Flavio about Business 2.0

Disclaimer: This is a paid posting, powered by trigami.

After finally having received some invitations to blog for trigami, I decided to give it a try with a new Web 2.0 service. The product is called Netvoting and is basically a polling service, with widgets that you can implement in your blogs - a product that has been existing for years. What they added now is a social network layer to the voting, hoping this would create additional value and convince bloggers and other pollsters to use their service.

The registration proved difficult because gmail classified the confirmation email as spam and had to be found in the spam folder. And gmail normally has a very good spam recognition rate, so I wonder why it failed this time.

After having registered, the use of the platform is pretty straightforward. You create your poll by:

1. Entering the question
2. Entering the possible answers
3. Choosing some settings

and off you go!

I must say that the product is great when it comes to settings, it let’s you choose between fraud detection over cookies or cookies and IP and correctly warns you that if you use IP some people sitting behind the same NAT Router might not be able to vote correctly, so it suggests that you use cookies:

After creating your poll you can let people on netvoting vote and you should also be able to embed a widget using javascript, which did simply not work. I had to resort to the code for the working power widget of another blogger to make it work:

This Power Widget seems to be working fine and is definitely a handy way to include a poll into your blog. But the fact that I couldn’t make it work proves that quite a lot of work still needs to be done.Another feature that I really like about netvoting is its statistics visualization of demographics. Here’s a look:

Small but very interesting features are the following:

• rss feed of your voting in order to stay updated of the votes cast (for your netvibes page, for example).

• publish to mainstream blog hosters and also to major social networks including facebook and myspace with just one click

I took a look at the social networking functionality and it really is exactly the same as on every other social network: profile, friends, groups etc. And I frankly don’t see the connection between voting and social networking. On a social network, you might want do polling from time to time, but would you want to do social networking around polling?

Overall, the amount of features are great, I especially like the social network and rss integration. On the other hand, I see no need to create yet another social network around polling. And it is definitely not stable yet, as a couple of things didn’t work out properly. But if they can fix that, it is a useful quick poll creation service with extensive publishing functionality.

You know you’re wasting to much time surfing facebook, reading articles on digg and looking at your stats? Want to use your time more efficiently?

Well looks like Tony Wright, founder of Jobby (sold to jobster.com), has come up with a great software to do measure your activities, at least those that you with your computer. The software has the promising name Rescuetime.

It’s a hybrid web app with a small software for your windows or mac (no linux version yet) that tracks your active window every 5 seconds. The data is then uploaded every 30 minutes to the rescuetime webserver (both time settings can be changed according to your needs). Online you are then able to see which websites and which software you’ve been using for how long. On top of that, you can tag the websites / programs with your personalized tags, i.e. communication for your email, IM, and social networks. This allows you to see very quickly where you spend the most of your time, and again can help you set goals to reach certain work / waste ratios.

The GUI of the software is already great and I can already see Rescuetime become one of my new time wasters, due to it’s addictive character.

On top of that, they announced exciting new features yet to come:

• The ability to set time management goals (daily or weekly) and receive notification when you meet (or fail to meet) your goals (coming soon!)
• Tools to see how you compare to other people in your industry (coming soon!)
  
• RescueTime Pro. This will be our premium offering, designed for businesses and teams that want to enhance their productivity with RescueTime.
  1. Create private groups that are as big or as small as you want… A company could have a group for all employees as well as groups by department.
  2. Compare how you spend your time with other people on your team.
  3. View the aggregate data of the group over time (is your team getting overrun with meetings? Buried in email? Now you’ll have proof!)
• An API for facebook integration, netvibes modules etc.

Rescuetime is still in private beta, but invites are being sent out every day, so I suggest you sign up for the invite list if you are interested in testing Rescuetime.

Overall, I can say that Rescuetime is a very cool software with great potential. I am recommending it to my business partners and friends and I’ll definitely be using it myself: I can already see it making me more productive since a report about my activities is being sent to my hyperproductive friend, who will not hesitate to scold me when necessary.