In a recent story, Google has been praised for offering terabytes of free storage (along with the hardware and the support) needed for scientists to transport large amounts of data between various teams. Up to 120 TB in fact, if we look at the example of data received from Hubble.

This sounds almost too good to be true, but I’m an optimist and a believer in most of Google’s endeavours (though I choose to not hold any of their stock if only to be able to claim objectivity). This move makes sense from a business perspective when one considers Google’s mission, its business goals, its evangelical R/D approach and its sheer data-storing ability.

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.

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.

Today I was testing out another impressive Web 2.0 off-shoot, standpedia.com. I must admit that the idea is compelling and quite fresh: to have a new way of logically and graphically representing debates/arguments, something currently handled almost single-handedly by forums.

Signup was quick and painless; creating new arguments or contributing to others was also a breeze. I should mention here that standpedia’s name tells us exactly everything we need to know – it’s a wikipedia-influenced concept of presenting your stands, or beliefs. Since it’s wiki-based, arguments are open to public moderation (unless otherwise restricted). It really works and looks rather good, also thanks to a Flash-based window navigating through the flowchart-like representation of the argument.