Meebo changes its ad model

Meebo, an instant messaging provider serving over 40 million people, has just launched a new ad model and changed with the old one. It is called as "takeover" and ads cover the whole background instead of a sticky or annoying banner. This new ad method looks innovative but Meebo is not the first one using it. Ekşi Sözlük, very popular interactive dictionary website from Turkey, is also using the same ad method almost for years as its major revenue model. Look at the resemblance:
I have a positive vote here for the change, because as a familiar person to the method, I know it is pretty attractive and can easily be likeable from the users angle if you can show some creative ads to them. Meebo also tells that you can turn the ads off whenever you want and turn back to the old blue background without an effort.

For the ones who are curious about the clickthrough amounts of the existing ads units the company says that they have a clickthrough like 1 percent.

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Facebook noticed that users disliked the new tweaks

After tons of polls, user compliants and negative comments, Facebook finally understand that the new updates made to the homepage design are disliked by the users.

Chris Cox from Facebook, announced that they are planning to do some modifications in the forthcoming days to make people happy. It is also said that, some technical features like new filtering options for the news stream will be added to the system, too.

So, these new tweaks are going to work? Who knows, but I hope it will work, because Facebook has been becoming a more and more complicated trash-box, nowadays. It is only a matter of time to find yourself lost while looking into your homepage.

If you disagree me, please check out the results of this unofficial poll made about new Facebook. Over 90 percent of the 1.3 millions of users voted to disapprove the new homepage design.

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Twitter's incredible rise

Twitter and other services which use its API become so popular in the last one year that, I can't stop blogging about it twice a week! I guess, I started to get bored about this issue but these stats are really need to be mentioned.

I already post a little article about the last year's traffic stats for the social networks, but in the previous days, Nielsen shared another research in their blog they made about Twitter's stats. The results of the research was really impressive. It says unique visitors of the service has grown 1382 percent in the last year which means from 475,000 uniques to 7 million. Twitter is followed by Facebook and Zimbio which showed also bigger performances like 240 percent and 228 percent. But, when you compare them with the Twitter's rise they are nothing more than worthless.

Another interesting result came out of the research was the one which is about the Age Demographics. According to the result, 65 percent of the Twitter users is older than the age of 35. If you also compare this data with Facebook and other social networks you can see a huge difference with the major age group of that social networks.

Now the only thing I am curious about is the success of Twitter in the countries other than US. I know lots of clone startups has failed becoming popular services in their local markets. They just couldn't get the users' attention. But, these results make me figure out something about that; maybe we can say; Twitter is found attractive by only older people which are the minor part of Internet users in those markets. Young age groups found Twitter-kind services less attractive and that's way those clones are all failed.

What do you say?

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Three Melons and GrubHub have just raised some fundings

Three Melons, an argentina based online game studio and advergaming company, has just raised $600.000 from Santander Bank and some angel investors as their first seed investment. As seen on their website, their portfolio which consists of some big companies such as AT&T, Coca Cola and Lego is pretty impressive. They are saying that investment will be used wile extending product strategy and growing in the Smartphone gaming market.

Another investment news came from a food delivery service, GrubHub, which worths $2 millions as Series B funding made by Origin Ventures, Leo Capital and Amico Capital. The last two companies are also the earlier investors of GrubHub. With this investment company secured $3.5 millions in total. GrubHub told that they are going to use this money to expand their service zone and create new products for enhancing user experience. The website still serving inChicago, New York City, San Francisco, Boston, MA and Philadelphia.

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Find a perfect hair style or show off yours

Mopshots, created by City Search, is an online hairstyle showroom where you can see lots of different models, share your hairstyle with people and get it commented. You can use the service to find a good hairstyler in your neighborhood, too. In order to have your hairstyle listed on the website you first need to be chosen by the editors (they are also called as dictators). These editors are all qualified experts in their sectors. If they choose you, they also comment on your style and provide some advice about it, too.
I believe ladies fall in love with MopShots and never leave the screen without checking out all the styles. That's why, I can tell "It has a future" for the service.

I believe they are not going to have difficulties while monetizing the service if they can reach enough amount of users. I think that, in today's internet world, niche websites, especially the ones which have ladies and kids as targeted audiance won't regret about what they decide if they reach their users. Because, it has been always easier to make them buy something or click on a link.

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Happy birthday Twitter

Tonight at 1.02 am, It is going to be 3 years since the Twitter first launched. In these 3 years Twitter succeed lots of things and survived as a startup. Now, it has millions of users from all around the world, has established a special service for a different country known as Twitter Japan and raised $55 millions worth fundings.

