In Sweden Jaiku has to a large extent been the microblog of choice. But with frequent downtimes, no new features for a long time and Google’s recent announcement that they’re turning it into an open source project, people were ready for an alternative.
In steps Jonas Lejon, an entrepreneur who’s behind several blog-related services in Sweden, who puts together Bloggy, a microblogging service in Swedish. He gets enthusiastic cheers, good feedback, and he responds. More than that, he responds quickly, adds new features, tweaks them, and does in a few months what Jaiku with all its Google backup hasn’t done in years.

When he announced a function for importing all your Jaiku contacts into Bloggy, there was no holding back the migration anymore. Over the weekend my mailbox has been flooded with friends requests from Bloggy users who have imported their contacts.
While it’s a bit sad to let Jaiku go, Bloggy is clearly where the action’s at for the Swedish microblogosphere at the moment. One of the great features is that you can easily follow and update both Jaiku and Twitter from within Bloggy, so you’re not really missing much, even if Bloggy still lacks support for channels. It has adopted many of Jaiku’s features, but it is a bit more like a community than a pure microblogging service.
I asked Jonas Lejon what made him develop the service.
- I was using Pownce, Twitter and Jaiku and I was tired of em all. I was thinking: Can I do this better? So i started developing Bloggy 8 months ago and implemented all the functions I liked from the other microblogging platforms, he says.
How come you decided to do Bloggy in Swedish?
- I think that the English language still feels uncomfortable for many Swedes and that providing a service in Swedish makes it more friendly. “By Swedes for Swedes”.

So far, we haven’t seen how it performs under heavy load. Monday provided one challenge with Thomas Mattsson at Expressen writing about it and giving it lots of space on their front page.

Also Bloggy was mentioned in Dagens Nyheter the other day.
There were a couple of downtimes Monday, but Jonas Lejon assures those problems are now taken care of.
- I’m working very close to our datacenters and they are helping me out with upgrading the server all the time when I reach the limits and I’m fixing performance bugs all the time and now it seems that all problems are gone.
You deserve praise for the way you handle feedback quickly and keep on improving the features. You seem to be online on Bloggy 24/7. Do you ever sleep? : )
- Thanks! I’ve been working a lot the last few days but I’m trying to take some offline time now and then and relax.

Team Eric Wahlforss (co-founder Sound Cloud), Henric Berggren (Sound Cloud), and David Kjelkerud, student at KTH, worked on an application they call listentoblogs.com.

Henrik Berggren was truly enthusiastic yesterday when he told CMW about the way it works:

– It is a really simple site where bloggers come and blogreaders come, not to read their favourite blogs, but to listen to them.

The idea is that you should be able to read, record and upload your or any blog at listentoblogs.com, and subscribe to it as a podcast straight to your mp3 player.

– We are supporting all big open formats. This is possible because we have built it on top of an awesome platform called Sound Cloud and App Engine. It is a glue between this kind of cloud-based services.

The listentoblogs.com team: Berggren, Kjelkerud, Wahlforss.

24hbc took place at Hasseludden Yasuragi, about 20 min drive from Stockholm.

The guy behind 24hbc is Ted Valentin, a Swedish entrepreneur, who has created stuff like: sushikartan (The Sushi Map), Wifikartan (The Wifi Map), Minkarta (My Map) and… Sites that maps different kinds of services and/or places.

- 24hbc is the place to try things out. The focus is to get things done. Not to be afraid to fail, Ted says.

The atmosphere at 24hbc is a mix of hard work, playing around and hanging out.

Erik Starck, one of the participants, said:

– It is like the punk movment all over.

The Swedish TV channel TV4 reported from the event early this morning. On Nyhetsmorgon (only in Swedish).

When we last summer started to see the microblogging-hype we felt that a search dedicated to microblogs would be a quite natural development for us. We like Twitter Search and been using it a lot, especially at conferences and when news like Mumbai were having the best news source at Twitter. But because we used Jaiku ourselves it wasn’t what we needed in many cases.

Microblogging services covered by Twingly’s search engine are: Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Pownce (which is dead, but a six month archive remains searchable), Swedish Bloggy.se and the German Bleeper.de.
They will keep adding new services, and aim to cover all microblogging services out there.

