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Entries categorized as ‘Tools’

Triphub.com group travel tool

December 13, 2006 · 1 Comment

Following on from my post on Web 2 Travel Communities I received a note inviting me to check out Triphub.com, an online tool for group planning:

  • Create a single “hub” for all trip information and discussions
  • Invite people to join your trip and keep track of who is coming
  • Research and discuss travel plans and activities
  • Collaborate on decisions and keep everyone informed
  • Create a shared schedule of events
  • Share travel itineraries purchased from any source or supplier

I’ve organised many group vacations and special events for family and friends and it can be a drag, so I think this idea is great and the opportunity big. The founding team are nearly all Expedia veterans and it’s refreshing to see something original in Travel and not just another me-too travel community.

I’m going to give Triphub.com a go and use it to organise my Mother and Stepfather’s Silver Wedding celebrations here in Spain. I’ll post later on how it goes.

Categories: Tools · Travel

PeopleAggregator: First Community launched

December 9, 2006 · Leave a Comment

The first Community based on the social network platform PeopleAggregator has launched. People Aggregator is one of various platforms have been launched recently give out of the box social network funcionality – see my earlier post Social Network Software.

The new site is called MyCreativeCommunity.

Via Marc’s Voice, the blog of the creator of PeopleAggregator.

Categories: Social Networks · Tools

Social Network Software

November 5, 2006 · 1 Comment

If you don’t want to build your own, there are alternatives out there, from Open Source programs to hosted pay-as-you-go services

BarnRaiser
BarnRaiser describe their software AroundMe as the ONLY free social networking and group collaboration platform available today!
BarnRaiser not only creates Social Network software, the Barnraiser Foundation actively creates projects to support real life communities.

People Aggregator
Project of Social Net evangelist Marc Canter, People Aggregator enables you to create a Social Network and blogging system – they offer both hosted and downloadable version. The license is curious – you pay them only when you’re making money.

Community Server
Community Server is the software developed by Microsoft, that their famous Channel9 MSDN is based. Spun-off into a separate entity it now offers hosted and software version.

GoingOn
Promises that you can host your network in their new environment, still to launch publicly.

Ning
Ning, a Marc Andressen company, aims to be to Social Software what Typepad has been to blogs. It’s a fantastic product, with a few drawbacks that have stopped it hitting the bigtime – no domain mapping and users have to register with Ning, not your app.

Sparta Social Networks
Creators of the (once) famous Backwash.com, a fully fledged Social Network white label company. Accessible and flexible price plans for the hosted version and now offering the software to install and run yourself

Meneame
Meneame is a Digg clone that has made their software open source so that anybody can create their own meneame, and many people have .

Scuttle
Open Source Del.icio.us clone.

New addition 15 November 2006:

ElggSpaces
From UK company Curverider who make the popular Educational software ELGG, they have launched their spaces box which is your own hosted fully-specced social network. Free (with ads) they then have 3 tiers of pricing. Domain mapping and full privacy controls are stand out features.

Categories: Social Networks · Tools

Switched to Google for your domain

November 4, 2006 · Leave a Comment

For the last couple of years I’ve been paying Yahoo to host my timto.com email. It was a good service, and I never had any problems. For the email and Web Site it cost me $11 per month – which after experimenting with various other services seemed like a good deal because it worked. The only thing that disgruntled me was that I wasn’t able to use the new Yahoo! mail interface that they developed from their Oddpost acquisition.

Last week, though I saw that they were opening up the Google Apps for your domain program to a wider beta and I signed up, transferred my domain and closed down my Yahoo! paying account. I’m really impressed with Gmail, I played around with it when it came out but felt I didn’t need to change, but now the price is right.

Closing thought – between me and my partner, Yahoo! just lost over $200 dollars of revenue per year. I wonder how many other people are transferring their paid email accounts to Gmail?

Categories: Tools