golfshake is a niche social networking site, targeted at golfers. In addition to the standard social features, golfshake adds many tools specific to the golf community.

Darren Ramowski originally submitted his site a couple months ago when it was golfscoretracker.co.uk. Since then he has done a complete overhaul and recently re-launched as golfshake.com. The new name and site are both big upgrades. As Darren explains in his blog, the main drive behind the switch was to promote the site to international (non-uk in the case) users. In addition the site has grown beyond a simple score tracking system to a full fledged community. The new name fits both these goals.

The original site was built seven years ago as a side project to help Darren’s golf game, as well as a way to refine his PHP/MySQL skills. The site has really taken off in the last 18 months as the user base has jumped from 1500 to over 16K. Darren attributes most of this growth to the additional community features which have encourages word of mouth advertising.

From Darren:

Within the last 2 years the site has seen some major updates to the code base and the introduction of lots of new features. Users can now get in touch with each other to arrange golf games, see how their golf compares with buddies, organize public events which other users can join and run golf societies online. It’s a bit of a cliche but it’s almost MySpace for golfers.

I’m a big fan of this sort of stat tracking/competition angle. It’s something that will keep users coming back and active on the site. The way Darren has incorporated the usual social networking features with features targeted directly at golfers is impressive. It is this integration of stat tracking and community that really set golfshake apart.

If you’re a golfer, golfshake is definitely worth checking out.

Popularity: 46% [?]

Blogarate is a blog rating site and widget combination. The obvious comparable site would be digg.com, but there are subtle differences. Blogarate targets blog posts specifically, as opposed to digg which covers anything that appears on the internet. There are other differences which I’ll cover shortly.

Blogarate is the creation of Clarke Scott, a Former Microsoft Solution Architect MVP. Staying true to his roots Clarke created Blogarate using ASP.Net, SQL Server, and MS Ajax. Take that anti-MS crowd!

Clarke, why did you undertake this project?

To provide a distributed news aggregation platform. By collecting blog post details including rankings at the source Blogarate reflects in greater detail what is making news on the web and what blog readers really see is important. Oh and it’s fun too!

Unlike Digg, there is no way to submit a blog post to the site. Instead it is up to the blogger to include the widget in their posts, which allows the reader to submit the rating. In fact it is impossible to vote for a post on the Blogarate site (as far as I can tell). I actually like this since it drives traffic to the blog, which is how it should work since the blogs are the ones providing the content for these aggregation sites.

Another thing I like is the ability for non-registered users to rate a post and still have it count. This does increase the ease of gaming however. Check out my post on adGridWork from a month or so ago on Blogarate. It was rated three times at 5 starts each time…all by me. One I did with my Blogarate account. The other two were when I wasn’t logged in, but all three were from the same computer/IP address. This is something that is going to have to be looked at before the system can really grow.

From the Blogarate FAQ:

Q: How does the rating system work?
A: Posts are given a rating of 1 to 5 by your readers. The algorithm for the rating system is kept a secret. We have kept this a secret so that the our system is as fair to all bloggers as possible.

My post that I rated 3 times at 5 stars each ended with a score of 15. The “secret” system seems pretty straight forward at this point. In addition to correcting the gaming issue, I would also suggest counting the anonymous votes for less then the registered voters. I think this is a good way to still allow anyone to vote, but controlling the impact of their vote. I would also suggest NOT keeping the system secret. Publish your algorithm and allow for open critique. Users are happier when they know how a system works and you’ll get less of the tinfoil hat types who think their is a conspiracy to promote certain blogs and keep others down.

My other complaint is with the widget. It was simple to install, but I wish I had more control over the look and where it appears on my blog. Some people will want to just put in the code and have it work, but plenty of others have super slick looking blogs and they’ll want to make sure the widget fits in with the theme. I was able to do some minor customization using css:

#PostRatingWidget {
     margin: 15px auto;
     background: #DDD;
     color: #fff;
     border: 1px solid #000;
}

But it just isn’t enough. What if I don’t want it sitting alone at the bottom of my post and I’d rather have it floated near the top of the content? Or put it in the header of the post? Maybe this is just a matter of putting together some advanced instructions, but I didn’t see that anywhere on the site.