The site has received a lot of love in the comments in the sidebar. What I like most about it is the way that any story can be scrutinized paragraph by paragraph by adding questions and answers, thus providing a tool for collaborative fact-checking and discussion about the validity of statements. It is also a social tool, letting me know when my contacts have been active on the site. And it flattens the news hierarchy (though not completely – you cannot add questions or answers to stories posted by users, and those are limited to 250 words). The news can come from traditional news stories or from other members (through letters to the editor), questions can be posed by anyone, replied by anyone (not just the reporter/writer) and anyone can comment.

Joshua Pollock writes at the Crunchberry project blog:

it harnesses the credibility of an established media company, leverages existing online social networks and gives people a constructive way to interact with each other and the news.

Comments, called quips in News Mixer lingo, are limited to 140 characters, making them similar to microblogging posts.

And, last but not least, it’s open source. So Eastern Iowa will be the first site in what will probably be a long number of local and national efforts. Looking forward to see this evolve. I hope to see a Swedish site not too far off in the future.

Today the BBC is collaborating with the site by sponsoring the feature called “the 12second challenge”, a daily question that users reply to. Users get to reply to the question “Economic downturn – how bad can it get? Give some examples.” The replies may then appear on BBC TV.

Further, 12seconds.tv today announced to its users plans to involve them in extensive coverage of the US election day.

In an email to the service’s users, the 12seconds team writes:

Citizen Journalism is pretty important for the health of a democracy. For this reason, we’re going to put a lot of effort into Election Day. Where appropriate (and legal) we’d like 12ers covering reactions, parties, exit polls and emotions on November 4th all over the world. We’re assembling a team of people and will feature their content on Election Day.

Jonas Nyvang from MySpace talked a bit about MySpace apps and Open Social.
- We give 100% of the revenues you can get from the app you develop. We’ve been pioneering the monetization of social networking.
Like when Arna and I met him in september last year, he doesn’t want to see Facebook as a threat. He makes this distinction between MySpace and Facebook.
- Facebook is more about the social graph, while MySpace is more about your interests, what you strive for and your passions.
His/MySpace’s view of how the web is evolving isn’t new. It is becoming more personal, more portable and more collaborative.

• Be intellectually honest about your motivation. Solve a real human social inefficiency.
• Choose a technology that works, with an eye on the future.
• Don’t compete, but rather build on other players. There’s a good basis available to build upon.
• Build something that’s good enough today. It needs to solve a real problem.
• Social networking needs to be all-inclusive, and work for everyone. Follow the least common denominator approach when finding your target audience.

- Execute a killer product strategy, don’t plan a killer app, David Haddad says.

He then answers three questions.
How will the mobile look like in the future, i e in four years?
- The Nokia N95 is targeted for the early adopters. Down in four years time, the phone that’s going to be in everyone’s hands is going to be similar to what you have now. The N95 is a good indicator.

How will social networking look in the future?
- If everyone in this room has an N95, how will that affect my experience with for instance Facebook? There are three things that differ from our current experience.
- The social networking will become concurrent, cirkumstantial and fundamentally socially impactful.

David Haddad thinks the adding of friends on social network sites will be automatic, by for instance bluetooth. News feeds will be more realtime.
Like Jaiku! : )

What can we do today to change the social networking environment?

• Pick your development environment.
• Choose your method of connectivity.
• How do you want to position users? There are many different technologies.
• How will you make money? Find a business model.
• Who are you going to partner with?

He believes in combined solutions for web and mobile units.

In the q&a a few interesting issues, including privacy and more on killer product strategies came up, but unfortunately there were network problems… and I didn’t catch much. I’m sure others have more, though.

Stefan Waldeck, Yahoo, talks about mobile marketing and search marketing at Daytona Sessions.

Self expression, social networks, and new technologies are the new trends. In the cellphone all of this comes together, he says.
- The cellphone is with you 100% of your waking hours. Plus it has a higher penetration than computers.
When you move from 2G to 3G you start using photo and video a lot more.

