LetsBuyIt Blog

Youtube has come up with a white label YouTube called Startyourtube. Now you can just create your own YouTube with the look, feel, name, URL, content, etc. that you want such as Snowboarderstube as you can see below. To increase the capacities, number of possible views, blogs, etc. one needs to pay but it still means that you have your own Videoportal!

Some other names of similar sites are Ning, Magnify, Reality Digital, KickApps, and VSocial. Let us know if you know any other sites.

In the last two weeks we have received some interesting statistics about social networks and webpages in Europe, namely Germany, that might interest you:

First of all it needs mentioning that there are currently around 149 social networks in Germany according to the ranking - list of zweinull.cc.

The Forsa-Survey, which was initiated by Sevenone Interactive, concluded that the average German only visits eight sites per month. Such a high loyalty makes it very difficult for new websites to become popular, because the average man checks out 21 new sites and the women check out 13 new sites on an average per month. To see what these main websites are and which age group is loyal to which site, see the statistics.

Another interesting fact is that according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 85% of the German internet users are in some sort of social network. What makes it interesting is that these people are willing to rather receive targeted advertising instead of having to pay for the service however don’t like to be monitored/tracked while surfing the internet. In correlation to the previously mentioned loyalty of internet users, German are interested in staying the same social network for the entire life instead of joining too many new networks. To read the entire analysis of this interesting PWC study click here.

We had previously reported about the Opensocial Initiative and that MySpace would like to open up an API for outside developers to develop applications for MySpace, similar to the applications of Facebook. Well, they are online now and some applications are already available. MySpace also provides the opportunity to create social shopping widgets! Check out the MySpace application center here.

We know that Social Shopping is the big thing in e-commerce now, which has brought up many interesting players such as Edelight, DaWanda, Smatch or Shoppero.

As I have found out through the interesting article on Exciting Commerce with the title “Social Shopping: Amazon Friends & Interesting People” I had to discover that Amazon and Ebay have now joined the ranks of competing for the social shoppers.

That will make things interesting!

Everbody in Germany has heard about disputed Spickmich.de, the start-up of Tino Keller, Phillip Weisenhiller und Manuel Weisbrod. This teacher rating page has been in the media many times now and this TAZ article I think is one the most interesting ones.

That German teachers dislike criticism or feedback is well known (reasons undisclosed) but one teacher now had to find out the hard way at court that she cannot refrain her pupils to have an opinion about her. The court in Cologne has denied her to have the feedback and reviews about her deleted and she needs to face up to reality. Why is she worried that students say something about her if her teaching skills and methods are so impeccable?

The next generation of dog-lovers is here. Like Facebook or Studivz, www.hallohund.de is a social networking platform for everyone wanting to present the world his or her fourlegged friend on the Internet. Here, Users can find out everything they is to know about dogs.

They can get beauty tips, information about their dog’s proper diat, post photos and even meet other dog owners to go for a walk with. In the categories Hunde-Basics and Hunde-Welt, people can read user letters and get informed about upcoming activities. Dog experts and vets give advise, and in the Hunde-Market you can buy anything to do with dogs; all the way from books to four-poster dog beds.

The best part is that as a registered user, you also have the option to individually design your and of course your dog’s own profile, write a dog diary, and ask dog experts questions. I am starting to ask myself who the dog is here?

The word Social Networking takes on a whole different meaning with www.hallohund.de. It is now not only target towards humans to keep in contact with friends and family but also at their K9 friends. Now Burda has really managed to link the print media with the online world!? I am very curious how that is going to work out!!

We have previously written about API and it’s one of the keywords of development in the last few months. When popular API are provided for the third-party innovators, there is a huge demand, as we can see with GoogleMaps and the over 4000 applications on Facebook itself.

With the growing availability of API it became more difficult to understand them all and that is why Google decided to simplify the development for websites and developers by creating one development platform called: OpenSocial.

This is how Google explains it on their website: “The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. Because it is based on the famous standard of HTML and Javascript it is easy to be learnt and quick to be applied. “

The following websites implementing the OpenSocial Standard are some websites which imply to revolutionize the development industry inevitably:

MySpace, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, und XING to name just a few of all participants.

If Facebook does not join this initiative we are bound to see an interesting competition.

Wikipedia defines a mash-up like this: “An application which combines the contents coming from several more or less heterogeneous applications”.

In the world of the Web, this corresponds more precisely to a website which gathers the services suggested by other already existing sites via the use of modules, called Application Programming Interface (API), such as Google Maps. These modules are developed by editors who see the means there, of offering their services to a greater number, and to thus make an additional publicity with their company. Everyone gains there!

Everyone gains there… at the same time, yes and no. Even if sometimes the use of certain APIs can lead to a new service suggested exclusively by the mash-up, the mash-ups depend on content proposed by others, pertaining to others, which makes their situation sometimes unstable.

This being said, the new development of the mash-ups awaits answers. The Net surfers who saw the services multiply in recent times, now wish to see all of them united to interact and communicate between them on one single interface!!

Cool Stuff for Your Life Online. Simple Spark is the place to find and share a new world of web applications.

It’s the small ideas, those simple sparks of inspiration, that change the world. The web makes it possible. Simple Spark makes it a whole lot easier. Whether you’re a blogger looking to add functionality to your site, a business looking for tools, or a developer looking to create the next big thing, Simple Spark is the place to find cool stuff for your life online.

Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 technology taken to the corporate world. Just as in the consumer Web, the goals of Enterprise 2.0 technologies are better collaboration, easier information management, and more personalized productivity.

Let’s discover today Mindquarry

It’s advisable to pay attention when SAP co-founder and chairman Hasso Plattner invests in something. One of those ventures is Mindquarry, an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint that includes a Java-based desktop client with features for file and document sharing, task management, wiki editing, and collaboration in chat rooms and forums.

Mindquarry’s goal is it to develop the best combined environment for the collaborative chores of knowledge workers to

• help them to get rid of bothering extra work,
• increase their productivity and quality level and
• make their work become more joyful.

Mindquarry seeks to become the leader in collaborative software.