Impressive ideas Nov 11 2005

With the huge amount of new applications and services springing up on the web, under the general ‘web 2.0’ banner, I’m surprised that there are still companies with ideas that can impress me. Two such services with great ideas are Riya, and Newsvine. The former I heard about a few weeks ago, and it now seems its available for use. I haven’t yet taken the plunge and tried it out (to be honest I don’t have enough photos I’ve taken to get any real use from it, something I want to change). But the idea is deceptively simple. It’s job is to make organizing photos easier, and I guess more automated. At the same time, it does some crazy things with recognition technology to do things I didn’t even think computers were clever enough to do yet :-) Looks like a real winner, and I’m a sucker for innovation. And as for the latter of the two services, Newsvine; on the one hand it too does something fairly simple, providing a way for users to decide and control what’s newsworthy, and what isn’t. The bit that got my interest however was the bit about users writing their own news articles. It gives everyone the ability to become a journalist, and provides a platform for users to get their articles seen. I think the service will be a big hit when it finally goes live (you can leave your e-mail address at the minute to be notified when they hit beta). In the meantime, this post explains further about the service, and perhaps shows just how exciting it might be. I just hope this level of innovation continues, as I really enjoy seeing all these new cool services pop up. And who knows, in the coming weeks/months I might just enter the fray, with something that I hope to be rather 'innovative’ ;-)