PayPerPost.com - 300/unit

Payperpost.com somehow tying up social networking and e-business via sort of mixing marketing services with blogging. This site is owned by a company with an appropriate name of Social Media Marketing.

According to Alexa.com, the site has a traffic rank of 37,107 and with a weekly average views of 0.0021% from global internet users, 43.3% of which are from India.

Basically, PayPerPost provides an online advertising service for one's website, product, service and/or company. They allow businessmen and other people to promote to their network of over 265,000 indepented bloggers. They allow these people to connect with their network of bloggers to create buzz (word of mouth marketing), build traffic, get product feedback, connection and linkage to others, create syndicates with others, and a lot more.

Also, the site attracts bloggers who want to get paid in what they do. PayPerPost advertisers are paying bloggers who write about their Web sites, products, services and companies for the sales and traffic they have helped to generate. Basically, they are paid for the opinion on various topics that they write about after getting the content approved.

On the Features. The site has created a marketplace where the bloggers will review, promote and market products, services and websites on behalf of the advertisers. The latter may be done directly because the site also allows one-to-one transaction between advertisers and posties (bloggers). They have also created this ecosphere that allows the advertisers to connect to the site's community of Posties and their readers via a variety of mediums.

Also, the PayPerPost marketplace has turned ordinary bloggers into publishing powerhouses. Videos from the Posties whose lives were changed by monetizing their blogs may be viewed by others, thus attracting more to become Posties.


The site actually looks as good as what it does. It does not bore, it is informative and it is safe (tested by McAfee daily).

Escrow.com - 300/unit

Escrow.com is a trusted third party people can rely on when doing business online. Basically, it is an e-business site that serves as a meeting place for buyers and sellers who don't know each other. It offers service of holding an amount of money/property granted to somebody and releases it after a specific condition has been set, thus the name "escrow".

According to Alexa.com, the site has a traffic rank of 42,984. Also, it receives an average weekly hit of 0.0026% from global internet users, 43.3% of which are from the United States.

As have been mentioned, this site targets online sellers and buyers and offers trusted escrow services to them, offering a new way of doing e-business.

On the business aspect of the site, Escrow.com gives the following promises to sellers: Knowledge regarding the buyer's funds (that they are already authenticated and held before shipping of merchandise), Opportunity to reach new target markets, Lesser expenses on bad debts, Faster transactions, access to the site's customer service, updates on order status anytime, streamlined distribution, transaction details maintainenance for 7 years, and proactive sequencing deals.

On the one hand, buyers are guaranteed: right to inspect merchandise before Escrow.com's release of payment to seller, fast transaction of orders, lesser procurement expenses, access to customer service center, updates on order status online, early receipt of goods, access to a large number of suppliers and details maintenance for 7 years.

The site may want to tweak more its over-all look (i.e. inclu de pictures of their happy customers and the like). Yes, it may be true that its main purpose is to conduct business and thus made their site look "straigh tforward", but it should keep in mind that business sh ould be fun too.

Moreover, its value proposition is not that clear. By just looking on its homepage, it won't make people think that it does escrow business for people on different goods.

Jooce.com [Matri-6]

Jooce.com offers ‘power to the people’. The main idea behind Jooce is to provide space where ‘cyber nomads’ – ‘people who maintain a busy online life from multiple computers, none of which they necessarily own’ – may save, access and share their files, watch videos from YouTube, and chat with friends. Simply said, Jooce offers the internet users a web-based application that would act as their own private space in the internet.

Knowing that people who own a computer manages their files in the computer’s desktop, the developers of this website incorporates the features of a desktop in Jooce. Jooce is your ‘private online desktop with public file sharing capabilities’, a virtual state-of-the-art desktop that can be access through any computer (provided that the computer has an internet connection and a flash player, since Jooce runs on Flash Macromedia).

This picture presents the start-up look of Jooce application, i.e., when you go to www.jooce.com, this is what you are going to see. The design of the application is inviting because it looks cool and exciting. Also, it seems like it is fun to use. One good thing about Jooce is that your excitement would not diminish when you are asked to sign-up because Jooce only asks you to fill-up four textboxes, unlike other websites in which you are required to complete a lengthy sign-up form. You only need to decide on your username and password, and then enter your e-mail address.

