The Progress Bar

The next Webinno is Monday September 10th. Event begins at 6:30pm in the Grand Ballroom at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge

There are three main dish presenters who will take the stage for a six minute demo of their service to the entire crowd:

Frame Media – Alan Phillips & Jon Finegold
GoLoco – Robin Chase
DesignMyRoom (Swatchbox) – Jesse Engle

Following those presentations, each of our side dish demonstrators will have an opportunity to give a quick 30-second overview of their service to the audience followed by a showcase of their companies at tables spread throughout the periphery of the room during the unstructured networking portion of the evening:

Fafarazzi / Dirtlocker – Chris Keller & Todd Galloway
SNIF Labs – Noah Paessel
TheUpDown – Michael Riech
GuitarStar (AdMe Corp) – Peter Eggleston
Mobleo – Tom Boilard Oncero – Phil Kim

Please RSVP at http://webinno14.eventbrite.com/ if you plan on attending.

I’ve been a proponent of user-centric profiles for a long time. Portable profiles stored in transparent database clouds which bi-directionally receive and propogate changes to user-managed profiles are going to be a major feature of the next version of the web.

ProfileBuilder is the latest startup to get into the centralized profile game, launching a few months ago. Today there is news from Mashable and Tech Crunch that ProfileBuilder has launched Profil.es, the search engine/front end for profiles stored at ProfileBuilder.

One of the more interesting part of Profilebuilder are Channels:

Channels contain content in your profile. For example, we are channels that will show information about you, list your eBay items for sale, display your twitter posts, link to your favorite websites, display photos and more.

You can re-arrange, disable and enable any channels in your profile. Making changes in Profile Builder automatically updates all your profiles.

This does indeed work, although I had a difficult time finding the RSS feeds for my Flickr wakeboarding photos sets that I wanted to put in my profile.

I hope that the Contact information is based on some sort of standard like FOAF.  Marc Cantor’s People Aggregator is leveraing FOAF which is good to see.

You can customize your own Channel as well. It will be interesting to see how people use this feature. Check out My Profile.

I am waiting for a more robust API and bi-directional Facebook/Myspace/Orkut profile updating, in it’s current format, it feels like I’m just filling out yet another profile, with no clear understanding of what it’s value is. This ambiguous value proposition of profile aggregator sites like Profile Builder have historically been their achilles heel and must be addressed before the services take off.

Profile Aggregator companies come and go, there have been more than a dozen since the dot-com bust and I suppose there will be a dozen more before one of them comes up with the right mix of money, resources, partners and technology. It’s exciting to see them get closer to the prize, now it’s time to make them useful, no small task.

Buzzword of the week, social graph.
Web 2.0 what went wrong?
Facebook Defines New App Ranking System.
Social networking comes to Google Earth.
Tagging disillusionment.

Mark Cuban throws out one of his periodic flamethrower blog comments. This time the Internet is dead and boring.

A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

Talk about a divisive comment. This topic comes up every once in a while, the last time I remember hearing about it was 2002. No VC money = lack of innovation. Arguable point but what about the 2001-2005 nuclear winter of consumer-based Internet applications?

I don’t think it has much to do with bandwidth. We’re slower than the rest of the world for sure but Myspace is not very bandwidth-intensive. Five years ago we had Mapquest and nascent social networks and blogs, most people simply weren’t clued into them yet. The readers of blogs like this are the 20% hard-core netizens, and we have different perspectives than most net users.

Development tools are better today (Ning, Yahoo Pipes, Eclipse) but companies are still not opening up to user-centric data which is what’s going to drive the next iteration of the web. The identity provider comment on Mark’s blog was interesting, I’ve been thinking about that for several years now. The good news is that the blogosphere is doing it’s job and embracing a growing discussion about social graphs and universal profiles, which will lead companies to investigate and someone is going to come up with a way to make money off of these concepts.

Scoble does a good interview with Marc Canter. There are bits about his People Aggregator, social graphs (terrible phrase!) single sign-on, universal profiles, FOAF, the identity stack and much more. Conversational in tone with lots of stories and subtle jabs at certain net gods, it’s good for a run on your iPod.