Yahoo!Go is a small java applet which lets the user access email, flickr, search and more. It will be in 200 cellphone models at the end of the year.
- It is very easy to use on a small screen.
There’s also an RSS reader integrated.
- We haven’t tried to copy what we do on the internet, but do a special solution for the cellphone.

Mobile seach is based on need and boredom, which translates into people wanting usefull information and games.
Search ads on mobile phones are more sensitive to appearing in the top part of the screen, since people don’t scroll much.
But click through rates are much higher than on the web.

Marc Andreessen explains the concept as similar to Facebook’s, but without the constraints. Any social networking system can be a container, and any application developed with the Open Social standards can be included in any of these containers.
One thing that seems promising is that it’s all HTML and javascript, making it easier to build applications.

Andreessen writes:

If you recall how I previously described the Facebook platform as “a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry”, you’ll understand why I think Open Social is the next big leap forward!
Open Social takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. Open Social is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done…
…including Facebook itself, potentially

He has also published some screencasts and screenshots.

Dave Winer is more sceptical:

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work.
In this case it’s Google trying to undermine Facebook.
And I don’t think it’s going to work.
What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer — Internet companies giving users full control of their data.
When Google makes their announcement on Thursday, the question they should be asked by everyone is — How much of my data are you letting me control today? That’s pretty much all that matters to anyone, imho.

Very interesting statistics today from Johan Myrberger at The Killer Attitude. He has taken Jeff Pulver’s statistics one step further, with detailed graphs. Sweden has close to one million Facebook users. One million. In a country of nine million people. That is pretty amazing.

Digga and Sovrat have been cometitors from the start in the struggle to create a Swedish equivalent to popular American site Digg. At the end of September, Digga was contacted by Digg, who asked them to change names since Digga was too similar to “Digg”. We then thought it was time to stop competing and instead merge into a strong and unified site.

Pusha will use the same technology as Sovrat and the same database, so that old Sovrat members won’t notice much change. You will also recognize the design, even if we’ve made a few usability improvements.

Yesterday MySpace held a big party in Stockholm to celebrate their launch of the Swedish version of the site. Along with a bunch of Swedish bands, LA stand up commedian Pablo Francisco did a gig which was much appreciated by the crowd of Swedish MySpace users and their friends.
Not all users were thrilled about the site being in Swedish though. One person who had journalism as an interest got it translated into belly dancing. And parts of the site still seem like they’re translated by babelfish.
- We’re working on continual updates to make the site more useful, MySpace’s Jonas Lindberg Nyvang told my colleague Arna.
Also, like Hans Kullin noted, the timing of the release was rather bad, since the site was down for maintenance yesterday.
Nevertheless, a large number of fans had made their way to Mosebacke in Stockholm.
Some users we talked to preferred the site to be in English, saying they got on it to improve their English in the first place, and to meet people from all over the world. Others, however, thought it was about time to get a Swedish edition.
- My English is quite bad, so this is a good thing, said Natali, 19.

Pablo Francisco, the lead act at the party, is one of the many artists with a MySpace profile. We got an interview with him about using sites like MySpace for building a career.
- People put my act on the internet, which is a beautiful thing, because the internet is more exciting and more fun to be around than television now. Because you can actually communicate with the stars, get advice and be friends with them, he said.
Check out the video clip from the interview below.

Through Robin Hamman’s blog I found an interesting article about the lack of interoperability on social networking sites. Michael Geist writes in the Star that this undermines the networks’ usefulness.

The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the Internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness stifles their potential.

Geist also points to the regionality of social networking sites, even the international ones. He has a list with some examples, for instance Orkut’s appeal to people in Brasil and India.

A number of initiatives are working towards greater interoperability, though. Some examples:

OpenID
An effort towards a single, decentralized identification system for social media sites. Requires sites to offer OpenID sign-on. Among sites offering OpenID identification are AOL, LiveJournal, Ma.gnolia, Wikitravel and others.
While security issues have been raised, OpenID remains an interesting project.

The Liberty Alliance
Presented as a “standards organization with a global membership that provides a holistic approach to identity”, the Liberty Alliance are defining standards for open identity, writing guidelines for privacy management etc.

