B2B Reviews

Original Post  - April 10, 2008

Similar to Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia allows you to save and share bookmarks with friends and colleagues. However, Ma.gnolia takes the social aspect to a new level and has a very easy-to-use intuitive design.

Ma.gnolia is truly a social place to trade bookmarks. You can find, join and start groups with similar interests, which share people, tags, and links. Tagging is an integral part to any social bookmarking site and ma.gnolia integrates tags throughout their website, presented in tag clouds so you can easily see what the group feels is important. Almost every page has a featured linker to provide you with both a new person to link up to and new content to look at. Ma.gnolia makes it very easy to find new people and to see what the community finds interesting.

Original Post  - April 7, 2008

I will be wrapping up the CDN segment today with a look at LimeLight Networks. Limelight’s technology is similar to other CDN’s available on the market. A bit too similar, as they just lost a big

Original Post  - April 1, 2008

In previous posts here and here I have discussed Content Delivery Networks in general. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper.

CacheFly is a price-point based Content Deliver Network provider that has positioned itself as the CDN of first consideration for small businesses and first time adopters. Their business strategy seems to reflect this on their website by openly promoting prices, something few other CDNs do. They seem to have aggressively positioned their services into the larger pool of start-ups, cost conscious companies, and focused industries who need fewer services. This could make them a good partner to consider for a B2B company looking to start out with a CDN.  I have a different opinion, which you can read under ‘Personal Take’.

Original Post  - April 4, 2008

What? Del.icio.us? What kind of url/company name is that? Well, it’s both a company name and a url, and Del.icio.us is one of the more popular social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is sharing of website links publicly or through your network. Del.icio.us and many other services also allow you to tag the link with keywords and a short description or comment. You can decide per link whether it is shared with others and every keyword has a RSS feed tied to it so people can subscribe to your link feed (and to your del.icio.us profile page). Del.icio.us is valuable as a content provider, link network, research tool, and seo tool.

Original Post - April 2, 2008

Pownce, similar to Twitter, allows you to send short messages to your friends or colleagues or to your Pownce profile page. Pownce has additional functionality to send files, links and events. You can also sub-divide your colleage or friends list into different groups to send different things to different groups. However, unlike Twitter, Pownce does not (as of yet) have functionality to update from your phone by text messaging. They do have a bare-bones mobile site which is ok. Pownce also does not integrate into your website or blog to show your “pownces”.

Original Post  - March 27, 2008

Since I’ve seen it covered in the news quite a bit lately, and many other vendors integrate with it, I wanted to do an overview of Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool. According to Wikipedia, micro-blogging is:

Original Post  - March 25, 2008

Do you need a quick and dirty social network right now? CrowdVine offers a free social network with basic features that takes just a couple of minutes to create. CrowdVine’s networks are centered on allowing network members to connect and communicate. Everything on the network exists to facilitate this communication - profiles, comments, blog posts, and profile questions, all of which are featured on the homepage.

Original Post  - Mar 20, 2008

If you want to get a nice snapshot of what search engines really feel about your competitors, SEOQuake will probably give you more information than you can handle. SEOQuake is a free web browser extension for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you can see information on any page you browse to either up in the toolbar or as an overlay at the top of the website in question.

Original Post  - Mar 18, 2008

We’ve been discussing tools to use to find out how your competitors are doing on their websites and how your customers and competitors seem to know so much about your website. Last week we covered one tool for getting information about other websites - Alexa. This week, we’ll take a look at another similar tool - Compete.

Original post  - Mar 13, 2008

You may have run across customers or competitors who claim to know your website traffic or how your site is doing compared to their own. How do they get this information? Typically it is from a service, such as Alexa or Compete (we’ll cover Compete next time).

Original Post  - Mar 6, 2008

Bulletin boards, forums and wikis are a great place for your customers to get support and to form a community, but they are often difficult to use for finding information. Searches or tags that do not have any intelligence about what is truly important make it difficult to filter for relevant information. Your customers are often the most knowledgeable in certain aspects of your products and/or industry. It takes time and effort to create documentation to help and support your customers. Is there a way to tap into the expertise and effort of your customers to allow them to help themselves more effectively than you can?

Original Post  - Feb 12, 2008

eNewsletters and eBlasts are a great way to keep in contact with your customers and potential customers. They offer an easy way to send out news and promotions, although they are best-received if they provide valuable information. The best way to send out and manage these emails is through a vendor. I have been using iCont...

Original Post  - Feb 5, 2008

Community Server by Telligent powers some large communities for NFL, National Geographic Magazine Online, Intel, Microsoft Game Studios, Mazda MX-5, and MySpace forums, among others. Community Server touts ease-of-use and has a community of its own with a documentation wiki and support forum. The software is powered by .NET, which can be downloaded and installed or hosted by Telligent. Standard community fare comes out-of-the-box: blogs, forums, profiles, private messaging, photos and files. Functionality and capabilities can be extended through add-ins and customizations (

Original Post  - Jan 31, 2008

Pluck SiteLife is a hosted social networking application which resides entirely within your website via javascript or API calls. This interesting combination keeps social network members on your website (for brand and traffic) and integrates seemlessly with the rest of your content, allowing use of your own ad servers and analytics programs.

Original Post  - Jan 29, 2008

Small World Labs offers a PHP hosted social network application with custom look & feel and full control over the functionality. Clients include Oracle, American Cancer Society, CMP, Save the Children, Special Olympics (

Original Post  - Jan 24, 2008

Yesterday I took a look at Prospero, which is really more of a community vendor with social networking thrown in as an add-on. They run the community engines for some fairly large sites: Marthastewart.com,

Original Post  - Jan 22, 2008

I had a demo today with a social network vendor: Leverage Software. They offer SAAS (software as a service) hosting to provide community and social networking software for some fairly large websites: InfoWorld,

Original post  - Jan 10, 2008

I’ve been taking a look at social networking sites for the B2B industry. I rediscovered Ning today. When they were first launched they were a free-only service that was geared towards only the consumer Internet audience. Now they’ve added a paid service to remove or run your own ads, increase bandwidth and storage space, and use your own domain name.