherwise you're kicked back out to try your hand again. This is simply a measure to keep people from hunkering down on a low price without buying.

Hoopstick tracks the price changes throughout the day, which means you can gauge whether you're on an up or down trend. There is a bit of blind luck though, since a slew of other people trying to buy something can drive up the price at a feverish pace.

The service is already off to a great start, however, it will have a tough time matching Woot.com's writing prowess, which quite frequently turns product spec sheets into works of art.

Hoopstick sells things online with a price tag that changes depending on supply and demand.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Enterprise social software company Socialtext is releasing Socialtext 3.0, with the features we previewed here in April: the corporate social network Socialtext People, and a revised home page for business users called Socialtext Dashboard. These functions, plus a revised and streamlined user interface, will be embedded in the Socialtext suite, along with a new feature that records a running stream of who's doing what and where on the system, which users can subscribe to from their profile pages or their dashboards. It's almost, but not quite, Socialtext's own Twitter for enterprise customers. Missing is the capability for users to post free-form, Twitter-like items into the stream. That function is coming later, according to Ross Mayfield, chairman, president, and co-founder of Socialtext.

What's the hold-up? Mayfield showed me a prototype business nanoblog called Socialtext Signals, as if to prove that the company could make such an app. (It didn't take long, he admitted). But he said of the app, "We're going to throw it away"--the code, that is--and start over to build a more robust business nanoblog that offers what people in a workplace really need.

You can't have it yet.

Mayfield says that just giving users a Twitter clone doesn't solve the dual problems of information overload on the one hand, and personal isolation at work on the other. He believes that the most important communication between workers in a company is what they are doing. "When I work," Mayfield says, "I'm sharing knowledge as a byproduct of getting work done. In the enterprise, what someone does is more important than what they say."

So the new Socialtext will let users subscribe to wiki pages and to the activity stream of other users, to see when files are edited, and when tasks are accepting and finishing. The product also displays comments left on wiki pages. But the feature that lets users ask free-form questions to their workgroup is missing.

Mayfield told me Socialtext will eventually release a standalone, desktop version of Signals that lets users "Twitter" to their co-workers. A private beta of the app is entering testing now.

I'm not sure Socialtext's delay is due to a lag in development or if it's strategic. I suspect the latter. Mayfield, who speaks in somewhat Delphic riddles regarding the nature of work, says, "The updates box (in Socialtext Signals) is less about trying to have conversations. It's about surfacing conversations that people are having in workspaces."

I'm glad to see a contemporary groupware company like Socialtext taking the longer view of the Twitter concept than upstarts like Yammer and Present.ly. In this space, I've been a fan of Socialcast more than those apps, because it's based on the larger vision of integrating information from numerous group applications. That's what Socialtext is doing, too, and it's the right thing for business. "The end state for this kind of application is a connected collaboration platform, not standalone microblogging, which is relatively shallow," Mayfield said. But I still believe that the company should hustle up and get its Twitter-alike product into the hands of its customers. Not everyone appreciates the long view.

Socialtext 3.0 gets a social network and a quasi-Twitter function.

(Credit: Socialtext)

Related Webware reviews:
Yammer: A 'Twitter for the enterprise'
Present.ly is smarter than Yammer
Socialcast is FriendFeed for your business

Yotify just launched its Web content monitoring service. You tell it what you're looking for, and it will monitor specific sites looking for your query to return results. Then it will send you an e-mail telling you.

It's a useful service if you're looking for a particular item for sale on Craigslist (but nowhere else), or a review of a new Web app on Webware (but nowhere else). The problem is that you cannot easily create a search agent (Yotify calls them "Scouts") that scans multiple sites at once, like Google Alerts does. On the other hand, Google doesn't allow data-aware searches -- you can't easily encode a search for 1- or 2-bedroom apartments in Russian Hill with parking at $3,500 a month or under; and Google also doesn't give you a preview of your results. Yotify allows you to refine your Scout until you have it right, and only then start to run it around the clock on your behalf.

There is one Scout that seems to be more Google-like: The vanity search. If you ask Yotify to set up a Scout for your name, it appears to scan against the entire Web.

Yotify has some social broadcast features, as well: It will send queries to your Facebook or FriendFeed networks, and then collect the results for you.

The upshot: I'd give this utility a grade of B- or B. It would be far more useful if its Scouts were multi-site.

Yotify will find apartments from Craigslist, but finding lodging elsewhere requires setting up separate filters.

Chrome

Google's new browser. Who needs it? If you have to ask, you haven't used it. (See all our Chrome coverage.)

