I am not trying to contend that Facebook is superior to anything in any way. While it’s a highly useful tool, it’s had its problems, and it still lacks some basic features (which would make it more useful but less of an addiction, which is supposedly bad for business). But while that may be a wonderful topic for another day, today I’d like to focus on why classmates.com is so much worse than facebook.com.

Some years ago, when classmates.com first came into existence, I’d like to think that it was one of the first splogs I’ve ever seen. It was impossible to surf the web for more than five minutes before walking into one of their annoying advertisements. And no, they weren’t the calm, serene, 200×200px adsense boxes. They were huge banners, oftentimes popups or interstatial popunders. I think I actually had a windows service running that was specifically devoted to blocking their ads. Not to say that I haven’t signed up for an account. The idea was good and I was in high school at the time. It all would have been wonderful, except that a) the website never got any major traction, and b) I think it became so synonymous with spam that the very idea of using it as a service caused an involuntary acid reflux.

While the current 11n protocol may prove quite an obstacle for wide-scale deployment in corporate environments, most notably because of the prohibitive costs associated with purchasing gigabit switches and 10-gigabit uplinks, as well as due to the problems currently present in the 11n protocol, those very same issues can provide a robust environment for a casual, working neo-nomad.

In a home/cafe/neighborhood environment, 11n access points can be a heaven in disguise. Usually strong enough to not have to rely on Power over Ethernet (POE) circuitry (which currently at 15.4 watts is often not strong enough for 11n devices), they also operate in the 5 GHz band, which is vastly preferable in places where the 2.4 GHz band is already crowded with other consumer electronics that contribute to the interference we have all seen in homes where sometimes even in the same room as the wireless A/P, the Signal-to-Noise ratio makes regular WiFi almost unusable. And in most cafes, currently covered by 1-3 11g routers, one 11n A/P will be more than sufficient - thanks to its increased speed and range.

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.