Similar to Shareaholic for Firefox, Shareaholic Accelerator for IE8 enables you to quickly, and very easily share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via a wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking, bookmarking, blogging, and e-mail services from Internet Explorer 8.
IE8 users, get it now! —
It was great catching up with TJ last night. TJ and I worked closely together on Compete.com from inception to launch. He also taught me a lot when I was at Compete, and I thank him every day for those seemingly small, but significantly valuable life/work lessons that stuck.
TJ is now one of FlipKey’s co-founders. FlipKey was conceived with the basic idea of applying web 2.0 principles to under served markets — in their case vacation rentals.
TripAdvisor invested in FlipKey last year, and it’s great to see how well they’re doing. TripAdvisor now includes FlipKey reviews on its own network of sites, which attract over 30 million visitors a month worldwide.
The big challenge with UGC is reaching critical mass quickly. FlipKey took an alternative approach compared to its parent TripAdvisor. Rather than offering an open review system where consumers were required to find the site and home/accomodation they stayed in to leave a review, FlipKey went directly to the source (the rental management companies) and created a Reputation Manager that invites confirmed past guests via an email to leave a review. This also ensured higher quality of reviews, as the reviewer is guaranteed to have actually stayed at the vacation rental. Smart.
Last night we also brainstormed some _big_ ideas for Shareaholic, which took me right back to when compete.com was hatched — lots more on that soon 🙂
Below is Digg and Facebook‘s monthly Unique Visitor chart going all the way back to the month they were launched. After looking at the first chart, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Facebook has been growing faster than Digg (isn’t so), so before you do, make sure you take a look at all the charts in this post.
The chart below overlays the same Facebook vs. Digg’s traffic data to their respective launch month’s:
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“Linear analysis will get you a much-changed caterpillar but it won’t get you a butterfly. For that you need a leap of imagination.”
— Robert Hutchings, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council in the cover letter for Mapping the Global Future (National Intelligence Council 2004)
