Digg has fully utilises the concept of harnessing collective intelligence, where its users are the one contributing information by sharing articles and videos on the web, which means Digg has never spent any cost on advertising. There are only total of 77 employees working for Digg and according to compete.com analytical results shows that Digg currently has 115 million visits during March, 2010.

According to the interview between Gadgetell and Digg’s founder Kevin Rose:

“Digg started in September 2004 as a personal project.  It was a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote content without the external editorial control.  After a very short time, we realized that we were on to something, as digg was becoming a great resource for breaking news stories, sometimes even before traditional media.  Today digg has more than 140,000 registered users – a figure that is doubling every three months—and more than 500,000 unique visitors every day.”

Digg portrays the pattern of lightweight models and cost-effective scalability, since it only started off with small amount of employees but serving a large amounts of visits which is a result of network effects, where Digg started off with a single hosted server ($99 per moth with $99 set up fee), free open source software (LAMP site with Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and outsourced to low cost developer from Elance. This business model provides low cost economics on the supply side to allow greater flexibility in scaling the technology, marketing and staff. Digg’s business revenue model based on advertising where Digg provides traffics into these advertised websites and also promoting the pattern of leveraging the long tail, reaching to the niche markets.

It is hilarious to found out that according to Kevin Rose, he noticed that Digg got famous was due to the Paris Hilton cellphone incident during year 2005. He admitted that there’s a user close to the hacker submitted the story to Digg, and the story was quickly “dugg” to the homepage and eventually Google and Yahoo! both indexed Digg and gave them the top position for the keywords “Paris Hilton Hack”. With such events take place, with enormous traffics coming in while Digg was only running at one web server at that time, who wouldn’t notice?

Digg also provides a tour on how to enjoy your stay at Digg.com.

Below are videos related to Digg:

Since it’s a long video, I suggest to watch from 0:20 – 3:59 to know more how Digg started and offered made to purchase Digg:

Kevin Rose showing how to use Digg on the show “The Screen Savers” aired December 13, 2004. (He was the host for that show yet he didn’t boast and tell people that he owns Digg!):

Hilarious explanation of Digg.com by Wallstrip:

So, what are you guys waiting for? Let’s Digg!

(By the way, you can login to Digg with its new feature of Facebook access login without registering an account again. Easy.)

References:

Digg Official Website http://digg.com/

Digg Tour http://about.digg.com/tour/1

Alexa http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digg.com

Gadgetell http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/gadgetell-exclusive-interview-with-diggs-kevin-rose/

TechCrunch Interview With Digg’s Kevin Rose http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J1T3Y70IW4

Kevin Rose shows off digg.com on The Screen Savers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4

Wallstrip – DiGG.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhI15TOJLnM

Play-Asia sells products to the smaller niche market of retired gaming platforms such as the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 which gives the company a competitive advantage. The majority of large retailers on the Internet have chosen to discontinue these retired products but Play-Asia continue to sell these products which results Play-Asia’s distribution more feasible and able to bring in potential profit from its consumers. Play-Asia sells over 100,000 different products and has leveraged the long tail, by target and capture new micro-markets of a wider audience who are interested in wide range of video games, movie, music, toys and etc.

Play-Asia also uses algorithmic data management to match the supply and demand of its audience, by helping its customer to find products of similar interest with columns such as  ”related items” and “discounted items”. This feature enables Play-Asia to increase its sales through better matching results to user interests.

Play-Asia utilizes the philosophy of “Wisdom of crowds”, by allowing users to provide comments on the product they purchased which eventually results in determining the product’s popularity rankings and reviews. Play-Asia has successfully leveraged customer self-service to increase customer satisfaction, by putting customers in control through the “My Account” page and able to view order tracking with arrival estimates, returns and lifetime order history.

Play-Asia also provide their service and information through the use of:

• Facebook fan page
• Delicious
• Digg
• Google Bookmark
• Reddit
• Strikebang Community
• and RSS feeds

Play-Asia has used the architecture of improved search, filtering and aggregation to provide effective search functions for its customer to view and purchase their desired product. Play-Asia provides the opportunity for its customer to purchase “rare” products that are hardly found on the market, and also provides an Affiliate Program where customer can refer other people to the site and earn commission from there to attract potential partners.

Since Play-Asia is a web platform business based on the Web 2.0, the future of Play-Asia would be relied on how will the Web 2.0 concepts evolve and how Play-Asia can take the advantages of that to improve its service and continue leveraging the long tail.

References:

Play-Asia Website http://www.play-asia.com/. Accessed 01 May 2010.

Delicious, formerly known as del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web-bookmarks. It also provides information about the most popular bookmarks being saved across many interests. In addition, Delicious provides search and tagging tools to help keep track of an user’s entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like the user him/herself.