Members work closely together to:

* Build open standard-based specifications for federated identity and identity-based Web services.
* Drive global identity theft solutions.
* Provide interoperability testing.
* Offer a formal certification program for products utilizing Liberty specifications.
* Establish best practices, rules, liabilities, and business guidelines.
* Collaborate with other standards bodies, privacy advocates, and government
policy groups.
* Address end user privacy and confidentiality issues.

Project Higgins
An open source project, Project Higgins has code contributions from IBM, Novell and Parity Communications. The goal of the project is to “give people more control over their personal online information”.

“Higgins is an open source software project that is developing an extensible, platform-independent, identity protocol-independent, software framework to support existing and new applications that give users more convenience, privacy and control over their identity information.”

Geist again:

Some services may believe that it is in their economic interest to stick to a walled garden approach; however, given the global divisions within the social networking world, the mix of language, user preferences and network effects, it is unlikely that one or two services will capture the global marketplace.

I found this interesting in the wake of the Facebook debate.

PS. I’ve been on a more or less unintentional break from this blog. Most likely I’m back, though don’t expect daily postings. DS.

After some pretty bad network problems everything seems to be up and running at Podcamp Europe. I spent the greater part of Christopher Penn’s talk on marketing aspects of podcasting working out these network problems, but here’s what I snapped up.

He talked a lot about evangelists, the people who really like your podcast and so they market it for free. And so you have to give something back to them, to make them want to keep doing it. He mentioned live videos from your podcasts, free cds that bands might send you, have competions where the first people who mail in might get some freebies etc.
Also it’s a good idea to make places for them to hang out.

He had a bunch of useful advice on important features on the podcast’s website.

• You need text to accompany your media.
• It might be a good idea to have mailing lists or send lists with show notes, news etc.
• Have your first episde available for people who are new to your podcast.
• Give your visitors things to do on your site, obvious calls to action.
• Subscription has to be one click, or you’ll lose listeners.
• Offer both download and direct play options.

More advice form Christopher Penn:
It’s important how you name your show – the name needs to be easy to share by word of mouth.
Add your subscription buttons to your social media profiles on for instance Facebook or MySpace.
Use the analytics – see who’s visiting your site, who is linking to you, and go to their site and connect.

A couple of services mentioned:
Reactee.com – you print t-shirts, they set up an sms gateway, and people can text message it and get your url in return
crazyegg.com – shows where on my web page ppl are clicking
feedburner.com – offers good statistics

To check out all my photos from Podcamp, check out to my Podcamp Flickr set.

Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money.

The key question is whether for instance rape, child abuse, mugging and killing online should be compared to these acts in the real world. And if so, which country’s laws should the crimes fall under.

Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, said in an interview that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. He recounted, for example, that his company has called in the FBI several times, most recently this spring to ensure that Second Life’s virtual casinos complied with U.S. law. Federal investigators created their own avatars and toured the site, he said.

In coming months, his company plans to disperse tens of thousands of computer servers from California and Texas to countries around the world in order to improve the site’s performance. Also, he said, this will make activities on those servers subject to laws of the host countries.

I was a bit hesitant yet fascinated when I first started using Twitter. Now I see the form mature and I think microblogging is here to stay.

Since Hej!2007, which got me into Jaiku, I’ve been using the service quite a bit, and I am more or less migrating to it from Twitter, though I’m still sending the random update to Twitter. The great thing is that my twitters end up on Jaiku too.

Here’s my brief comparison of the two services, and why I think Jaiku is so much more interesting and useful.

It’s more social. The comments function makes it easier to interact with other users.

You can add any feed. Jaiku can also contain your twitters, along with your recently played songs on for instance last.fm, your del.icio.us bookmarks, your blog headlines, your flickr photos, or anything similar. Just add an RSS feed and it will be scanned for updates.

Jaiku has channels. You can create a more private group conversation by posting updates to a channel. Only the channel members see the updates – they don’t show up on the public timeline. This was used during Hej! 2007, for instance.

Less technical problems. I’m quite frustrated with Twitter being slow or at times inaccessible. So far I haven’t seen similar problems with Jaiku. Let’s just hope they are prepared for a rapid growth in the number of users.

