I’ve just read an interesting post on the CNET News.com Gaming blog. With the help of Millions of Us, CNET Networks now has a recreation of their corporate HQ in Second Life! The office looks nearly identical to the real one, but in Second Life they are on the water. Lucky bastards! 

>

According to Daniel Terdiman’s blog post this SL CNET Networks office “will be used for a series of interviews with virtual-world luminaries, and as a forum for CNET News.com reporters to come and talk about stories they’ve written. Over time, however, CNET hopes the space can be used for CNET.com reviewers to talk about products they’ve tested, as well as for any number of multimedia projects, including the posting of CNET videos, meet-ups and other events.”

Steve Rubel thinks that other media companies will start doing the same. I think as the popularity of Second Life and other online worlds continue to increase, we’ll start to see all companies, not just media, wanting to build their presence there. I just hope the Starbucks and McDonalds don’t dominate the virtual world like they do ours!

Today, Facebook announced that they are opening their doors to everyone. You no longer need to be part of any educational or corporate group to sign up. People can either get invited or sign up for themselves under the flattering category of “None of the Above”.

I fully expect this move to be met with extreme controversy–especially by those Facebook users who were protesting against the Mini-Feeds. I only have three words for these people: “wah wah wah!” Facebook still has, at its core, the same privacy functions as before, as Carolyn says on the Facebook blog:

This doesn’t mean that anyone can see your profile, however. Your profile is just as closed off as it ever was. Our network structure is not going away. College and work networks still require an authenticated email address to join. Only people in your networks and confirmed friends can see your profile.

As a Facebook user, I’m not worried about the sudden influx of new people. Sure, there are going to be the usual spammers and trolls which come along with any popular social networking site. But, I have my faith on Facebook’s privacy and friends system to work out the kinks. The bottom line is that I have had no privacy problems with Facebook, ever. That’s more than I can say about my friends’ experiences with MySpace.

Facebook has literally squeezed the college and high school market dry. In other words, they’ve hit the ceiling. So, the natural next step is to utilize their well-built system for a wider audience.

I for one am not afraid of the coming changes in Facebookland.

The recently launched Widgipedia let’s users upload and rate widgets. You can think of this site as the BuzzShout for the world of widgets. Since the new widget craze has swept the Web 2.0 community, Widgipedia looks like it would be a useful resource for widget developers and addicts.

In terms of features, Widgipedia isn’t pushing any new boundaries–users can submit, rate, comment on, and download widgets. They currently accept 12 types of widgets, including Opera, Dashboard, and Windows Sidebar Gadgets. Since the site is young, the overall selection is quite small.

The interface has a pleasing design. However, I do have one complaint. Almost every page on the site is served up via AJAX, and, as such, the site is pretty speedy. However, they are using AJAX to serve up entire listings on each page. In other words, there’s a considerable amount of data that is transmitted without page loads. For me, this causes major issues when using the back button. The bottom line? Page loads are okay for large page changes. Save the AJAX for smaller inline functions, such as voting or tagging.

I just stumbled upon a possible new Google search layout:

I’ve seen this layout once before, but slightly different. Note that the horizontal menu has been replaced by a vertical one on the left hand side, with options to search Images, Maps, News, Groups, Videos, Books, and Froogle on the top and bottom of the page. Also, the ads seemed to have disappeared. I’m not sure I like how the left menu is eating into the search results real estate–it would be better to stick with the traditional horizontal menu near the search box.

Is anyone else seeing this? Or has my IP yet again been singled out for beta testing?

My girlfriend frequently watches Rachel Ray’s cooking show on the Food Network (the picture is of Rachel Ray, not my girlfriend). She enjoys the show mostly because of the great meals that Rachel prepares in just 30 minutes. Today she told me that she wanted to buy a Rachel Ray book so she can use some of the recipes at home. Instead, I decided to try to prove to her that she could find the same great recipes online. Google was my first stop, and I was presented with so many sites that had so many different recipe choices that I didn’t know where to start. To better refine my search, and find out what others were saying, I went to BuzzShout. On BuzzShout, my recipe search led me to two sites that I thought looked promising– MyRecipe.org and RecipeThing. 