Rather than saving bookmarks in folders, Delicious promotes use of “tags” to organise the bookmarks. For example, that all of the bookmarks tagged with “funny” and “video” will automatically be placed in the “funny” collection and the “video” collection. One of the benefits of using Delicious is that, since the bookmarks are stored on the web server, user able to retrieve and view their bookmarks whenever they go and it is accessible through any computer or mobile devices.

Delicious always update and include new features into their web app and it’s always improving. With involvement of users as real time testers, Delicious able to design and update new features according to the users requirements by analysing the user feedbacks and feature that most likely would be welcomed by the users. Delicious announce their updates and new features details on their blog to inform users about the latest release.

Delicious is a service currently owned by Yahoo! and also available in mobile version.

Foursquare is great for finding recommendations for a certain places, for example when you check-in into a certain restaurant in town, there might be a previous recommendation saying that what food is worth to try and what other good food they provides. You can also see tips given by other people suggesting what to do at that particular location, what is good and what is better to avoid. Therefore, the more people contribute in it the better foursquare will be.

What makes foursquare worthwhile to use is, it provides services on mobile devices such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm and other devices. Foursquare also provides a mobile version on their website which works on all phones with Internet access. By installing the foursquare apps on the phone, people can just login into their account and check in when they visit a place. Foursquare apps also allows people to send notifications and update on their Twitter and Facebook account when they check-in to allow their friends and followers to keep up with them. The foursquare apps uses the GPS feature of the phone to show a list of nearby places with integration of Google Maps and Yelp.

Foursquare also provide “unlock badges” feature where whenever people check in a place, they able to to earn points. As people checking in into different places or new places, they will be able to “unlock” badges  based on the their achievement such as discovering a new place or stopping by different locations in a day. (Basically like playing a game, information about badges can be read at here.)

If a person been to a place more than anyone else, foursquare will crown that person as “The Mayor” of that place. Being “The Mayor” brings benefits such as free coffees or appetizers or discounts at that particular venue which has a foursquare special. For example, there’s a cafe called Cafe Luxembourg in New York City and they provides free ice-cream if customers showed that they used foursquare.

I believe like other apps that provides information, foursquare could improve its service by providing language translation feature since a lot of users are found using their own native language with foursquare such as Korean and Japanese. Also, any improvements on Google Maps feature should be updated in terms of integrity and responsiveness. It is told that, foursquare is currently working on its way to increase its database for nearly all major cities in the world. However, people must contribute in order to make these kind of social apps to be meaningful, so come join me at foursquare and be a Mayor yourself!

Below is link of a a video introduction about Foursquare:
http://www.howcast.com/videos/386406-How-To-Unlock-Your-World-With-Foursquare

Example of Foursquare apps on my iPod Touch:

Mcd Check-in

Food Tips

Videos that are produced with Animoto can be shared by using e-mail, Facebook, upload to Youtube, burned into Dvd disc and also able to placed on blog or MySpace.

According to Animoto: “Animoto’s founders have produced shows for MTV, Comedy Central & ABC, studied classical music in London, played in rock bands in Seattle and developed software in Japan. They have developed a patent-pending, Cinematic Artificial Intelligence that thinks like an actual editor and director”.

Animoto also provides business service by producing professional videos and other extra functions such as call-to-action button which turns an Animoto video from a passive viewing experience into an active marketing tool for lead generation. With less than a minute, a well presented video can be created to bring an amazing presentation for the meeting.

Below is a simple guide how to create video with Animoto:

• Sign up for an account
• Choose create a short 30-sec video or a full length video
• Choose to upload images from your computer; or pick one of the following services: Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, and others.
• Allow Animoto to retrieve images and processes them
• Once uploaded you can choose to use them all or remove other unwanted images.
• After confirm the images, choose a song from Animoto’s library or upload own music files.
• Then finalize your video with a title and description and let Animoto works it’s magic.
• Email the video, download it or even embed in a webpage to share in with others.

Animoto’s terms of use stated that videos that are created with Animoto is shareable with individuals but restricted for commercial use. Animoto’s video can be sold to individuals or couples as a gift but not prohibited to be sold to another businesses or company.

Below is an example of a video I made with Animoto, enjoy:

References links:

Animoto –  http://animoto.com

Amazon Web Services provides:

• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Flexible Payments Service (FPS)
• SimpleDB

According to Amazon, the Amazon Web Services delivers a number of benefits for IT organizations and developers, which can be seen here. Most developers would be more interested in Amazon EC2 as it allows user to “rent computers” which is virtual machine where user able to run their computer applications on it. It is scalable and cost effective since it’s paid by hours for active servers or amount of data transferred. Amazon EC2 also able to provide back up to servers which is down at some time.

Amazon EC2 also provides Amazon Cloud Watch API tools to allow user to run, monitor and terminate any instances at real time. Cloud Watch can be accessed with command line tools and web API’s through user’s enterprise monitoring software. Amazon EC2 also provides other API tools such as Auto Scaling API tools, Elastic Load Balancing API tools and more here.

