A few weeks ago I covered the new cohort of social activities sites. In the subcategory of basic events listing services, notably comprising Upcoming.org, Zvents, and Eventful, I neglected to include BusyTonight. Ironically, I missed it despite the presence of an active blog on which developers write thoughtfully about the philosophy and execution of the service. BusyTonight is a subsidiary of privately held Team Gigabyte and based in NYC. The CEO is Joshua C Lerner, COO is Richard Mintz and CTO is Matt Kangas.

BusyTonight differentiates itself from the other services by targeting the big mass of less popular events would go otherwise unlisted, the Long Tail. Everyone will list a Madonna concert and likely some or all will miss a lacrosse team fundraiser at the local community college. That’s because they all subscribe to the same duopoly of commercial sources, EventSource and EventCrazy, which naturally capture economically incentivized events, and rely on the imperfect methods of pulling calendars, eg Google Calendar, and RSS feeds and gathering user contributions for the remainder of events. These methods are imperfect – imcomplete and slow - because they require a mass of individual effort. Some of the “loose” events may be captured this way, but the majority will sit unreplicated in their home web pages.

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A few weeks ago, Om Malik did a highly unscientific graphic comparison of second life and real life. Well, real life sucks, and it is in the after life where harems of virgins await us. (...await the virtuous men. Who knows what women want?) So for round two, we do a highly scientific graphic comparison between second life and the after life.

Calibration - after life vs. afterlife

This calibration comparison shows that though after life is more popular than afterlife globally, both are highly correlated, so we can choose either one. We pick the stronger term for final combat.

Calibration - second life vs. secondlife

secondlife emerges as a search trend at the end of Q1 2005. At the same time, second life starts trending up from its previously stable baseline. The MMO game is finally garnering attention eighteen months after its October 2003 debut. second life is the far stronger and more dynamic signal so we choose that for final combat.

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As casual planning startup Renkoo revs up in closed Beeta (pronounced Bee-tah), UK based Renzoo launched this week a beta of its unified messaging platform. Apparently Ren-ness was in the air the latter half of 2004: both domains were registered a month apart, Renzoo.com on Aug 27, 2004 and Renkoo.com on Oct 28, 2004. Luckily for both firms that each targets a different part of the globe. Renzoo’s audience is the UK and renzoo.com forwards to renzoo.co.uk.

Oh yeah, about Renzoo’s service. The ways in which it multiplexes email, voice, voip, sms, wap, and voicemail as a centralized messaging service for individuals is pretty mindnumbing. You can read all about the feature set at renkoo.com, I mean renzoo.co.uk.

Technorati Tags: unified_messaging, renkoo, renzo

Trillian, if you don’t know, is an instant messaging client that works with the AOL AIM, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, and IRC chat systems, any or all at the same time, channeling your chat activity through one interface. Spokeo, founded by three Stanford guys, applies the same concept of tributary merging to the proliferation of social networking, blog, photo and video systems as well as RSS feeds. Just launched, Spokeo currently supports social networks Bebo, Facebox, Friendster, MySpace, Wretch, Xanga; blog, photo, and miscellaneous sites Blogger, DeviantArt, Digg, Flickr, Fotolog, ImageStation, LiveJournal, PhotoBucket, PictureTrail, Piczo, WebShots, Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo Video, YouTube.

I’ve never found the idea of Trillian attractive. I’m a software junkie and prefer to use each chat system through their respective clients. Each client is a unique creation and Trillian is a common denominator that often fumbles features such as file transfer or voice chat. But I have friends who swear by it. To them the utility of chatting – sending and receiving text – and managing their buddy lists across several systems through one interface outweighs the aesthetic drawbacks and the deficiencies in seldom used features.

Spokeo seems even more useful for its targeted space than Trillian is for chat; most if not all of these community systems place your friends’ pictures, blogs, and videos on individual profile pages. Except for possibly a list of blog subscriptions, you’d have to surf each account to keep up to date. Spokeo distills that content, from their often noisy profiles, and aggregates them all by each friend onto one scrollable page, and allows you an array of different views and slices. So Spokeo is useful for monitoring friends on say MySpace alone; Spokeo can do that for your all friends across the supported systems. In this way, Spokeo is like the RSS reader but evolved for the multimedia content of social systems.

And of course, Spokeo as a meta-social network is a social network itself.

The Ajaxy interface--built on top of Ruby on Rails--is kludgy in a few places. But it’s not bad and on par for an early stage service. They have medium term funding and are hiring programmers and engineers to ramp up.

Technorati Tags: trillian, social, bebo, trillian, aol_aim, youtube, rss_reader, digg, flickr, webshots, deviantart, livejournal, social_networking, piczo, xanga, icq, imagestation, spokeo, blogger