Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software

A few years ago a ton of sites started popping up for you to review local businesses and services in your area. The idea behind the sites such as JudysBook was that reviews were written by average everyday people like you, therefore they could be trusted more than a review you read on another site. Sites granted you to create a profile, upload a picture, and invite all your friends to join as well so you can share information.

GigPark works under the same principal, except the company assumes to some extent that the people you’re friends with on the site are your actual friends, not just people who happened to find you on the site. You can import addresses from your yahoo, hotmail, or gmail account onto the site to find people you know who are already using the service, and invite those who are not.

GigPark also has a Facebook application, so you could pose questions like “Who know a great eye doctor” on facebook and solicit responses from your friends directly on Facebook. Of course your friends would also have to add the application in order for all this magic to happen, which given the multitude of annoying facebook applications kicking around these days, is probably unlikely. You can make your recommendations public however, so even without adding the application your friends can read how excited you’re about your new plumber.

What do you consider sites like this? Would you use it to solicit suggestions, or would you rather just call a friend and ask?

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Filed under: Web services, Microsoft, Mozilla, Social Software, web 2.0, Browsers

Are the oldschool browser wars starting up again? It sure seems care about it.

Flock has a preview of their version 2 out, Firefox launched version 3 this day, and Opera launched version 9.5 on June 12th.

Who’s missing from this uber release celebration? Oh, that would be Microsoft’s World wide web Explorer…the browser with the #1 market share. After their less than stellar (and way less than standards compliant) version 7, Microsoft better come up with some EPIC for World wide web Explorer 8.

Opera as you know is focused on security, speed, and mobile.

The sometimes over the top Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner stressed that Opera 9.5’s most innovative and most important feature is the cross-link between your desktop and mobile devices. A feature that other browsers haven’t even bothered to start playing with yet.

Will Opera’s mobile first, desktop second strategy work? We shall see.

4.7 million downloads in 5 days is impressive, but can Firefox surpass that in a single day? Not if they can’t keep their own site online.

Stay tuned!

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Filed under: Debt, Retire, Saving, Relationships

With money being listed as one of the top three reasons that couples fight, it’s no doubt that it is a tricky and touchy subject to deal with. The issues can be even harder to deal with if the situation incorporates complex legal rules. In order to superior prepare yourself for the obstacles in or after your marriage related to money take Money magazine’s “Your marital money rights” quiz.

Check out some of the questions below.

1. Can I cut my spouse out of my will?
2. Can my divorced spouse get my social security?
3. Can men get alimony? - Check out more on Manimony at WalletPop!
4. Will my husband’s pension provide for me too?
5. My spouse has massive credit card debt in her name. Am I responsible for it?
6. I found my spouse’s secret savings account! Do I get half?

You’ll have to head over to Money magazine to find out the answers to these questions, a few of which might surprise you. Even if a particular question doesn’t fit your current place in life, the knowledge is worth having, if only to remind you to look further into a situation when it happens to you or a friend.

Do you’ve any marriage and money questions? Leave them in the comments and we’ll try to get an answer for you.

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Today, OneSpot has formally announced the commerical availability of its OneSpot publishing-as-a-service[TM] platform. This subscription service allows publishers and businesses to deliver relevant content from across the internet to a targeted audience. Think of OneSpot as a white-label Techmeme, Sphere Netvibes and Digg solution.

For instance, if you publish a site about social media, OneSpot will provide related content from relevant sources that you can feature alongside your original content, in sidebars, headline widgets, RSS feeds and more, giving full credit to the original author and source. Thus, instead of having to populate an entire site with news stories and haphazzard links, you can focus on creating quality original content, while still linking to the biggest stories in your particular area.

OneSpot tracks over 200,000 web feeds to find content in a specific area; these feeds are from trusted sources and the user has full control over which stories are featured, approved or blocked. How content is displayed and how frequently it is published is all determined by the user. The net result is something similar to the New York Times BlogRunner service, with the additional ability to have a branded “Meme” tracker and the ability to enable user-voting a la Digg or Reddit.

We think that OneSpot is an interesting approach to content aggregation and syndication. Looking at their site, the way related articles are collected and aggregated appears both efficient and timely — a problem with many related-content engines is that the sources are sometimes old or out of date.

For businesses or publishers looking to add extra value to their sites, OneSpot might be a viable solution.

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