Web 2.0 Wars: Round 2

It’s time for Round 2 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 2:

Scobee
Shadows
Gravee
YouTube
Zimbra
Furl
Smugmug
Newsgator

Scobee is an event planning service. I already reported on it here. My conclusion then: “too early to tell, but I’m not blown away by the concept.”

Shadows is a social bookmarking service. It looks like it’s shooting for a combination of Technorati and Delicious. I couldn’t find too many results for my test tag “memeorandum” without creating an account and logging in. There may have been more results had I logged in.

Gravee needs to change its logo because it looks like Grovee. It’s a community powered search engine that somehow shares revenue with sites that appear in its search results. It’s a pretty crowded field with some formidable competition and I can’t imagine the revenue share would be all that significant, but the search engine was fast and reliable based on my test tag and my test blog (Newsome.Org, of course).

YouTube is a video hosting, sharing and search service. It’s free and seems fast and reliable.

Zimbra is an open source collaboration tool. I don’t really understand the description, which means that a lot of other people don’t either. There simply must be a better way to describe itself than this: “Zimbra focuses on solving the cost and complexity for enterprises that run large email/collaboration systems. We accomplish this by combining industry-proven open source components with our experience in designing and operating large-scale messaging and mission-critical software systems….”. I learned the hard way in the last dot.com bust to avoid companies who can’t explain in simple terms what they do.

Furl is a information bookmarking and information clipping service that lets you store information you find on the web for easy access. It looks similar to Onfolio, but the information is saved online. I have an automated bookmark for it on my posts here, but I haven’t used it very much. It looks pretty cool, though.

Smugmug is a photo storage and sharing site, similar to Flickr. It lets you create a store to sell prints of your photos. Lots of people use Smugmug and it has both market share and brand recognition.

Newsgator is an online RSS feed reader, similar to Bloglines. The basic service is free. The premium services will soon include a synchronized copy of FeedDemon, a popular desktop feed reader. It’s a competitive field, but Newsgator has some market share and brand recognition.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

6 out of 8

And the Winner of Round 2 is:

YouTube in a battle. Lots of good contestants in this round. Some of the others suffered from an unlucky draw.

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