First, you won’t get very far with RecipeThing, unless you create a username and password, but it is definitely worth it to do so. With RecipeThing you can search through other’s recipes by using the tag cloud or by selecting one of the featured recipes on the front page of the site. After creating an account, you’ll have your own recipe box where you can add your own recipes by writing them in, or copy others recipes from the “community potluck”. After copying someone’s recipe into your own box, you can then edit the recipe and take out or add ingredients or change preparation instructions to your liking. With your free account, you’ll also have a pantry that’ll help you keep track of the ingredients you have in the real-world. This is useful when seeing what ingredients you’ll need for different recipes that you collect on the site. With the “what’s for dinner” feature you can drag and drop recipes into days of the week and then get a shopping list based on what you have in your RecipeThing pantry and what you’ll need based on your chosen recipes for that week.

MyRecipe.org has a better looking UI than RecipeThing, and just looking at the pictures on the front page makes my stomach growl. MyRecipe.org also has tags, but unlike RecipeThing, you can also check out other user’s profiles and see what recipes they like or have submitted. On the negative side, I find two things very annoying about MyRecipe.org. First, when I forgot my screenname and password, I had no way to recover it. That was especially strange since they asked for my email both times I registered. Secondly, while I can email recipes to myself or others, I can’t copy them to “My List”, which is the part of the site where I’m able to aggregate recipes I like. I instead need to write all the recipes out myself.  

So, I will recommend two things to my girlfriend. One, that she uses RecipeThing instead of MyRecipe.org, and two, that when she cooks she wear the same outfit as Rachel Ray is wearing above.  

Flagr, a mobile social bookmarking service for locations and places, have utilized the Facebook API to map your friends’ hometowns on Google Maps. It’s always nice to see companies doing these sorts of side projects that foster the use of open APIs.

You can tell from my Facebook map that I started my life in upstate New York, then moved to Oklahoma during my high school years, and somehow ended up in the bay area after a stint at Cornell.

If I’m looking for a quick bite at a restaurant, I’ll usually want it to be close. Real close. That’s where Yelp’s local mapping feature is helpful. I know that Yelp has had Google Maps integration for a while now, but I just recently noticed the tight integration between the map and the reviews. After you search, hovering over a listed restaurant pops up more information on the corresponding map point.

An even more useful feature is that the listings update automatically when the map is dragged. Simply drag around the area you’re interested in and watch as nearby restaurants pour into view. The listings on the left hand column also update as you drag.

It’s really a great tool for those times when you’re not exactly sure what’s around and are flexible about what you want to eat. Of course, clicking on the mapped restaurants brings up their reviews page. Sure, Google Local may have a bigger and better mapping interface, but I like Yelp’s wide range of personal reviews better. My only complaint is that you can’t make their map larger.

Dude, screenshots are so Bubble 1.0; check out the screencasts instead. Molly, a loyal BuzzShout user and our new friend, has created a wonderful screencast of BuzzShout. Not only has she done a great job with the screencast, but on it she’s even helping us promote our Shoutblog contest. What a great gal!

According to her Screeniac blog, she is the newest addition to VPOP Technologies, which does custom programming and web hosting out of Southern California. She has already done 50 screencasts, so be sure to check out some of her past work. If you also like her screencasts, and have a good idea for a site she should feature, drop her a suggestion here.

A song: Molly McDonald had a screencast, ee-eye, ee-eye-oh. And on that screencast she had Buzz-Shout (hyphenated to keep rhythm), ee-eye, ee-eye-oh. With a new site here and a new service there, here an app, there a mashup, everywhere a social networking site, ee-eye, ee-eye-oh…or something.

Note: About that contest, the prize has been decided and we think everyone will love it. Drumroll please…it’s…CASH! Fifty dollars of cold hard cash in the form of a pre-paid credit card. So get those blog entries submitted to us at the BuzzShout feedback email before the end of October. Don’t procrastinate or you’ll forget. Also, thanks to Computer Joe for the mention on the 9Rules site.

