Sociosophy

Everyone’s got problems.  And the truth to problems is that it is always easier to solve someone else’s than your own.  Enter Solvr.  You post a problem, and other users help you work it out.  It’s not a public service, so you’re not exactly airing your dirty laundry for all to see; the URL to your problem is private.  Send it to your friends and they’ll take a stab at it.  Every “idea” is a proposed solution, which is met with another problem and so on until there are no more foreseeable glitches.  The best thing about this service is the super clean form.  Phone conversations with Mom and even online forums get messy; Solvr uses the tree outline, so you can see exactly how your problem progresses into a solution.  (You remember tree outlines, right?  From third grade?)  Interesting and quirky…but will people actually use this?  Mom’s going to be so disappointed.

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Layar is the baby of mobile innovation company SPRXmobile.  The “world’s first mobile Augemented Reality browser” allows users to actually see what they are searching for, from jobs in the area they’re standing in to the closest ATM.  Layar was originally launched for the Dutch market and works on mobile phones hooked up with a camera as well as GPS and a compass.  The application is first available through the Android operating system, but development with a focus on the iPhone 3G S is in the works.  A launch in the US (as well as Germany and the UK) are planned for this year.  Keep your eyes peeled and in the meantime, watch this.

And I remember when the camera phone was huge…

Okay, I dig this one.  Springo is a shortcutting tool as well as a crap-cutting tool.  It’s like a search engine for…searches.  Springo takes the (Internet) age-old problem of website overload and makes it better by singling out the most relevant sites for your searches and presenting them at-a-glance instead of the old click-and-load.  From your initial query, you can also narrow down or expand the search to fit your needs.  Say you want…a puppy.  You’ve got PetFinder.com, PetSmart, PuppyFind.com andPetco.  Voila.   These picks are chosen based on usage statistics and are ranked by their popularity among us, the searchers.  Google just got a sidekick.

Social following, in its definition according to socialfollow.com, kind of sounds like social stalking…but it’s actually pretty cool.  If you have a plethora of social accounts, as most folks these days do, you can add a “Follow Me” button to a website, blog or social site that allows easy access to your other accounts, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and YouTube.  From a work perspective, it’s a good way to get your business some play.  From a personal standpoint, it pretty much eliminates the search button.  If you’re connected on one account, you can get connected on any account.  Time-saving is a pretty sweet thing.  As of June, Social Follow has also implemented the option of a Social Follow Profile, a name-unique URL you can attach to every Social Follow button you have.  These profiles are pretty much like all the other ones you already have, housing your info, Twitter and blog updates.  A little on the unneccessary side, but what’s one more, right?

The extending market of URL shortening is growing with Twitter’s user base. Recenlty the whole Digg thing with their bar and all that noise is pretty neat, Adjix (which I loath) and even Facebook are doing their own thing now… So why not include StumbleUpon into this bucket of “we want your traffic, your traffic wants us?” apps.

Makes sense to me. Apparently it makes sense to them as well, hence Su.pr. (more…)