Twitter has around 8 millions of unique visitors per month which makes it 285th most visited website right now.

As a nostalgia, here is one of the earliest tweets from the service made by Jack, the founder of Twitter.

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Undo your mail if you sent it accidentally

Gmail Labs offers a new feature called "Undo Send" for gmail users. If you sent your mail too early by hitting the Send button accidentally or you noticed that you mistype the receiver's address after sending the mail, now you have a chance to Undo it for a few seconds. That's all.. Is it a big deal?

If you are drunk and don't know what you are doing exactly, maybe it can help for you, or you hit the Send button of the mail you were writing to your Ex and feel regret about that it could work for you, too.

The big deal is, I guess, Gmail works day and night, on the contrary of Hotmail and Yahoo, for new features that make life easier. Losing a user as a web service is a very easy thing to happen on Internet, because you have lots of rivals which give the same service to users and waiting for them. So, keeping your users always with you is really a hard work. Gmail does this. They not only try hard to gain new users, but also work in order not to lose the existing ones. That is what the big deal is.

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This service makes the computer pray for you

Ok, I have seen lots of websites offering different features that suprise me up to now, but when I saw Information Age Prayer I was just couldn't know what to say, and I still don't, too. I won't mention about the religious stuff of the project and be a part of it, I just am going to criticise its startup side.

Well, Information Age Prayer is an online praying service which works as long as you pay. No matter what religion you belong to, even you are an unaffiliated, they have every kind of prayers in their databases to serve. You can also write down your own prayers to be prayed.

Here is how the system works: First you choose a package (like Prayer for Financial Help or Prayer For Peace) and pay for it. By the way, They are very cheap, have very reasonable prices :) Then you write down your name and choose your prayer. After that, a text-to-speech program created by them, starts to read your message in their environment at a volume equals to a typical person praying while your name written on the screen. You can subscribe monthly. So you got your praying daily. Cool, ha :)

My last word you should check out the FAQ they have. First, they do not quarantee you heaven and second I found this:

Can I get a direct Peer to Peer connection with God

God is not your peer, His connection with you is ever-present. What we offer is a way you can tell God that you think of Him every day with our Information Age Prayer Services.

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TwitterJobSearch helps you to find a job via twitter

Have you ever thought you will find a job one day via Twitter? TwitterJobSearch project makes this happen. When you connect the website, you simply write down what kind a job you want and where do you willing to work. Then the system takes the information you gave and compares with the database which created by some semantic processes. At last, system serves you whatever it found.

It is your business to read and decompose the results from that moment. You can view the job, retweet it or follow the tweeter. There were nearly 30.000 different jobs when the last time I checked. So, What about the results? Does it work accurate enough?

Well, I guess it depends on what you looking for, but not bad. I, personally, made a query like "chemist in new york city". TwitterJobSearch found me 5 results and successfully all of them were about chemist jobs, but only one difference. I did say; "I want to work in New York City", but, system found me a job in Auburn-Opelika, Alabama. It is about 1.000 miles away from New York City. The other jobs were in Washington, California and Berkshire. Only one of them was in New Jersey :/But, I know it is too early to criticise the results because the system has just established, and I believe it is going to work much better in the forthcoming days.

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Track and see who use your content for free

FairShare is quite a new service which tries to follow your online works and gives reports to you about how and where they used. Think about you have a blog and you think people use your posts in another websites for different aims. Now, using this service, you not only track your content and see if it shows up in different places but also you can see if the websites which are using your content give you a backlink as credit. And one of the key facts, Fairshare is a free service. So, how does it work?

After signing up the service, you first share your feed URL and then mark them as "public", "private" or "copywrite". Later then Fairshare starts tracking your content and gives you some reports in about 12 hours. According to that reports you can get what people do with your content(like if they re-publish them without your permisson or without a linkback) and then easily decide on a way about how to share your feeds(full post, only title, half of the post). It is obvious that, Fairshare will help you fighting with your content thieves.
Copyscape has been doing the same thing for years, but this service is free of charge and also that professional.