Another good thing about Jooce is that the application is translated into many other languages, including the Filipino language as shown below.

Jooce invites its users to COMMUNICATE with other internet users, MOVE their files to their own Joocetop (Jooce Desktop), PLAY videos and music in it, and CUSTOMIZE it. These features are represented by the four boxes that are shown at the initial page of Jooce. These features are discussed and evaluated below.

Jooce: Communicate! Taking into consideration the obsession of most internet users in social networking and in chatting, Jooce allows its users to manage their instant messenger (IM) and social networking accounts in the Joocetop. Users may chat with other people who are using Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, or AIM.

They may import their contacts from their accounts in these IM networks. Joocers (Jooce users) may also share files with the persons who appear on their contacts list.

Matri-6: CAN’T communicate. We’ve tried to import our Yahoo! Messenger Contacts into our Jooce accounts so we may chat with our friends in Y!M. However, our contacts do not appear in our Jooce contacts list for days. The control panel keeps on displaying that it is still importing our contacts.

Jooce: Move! Knowing that not all cyber nomads may afford to buy a USB Flash Disk, Jooce provides a virtual storage for their files. Joocers may upload their files to their Joocetop from a local disk drive and also from the web. They may then access these files through other computers. Also, Joocers may share their files among the people in their contacts list.

Matri-6: CAN’T move. We’re very interested in this feature than in any other feature that Jooce offers. We were excited to upload our files into our Joocetop so we’ll have back-ups for the files in our USB Flash Disks (which at any time may fail to function properly due to viruses). Unfortunately, we were not able to upload any file to our Joocetop. Everytime we try to upload a file, Jooce displays a textbox which states that they are ‘not sure of what happened’, and that ‘the system seems to be having a nervous breakdown’. The irritating box looks like the one below.

Jooce: Play! Jooce allow its users to play videos, listen to music, view photos, and play games in their Joocetop. There’s an icon at the bottom of the screen which is designated for YouTube. Joocers may search and play YouTube videos right in their Joocetop.

Matri-6: WE’VE played! Finally, here’s a feature that worked well. We we’re able to play a YouTube video in our Joocetop. As you can see in the preceding picture, we’ve watched the “The Incredibles Trailer”. Joocers may also play the videos in full screen for greater pleasure.

Jooce: Customize! Since Jooce promises to provide a virtual desktop to its users, it allows Joocers to personalize their Joocetop. They may do so by changing their Joocetop wallpaper, and also by setting an avatar. The toolbox for setting the avatar is shown below.

Matri-6: CAN’T customize. Yet again, whenever we upload a picture that we would like to set as wallpaper or as avatar, the same textbox appear in the screen as shown below.

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Having read our website review for Jooce, you probably know that we are quite unsatisfied with this website. But then……

Jooce & Matri-6: You’re Invited!

Jooce offers internet users like us, many things. Even though we’ve encountered problems while using the site, we still invite you to try it on your own. We know that the intentions of Jooce are great and that we should still give it a chance to prove itself. Jooce is actually one of PC Mag USA’s Top 100 Undiscovered Websites of 2008, so you better spend some time to discover it. According to Alexa.com, Jooce ranks 74,949. For other traffic details about Jooce.com, please refer to the tables below.

The team behind Jooce.com should try to improve the application by addressing the common problems faced by its users. The website is founded on great intentions, and our group believes that these may be attained by the Jooce developers if only they would make the necessary alterations. Jooce addresses the problem of digital divide as it aids internet users who don’t have their own computers, and only uses computers in the cybercafés. Jooce also has business value as it encourages the use of Macromedia Flash. Also, Jooce invites cyber nomads to engage in more internet activities thus increasing the profits of cybercafés. Jooce could serve many purposes for the internet users if it would be revamped.

Scribd.com - review by In-Between Names!

