CoRank Introduces Wisdom Of Your Friends to Social Bookmarking

CoRank, a new social bookmarking site that just came out of private beta is the new Digg clone in town. At first glance it looks similar to Digg, but actually its completely against the Digg´s ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ philosophy.

The front page can display a ‘featured by all’ list of stories, but the real idea is that you use these stories to build your buddy list. After which you will only be able to see stories submitted by your friends. But if this seems like too much of a restricted world view you could tag your account to display ’sources of your sources’. A full list of features could be viewed here.

Its evident that the founders are trying to mixup the best of Digg and Del.icio.us. Although you are not hampered by other person´s permission to add him as a buddy, but then too creating an initial meaningful list of sources would be too much of a time investment, that atleast i am not willing to put into for something i could easily find out from digg.

See Rafe Needleman´s take on this.

AOL Launches AJAX Based WebMail, Whats Next ?

AOL has recently launched AOL Mail Beta, code named Cayman, that will ultimately replace the existing web based email offering.

The new service offers a simple AJAX interface, that makes it easier to manage and organize large quantities of email. Some notable improvements are inline message reading instead of pop ups, easy email and fast email access, to-do lists in the right pane, contacts and celebrity gossip via TMZ, 2 GB of storage and personal domain selection.

Some notable features still missing from the lot are support for email tagging, RSS and IM integration, mail forwarding, POP/IMAP in or out of the service.

During the signup AOL asks for a compulsory phone no. Only Phone nos from US are supported, so i end up entering Yahoo´s Phone number in to (see snapshot below). All in all its a nice upgrade but somehow i feel that AOL has come too late to the party where Gmail has gathered all the limelight.

For a comparison of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail see Techcrunch.

AllPeers Joins The Open Source Bandwagon

AllPeers, a firefox P2P extension that launched last year has decided to make their code open source. This would be an interesting move, but one that is gaining popularity with SecondLife also announcing to go open source in recent times.

AllPeers allow the users to create private P2P file sharing networks that wont be trackable by RIAA and MPAA. AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. You could share and discover files with these buddies and have files downloaded to your PC with a single click. Since its a bittorent client, it even works when the sharer is offline, and allows files to be pulled from multiple sources.

Other similar services include Zapr, Pando and Exaroom. For a comparison of these services see Techcrunch.

Skype Launches Skype Prime, Sets to Kill Ether

Skype has just rolled out Skype Prime, a service that will enable users to charge for skype voice and video calls. In their own words:

In short, it enables paid Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls. You can charge other people for calling you either a one-off fee or by the minute. Conversely, if you are the caller, you can call experts who charge for their services, and you can then pay the fee and access the expertise that the other call party provides.

Users will have the ability to set the fee they want to charge on a per-minute or per-hour basis. Skype will charge the caller via their Skype credit and will then make payments to consultants via paypal (a Skype sister company). Skype would bag 30% of this consultancy fees. This would be the first real integration of Skype into the existing eBay services, which certainly took a long time coming.

Ether, a startup which launched last year provides a similar service. The only difference being that it charges 15% as against Skype´s 30%. Skype however has a huge installed base and works across the borders.

Skype Prime is currently available for windows only, and both users need to download the latest version of Skype in order to use the service.

Digg, The Social News Mogul Hits 1 Million User Mark

Digg, the social news mogul of our times today announced that they have hit the 1 million registered user mark in less than 2 years. The one thing we don’t know yet is whether this include all those fake accounts, that have been set up on digg, as well or not.

At digg you could submit you favorite story from across the web. Users could then digg, bury, comment and blog about it. Digg eclipsed Slashdot, a long time back, as the leading hub for techies, and continues to build on that momentum. Digg recently added the ability to share and rank videos as well alongwith the introduction of several other news categories. Readers could also see upcoming stories and visualize them Digg in real time by utilizing tools provided by Digg Labs. A great feature is the ability to read an excerpt from the story on the popular stories page, an idea incorporated from Google.

Due to Digg´s ability to send huge amounts of traffic to content providers, it has been an active battle ground for people trying to game it to promote their stories or to bury the ones from competitors.

Some popular digg clones include Reddit, Netscape, and Dell´s Ideastorm.