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Story of first six weeks of a startup; Domain Pigeon

Matt Mazur, the founder of a web service called Domain Pigeon which helps people to find great domain names, has written down a great article about the first 6 weeks of his startup. He mentioned about DomainPigeon's traffic stats analysis, business model changes, marketing strategies, design elements, targeting the right audience and lots of things more. That is really an inspritional article for the ones who need some :)

After reading all the article I just want to take your consideration into a few important lines from the text as a summary:

Traffic is not as important as you think to make money

If you have a good business plan and a revenue model then you can still make money with a few hundred visitors a day. Domain Pigeon is a nice example for this, It gets only 1700 visitors per week right now, but still making enough money to stay alive.

Design of a project always comed second (except special conditions such as if you re building a DeviantArt :). Do not stick with the design, focus on the content, idea and business plan. You will solve your problems about the design, anyways. Here is the deal:

Bad idea, great design – You stop working and move on.
Bad idea, bad design – You also stop working and move on, but at least you didn’t spend all that time on the design.
Great idea, bad design – Now that you know your product is one that people want, go ahead and make it look good.
Great idea, great design – If you’re lucky or talented enough to be in this category, go after it with everything you’ve got.

Decide on your target audience very well. Make your target as nich and narrow as possible.

If you say; "I'm targeting the people who would like to register a domain" it becomes like "I'm Walmart, I target people who want to buy things." Realize that something is missing in this kind of a project.

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Wefollow, see and subscribe to famous twitters..

Most of the users signed up the Twitter having some trouble to find the right person on network and don't know who the follow at first. Twitter has a basic solution for this by offering a Suggested Users List, consists of Top 100 twitters, to the newbies to start following. But, It is very suspicious how that amount of people selected to that list, especially right after the $250.000 offer of Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis to Twitter to be on that list.

Well, now Wefollow, launched by Kevin Rose the founder of Digg, is offering us a new way to choose Twitters to follow. It is not a new idea but the service quite sweet with its simply designed pages and always up-to-dated list.

And also, i can't pass this without mentioning, Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed becoming a new marketing platform. This means that we better be ready for the new spammers.

Some other similar services:

# Tweeple Pages
# Just Tweet It
# TwittFame

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Mikogo, screen sharing for your free online meetings

Mikogo is an innovative startup which finds a new way solution for your online meetings. After signing up for the service and downloading a little executable program to your PC or Mac you are ready to share your screen with anybody online.

Mikogo is a new service in this area, but not the only one. Yuuguu is another service featuring online screen sharing but with a little difference: you need to pay to use :) There is also a free edition of Yuuguu that offers less feature. However, Mikogo promises you more options -even if you compare with the priced version of Yuuguu- listed below:

# Screen Sharing
# Switch Presenters
# Participant Pointer
# Remote Control
# Pause Transmission
# Application Selection
# File Transfer
# Meeting Scheduler
# Recording & Playback
# Whiteboard
# Back Monitor
# Copy/Paste/Email Meeting Info
# Voice Conferencing service
# Instant Screen Buildup
# 256-Bit AES Encryption

Forthcoming days will show us if Mikogo will be successfull or fail, but I believe they are very close to get a funding if they continue serving this idea troubless to their users.

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Twtbase: all the twitter apps in one place

No need to to say how popular twitter is. As the developers know this, there hasn't been any day without seeing another Twitter application on internet. I can say, it's even impossible to follow these applications. But now, you can find out every single new app through this service, Twtbase, the twitter apps search engine with their own words. You can also subscribe to their feed and be informed immediately when a new application comes out. If you are a twitter holic (and i guess most of you IS, if you are visiting my website :) you should check out this website.

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Paypal now officially covers Turkey

One of the best payment gateways for the web services, Paypal, has officially announced that they will send money to the Turkish banks from now on. It is really a big news for Turkish entrepreneurs and for the ones who make business online. As we all know, It is very hard to stand upright for a web service which has no revenue model or having lack of a payment gateway. Now, for Turkish entrepreneurs and people who are willing to make online business to Turkey has another way to complete their transactions instead of Credit Card.

The only thing we need from now on will be the new creative services to use this opportunity. Devamını Oku..

Last year's traffic stats for the social networks

A little while ago I found a nice graphic prepared by Nielsen Group (I really don’t know where did I get this, but probably from FriendFeed) showing off the last year’s traffic and time per person stats for Top 20 social network sites worldwide in comparision with 2007 . I thought you might be interested. So, here is the graphic:

As you can see; social network sites especially Twitter, Tagged, Facebook and Ning have gained a huge amount of traffic last year. I can only see MySpace, Flixter and and MeetUp which couldn't have been that much fast. It is quite an interesting news if you think about the Facebook and Myspace war. We’ll see what 2009 going to bring us about social Networks, but I can personally say that this year is going to be the year of Twitter and Friendfeed. Hello Facebook and Myspace! You just have a buddy :)
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Latest rumour which reveals Twitter’s revenue model

Everybody is curious about the way how Twitter will make money especially right after the latest $50 million worth funding they got. They have money, they have reputation, they have millions of users they have nearly everything that a web service must have except an revenue model. A company with no revenue model but millions of dollars of fund ?