Those are the key points why I like Jaiku. But there are others things that Twitter does a bit better. So far you can only get Jaiku in your cellphone if you have a Nokia phone, for instance (there’s a java version of Jaiku Mobile in private beta). And Twitter has more options for its web widgets.

More on microblogging:
From the Hej!2007 live updates – scroll down to read what Andy Smith of Jaiku had to say about Jaiku compared to Twitter
Using Twitter on the road – why mobile blogging works so well in the micro format
Twittervision – see the world twitter A twitter/google maps mashup
Mashup brings CNN news alerts to Twitter
Twitter was Mashable’s top choice for mobile social networking service 2006
Citizen media or citizen nonsense My initial reflections on using Twitter

If Habbo was a town it would be bigger than Stockholm, thus becoming the largest city in Sweden. Habbo is also growing globally. Today there are more than 76 million virtual Habbo characters worldwide. This can be compared to Second Life which has around 5,3 virtual inhabitants.
The reason behind the fast growth is a continuos creative development of the community. All the time new activities are added, which are exciting, informative and fun.

Among the activities mentioned is a guest appearance by Swedish singer Darin and q&a with representatives from the youth section of the Red Cross.

Just my five cents on that. And to let you know that I’m back. Tomorrow I’ll start blogging on Bloggvärldsbloggen in Swedish. I’ll try to keep these two blogs separated, but an excuse for possible double-posting might be in place even before I start out. There is only so much time, and I want to keep them both active, along with my personal blog and Skriva.

A lot of Twitter mashups have popped up lately. The latest that I’ve tried out is Twittervision, a live world view where twits show in real time. It’s rather addictive watching people’s actions described all over the globe. I’m still pretty hooked on Twitter, and I like that they keep developing the service. Though the increase in numbers of users have caused them some server problems. At times today it’s been impossible to reach the site. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

Twittervision is in beta, and is a service from David Troy, who’s also behind Twittermap, which is also pretty cool. You can type in your location and see what others in your area are twittering about. I found myself in Stockholm, though since I haven’t given an exact address it’s not actually where I was at the time of twittering.

When Twitter adds gps data, this will be really interesting. Now the locations are often pinned wrong, twits from people travelling show up in their home town.

Troy is also behind Twittersearch, a search engine for Twitter.

There are also a large number of Twitter widgets to use on blogs or other sites. Twitter has added to their own widgets, or badges as they call them, letting users display the latest twits from their added contacts. Here’s an example on my personal blog.

We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users. So in the coming months, we are going to be opening that up.

Nicholas Carr at Rough Type points to other reasons than supporting creativity possibly being behind the move.

This is a smart strategic move on YouTube’s part. It’s an even smarter move on Google’s part. As for the users: Don’t quit your day jobs, guys. The money’s in aggregation.

So far, no details have been announced as to how the revenue sharing will work. I4U News points out the gray-zone of what is original work, for instance lip-sync videos.

If you get paid for something you definitely need to have your copyrights in order.

Founder Drew Peloso says that he hopes to create a community where brands can reach out to receptive users and engage with them directly. Brands give back to the community by sponsoring contests.

According to Arrington, Shycast’s first sposor will be Swedish furniture giant Ikea.

eSnips will provide controls to the Microportal owners to monitor and control the content going in. Users will also be able to customize and edit the appearance and background of their portal.

eSnips has a number of widgets for use in blogs, and of course you get a personal eSnips page to display what you’ve uploaded.
The site also has a marketplace where you can sell art, crafts, fashion, music and gifts.

The power of principled leaking to embarrass governments, corporations and institutions is amply demonstrated through recent history. Public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive institutions pressures them to act ethically. What official will chance a secret, corrupt transaction when the public is likely to find out? What repressive plan will be carried out when it is revealed to the citizenry, not just of its own country, but the world? When the risks of embarrassment through openness and honesty increase, the tables are turned against conspiracy, corruption, exploitation and oppression.

But WikiLeaks isn’t restricted to leaks about oppressive regimes.

WikiLeaks will be the outlet for every government official, every bureaucrat, every corporate worker, who becomes privy to embarrassing information which the institution wants to hide but the public needs to know. What conscience cannot contain, and institutional secrecy unjustly conceals, WikiLeaks can broadcast to the world.

