The recently launched Squirl allows collectors to become online curators. The company is betting on the fact that hardcore collectors will benefit from sharing their object obsession online and interacting with like-minded people.

Squirl was founded by two friends who saw a need for an online service that would let anyone keep a digital copy of their collections, whether it be 3000 45rpm records or Pez dispensers. Unlike Wishlistr and Your-Wishlist, Squirl is about showing off the unique items that you already own. And, unlike listal, Squirl doesn’t limit its users to movies, books, music, and games. They’re really trying to build niche communities around any type of object in general, which is a similar to what Fanpop is doing for interests.

Of course, the most important part of a collections site is the uploading. It’s really the tedious act of digitizing your collection that can be the real turn-off in using a service like Squirl. They allow you enter each item manually, batch upload 5 items at a time, or import data from Amazon (when available). Each item can have an associated name, picture, description, tags, condition, dimensions, and various other metrics.

Uploading is fairly easy to do, but I think they should consider more third party support. Amazon and listible already lets you create lists, and many people are passionate about them. Squirl would be wise to let these users automatically import lists from similar services. Also, for hardcore collectors with tons of items, an Excel or plaintext formatted file importer would be useful.

Squirl currently offers two plans: free and plus. The free plan lets users have a maximum of 3 collections and maximum of 200 items. The plus plan, which costs $25.95 a year, gives 5000 max items and unlimited collections. Personally, I don’t have enough collections to justify the plus plan. Is there anyone who would consider using the plus service?

Currently, there aren’t too many collections on Squirl. For collection browsers like me, the real power of Squirl will come when thousands of niche collections are created.

I tend to email myself a lot of MP3s. Today, I did it for the first time using my Gmail account, and was pleasantly surprised to find an embedded play button directly in the mail item. Clicking on it brings up a Google Video style player that streams your MP3 from Gmail’s server.

I always love finding these small feature nuggets that Google embeds into its applications.

It’s official: Google is sticking its neck out into the enterprise applications market with its Google Apps for Your Domain. After a slow but deliberate investment in online web applications that mirror Office applications, Google has finally let the water out of the hydrant. Let the games begin!

Currently, Google is offering Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator to businesses that own a domain. The service is free during the beta. Paul Kedrosky has already played around with the service, and is impressed with the interface. Basically, there are no real suprises–just the usual clean and functional interfaces that we’ve come to expect from Google.

So, should Microsoft be shaking in their boots? With the push of Vista and its increased document sharing capabilities, Google is directly attacking Microsoft’s turf. But, it’s not going to be a walk in the park for Google, and here’s why:

• Responsiveness: On slower machines, Google’s online apps are significantly slower than Microsoft’s desktop offerings. No matter how they slice it, heavy duty apps running in browsers are less responsive than desktop apps today.
• Connectivity: Storing everything in Google’s datacenter means that you’re out of luck when you’re offline. There will probably be solutions for this rolled out in the next year, but currently, you’re stuck without an internet connection. Perhaps an Office exntension paradigm like what Xcellery provides could be a viable solution.
• Portability: Simple Excel and Word documents can convert fine. But, what about real-world complicated documents? These currently aren’t guaranteed to fly in Google’s world.

These problems are by no means simple, and I’m sure Google is actively looking into potential solutions, especially for the connectivity problem. If they can trump these three issues, Microsoft will certainly see a significant number of users jumping on the Google ship.

When it comes to maps, the techie inside of me still loves Google Maps for its shear interactiveness. It was one of the first to employ draggable maps that would forever banish the use of those pesky arrow buttons. Even though I find that it can be a tad slower to load than Yahoo Maps, my personal choice for maps is still Google Maps.

But what about all those sites that have store locating interfaces? For most, you’re either stuck using web 1.0 style non-draggable interfaces, or, copying the address to Google Maps. Blipster, which just recently launched, aims to bring affordable mapping solutions built on Google Maps to all businesses.

Now that superb services like Google Maps have opened up their APIs, small and agile development teams can compete with the age-old mapping incumbants. Blipstar’s tactic is to penetrate the store locating market with low prices by leveraging Google Maps. In fact, I’m suprised that there aren’t many others doing the same thing–blipstar appears to be the first.

Blipstar allows businesses to enter data manually, or using an Excel sheet in a particular format that blipstar understands. After uploading the location data, blipstar hosts and stores the map data. All the business needs to do is link to their blipstar map page to allow their visitors to search for stores nearby. The style of the store locations page can be changed to suit the business.

When I tried out making my own store locater, blipstar was clearly having some technical issues, as I couldn’t browse to my store locator due to javascript errors. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon. The screenshots I took below are from the demo, which does work.