Scribd.com is a website that allows exchange of information between Internet users worldwide. The site does this by allowing users to publish their own literary works for others to read by uploading their files to the site. It was launched on March 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstam. Based on the information gathered from the site itself, Scribed.com attracts more than 50 million readers every month, with more than 50,000 documents uploaded every day in 90 different languages.


It targets people that use it to obtain information of all types and forms. Groups of people that would benefit range from college students to working professionals, from kids to adults, from classical music enthusiasts to literary buffs. Notable users of Scribd.com include President Barack Obama, The New York Times, FOXBusiness.com, among others.

Scribd functions much like a document version of Youtube, and the concept that allows this comparison is the iPaper document reader. iPaper converts regular computer files to a proprietary form for easy convenient viewing. Compatible documents for conversion are the following:

• Adobe PDF (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Microsoft Word (.doc/ .docx)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt/.pps/.pptx)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls/.xlsx)
• OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
• OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
• OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
• All OpenDocument formats
• Plain text (.txt)
• Rich text format (.rtf)

Business value

Scribd.com allows businesses to reduce their research costs for strategic decisions, new trends and methods of production, retail, and other business processes. Instead of spending subscription fees to industry journals, specialty websites, and the like, the research division of a company can acquire relevant information through free and simple registration to this site, which then allows them unlimited access to all documents uploaded at the site.

Independent consultants can use Scribd.com as a platform to popularize their services. Published technical reports bring credibility to the firm or person who made it. Industry journals serve this purpose, but these publications are not accessible to the common man. Scribd.com, as a purveyor of intellectual democracy, is able to provide the information to anyone who seeks it. Writers struggling to be noticed by the reading public and by publishing firms can use Scribd.com the same way as the previous example.

Companies can show innovation in information dissemination of its products and services to the general public via Scribd.com, surely a very unorthodox method. The usual manner of dissemination among is with traditional advertising (Print, Radio, Television). With the advent of the Internet, email became a method for direct marketing, but as email made it easier for entities to communicate, junk emails are as easy to dispose. The recipients of the information via email are limited by the company’s contact list, since these contacts have already previously contacted them. Unlike the traditional method of advertising, prospective buyers, while looking for information about specific goods and services, can use Scribd.com to get the needed knowledge, and hopefully entice them to purchase from the information provider. The buyer only needs to search at Scribd.com for related literature.

A company that uses Scribd.com obtains a degree of competitiveness with respect to other companies by reducing its cost of advertising the products and services it offers to the public. The aforementioned traditional venues for advertising are not cheap. With Scribd.com, information is spread for free. Another benefit it provides is a focused, sharp-shooter method of promotions because it specifically targets those who desire knowing about the particular products and services the company can provide.

Critique:

Scribd.com, though extensive, does not contain all information. Some may possess important information but may not be a registered user of the website. However, this constraint is relaxed over time as the data gathered form Alexa.com suggests that more and more users begin to frequent this site. It is currently ranked Top 200 by Alexa.com. We believe that there is a strong positive correlation between the number of registered members and the amount of information contributed to the site at a regular basis.


Reliability of information gathered from Scribd.com is also a concern for the would-be researcher. One cannot ascertain the credibility of documents available at the site because of what has just been stated – that information is limited by the number of registered users.

Jobstreet.com (99 Stars)

Jobstreet.com is an answer to both employers’ and jobseekers’ problems. It helps jobseekers to find companies with vacancies, who are looking for possible hires who can fit the job description. It is like an online job fair that is forever open to anyone who is looking to be employed, whether they are students, fresh graduates, unemployed or underemployed, etc. Because of the numerous jobseekers online, Jobstreet.com is given a traffic rank of 1388. The largest share of its visitors come from Indonesia, averaging 27.5% of its total visitors. The Philippines’ share of the total visitors, on the other hand, is 16.2%.

Jobstreet.com is an online and a virtual job hunting and job posting website that, obviously, caters to both employers and employees. It makes job compatibility easier to find and job applications a lot simpler and faster. The site is very friendly and surprisingly systematized in such a way that the jobs offered are segregated among three groups: specialization, location, and low application.