Why I like it: Very fast. Very stable.

Areas for improvement: Extension support! I would use Chrome full time if I could import my favorite plug-ins, especially the password keeper Roboform. Also, Mac and Linux versions.

Evernote

This note-taking app has finally and completely replaced OneNote for me (it was a slow transition). It's a great place to store all your thoughts. It has a good search feature and it's good with photos--it even OCRs them in the background. Cool new feature: iPhone notes are now geo-encoded, and you can filter your display of notes by location. (Read the review from March.)

Why I like it: Fast, reliable, and synchronizes across my PCs, my iPhone, and the Web.

Areas for improvement: I would like it if the text editor were keystroke-compatible with Microsoft Word. Shortcut keys I'm used to don't work in Evernote. It slows me down.

OtherInBox

Alternate in-box for bacn--the e-mail status updates you get from social services and commerce sites. (Read launch review from September 8.)

Why I like it: Can set up a new filter (actually a unique e-mail address) for a new service on the fly. Really does decrease load on my main in-box.

Areas for improvement: It's still in private beta, and the features aren't all built-out yet (like receipt tracking). Could be faster.

Bonus: I just got 500 new invitations to the OtherInBox private beta for Webware readers. Get yours.

TripIt

A good place to collate all the planning data that goes into a vacation or business trip. I use it to create a printed itinerary before each of my trips, and I e-mail a copy to my family too, so they know where I am. Nothing that can't be done with a calendar app or word processor, but it's much faster with TripIt. (Read first take from September 2007.)

Why I like it: Makes organizing trip info easier. Saves time.

Areas for improvement: Needs an iPhone app. (The mobile Web site is nice, but isn't fast enough when you need trip info ASAP.) Also, could do better at parsing e-mail confirmations you get from non-mainstream sources,

Twhirl

Best desktop Twitter and Friendfeed client from the company that's behind Seesmic, which I never use. Updated frequently with new features. (Read initial review from March.)

Why I like it: I use multiple nanoblog accounts, and Twhirl does a great job of letting me see and write to all of them separately. Good support for photo uploads.

Areas for improvement: I would like the promised option for single-pane view of everything. Also a Ping.fm-like feature to post to multiple nanoblogs at once.

Extra: Dead to me

There are some products I used to love, but have (or want to) stop using. These apps, for example, are in the process of becoming dead to me:

NetVibes. A useful single-page aggregator, but it's slow to load and the log-in screen is a pain to get through whenever your browser forgets your identity. I'm seriously thinking of switching over to iGoogle.

Trillian. The instant-messaging aggregation app still works, but it loads up almost as slowly as Outlook. No excuse for that. I'm in the process of switching over to Pidgin.

Cool alert: If you feed your blog to Outside.in's new GeoToolkit, it will monitor it for location-specific content, and give you a map you can embed in your site. It also gives you analytics, so you can tell later what locations you've been covering.

Previous coverage:
Outside.in Radar: Super-mega-hyper-local content.

The map widget gets more interesting when it brings in the geo-tagged data from other sources as well. If you're writing about a happening at a particular location, you could, theoretically, ask your map widget to show related content from other sites or from advertisers.

I tried the automatic location-deriving function on Webware, and it picked up popular company names for which it knows the address. It also picks up popular venue names (airports, stadiums), neighborhood, ZIP codes, and so on. You can help it along by geocoding your blog posts explictly, for example, by inserting a Google Map link in a story (other methods).

The geocoding function isn't relevant to all sites, especially those, like Webware, that are about apps that exist primarily in the no-place of the Web. But if you write about the real world, it's a clever tool that helps readers see what your content is really about.

See also: Everyblock; Yourstreet.

Location flag for the post (Outside.in's address): [where: 20 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY]

The service's user interface, which lets people post items they like to dozens of services, such as Digg, Twitter, Delicious, and plain old e-mail, is also getting a graphical and performance refresh designed to make it simpler to use. (See story, "ShareThis and the stealth business model," for a look at the current version of the product.)

The real power is the new ShareThis page that reports on what people are sharing with their friends. As I said, there's a Digg-like element to this. But while Digg only ranks the stories that people send to Digg, ShareThis can track what people are sending to Digg, Reddit, MySpace, and dozens of other services. Also, ShareThis is egalitarian--the ShareThis button appears on every story on more than 60,000 sites, CEO Tim Schigel claims.

