Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a wonderful web application because of your ability to reach potentially millions of individuals easily, but it has become somewhat of a mess lately. A new site that is currently in “Beta” is almost identical to the structure and flow of facebook (you will see what I mean when you start using it), I feel like this new site will became more effective than facebook for socially responsible enterprises to network online. The site is called UnltdWorld. It is essentially a niche version of facebook geared entirely to individuals and organizations that are interested in socially responsible organizations. Hopefully they have learned from the mess that is now my Facebook inbox which I constantly have to hit “Ignore” buttons for application requests about who should sleep with who, and movie quizes, and will really tighten up on what all makes this site effective.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Facebook for its original intent, staying up to date with friends, however I am glad to see smaller niched social networking sites that are learning from the pros and cons of Facebook. Check the site out and be sure to become “friends” with me (http://unltdworld.com/profile/chrisauer/).

Exactly how much time do you spend on the internet that is productive? How much time is wasted? You might be shocked to find out how much of your life is wasted away visiting pointless and useless sites subconciously. I found a cool little web-app that help you track and manage how much time you are spending on the web.

The site is called RescueTime and can be found at: http://www.rescuetime.com.

I installed their little desktop application and started seeing statistics right away about how much time I was chatting on google talk, how much time on linked in I had spent, as well as all the other sites I went to. P.S… if you are paranoid, I wouldn’t bother going to the site. If you are like me and have nothing to hide and can see the benefit of know how you spend your time online, then check it out!

I am going to be doing my own market research for our proposed document/content management wing of Helm Technology Solutions, LLC.  Traditionally (especially a few years back) I would never actually be able to have access to the expensive market reports.  Now, using even just a few online tools, I can essentially perform my own market research without putting too much effort into the whole deal.  Here are a few sites that you can use to perform your practically free market research.

1.   http://www.wufoo.com: Obviously, you need some site to create a form for you to fill out.  Wufoo practices the “do one thing, but do it really well” business model and is the best way to create a survey online that I have seen yet.  They allow you to create a few limited forms, I went ahead and paid the 9 bucks a month to upgrade my account though.  Totally worth it to make sure this little business is around for a little bit.
2. http://www.linkedin.com: We are currently living in the age of social networking online, so obviously number 2 should just be any social networking site that you actively use most.  I choose linkedin here simply because I have done some preliminary searching for my “target market” and know there are quite a few individuals to pull from on this site.
3. http://www.giveanything.com: If you need a little incentive (I am planning on doing this for my market research) to make sure that people feel its worth their time to fill your survey out, you can reward them with a gift certificate from giveanything.com.  They allow you to email gift certificates for hundereds of stores.

Being a geek, I keep up with geek news. I am not interested in only blogging to other geeks so much as I am to other businesses, so I tend to stay away from a lot of really detailed geek-speak.

I have no problem bringing up Web 2.0 though because if you haven’t seen it on a magazine, or at least heard it mentioned when talking about business in the present couple months, then you have been living under a rock. Saving you from all the acronyms and geek talk associated with the inner workings of a “Web 2.0″ project, the simple answer to the question of what puts the 2.0 in Web 2.0 is that it’s the next wave of venture capital being poured into web startups.

See, apparently VC’s didn’t learn from their mistakes the first time. In light of simple sites being sold for billions of dollars, many VC’s are starting to throw obscene amounts of money at rediculously simple concepts in hopes they will be purchased by one of the success stories of the first internet startup waves. The issue that faces the next wave of overly-financed startups however is that most of the players will have a difficult time keeping users around. The ventures being financed don’t seem to have enough substance to be the next Amazon or Google. These sites are often very niched, and simple to operate, but lack the “I can’t remember life without Google” affect that made one company so successful.