It also makes your job searching efficient because it will let you see those jobs that are appropriate for you. Evaluating your location, years of experience, position sought for, specialization, and job type does this making it more hassle free for any job seeker to find the right and appropriate job for her without spending so much time scanning the classifieds of the broadsheets.

With minimal charges, the site also offers services that will jumpstart your job search. A very good example is the Priority Application service that would make your resume’ more readily viewable to seeking employers. Tie-ups with cellular carriers in the country like Globe and Smart also makes the site more useful than otherwise thought possible. This is epitomized by services such as the SMS Apply and the SMS Alerts that will lead you more mobility and liberty in choosing and applying for the jobs that you really want.

Another beautiful catch about the site is that it does not only cater to professionals and graduates, it also serves the needs of students. It offers introductory courses to job hunting, job interviews, and resume’ writing. It also offers students with possible part-time jobs and internship programs that will boost the experience level of the students for future and more formal applications.

The site is also bilateral in a sense that it focuses not only on job seekers but also to employers who need to advertise their current manpower needs. It is also one of the most reliable internet-based job hunting module because it has the largest database, it services a huge number of companies, and it provides efficient and clean service.

Jobstreet.com earns money through paid advertisements both commercial and job advertisements. Instead of publishing job ads on newspaper, it would be cheaper for employers to post their ads on this site. Jobstreet.com also partners with different companies to become a link between employers and jobseekers. Partnering with Jobstreet.com reduces the cost of the employers of finding possible hires and at the same time caters to the needs of people who want to find jobs. It would be efficient for the applicants to look and submit their resumes in this site instead of going to the companies. The website earns income through this type of service. Not only that, Jobstreet.com is also an avenue for companies and advertisers to promote their company and attract future employees and customers.

This site is a great way for people to find jobs that will suit them given that this site has features that categorizes job opportunities according to their location and specialization. The reduced cost in finding jobs is further reduced by this kind provision of the website. The faster the people can find jobs, the faster companies can hire people who can fill in vacancies to make their company more productive. With this kind of service, both parties can benefit from this collaboration with Jobstreet.com

Librarything.com: TheDeterminants

 

If you are a proud bookworm who wants to brag about all the books you read, then librarything.com is a website for you. Librarything.com, in a few words, is a social networking site with a twist – it relates its users with the books they read. That is, like your typical Facebook account where you collect and add friends, here the only difference is that you collect both friends and books.

 

A snapshot shown below shows the user interface of the website, specifically the library section where users stack their books.

Founded by Tim Spalding in 2005, librarything.com introduced a new genre of social networking and indirectly created the “largest book club online”. Equipped with its excellent book searching capabilities, users can find all the books relevant to them and post it to their online personal libraries which others can freely view. Once they have added their books, users can also add tags to it for easier searching as their library gets bigger over time. Of course, users cannot access the content of the books they are adding. Although the process of adding books to your personal library is merely adding their cover pages, this is perfectly fine since the site is not about reading books online anyway, but collecting, documenting, tagging, and of course, bragging it.

 

Adding books into your virtual library is quite easy. Just search for the book you're looking for and the website gets information from Amazon.com, Library of Congress and other libraries around the world.

Librarything.com also analyzes the books its users have in their libraries and recommends books that they might like. It does this by finding other people’s libraries which best resembles yours and then reporting you what they have read that you have not yet. This makes book hunting more personalized and has a better probability of giving its users a better recommendation.

This website, which has a catalogue of nearly all of the books in this planet, is establishing dominance among its kind and boasts 600,000 unique registered users while enjoying a margin of about 0.1% from its biggest rival shelfari.com. Data from alexa.com reveals that most of its users come from the US with 43.9% share of its total visitors, and only 0.8% of its users come from the Philippines..

The site targets avid readers as well as book authors to provide them a venue to exchange ideas. Also a social networking site, it also allows its users to create profiles, comment on other people’s libraries, recommend books, or even warn others from reading a ridiculously boring book. Another cool but quite eerie feature of this website is that one can search for other users with the same library and books as you have. Here, you can find other people with the same taste as yours and add them as your friends.