Nice Facebook reality check at Venture Beat.

Boston’s Web Innovators Group continues to mature although I keep running into smart connected people that don’t know what Webinno is, so here’s a recap from the blog.

The Web Innovators Group (WebInno) is comprised of people engaged in internet and mobile innovation in the Boston area. We aim to support entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the field by holding events which foster community interaction.

Our regular meetings provide a forum for entrepreneurs from self-funded/early-stage startups to present new services to their peers, as well as an opportunity for everyone in the community to share and exchange ideas.

WebInno was founded and is currently led by David Beisel of Venrock.

Last week someone said they thought they saw a familiar Tech Crunch trajectory brewing. I’ve never been to one, but early Tech Crunch parties saw friends of mine crashed on Arrington’s couch after a long night of  networking. Something tells me that won’t be happening at the Royal Sonesta.

The Webinno website/blog has undergone various changes over the summer. The Webinno signup wiki has been replaced by Event Brite and looks like the entire site is now powered by a blog. Tip to the Webinno webmasters: why is the blog under the category sub-directory?

Despite a lack of community and conversation outside of the bi-monthly events and the fact that most demo’s could be done sitting at home in front of my computer, Webinno continues to grow month after month. We are starved for contact with our people, but is Webinno enough? In a word, no. Sites like Mark’s Guide tell us about the events, but the topics of most tech events are either too mainstream or technical for my liking. Beisel created Webinno to flow deals into his VC firm, the side-effect being a bi-monthly room full of people who tangentially have something in common.

Does anyone remember the MIMIC parties on the top floor of Trattoria il Panino back in the day? That was more of an excuse to get drunk and dance than network, although I remember some decent sized deals originating on the dancefloor.

Webinno has hosted a few dinners focusing on specific topics like mobile and widgets, but I cannot comment, as I was not at either of them. One of the best Boston dinners I’ve been to was the Identity conference at Harvard last summer. Sitting across from Doc Searls at a table full of brilliant people talking about the everything from digital cameras to persistent, portable identity metasystems and soaking in the conversation and great wine.

Questions for Webinno staff. Where is the message board? Where is the monthly newsletter? Why is the wiki gone? The blog has few comments but that’s because the content on the blog doesn’t really draw one out to leave a message.

Part of what makes blogs like Tech Crunch and Scoble interesting is that they are frequent posters, often wrong and write incendiary posts that get commenters up in arms several times a day. Makes for good reading but it’s sad that grown men are reduced to tears based on a non-stellar Tech Crunch review of their me-too social net or video sharing service. Boo-hoo.

I was expecting some more collaboration and conversation to pop up, but then again I work from my home office and my clients are around the world, requiring late night conference calls, so I don’t get out and about the Boston tech scene much. I guess I should start a networking event that caters to what I need. Isn’t that how most great ideas start out?

A quick shout out to the Co-Working Betahouse, who throw good parties every once in a while. I want a Betahouse for the rest of us. The marketing, financial, design, biz dev and in-betweeners. Who’s heading that up?

Ok, I’m done thinking about Webinno. One last Webinno feature worth mentioning- the Webinno job board, powered by Edgio, has several openings, mostly technical. Go forth and interview, and don’t forget to sign up for the September 10 Webinno. See you there.

According to the Silicon Valley’s version of the National Enquirer,  two enterprising post-college grads have created a mashup which displays your out-of-control Myspace spasm in the spare, blue-and-white layout we call Facebook. And they call it, wait for it…. SpaceLift. Looks broken at the moment, won’t import my Myspace profile, must be getting hammered on.

This just in: The easiest way to get hired at Facebook is to come on as a ringer on their ultimate frisbee team.

Last year’s breakout UK geek tv show, The IT Crowd, is back with season two. The first episode felt different from most of last year. Grab the Torrents of season one for some basement-dwelling IT department humor with a British twist.

Flowcharts for deciding if something is f*cked up have existed in various forms for many years. Here’s a few variations via BoingBoing.