Parentville Content Widget
Parentville.com launched a new feature, a content syndication widget.
Now, our partners can show the recommendations they’ve made on their site or blog.
It’s a step towards bringing the Parentville recommendations closer to our audience, which we believe will increase a number our metrics.
Only time will tell.
You can see it in action at
Parentville’s Townhall Blog
Life With Pooka
Changing your personal workflow
I’m working on several projects that have a website component. I got to thinking …what will it take for you to augment your personal workflow to use a new website on a regular basis?
When I fire up my browser, I have 5 default tabs: personal gmail, work gmail, google calendar, google reader, and tweetlnks. I’m also test driving some additional websites that could be added to the default list, yammer and google wave. Then you have regularly used applications Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, Putty/Editor, tweetdeck etc.
A new website/service has to have some compelling value for me to use it regularly. Ideally, the new website/service can integrate (widget/API/firefox plugin) into one of my defaults until the I see enough value so that is top of mind for me to visit regularly or to make it a default.
Some examples: I really like RememberTheMilk, but the gmail integration wasn’t great and it couldn’t dethrone outlook tasks and gmail stars.
Collecta is a great search engine, but I haven’t seen the value yet. I’ve tested it and liked what I saw, I just don’t want to spend time doing another search just to see if I’m missing something.
My twitter usage was sporadic until I hit a tipping-point (I can’t believe I used the term) and now it’s one of my defaults.
Bing could be an interesting case study for this. It has grown market share, but at the expense of Yahoo, not Google. See here Bing increased it’s market share as a result of marketing and users taking it for a test drive. But now the growth has slowed as the buzz has worn off and we find the results aren’t all the different. See my app to compare. How many more users will change their default search from google to bing?
How many websites do you visit on a regular basis?
What have you added to your “regular/default” list? Why? What was the hurdle that changed your workflow?
Hackable business development at Parentville
Parentville.com is a niche product targeted at new parents. While developing our product and understanding of the market, we’ve recognized the value of syndicating content within a fragmented industry, especially for a start-up.
Partnering with others in a fragmented industry can provide valuable original content for one party and bring more page views for the other party.
There are plenty of existing API opportunities to use content - twitter, amazon, youtube, etc., but the results usually aren’t specific or meaningful enough.
So we’re seeking out partners who can provide us with content that we *think* our users will want to see, and in return we do the same. Most of these are smaller blogs or websites don’t have formalized content sharing tools. There is where hackable business development comes in.
If you’re small, you’re venerable, but you can work together and become stronger… like the Power Rangers
Read more thoughts on hackable business development here
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/170568831/hackable-business-development
http://blog.aweissman.com/2009/09/no-business-developement-or-hackable.html
Restaurant health inspections from http://nyc.gov/data
First off, kudos to NYC for releasing the data in a usable format. I hope they update the data as necessary. The apps that will be built around the data will most likely require updated data going forward.
I finally got around to parsing the health inspection data, here are some stats from the overall 375,488 data items available.
- 19,332 restaurants inspected
- 22,778 restaurant locations inspected
Of those 22,778 locations,
- 9,161 Manhattan
- 2,271 Bronx
- 5,265 Brooklyn
- 5,137 Queens
- 944 Staten Island
Next is to look into the inspection data and see what we can do with it.
Anyone interested in using the data for an existing app? email or twitter me @lmai
Officially shuting down GoogSMS
We have informed our users that we have discontinued our service of forwarding Google Voice SMS to email.
Google Voice released the same features, so we encourage our users to switch to Google Voice.
Log into your google voice account - Under “Settings” and “Voicemail and SMS” there is a checkbox to forward SMS.
Like GoogSMS, you can also reply to SMS by replying to the email.
We are exploring other features to add like Prowl notification, but there are already providers of the service. http://googlevoice.ub3rk1tten.com/voicegrowl
Thank you all for your support.