Well, now i guess they have one, too.

Think about your cell phone and imagine a text message (SMS) sent you from a friend of you including an advertorial at the end of the message. This is a very popular method used by the web services which let you send free text messages online. According to the rumour twitter is planning to use the same system.

They are going to attach some advertorial texts to the end of your tweets. I am sure they will try to make those ads targeted. So, if you tweet about your car then an ad about cars will be automatically attached to the end of your tweet. It is quite an old fashion method but could work.

What do you think?

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Finding an investor never been easier

I remember the days for about 2 years ago. The only web sites which raised fundings were the big boys such as Youtube, Blogger and Facebook and it was just a dream to find someone who will give you money for your web projects. As time goes by, lots of investment and venture capital companies realized the power of the web with web 2.0 age, and little startups found to get a chance to get invested. Now,Today, it has been more and more easier to find an investor but it is not that easy to find an idea that really kick-ass. Whatever..

I sincerely heard that, Angelsoft, an investment company, has just opened their web service for the entrepreneurs who believe that it is time to look for a daddy for their startups. Clicking on this link will take you to a new search engine called Invester Search where you can filter venture capitalists and angel investors by the investment amount, by the sector, by the milestones you gotta achieved and even by the physical distance with you and the investor. It is awesome, isn’t it? You should really check it out..

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Final countdown for the YCombinator ’09 camp

yCombinator, a venture company and the invester of lots of successful web services such as Reddit and Justin.Tv, organizing another web camp in LA for this summer. If you have a startup which is already working or just an idea fill in the application form through the yCombinator web site till March 18th, and wait for their answers. If they accept your project, you will get $5000 for the project and another $5000s for each member of your team. You will also be hosted in their camp in LA for the whole ’09 summer and be together with lots of welebrity in dinners every week. Another good news is yCombinator promises to do all the paperworks for your company to be established. After all these, they only want 6-7 percent of your web service. I think it is a pretty reasonable offer for startups to get their first seed investments. And it seems it is also gonna be fun being that camp. Here are their own words about the organization:

How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most to us. We look for brains, motivation, and a sense of design. Experience is helpful but not critical.

Your idea is important too, but mainly as evidence that you can have good ideas. Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

We're more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments on Hacker News. In fact, that was one of the main reasons we wrote it: so that we could get to know people before they applied.

The ideal company would have two or three founders. We'll consider those with four or five. We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple.

We don't expect you to have a formal business plan yet. All you have to do is fill out our application.

$5000 + $5000n is not a lot, but it turns out to be enough. It will cover at least 4 months' living expenses, and that is enough time to build something nontrivial. It's in your interest to take little money in the earliest stages, because you give up less control for it.

The original motivation for Y Combinator was benevolent, but this is not a charity. If our investments pay off, we can invest in more startups, and if they don't, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. So we're looking for startups we think will succeed.

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Another successful example of simplicity: fizy.org

Nowadays, Fizy.org, a new startup developed by Turkish enterpreneurs, has been rising tremendously and shaking the rankings. Despite its huge rivals such as Songza and Woonz, this music and song search box quadrupled its traffic and so the Alexa ranking in just 2 months since it launched. What is fizy.org? What does it do?As you will see, it consists of just a basic search box and nothing else.You simply write down what you want to listen and click search. Then you choose one of the search results and oyur favourite song or music starts rapidly.

Lots of developers and enterpreneurs try to make complicated web services with lots of options and specific features. Does it really necessary to be successful and getting invested? Well, it depends. Fizy.org does only what it has meant to do. No more, no less. Using the service doesn’t require any membership or any kind of web experience. Someone who just learned to google something can use the service easily. That’s why it has reached the 100k/daily unique visitors in only 2 months and lots of newspapers made news and interviews about it . Owners of the service says that, Fizy.org is indexing 35 billion songs right now by using 25 different APIs.

By the way, Fizy.org has just raised their first investment from a Turkish Online Advertising Company, Reklamz by giving them 40 % shares of the service. There is no information about the amount of investment but I think it has no importance right now for a 2-month-old web service. It has already been a success story.

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