The service will also soon get new group features. When you're in the process of sharing a story, it will also show you other similar stories that your friends (people you've shared with in the past) have also shared. Schigel has commissioned research that shows that adding general-sharing functions to a site increases readership by 3 percent and that ShareThis in particular does so by 6 percent.

New, improved pop-up ShareThis menu.

If people begin to use the ShareThis aggregation page to find sites and stories to read, it will kick off a virtuous cycle of site managers installing the widget to get onto the aggregation page, and the aggregation page potentially driving traffic back to the sites.

ShareThis can also provide analytics on sharing, showing site managers which stories are the most shared and what services they are shared on. (I'd love to get this data for my work.)

The service also has a browser plug-in for FireFox, but the product's real power comes from the widget that publishers are voluntarily installing in their site templates.

There are other sharing widgets out there, like AddThis, but I continue to be impressed by ShareThis. It's unobstrusive and functional. Site managers seem to be adopting it as the default sharing widget on new and existing sites. And now the company is planning to leverage that growth in a new and interesting direction. It's smart.

What remains to be seen is whether the company will succeed financially. Schigel explained his revenue ideas to me in a meeting in January, and repeated them last week when we met again. But he still hasn't turned them on. I'm concerned that he may be building a powerful and important online service that won't actually make any money; in my opinion, companies should begin beta testing their business models as soon as their product begins to attract loyal users.

The new ShareThis will show you how many times the things you share are shared by others. There will also be a Digg-like page showing what's being shared around the Web.

ShareThis plans to put the updated service into very limited private beta on October 6. First 100 people to e-mail beta@sharethis.com with "Webware: beta" in the subject will get access to some of the new functionality at that time, through a Firefox plug-in.

Try the current version of ShareThis with this blog post:

Although my profession is creating content and publishing it, my problem is hardly unique. I post a few times a day on Webware and Twitter, and I contribute to some other blogs and podcasts, and once in a while I update Delicious and Flickr. But compared to some people in non-publishing jobs my output is modest. There are people active on multiple personal content services like Facebook, Digg, Vox, Blogger, and Youtube that produce more content than I do, and they're also using republishing services to make sure that all their friends, on all their networks, see all their content.

It shouldn't be this complicated (click for full-size).

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

The challenge is keeping track of all the connections between services. It's a tangle, as I said: I have Friendfeed republishing my Twitter posts. Ping.fm, which I often use to post to Twitter (and thus, to Friendfeed), could just as easily publish to Friendfeed directly. I just happened to set up the Friendfeed-Twitter link before I started using Ping.fm. I have Ping.fm updating several other nanoblog feeds, like Jaiku, Pownce, and Plurk. Meanwhile, my Webware article feed (just my stories) is read in to to Friendfeed and directly by Jaiku. I do not feed Webware into Twitter directly; I use a republisher called Twitterfeed. I am also using Twitterfeed to republish my ProPRTips blog into Twitter, which is strategic, since I get more readers for that blog's content on Twitter than the blog gets itself.

Twhirl, a desktop client for Twitter and Friendfeed that I dearly love, updates only one site at a time, so I can use it to send Twitter posts to either my main Twitter account or other specialized accounts I occasionally write to. Friendfeed reads in only what I write in my main Twitter account, though. And since Twhirl does not update other services I use, like Jaiku and Plurk, when I use Twhirl I need to be mindful that some of my followers on these other networks aren't going to see the posts.

It gets worse. All the sites my content ends up on (partial list: Webware, News.com, ProPRTips, Swagalicio.us, Twitter, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Pownce, Kwippy, Flickr, Delicious, Digg) each have their own communities. And I never know where a conversation will take hold. Since I'm most active on Webware, Twitter and Friendfeed, I check those services more frequently. Sometimes something I write will spark a conversation on one, sometimes another. There's no telling. (By the way, Plurk gets a decent share of community action; every time I go there I think I should check in more frequently). Disqus can do a lot of discussion bridging between blogs, but one thing it doesn't do is bridge communities between the microblog sites.

I am, so far, managing to keep most of these connections in my head, but I fear that if I sleep for more than 9 hours I could forget how my network is put together. I could look at my sketch. But we really shouldn't need network maps to keep track of what we're doing where, should we?

So this is my challenge to the Web 2.0 community: Solve the personal content and community problem. Take the multi-publishing chops of Ping.fm, the aggregation features of Friendfeed, the republishing capability of Twitterfeed (with more functions, please), and the discussion aggregation of Disqus, and put it all together into one simple, easy-to-maintain product that acts as a hub for publishing, reading, and community in all these services. And while you're at it, make sure you don't steal traffic or community from the services you're front-ending; they all have personalities we want to keep alive.