I feel like I’m being super critical here, but a site that bills itself as “Blog rating widget” should do two things very well - rate and widget. There are big flaws in both of these right now. The flaws are correctable, but before I would even think about growing the user base or adding more features I would want to smooth them out.

I don’t want to give the impression the site is doomed. I like the concept - that the blogs themselves should be driving the ratings, rather than the aggregation sites. I meant my comments above to be constructive and I would definitely like to revisit Blogarate once it’s matured.

Popularity: 21% [?]

ProgrammingBooks.org is a great resource for any developer/programmer looking for the best of breed books on a particular coding area. All the books are user ranked, kind of like a highly targeted Digg, minus much of the social networking elements. The simple act of adding a book as one of your favorites increases it’s ranking. Users can comment on any book in the system, not just ones they mark as their favorites.

Like most programmers, Shane had read many programming books over the years. ProgrammingBooks.org grew as a result of a blog post about his favorites.

I’ve read a lot of programming related books over the years and I’ve always thought about writing an article on my blog about the books I thought helped me the most. I finally wrote it and the response was amazing. The article made the front page of digg and del.icio.us, and got roughly 50,000 readers in the first 24 hours. I noticed that a lot of people disagreed with my choices and had very strong opinions on various other books. I started thinking about a way to allow everyone to pick their top 5 programming books and programmingbooks.org came out of that.

Shane built the entire site in about a month using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. The user interface takes advantage of Yahoo! UI Framework. The design of the site is sparse, yet clean and efficient. As more of a developer then a designer, Shane struggled with the look of the site, especially the logo. This is certainly an area I can relate to, but with a site targeting programmers, under design can have it’s advantages.

Shane attended college at Texas A&M, but fell just short of graduating (the second developer since I’ve started this site who didn’t finish college). He currently work at Frog Design.

As of Jan 21st ProgrammingBooks has 193 registered users, who have ranked 613 books. The process of ranking a book is dead simple. First you select the category of the book. The users is then presented with five text fields where they can enter the title of the book. If the book is in the system the field will auto complete. Books that aren’t in the system must be added through a separate form before they can be ranked.

ProgrammingBooks.org is a great starting point when looking for the consensus best programming book in a particular area.

Popularity: 17% [?]

lib.rario.us is a social networking site focused on the media (CDs, DVDs, games, books) that you own or are interested in. Coincidentally TechCruch recently published an article about sites focused solely on cataloging books. The TechCruch article is mainly about Shelfari, butmentions others in the same space, although they fail to mention lib.rario.us. Social cataloging seems to be an up and coming niche.

lib.rario.us is the brainchild of M. Dave Auayan, who did all the original design, development and marketing. Recently his friend Jim Myhrberg has taken over primary coding duties. Like most of these projects Mr. Auayan started lib.rario.us to fill a personal need.

I started this project mostly because it was something my wife and I wanted, a site we can put up our media collection so friends and family can see what we have and what we like. I wanted to keep the data portable so that users would be able to use their info anywhere, not just lib.rario.us.

lib.rario.us has a great feature which allows a user to export their catalog into an excel spreadsheet. The site also has custom RSS feeds for each user, so you can track your friends without having to constantly visit the site.

I think the biggest issue with social cataloging is getting the information to the site. The thought of entering all my CDs, DVDs and books is quite overwhelming. The lib.rario.us form is simple enough and it uses Amazon’s API to ease the process. Also by using Amazon’s data the site can normalize the entries making matches easier.

I think this is an area where one site could take a huge lead over the competition. One idea would be to use bar code scanners, such as the CueCat, to make adding items much faster. An even cooler implementation, and one that is probably more likely to gain wider acceptance, would be to use webcams as the bar scanner. Imagine just waving a DVD in front of the camera and having the site automatically add the item. Flash could be used as the interface, since it can access a users local webcam (I’m pretty sure). The image recognition piece would be fairly tricky, but if it was easy then everyone would be doing it.

lib.rario.us is written in PHP and uses MySQL. The site is currently going through a major re-write which will be built using a custom framework. The site had been live for one year now and has grown through word of mouth and social bookmarking sites, such del.icio.us.

Mr. Auayan is currently trying to figure out how to monetize the site so they can grow it even further. In my opinion this type of site doesn’t lend itself well to the free/premium model (there is a buzz word for this, but I can remember it at the moment. Freemium? Anyone know?). I think there is too much competition who aren’t charging, plus I struggled thinking up a feature set that could be part of a premium package.