But how could it possibly be used as a journalistic tool? How does a journalist verify that the information is correct, that the documents come from where it’s said they are from? This could indeed become an efficient tool – for spreading misinformation and rumours. Though the documents are supposed to be scrutinized by the public, it is not necessarily so that the public knows much about the exact things being leaked – if they did, there would be little point leaking them.
Here’s what the site FAQ has to say on the issue.

WikiLeaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.
[...]
If a document is leaked from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document is leaked from Somalia, the entire Somali refugee community can analyze it and put it in context. And so on.

Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy has some objections against the project:

In the absence of accountable editorial oversight, publication can more easily become an act of aggression or an incitement to violence, not to mention an invasion of privacy or an offense against good taste.

“As we saw with the Saddam hanging video this week, gatekeeping is over”, responds Martin Stabe, and continues:

There is no way to require “accountable editorial oversight” as a barrier to entry to the public sphere anymore — a determined leaker will find a way to publicise their material online. But that doesn’t mean a responsible journalist has to cooperate with a project that carries a high risk of being used irresponsibly and seems to abdicate all responsibility for the actions of its users.

Jeff Jarvis, who’s been helping this startup out, has more:

Note that the only thing that is created by editors is the cover you’ll see on the home page. Everything else is automated. I’ve been saying that I am the only editor on earth who is not building an empire. But that is just why it has been so exciting to work on Daylife, to collaborate with an incredible technology team assembled by founder and CEO Upendra Shardanand as they find new ways to analyze, understand, display, and distribute news. I believe that what this does in the long run is send people — and thus support — to journalism at its source.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was less impressed though, critizising the lack of RSS feeds and comments fields. RSS feeds will be included in an upcoming release, responds Jarvis, but wonders whether comments funcions are necessary when you can comment on your blog (atleast that’s the way I interpreted it): “Is the use of the platform on sites everywhere a rich form of interactivity itself? What is the best form of interactivity on the site: comments or contributions?”

For a quick look at Daylife, you can take the tour.

Update 2007-01-06:
Dan Gillmor on Daylife: “It’s a very promising start to a useful service. If they get it right, they’ll be Google News done the right way.”

We live in a time when the English language affects most of our surroundings. News, web sites, computer games, email, course literature, company documents and so on are just a few examples of areas in which both English and Swedish are used, and often mixed freely. In such an environment the need arises for a tool to bridge to any language problems.
We think that Tyda.se can make a great difference in this field!
Tyda.se wants to become the obvious choice when you need help translating between English and Swedish.

My translation. I didn’t use Tyda for it, so pardon any mistakes.

Tyda is also developing a reward system, so that users get points for the stuff they contribute. These points can lead towards different kinds of rewards. There will be audio files helping with the pronunciation of words, and examples of their usage.
The new version of the site will be launched later this month.

(via Frihetens vingar)

Humble Voice is a community of artists and those who appreciate them.

When you sign up you get to pick whether you’re a 1) Musician, 2) Videographer, 3)Photographer, 4) Artist, 5) Writer or 6) Relatively normal person with possibly no artistic talent.

I created an account to try it out. The site has a nice look and feel to it. A sense of smallness which is appealing. In the long run, I believe more in interest-focused networking sites like this one than the general ones.

(via Ichigo noterat)

My personal favourites among all those mentioned are (in no particular order): Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, YouTube, Twitter, LibraryThing and MyBlogLog. Or, those are the ones I use and enjoy – there might be more qualified entries that I simply don’t know enough about.

These are all the winners and hot-to-be:s.

Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
Mashable’s Choice: MySpace
People’s Choice: Multiply
Hot for 2007: Bebo, Vox, Facebook, Facebox

Widgets and Add-Ons
Mashable’s Choice: Slide.com
People’s Choice: Zwinky
Hot for 2007: RockYou, Stickam, Snocap, Zingfu, MyBlogLog

Social News and Social Bookmarking
Mashable’s Choice: Digg
People’s Choice: Trailfire
Hot for 2007: Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Blinklist

Sports and Fitness
Mashable’s Choice: FanNation
People’s Choice: Takkle
Hot for 2007: SportsVite, Ultrafan