Or should I drop it all and just write e-mail newsletters instead?

ExitReality is the latest virtual world to come onto the scene and is launching out of private beta tonight. Its big bold feature is the capability to turn any site you're on into its own 3D world with interactive elements created from content found on the page. This includes photos, videos, and music files.

The service requires a small system plug-in that currently runs only on PCs. I was told no Mac version is planned, but may come into the picture if there's enough of a demand. Once the plug-in is installed, you just need to click a button in your browser and it will take you to the 3D version of that site. The tool will automatically scan any page you're on and make a "default" world where bits and pieces of content are pulled together and organized within a giant room. Site creators can put together their own creations, complete with a developer toolbox that lets people create some Second Life-esq environments using open-source 3D modeling standards.

In a demo earlier this month co-founder and CTO Danny Stefanic walked me through something that looked like the Ewok village from Star Wars. Unfortunately Webware.com did not look as lush, although my byline has never been bigger. Stefanic says site owners can put together their own worlds that would become destinations, or companions to their existing sites, and offer yet another place to monetize their content.

This is a more developed ExitReality page that includes many user created elements. The stock page that's generated on text sites is far less flashy.

(Credit: ExitReality )

To that end, the entire Exit Reality platform is tied to two important things: a social and ad network. Users can have their own Exit Reality specific profiles that come with them from site to site, and there's a built-in directory and search tool used to browse some of the best creations. The advertising side is a little more vanilla, with contextual ads that layer on top of your site's content. There are also special branded 3D elements such as a Carl's Jr. moving bull which was shown off to me in reference to a 2-year-old TV advertisement, which can be found when visiting the Carl's Jr. site in Exit Reality.

Ultimately my only beef with Exit Reality's approach is that it's not offering a whole lot more than something like Me.dium when it comes to the social side of browsing. Me.dium doesn't try to re-think what site creators have come up with and makes the discovery process no different from the experience everyone else on the Web is having. Exit Reality seems to be focused on the 3D attraction, which is certainly not a bad thing, but the experience you get coming to a default version of a site is just not up to snuff with the handful places that have been meticulously created to be immersive. It's a classic chicken and egg problem, with users bound to get bored of it unless there are plenty of interesting places to visit.

Another problem is that the 3D virtual world space is getting crowded fast. Last week at the TechCrunch50 conference we saw the launch of Hangout.net which looks a little more visually impressive and includes things like VoIP chat and a really neat physics engine that lets you throw things around with some level of realism. There's also the Home service coming to Playstation 3 owners in the next few months, alongside the other myriad online choices like Doppelganger, Kaneva, and There.com which also partially compete with gaming heavyweights like Second Life and World of Warcraft.

The one thing that's really going to keep people coming back is something different, be it the people there or the available activities once you're on a site. Whether the open-source creation tools (which I think are one of the strong points) are enough to make that happen is anyone's guess.

This is what you'll find on most sites--a flat surface with a bunch of media strewn about.

(Credit: ExitReality)

Check out other Sightix reviews on Alt Search Engines and Webware. Here's Ari explaining how Sightix works when trying to find models like Bar Rafaeli:

Here at Webware, we are occasionally guilty of neglecting our real-world friends who use real-world platforms. We talk about Twitter and we forget that about 0.0001% of the population uses it. But nearly every working stiff still uses a business phone. For those of you still struggling with a barrage of incoming office phonecalls (Luddites), we have this review for you: Phonesheet.

This is a simple Web-based service that lets you take a call and record who called, when, and why. Then you, or anyone else in the office you give the access to, can see the board, and can mark the call as completed when it is handled. Very simple, and a good use of shared connectivity (the Web). It's a nice app for an individual trying to keep up with their phone log.

If you have an assistant handling calls for you (Double Luddite! And, yes, we're envious), it can help with the back-and-forth over returning phone calls. It beats e-mail and even Twitter for managing and recording a call list. We like how it archives everything. However, the app doesn't work for a multi-person office, since you cannot filter out the calls that are just for you or your job. Also, the service doesn't hook into PBXs to grab Caller ID, nor will it send alerts out via e-mail or IM. There's not even a place in the entry field to record a caller's e-mail address. And there's no mobile interface.

We like what this app is getting at, but it costs $15 a month (after 30-day free trial). That's extremely high for this functionality, despite the app's basic usefulness and pleasing simplicity.

I'm sorry, Mr. Needleman is out at the moment.