The interface as it stands is pretty functional for users, allowing them to quickly see different store locations relative to their location on a Google Map. One complaint I have is that when users request directions to a store, the ending address is given in GPS coordinates, which is not so user friendly. Another major concern is that the interface isn’t completely cross browser compliant, as I had to switch from Opera to IE in order for it to work. For high volume business customers, compatibility issues like these aren’t going to fly.

blipstar charges $25 for 25 locations, $50 for up to 60 locations, and $90 for up to 250 locations. Their prices are reasonable for business owners who aren’t technical enough to dabble in APIs and web programming. Overall, blipstar has the right core values–they just need to streamline their interface and work out the technical issues.

One of my favorite places to find addicting games is at digggames, which aggregates flash games that have made it to the front page of Digg. With Digg’s current interface, it can be difficult to distill these kinds of genres from previous posts. Thus, digggames was really doing a service by filtering out Digg’s content for a niche market. Recently, they were served a cease a desist letter (page 1 and 2) from Digg claiming that they were infringing on Digg’s trademarks.

But, why not stop there? If Digg is going to go after digggames, why don’t they also go after 80% of the sites on the digg tools list? Sites like Diggdot.us, DiggLicious, and Digg vs Dot would also be ripe for a takedown. At the extreme end, mashups would all be considered illegal, squashing all the creative juices that have made web 2.0 innovative and liberating.

Certainly, Digg has the right to enforce its trademarks. But, taking down digggames, a small homebrewed site that isn’t meant to compete with Digg, takes points off of my book for Digg.

TheNewPR Wiki has a great set of elements that every company should be monitoring. For web 2.0 companies, many of these are obvious, like tracking your company URL, tags, digg, and other social news sites. But, for many companies not typically in the tech loop, searching for their name on Flickr is about as alien as asking the cows what they think of their product.

As social sites gain popularity, companies can and should start tracking everything from YouTube to MySpace. The number of things to track in the list currently stands at 29, and could probably grow to at least twice that with a little more thought.

But, what if you’re only one person with very limited time starting a new site? Here is a list of sites I typically use to track my buzz on a daily basis. This is by no means a complete list, but, combined, they can be used as a quick barometer on how well your marketing is doing. Perusing these sites is typically how I start my day (or night).

• Technorati: Still the most comprehensive blog aggregator and search engine. Use it to see who’s talking about you.
• Google Search: Should be a no brainer. Use it to see what sites have used your brand’s name.
• Google Link Search: Search Google with the query “link:your site’s url“. You’ll see all the sites that are linking to yours.
• Google Groups Search: Newgroups are still one of the most active places on the net. Yet, many people forget they even exist (I sometimes do).
• Alexa and Alexaholic: Great for comparing how your site’s traffic is doing with respect to competitors. However, take this with a grain of salt, since Alexa only monitors a small sample of web surfers (those that have the Alexa toolbar).
• del.icio.us and digg: Both of these have a lot of activity, especially among the avante guarde techies.
• stumbleupon URL page: Go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/your site’s url/ to see reviews that stumbleuponers leave. They are a really active and passionate community, and leave good comments about your site (if it’s already been stumbled upon).
• socialmeter: A relatively new aggregate search site that quickly tallies the number of times your url appears in many popular social bookmarking and search sites. It also links to the relevant search pages for each of the bookmarking sites.
• TagFetch: Another tag search engine which is more visual than socialmeter, and has a richer feature set.

If you know of any more valuable search sites that have helped you track your brand, leave a comment about it below.

The recently launched UK-headquartered Upingme service will let you post a classfied ad from your phone for free. Well, standard texting rates apply, so Upingme might not be as free as it originally appears. The posted ad will appear online at the Upingme website, complete with tags and a “magic number” that will keep the posters anonymity. Other users will have the post texted to their phone, but I’m not sure if they’ll be able to decide which types of posts they’d like to receive. The basic text commands to use the service can be seen here, and an example is shown below.

Honestly, I don’t know why someone would need this service. First, there are already several classified listings already out there, both online (Craigslist, Yahoo classifieds) and offline (pretty much every newspaper there is). Second, do you really need to immediately list your poodle as up for adoption? Can’t you just do it from your home PC? Lastly, Upingme will charge “a very small fee” to those who want to respond to an ad by text over their phone. Well, if you’re in the UK that fee is £1, or $1.89– not quite a gallon of gas, but no “very small fee” either. Both posting and responding to a Craigslist post is free (except for posting help wanted ads in SF, NYC, and Los Angeles, and for broker apartment listings in NYC and Los Angeles). So I ask our readers, and the guys behind Upingme: Why would someone want to use this service?