Photo Sharing
Mashable’s Choice: Flickr
People’s Choice: Twango
Hot for 2007: Zooomr, Webshots, ImageShack, Tabblo, Pickle, BubbleShare

Video Sharing
Mashable’s Choice: YouTube
People’s Choice: Gotuit
Hot for 2007: Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, vSocial, StupidVideos, Blip.tv, iFilm, Eyespot

Startpages
Mashable’s Choice: Netvibes
People’s Choice: Pageflakes
Hot for 2007: YourMinis, Protopage, Webwag

Places and Events
Mashable’s Choice: Yelp
People’s Choice: CollegeTonight
Hot for 2007: MingleNow, HeyLetsGo, Planypus, ILCU (and others)

Music
Mashable’s Choice: Last.fm
People’s Choice: ReverbNation, MOG
Hot for 2007: Pandora, YourSpins, Rapspace, ProjectOpus, iLike, Splice, MusicHawk and More

Social Shopping
Mashable’s Choice: Etsy
People’s Choice: ThisNext
Hot for 2007: Crowdstorm, Kaboodle, ShopWiki, StyleFeeder

Mobile
Mashable’s Choice: Twitter
People’s Choice: Wadja
Hot for 2007: Friendstribe, JuiceCaster, Zingku, Moblabber, Zemble, Veeker, Treemo

Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks
Mashable’s Choice: Flixster
People’s Choice: Dogster, LibraryThing
Hot for 2007: SneakerPlay, MothersClick, Motortopia, Minti, ComicSpace, Curbly, MyChurch, Ziki, VeryLiberating, ITtoolbox, Fanpop, ShareYourLook, FamilyThrive, Blubrry, innerTee, Listal, ConnectingMoms, FirstGiving, RealityAllStarz, CafeMom, BeGreen, AdFemme, Dianovo, eLifeList, CampusBug, SnehaH, HumanOpinion, MerchantCircle, Barrio305, GenevaOnline, MDJunction

I like the look and feel of the site and the logo. Also that they’ve got a limited number of skins to choose from for the profile pages, which means you can actually read all pages (as opposed to MySpace where you’d think some of the users are first time internet users, combining bright background photos with text in almost the same colours).
So far the community seems to be comprised mostly of cool twenty-somethings, many of them band members.
Update: A somewhat sloppy reading of the conditions on which you sign up for a beta profile on my part resulted in some fairly detailed descriptions of some of Trig’s features. I’ve removed them and have kept the general impressions in this post.

The site supports video in postings, and according to Ekonominyheterna, the community will have its own tv channel.
There’s not much on Trig that you cannot find on MySpace, but Trig has a nicer look and feel to it. So far, it also has the advantage of small size, but that will change.

At Sime, we got an interesting presentation from Polar Rose CEO Nikolaj Nyholm (seen to the right on the Red Herring cover). What makes Polar Rose different from old school image search engines is that it works from a 3D model of 2D images.
Nyholm showed how you could take a picture of a beautiful woman you found on the net and see if you can map it to photos on online dating services. If you’re out of luck, then you could widen the search and look for other women who look somewhat like her.
To make Polar Rose really useful, you need to download their software. It’s a browser plugin that lets you tag photos on any web site.

Polar Rose founder Jan Erik Solem writes (in the comments):

Look at how visual the web is becoming. Try doing an image search for a person on your preferred search site. What you’ll most likely get is some photos of the person you were looking for and some not even close. Most likely there are even more and better photos out there without labels/text/metatags which you’ll never see. Look at the long tail of web photos (yours and mine) and you’ll see lots of photos that are unsearchable.

So what’s the social media use for Polar Rose’s technology? Well, it provides a tool for connecting photos within and across websites, for grouping photos based on their appearance instead of their context or tagging. You could find out how you are presented on the web in more detail. And, well, the dating site example might be useful for some.

Jonathan at Swedish blog lab:kloud9 writes:

there is a connection here to social media (and possibly the FBI/CIA) and any time we can make the web more sortable, I’m all for it.

Others raise concerns about privacy, like commenter Akaishi on Tech Novelty:

“It occurs to me that this could be used to do things like identify the past lives of witness protection program participants. Are the ethics of it even under consideration?”