As a profitable e-business venture, it generates its revenues mainly from three sources: advertising, book store referral fees and user subscription charges (users can register only 200 books for free. Beyond that limit they collect a fee). This site is also a good marketing strategy for online book sellers like amazon.com as it provides a portal where book buyers and sellers can transact online.

 

The site is easy to manipulate and has many excellent tools, but it lacks aesthetics. Though functionality is more important than aesthetics, the online world however, seems to value them equally. Its lack of aesthetics makes first time users clueless about what the site offers, and in a sense does not give them the incentive to make the first move and click the sign-up button. Based from our personal experiences, though we liked the functionality of the site, we found it difficult to comprehend what the site is for until we read its article in Wikipedia.

 

Also, compared to its rival shelfari.com as shown below (which is by the way gaining more users), shelfari’s graphics is by far better which makes its functionality better to understand before even the visitors hit the sign-up button.

However, though these problems exist, librarything.com still overtakes shelfari.com in terms of its number of users – providing a better community of book lovers.

Delicious.com

Don’t you just love seeing the array of foods that you can choose from in a grand buffet? If you want the endless choices of websites whether they are new, old, exotic, exciting or resourceful, delicious.com is here to help you! Delicious is a social bookmarking site, which is ranked fairly high, placing 2695th rank according to Alexa. Main users come from USA holding 26.9%, followed by India, China, Germany and the UK.

This website allows the users to visit different Internet websites that were not know to them or were not able to find them. When the users do not have enough time to surf the site they want, or do not want to lose the information of that website, Delicious.com allows them to bookmark the website and revisit the site anytime in the future when they have time.

The website also allows users to tag, save, manage, and share web pages all in one place. It allows the users to bookmark any site in the Internet and additionally, one can see the same bookmarks that one has made using different computers.

Delicious makes it possible and easy to keep track of all websites and keep them in sync. Users are not limited to the individually created bookmarks but open to the bookmarks of friends or anyone visiting the site. They could click on 'popular tags' to look into sites that are interesting to the other users and they could also look into the sites that others have saved as their bookmark!

The bookmarks arrange themselves according to the tags that they were assigned to by the users. So if one has found a site about Filipino food, and tags it as 'Filipino' and 'food', the website could be found under those tags. Easy! :) loads of sites would burst out per tag!

As you open the website, you see a list of popular bookmarks and a list of popular tags such as art, reference, tutorials, photography to name a few. The list is made as a compilation of the most visited bookmarks, and the most clicked tags by users of delicious.com.

For businesses or for certain people like artists or cooks, having their website marked as a popular bookmark or be included in the list of popular tags may be an advantage since it increases the chance that people may visit their page and of course, see what they have to offer, which may eventually lead to a sale. In short, delicious.com is a tool for sharing of valuable and interesting information, and it may also be used for indirect advertising, which can be viewed as a business value of the website.

Critique

Pros:- Its first and foremost advantage is that it is personalized. You can make your own categories to group your bookmarked websites. You can also edit your profile.

- This website provides benefits of being able to access wanted sites anytime the user wishes to. It is well organized and user friendly in the sense that even the first timers can actually use it without difficulty. There is a demo tour and a “getting started” action for beginners.

- The search engine is also smarter, and more social. (As aforementioned above) you can search within one of your tags, another user’s public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

- The Delicious Team is constantly transitioning Delicious over to a new platform that would be of advantage to users. Delicious.com former website name is del.icio.us.com, which is obviously hard for people to remember, find the site and share it with their friends. The Delicious team is not just hearing out requests and questions of the users but they are putting these into actions. The new website is faster to traffic growth while ensuring that Delicious is still reliable. The bookmarks are sorted alphabetically and categorized into bundles of interest.

- The Delicious Team are actually replying to the messages of the users and trying to address their concerns. It only shows that the team is concerned with their users.

Cons:

- One needs to download the add-on first before one can use it. It’s a waste of time for someone who avail computer rentals. He/she can only log in to his/her account but to make use of it, he/she has to download the add-on all over again.

- The page needs some work. The font is too small and the bookmarks look a little crowded. The page should be colored brighter to make it more exciting to look at.