The TechCrunch 7 party was quite a blast–I met a bunch of people, all of who are doing interesting things online. During the course of the evening, I chatted with the founder of WageExchange. Their goal is to even the playing field in the job market by gathering salary information from employees around the US, and anonymously divulging the data for all to see.

There’s already many salary information sources online from survey companies. However, WageExchange is the only one that I know of that exposes the raw salary data. Other companies only provide aggregate data such as medians, averages, and standard deviations. Aggregate data is informative, but it also means that you’re at the mercy of how the companies decide to slice the data. With WageExchange, you can slice and dice however you want (as long as you have the skill to do so offline).

So what is the benefit of raw wage data? WaveExchange’s tag line is “it’s rude to ask, but you want to know.” A well-informed employee will have more bargaining power when it comes time for performance reviews. WageExchange’s founder shared a story with me about a group of accountants who collected all their pay stubs, and discovered that they were underpaid. They approached the board of directors with the pay stubs and statistics in tow, and got the raises they deserved. The directors just couldn’t argue with the hard numbers. This was the inspiration for WageExchange.

In order to get access to the wage data, you must first fill in a salary survey. It’s a pretty typical survey that asks for your job title, industry, salary, bonuses, working hours, and other relevant information. After finishing, you can leisurely peruse and search others’ salary information. The design of the interface won’t win any awards, but it’s functional and gets the job done.

Right now, there’s about 600 survey items that have been filled out. WageExchange is looking to expand, which will make their database that much more valuable. A feature that I would like to see is the ability to provide aggregate data alongside the raw data. Various drop down boxes would allow the user to slice the salary data along various dimensions like industry and job title. Also, the ability to export the data to a spreadsheet would be nice for us information addicts out there.

Overall, WageExchange’s goal is a noble one: helping employees discover their value in the market. Go fill out a survey, and see if you’re the one being underpaid.

Farecast, a paradigm shifting airline price prediction service, recently opened up their service in over 55 cities. I’ve been keeping my eye on Farecast ever since the first announcement, and personally, I’m very excited to see how successful they’ll be in making ripples across the airline industry, and, in the process of how consumers purchase tickets.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Farecast, including a nice mention in Time magazine as part of the 50 coolest websites. I had the chance to speak to the Farecast team at the TechCrunch 7 party last week, all of whom are excited about Farecast’s potential. The major innovation behind the scenes is the data mining know-how. They’ve worked three years with a team of PhDs, researching methods to predict airline prices with confidence. The end result is that we, as consumers, are able to make more informed decisions at the point of sale.

So, how exactly does Farecast predict prices? Do they have access to some secret treasure trove of information that competitors like Orbitz and Travelocity don’t? The answer is no. It turns out that they use exactly the same information, but, unlike Orbitz, they keep and analyze all past pricing information. It’s an honest reliance on smart data mining and analysis.

But analysis by itself is by no means the end. The presentation of the complex prediction data to the average consumer is pivotal. No one would use a confusing prediction interface, no matter how good the prediction is. It turns out that when Farecast conducted focus groups, there were two types of people: data junkies and prediction acceptors.

The data junkies, whom I identify most with, loved to look at the price prediction graphs–the more data, the better. Then, they take matters into their own hands, and decided whether to buy their tickets now or later. On the other hand, prediction acceptors simply wanted to be told to buy now or wait. They didn’t care to look at any other information, and trusted Farecast’s suggestions. These two main groups are represented in Farecast’s search results page, which has a buy now or wait indicator alongside a price history graph.

If you haven’t yet tried out Farecast, you should definitely take a look, especially since they’ve expanded their search to many major cities. I’ve barely touched on Farecast’s interface, which is intuitive, smooth, and beautiful to look at. Oh, and if you thought Orbitz’s grid view is cool, Farecast’s flexible travel data view options will blow you straight out of the water with its multi-color, multi-graphing, multi-destination goodness.

Overall, the airline industry response to Farecast has been positive, since Farecast has the potential to rake in new customers. Other ticketing services like Orbitz have shown interest in partnering and potentially using Farecast’s technology. If all goes well, be on the lookout for enhanced price analysis, not only at Farecast, but at other services as well.

I’m not sure if this is a new feature or not, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it: auto completion for locations in Google Maps. It’s quite handy when you’re dealing with multiple addresses and directions. I hope they’re working on the ability to save locations like many of the other map services.

Update: Ah, it looks like I’m an idiot–Google Maps already has saved locations, as Ron pointed out. It’s over on the top right-hand corner, and it’s a snap to add your own locations to use for later.