Today I got my invite to try out minggl.com. First, a brief description from their own site: “MiNGGL is a free, simple, and easy-to-use browser plugin that helps you connect with friends and manage your profile, whether you’re a member of one or multiple social networking sites. With the MiNGGL Social Palette, your friends and favorite social spots will be connected into a larger network that you control.”
Sounds good, right? Aggregators are becoming popular nowadays, which is the natural step in the world of post-myspace and post-facebook startups that hope to claim a piece of the socnetverse.^[1] Minggl’s potential uniqueness in this paradigm is that it does not simply aggregate data using rss, opml or api on their own site – instead they provide a browser toolbar / plugin that allows their own Minggl notes to be added directly to the site in question (so far myspace and facebook). A little note shows up in the white-space surrounding the facebook / myspace profile that sums up your relationship to the person, and if the person also happens to be a minggl user, more of these floating boxes will appear throughout the profile, nicely embedded wherever the user decided to add one of these notes.
But instead of talking, let me show you what I mean. The setup process is a breeze – in my case I used FireFox 2.0. The toolbar installed just like a standard plugin would (although at 600 kb+ it is rather large for FireFox). After the installation, this is the page you see:

Right off the bat I should admit that I don’t particularly like their choice of domain. It’s not catchy, it’s not a type-in domain, and it does not seem very relevant to their market. I hope I’m not wrong on this and that their SEO guys will try to make up for it, but it’s a gut feeling I can’t seem to shake off.

Ugenie.com serves a dual purpose. On one hand it’s a tool to search for bargains; on the other it tries to present the user with potential bundles to get instead of just an individual product. Its first purpose sounds secondary, since there are many sites who already do this – so we’re led to believe that its real focus are bundles and being able to save is just a natural extension of that service.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the long lost art of writing [part 1] [part 2] – or the problems with grammar kids and adolescents face nowadays. In case you missed it and don’t feel like rereading, my conclusion was that basically the end justifies the means in this case – language is organic and it how it should be used depends on the situation.

That was a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been (proudly) accused of mild liberalism, which for many of my friends and readers was a bit of a surprise considering that my views on literature at large are rather traditional. However, then I came across this article and my blood almost boiled.

Frankly, I believe that that’s how all of the web 2.0 world should be categorized – into good mashups (slick and useful), bad mashups (eyecandy, but no value) and ugly (useful, but lacking in design). Here’s an example of three recent offerings which exemplify these categories.

klostu.com – one of the smartest recent start-ups, aiming to aggregate anything and everything to do with web forums – your presence, multiple identities across multiple forums, tracking friends’ activities, new posts and threads, etc. Wonderful idea, if only because they were the first to think about it and while we already have a number of early-stage social networking / RSS aggregators, forums are a large part of the net and they definitely deserve their own tracking engine. Judging by klostu’s blog, they still have quite a bit of features up their sleeve, so keep an eye out here. And whereas I am not convinced about their choice of a color-scheme, the website is definitely good looking by almost all Ajax standards. Clean, crisp, fast – thus easily falling into the good category.

Taking a small break from the world of technology… I have not written any reviews for a long time and while this isn’t really an attempt at one, I just felt like sharing this with you.

The Edukators (original title: Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei) is a slightly unusual movie. Form-wise, there is nothing to it. Yes, the camerawork can be a bit jarring, as the camera is almost constantly moving, the shots are sometimes a bit too rushed, almost impatient. But the main impetus lies with the actual body of work.

In a way, it’s both a coming-of-age story (mostly for the characters vis-a-vis their interpersonal issues) and a in-search-of-idealism-lost story (that is the least the implied message provided for the audience). What I particularly like about this seemingly plain plot is how those two main themes interplay in terms of accessibility – sometimes the issue is private to them, other times it becomes public – it affects the audience. Then another theme emerges and tries to take the centre, with a number of secondary themes always present in the background. It really is quite fluid.