Have you ever hosted a house party and needed some cool drink ideas to serve? Have you ever been at a bar, and asked for a chocolate cake, only to be looked at with complete bewilderment? Right now I have a bottle of Vodka in my freezer, and my cranberry and orange juice is gone. I know there are other drinks I can make, but none immediately came to mind. Does vodka go with ginger ale?

So I visited BuzzShout and typed “drink” into the search box. One of my results was a site called Extra Tasty!, which helps you find great drink recipes and figure out what you can make from the different ingredients you’ve got. I felt I was meant to find the site tonight since the “Drink of the Day” on the front-door to the site was made with my favorite soda, ginger ale. A tag cloud on the sidebar makes it easy to find drinks with your alcohol or ingredient of choice.

With the “My Bar” functionality you can list the ingredients you have available and figure out what drinks you can make with them. I did experience a problem with the site when I went to the “Full ingredient list”, where I was supposed to be able to add a lot more ingredients to the list that the site already provided. I wasn’t able to click on the plus icons next to different items to add them to “My Bar” because there were no icons there to click on. That might have been due to my browser, but I did see plus icons on the sidebar under “People’s commonly added items”. I’d like to know if others aren’t able to see the icons on the full list.

The coolest feature is the SMS search which I haven’t tried yet. However, I was able to try it from a demo on the site to better understand the use. You can type a SMS text keyword such as “Vodka” into your cell phone and send it to 82789 (fees may apply). Here is what you’ll get back:

” 68 results for vodka. The top rated drink is the Malibu Sunset : Prepare a glass full of ice then add the Coconut rum, next add the Cranberry juice.”

A very useful function if you want to impress a certain somebody at the bar by sharing some drink ideas. So if you drink, and you’re looking for some new ideas, check out Extra Tasty!, and tell us what you think.

Congratulations to Ryan and Gillian Carson, and Lisa Price for putting on a wonderful conference. I especially enjoyed Yahoo’s Tom Coates and Dogster’s Ted Rheingold, who both talked about social communities on the web and how strong ones are built. In fact, a lot of the knowledge they had can be used to help grow the BuzzShout community. I realized there was a lot we should be doing, but aren’t yet. BuzzShout was created to help people cut through the hype of Web 2.0. As individuals, we don’t want to check out every single new website, web app, service, or mashup. If we collectively share our opinions on the few we do visit, then we’ll help each other figure out what is the best, and not have to visit the ones that suck. An interactive BuzzShout community will make a very useful and informative site where participation will help shape the future of the web. The larger we are, the more our opinions are heard.

I also enjoyed seeing some of the aesthetically-pleasing applications from digg labs that gives a larger, visual perspective on stories and how they’re doing on digg. These have been around for a while now, but I have never checked them out until yesterday. I find them useful as one thing I don’t like about digg is having to mull through multiple pages. Kevin also mentioned that there will be some new digg labs inventions launched within the next couple of months, so keep your eyes peeled on the Shoutblog for coverage. A commenter mentioned that users should be able to “digg” which digg labs ideas are implemented on the site. I thought that was a great idea, but Kevin said something about not being able to do that because of Calacanis being a competitor. Also see Rafe Needleman’s blog entry on some new digg features.

Although they weren’t presenting, I had the opportunity to speak at length with Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate. For those of you who don’t know, Thomas is a wonderful photographer (the photos in this post are his) as well as an investor in Kristopher’s Zooomr. They gave me some info about their newest additions which include a tagmap, comments on specific photos, and quicker upload speeds. Flickr has also came out with geo-tagging, but I look forward to even more innovative features that Kristopher confirmed will be coming out soon for Zooomr. Small companies like Zooomr have great opportunities to take on market leaders because they don’t have to deal with bureaucracy when taking on new projects.

Other blog posts about the conference can be found at Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, and Dan Farber’s write-up on Arrington, and Liz Gannes on GigaOm. Also check out Scott “Laughing Squid” Beale’s photos on his site.