The first thing I would do, and this would be pretty simple since the app is already tied into Amazon, would be to add unobtrusive “Want this CD/DVD/Book? Buy it at Amazon” referral links. I don’t think users would mind this at all. Upon further review I see they’re already doing this. I think the key is tying the ads into the catalog so that they’re actually relevant to what the user is looking at. So rather than just sticking up some Google ads, I would become an affiliate at TicketMaster and have concert links for whatever band made the CD.

Another idea for monetization, although this is somewhat controversial, would be selling anonymous data. The type of information being gathered would be useful to companies doing market/trend analysis. If you had a big enough user base I think you could package the data in a way that protects the individual user’s privacy, while still providing valuable information to market research firms.

I would like to extend my thanks to Mr. Auayan for sharing his project. He’s facing some tough competition, but as a friend of mine always notes: competition just means there is a market for the product. Keep an eye out for lib.rario.us in the next Tech Crunch social cataloging post

Popularity: 17% [?]

16bugs is a hosted bug tracking solution developed by Michele Finotto. The app has both free and paid versions and uses PayPal for payment. 16bugs has all the AJAX, RSS and javascript effects you would expect from a Web 2.0 app.

Before I did any actual Googling I was under the impression that there were numerous hosted bug tracking sites. The first site that came to mind was Basecamp, the hugely popular project collaboration and management app. But it turns out they don’t actually have a specific bug tracking module. This appears to be intentional, to some degree, so as not to restrict there market to only software development.

In fact after doing some Googling I was surprised how few players there were in the hosted bug tracking arena. And the ones that were out there seemed decidedly weak and dated (aka not Web 2.0 (aka no AJAX)).

Michele felt the same way:

I’m a developer and as any developers I needed to track bugs in my
code, but available solutions weren’t good enough for me, so I decided
to roll my own bug tracker.

16 bugs was started in March of 2006 and took about two months to release the initial version, although new features are being added constantly. The app was built using Ruby on Rails with a MySQL database. Users can upload attachments with their bug reports, which are stored using Amazon’s S3 (Simple, Storage Service).

One of the coolest features is the ability to create dynamic 16bugs subdomains. For example I made a test company for this blog. You can even style your subdomain, although the options were limited to a list of the color scheme and uploading your logo.

This opens up an interesting area - social bug tracking. Many open source projects already do something like this, where users can post bugs. I have yet to see this same style approach taken to web sites. Some sites have forums where users can post issues, but it would be cool if more sites/companies tried this open approach. Obviously some bugs would have to be kept private, such as “admin/admin is a hard coded login that will allow full access to the site”. For now 16bugs only allows open viewing of bugs (configurable of course), not posting, but I think that would be an interesting direction for this app to take.

Michele seems to have found a not so small niche and has positioned 16bugs to fill that need. The app has all the basics you would expect from a bug tracking solution, giving in the framework to grow into something truly unique and special.

Popularity: 15% [?]

There certainly isn’t a lack of web-based time tracking apps right now. I’ve used SlimTimer in the past, but Tick, BaseCamp and Harvest are all major players, to name a few. Despite the number of options available, Myles Eftos couldn’t find one that fit his needs. Myles motivations for starting 88 Miles were twofold.

1) I needed a decent reason to use Rails seriously, and
2) I was in desperate need for a really simple time tracking system

Myles was looking for something simple and with 88 Miles he’s achieved that. The application is easy to pick up - I didn’t even check out the help section once. 88 Miles is great for single developlers, but also has features for tracking multiple users over the same projects.

88 Miles is free if you tracking under 40 hours a month and offers for pay plans if you need to track more time. There is also a mobile edition, which I didn’t get a chance to try, but is a nice touch. Also of interested to developers is the open API.

Myles works full-time for Bam Creative as a development team leader. In the 5 months he has been working on this projects he figures he’s put in 250 hours. In addtion to the 88 Miles blog, Myles also has a personal blog, which I highly recommened for any web developers.

As a final note, I would like to compliment Myles on his design skills. Although is admittly more of a coder then a designer, I’m impressed with the look of both 88 Miles and his blog.

Thanks to Myles for submitting his app. I encourage anyone looking for a simple time tracking system to check out 88 Miles.

Popularity: 28% [?]