I had the chance to get a demo from the 411Sync team at the recent Tech Connection Party. On the surface, 411Sync is a simple no frills information service aimed at cell phones, primarily via SMS or email. The magic is that 411Sync hasn’t developed any of the interfaces needed for their service– developers voluntarily create mashups which provides cell users with info ranging from movie times to the latest live cricket scores.

The concept of mashing up commands sounds familiar doesn’t it? Indeed, 411Sync is the YubNub of cell phones, providing social commands on the go. It’s definitely a concept that is useful for cell phones, where brevity is key to a successful service. 411Sync allows developers to create short keywords that provide access to valuable information.

The best part is, if a particular information source isn’t available, you can create it! 411Sync’s mashup interface is a little more complicated than YubNub, but, with a some scripting know-how and guidance, you’ll be well on your way to making a unique command for your cell phone. Currently, they have over a thousand commands, with an average of 3 new commands created everyday.

411Sync is not backed by any venture money, and is the result of hard work from two engineers. Don’t expect any bells and whistles from their site, which is functional, but quite bare in its presentation. Since the service is aimed at attracting developers, a shiny look is a secondary consideration.

One thing to improve upon are the access numbers, which uses a typical 10 digit code. They really need to get some short codes.

So, if you’re a developer itching to create some cell mashups, 411Sync may just be the ticket. Even more compelling is the value that they could add to 3rd party services who don’t already have a cell phone interface. 411Sync is an easy way to add your service to cell phones without needing to understand all the ins and outs of the SMS interface.

The last time I checked in on Wikimapia was about three months ago, shortly after they launched. There certainly weren’t many locations mapped out yet. Amazingly enough, they have recently added their 1,000,000th location! I checked back and took a look at San Francisco, and was stunned by the level of tagging that was going on.

At each zoom level, Wikimapia allows you to browse places that have been wikied by other users. As you zoom in, the smaller plots begin to emerge. For example, at the high level in San Francisco, the major neighborhoods have been defined. Zooming in, you’ll find little pockets of information like where somebody’s cat died.

To be honest, I haven’t looked back at Wikimapia, but I will now. It’s especially been helpful in deciphering exactly where the neighborhoods in SF end and begin (which most people can sit and debate for hours on end).

Digg has quietly added still shots of video entries on their video vertical. It looks like for now, they’re only able to grab the shots if the video is coming from YouTube. Netscape already has pictures sprinkled across news entries since day one.

In general, I’m all for adding more metadata in the usual sea of text at Digg, whether it’s simply using an API to grab photos, or allowing users to upload media related to the story.

2nd Update: Only one more to go! Who will be the one to add it? Grab your piece of BuzzShout history now! Update: We are now up to 998– Keep them coming!!! BuzzShout is quickly approaching the addition of company number 1,000 in our directory! We’d be thrilled if you helped us soar over this benchmark; please submit plenty of cool web companies with Web 2.0 offerings. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to add company number 1,000! If you are, we’ll give you a mention in this blog.

Sutori officially launched yesterday, and is now in public beta instead of private beta testing. While there are many wonderful user review sites out there (e.g., Epinions, BuzzShout, Yelp, RateItAll), Sutori is meant to be specifically for consumers to voice their grievances or good experiences. Users of Sutori can create their profile, write a review about the company or product, and tag each review. There is also a social networking aspect since you are able to add other reviewers as friends. The “1/0″ that you see in the screen shot below represents “agree/disagree”, although that isn’t readily obvious to someone who hasn’t signed up for the site. One issue I have is that once you agree or disagree you can’t change your mind at a later time.

The orange and red colors above represent the levels of goodwill for a company, product, or brand. I agree with Pete Cashmore who points out that the range of colors should be better differentiated. However, it was a good idea to incorporate colors into the reviews which helps beautify the overall look of the site.

Sutori was founded by a small team of Blast Radius employees who wanted to practice what they preached. The site was built using ruby-on-rails and has a wonderful UI that lends to a nice user experience. The tags help build Sutori’s Web 2.0 street credibility, and I was most impressed by the overall look of the site. The biggest challenge that Sutori faces comes in the form of a question that all user review sites have to answer: How do you get people to go to your site, log on, and write a review about something? It is interesting for me to see how other review sites answer this question.

My favorite Sutori story is Tara Hunt’s negative review of U-Haul. I seem to move at least once a year and I haven’t yet had a good experience with U-Haul. In fact, I feel like they’ve gotten progressively worse, and for some odd reason, I continue to use them.

zeeDive is one the new breeds of online bargain and auction sites that will let users get great deals on items while being entertained. Item prices are dynamically updated in real time as buyers attempt to “catch” them.

The key to the entertainment value is in the information. zeeDive gives you more information than eBay by dynamically showing the price “dive.” As a buyer, you have two options: either set a price to catch the item, or buy it at the current price. Some items won’t even have a minimum price set, so, the price will fall until hitting the greatest price set by all the buyers. It’s not much different than a usual online auction, but it’s compelling in how the pricing information is relayed to the buyers.

Another cool thing is that zeeDive is really trying to create a whole new vocabulary involving online purchases and zeeDiving, with words like dive, catch price, flash dive, and partial catch. It’s elements like this that will be successful in fostering a community around a site. And zeeDive has great potential in this arena.

The underlying AJAX makes setting and viewing the prices a breeze. The site is also nicely designed, with a very clean browsing interface. This will definitely be a site for eBay to keep an eye on.

zeeDive is currently in private beta.

I was recently looking for a room somewhere in the city on Craigslist, and realized that, even though Craigslist has the largest user base, it doesn’t do a good job of organizing rommmate matching data. There’s no set format for gender, sleeping, and other lifestyle preferences. So, I was curious to see if there were any companies out there whose goal is to match roommates.

This was when I stumbled upon Roomster, which has a decent amount of lifestyle data that you can enter. You can also browse people with similar interests who are either looking for a roommate, or offering a room. There’s also a way to let Roomster automatically suggest matches, but, the ones given to me seemed quite arbitrary, either due to the limited user base or the actual matching algorithms.

This is all well and good–I didn’t have any hopes that Roomster would be the holy grail of roommate matching. That’s when I got an email from Roomster notifying me that a potential roommate had sent me a message. I quickly logged in, only to find this upgrade screen:

I couldn’t believe it: I had to upgrade to a premium account in order to view my messages! A core functionality such as messaging should never be a premium service on a roommate matching site. Any restrictions based on premiums should be reserved for power user types of functions. Flickr offers all of their services for free, but with a bandwidth limit. If I want to upload a few photos, message people, and make a few albums, I could use their service for free. The equivalent of restricting my messaging capability on Roomster would be restricting my commenting ability in Flickr, which would be utterly ridiculous.

The bottom line is that all I want to do is to read and write a few messages. I’m just a casual Roomster user who is turned off by the fee to read my messages. What Roomster could do is to limit the number of messages per day or week, based on the free account. Another option would be to charge the people who are renting their rooms, rather than the people hunting for rooms. The new pricing model in Web 2.0 is to charge the few, and give away the technology to the rest. Roomster is charging everyone a flat fee to get the basics of their service, which is not a good move.

While writing my post on Eons I noted they had a channel for the user to write out their goals. Wouldn’t it be a great idea, I thought, to dedicate an entire site to helping someone achieve their goals! There is 43Things, that allows users to create and share what they’d like to do, but doesn’t necessarily help them do it. My site would give users strategies to accomplish their aspirations, and allow people to help others achieve their goals. Maybe once you help someone achieve their goal, you earn some good karma. 

During my initial planning stages of my new “goal site”, fate (or was it a search engine) drove me to SuperViva. With SuperViva you can browse through other’s goals, then list and share your own (or you can keep some, or all, private) and find resources or people to help you achieve your goals. Some of SuperViva’s best features are the planning functionalities. The user can prioritize, set due dates, determine the difficulty of the goal, and figure out how much it will cost to achieve. Susie Wyshak, the founder of SuperViva, was hoping to help users accomplish their cheap and easy goals on a free day, whereas the harder more expensive goals would have to be planned out. Users also have the ability to give their goals a status so that the “someday/maybe” goals can be put on the backburner. For easier categorizing goals can be put into lists (e.g., visit the Eiffel Tower could be under the ‘France Trip’ list).

In my opinion, Susie and team have done a great job creating a site to help people compile and accomplish their goals. However, work needs to be done to improve the aesthetics and usability of the site. A lot of areas are too jumbled and on some pages the amount of information is overwhelming. I corresponded with Susie by email and she mentioned that there are some new improvements in the pipeline. Maybe that will include some site upgrades? 

Site looks aside, I definitely recommend signing up and giving SuperViva a try. If you are goal-driven like me, then this is the best site I can find to help you find new goals, write them out, and accomplish them.

It looks like Yahoo has caught wind of the Rollyo effect, and have launched the Yahoo Search Builder, which allows users to tailor searches based on their interests.

The idea is to foster the creation of focused search interfaces. For example, if you’re into computer games, you can make a game-focused search for your website. The creation of the search is simple, and is very similar to services like Rollyo. On a basic level, search is focused by specifying a list of sites that are to be searched. Yahoo also allows you to add keywords that will be included in every search, exclude keywords, and exclude certain sites from being shown in the results.

After customizing the look and feel, users paste some code on their sites to publicize their searches.

Yahoo’s effort is lax compared to that of Rollyo, which gets much deeper into user involvement with the use star-powered searches from celebrities and featured searches. I’m sure Yahoo is working on the community aspect, but, it may be too little too late.

On a more nit-picky point, is anyone else bothered by images implanted in text forms? At first, I mistook the Yahoo search box for an image with a border around it (so I was wondering where the search box was). They need to either make the image lighter, or get rid of it entirely to avoid confusion.

Here’s one for those lazy Sunday mornings: someone has made a Google Maps flight simulator mashup, complete with a 3D biplane. It’s a simple little game where you fly your plane above the landscapes of New York, London, Paris, Washington DC, and Tokyo. Just make sure not to fly too low, or you’ll go up in a fireball.