There are few disadvantages of Amazon EC2 if compared to its competitor such as GoGrid, such as server instances are not recoverable with Amazon EC2 where GoGrid will try its best to recover it, and Amazon EC2 doesn’t support Windows Server 2008. Further information of comparison with Amazon EC2 and GoGrid can be read from here.

Amazon AWS’s Terms of Use mentioned that services are provided “as is” and “as available”. There are no guarantees and warranties for user’s material, information or contents which held on Amazon AWS services. User also unable to run different API’s or web services at same time with Amazon AWS. More terms of use can be found here.

In the past, most people would expect that web services will be the next source of  Internet-scale grid computing, but it seems that virtual machines based on web platforms is the next major change in the web with Cloud Computing usage arise.

Below is a video of Amazon EC2 Tutorial:

References:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9002865/Amazon.com_s_rent_a_grid?pageNumber=1

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=251

http://www.devsource.com/c/a/Architecture/REVIEW-Cloud-Programming-with-Amazon-Web-Services-AWS-Toolkit-for-Eclipse/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QKnORsJKt4&feature=related

http://aws.amazon.com/

http://aws.amazon.com/terms/

Yahoo! Maps is a free online mapping portal provided by Yahoo!, which allows user to search for a location, store a list of commonly used street addresses in Address Book, showing live traffic conditions by using traffic incident markers, find business and other points of interest nearby a location by using SmartView, and also provide driving directions by displaying on the map or simple text.

Recently, Yahoo! Maps has released a new and improved version which is called Yahoo! Local Maps. It is written using AJAX where provides new features such as drag-gable maps, multi-point driving directions, widgets and satellite imagery.

Yahoo! Maps indicates in their Terms of Use that data provided are only for personal use and not for resale. It is protected by copyright, and it’s provided by licensors such as NAVTEQ, United States Postal Service, Cartifact and more providers.

Yahoo! Maps also provides web services through the Yahoo! Maps Developer APIs which allows user to embed their interactive maps into their web and desktop applications.

In my opinion, Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps are quite similar. It just depends on which platform or providers does the user feels comfortable to use with.

Here’s some tips on how to use the Yahoo! Maps:

Reference links:

Yahoo! Maps – http://maps.yahoo.com/

Data is the Next Intel Inside – http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=3

Google Buzz is about sharing status updates, photos, videos, and more. It’s built right into Gmail and uses friends that has been added so it save user’s time to start adding their friends. Google Buzz allows you to pull images straight from links, watch video online (empowered by YouTube), and also view photos in their original size with bigger photos and fast. The best part of Google Buzz is that you can connect to other sites such as Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter, which allows interoperability between different Web 2.0 applications without having to logging into each of them separately. Also, to allow conversation keep going on, comments are sent into inbox for easy viewing and replying purposes.

Google Buzz is similar to Facebook where it is harnessing collective intelligence pattern by allowing users to participate explicitly by creating status update or topic, communicating with each other and more. Google Buzz also provides extra information by default through Google ads to keep their user up to date with the current latest news or hot topics around the world. Google Buzz also involve implicit user participation where side effects of user actions such as what current topic interests them, information of how does users get to find their new friends and what has user done to get more comments or popularity in their network.

Google Buzz is also compatible with mobile where user able to update their profile status and upload photos at anytime, anywhere which is similar to Twitter. It is also said that Google Buzz are combination of various web 2.0 applications that are famous now: Google, Gmail, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.

Google Buzz provides privacy control which allows users to choose whether to publish their ideas to the public or only for their closest friends. However, Google Buzz does auto add friends into your friend list based on your Gmail’s contacts which might have some trouble with privacy issues since not every personal contacts you have might want themselves to be in your “social network friends list”, such as your employee or employer.

Google Buzz does provide some insight of how important and useful if there is interoperability between different social network applications, but however due to large amount of people who are currently involved in Facebook and MySpace, it is expected that if Google Buzz unable to provide integration with Facebook it will results in failure. On top of that, Google’s rival Yahoo already identified the weakness of Google Buzz where Yahoo already have similar social features before Google does (“Yahoo had Google Buzz”, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359012,00.asp). Also, one of Google Buzz’s feature which allows user to import status updates from Twitter doesn’t seem practical enough since the feature can’t be turn around, by having Google Buzz’s status updates posted on to Twitter.

Google Buzz can be a hit if only they are able to solve or improve these problems:

• Auto added friend list
• Integration with Facebook and MySpace
• “Complete interoperability/sync” with Twitter and other web 2.0 social applications
• Provide more applications and functionality such as groups or fans page

I guess people will still prefer to stick with Facebook for the time being, since I do still prefer to Facebook, too.

References links:
Hands on With Google Buzz – http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359015,00.asp
Yahoo: We Had ‘Buzz’ – http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359012,00.asp
Google Buzz: What It Means for Twitter and Facebook – http://mashable.com/2010/02/09/google-buzz-facebook-twitter/

Introduction of Google Buzz: