If Orb 1.0 was Frankenstein, Orb 2.0 is definitely related but prettier and more useful. For the mass-sumer, you may still want to wait for 3.0. As a traveling consultant, I’ve been using Orb for months to remotely access TV shows, mp3s and photos on my home PC. Think of it as a Slingbox for all digital media on your PC and it works as advertised when accessed from another PC. Orb 1.0 mobile access on my 2.5g phone was slowish for photos but uselessish for music and video.
Orb 2.0 was released just yesterday and I was stoked to see improved performance and features. On top of that there was the promise of beating youtube to deliver user-generated content to the phone. Orb delivers on features but the performance is SLUGGISH. I started my test by installing the new Orb client and directing my browser to mycast.orb.com. Upon login I was greeted with a full customizable state of the art AJAX infused RSS reading start page. It kinda felt like I was back in Yourminis world! Maybe Goowy and Orb can merge these into YourGoowyMinisOrbMyCast.com? The name can be worked out later…
Orb differentiates itself from the flock of startpages with the “Home” menu that lies in the top left. This is where Orb ties back into the desktop client the access to photos, videos, music and now documents. Pick the category you want and you are off to see a Windows Explorer-esc interface to all your shared media. Orb adds the ability to download ala Soonr but I see Orb as a media application where Soonr is a business application. You can find your media by searching or sorting a million different ways. So far, very impressive technology but a bit slow.
I took a moment before to install the “Orbthis” browser plugin and Orbthis’d my favorite music video and my favorite sneezing panda. Then I busted out with the hardware. I started with a Nokia E61 on Cingular’s EDGE network. I pecked my way to mycast.orb.com and was greeted with a new mobile interface…a nice improvement. It took me a while scouring through the menus to find my videos and when I attempted to play each, I was asked which of the five video formats I wanted to use. I tried EACH ONE AND NONE WORKED! BOO… I cannot take my youtube videos to go afterall.
Thinking that perhaps it was an issue with the phone (I could not find anything on the orb site indicating a requirement for certain mobile hardware), I brought out the super fast LG CU500 on the fastest 3G connection available this side of the pacific. After the same routine, I was buffering a video…and waiting…and waiting (I do realize that Orb offloads the transcoding to the local PC, but this was a buzzkill). A minute later I saw some dorky LG animation playing with Weird Al music. Audio yes, video no. I gave streaming an mp3 a shot to no avail.
Orb has kicka$$ technology but it isn’t ready for primetime. I am a total geek and I struggled to get results with some of the best hardware available. I will keep slinging my media using Orb but I have to recommend that y’all wait for 3.0 to be a charm, just like with most Microsoft products 
I’m amazed how much time some people I know put into browsing the latest social networks. But when school ends and work begins, priorities change. Young working people are BUSY. We need tools to streamline our online activities so we are not aimlessly bouncing from one myspace profile to the next.
I’ll be honest…I signed up for myspace after much reluctance because I needed an establish an online social identity. Friendster has long ago passed out of favor and Facebook was up until very recently a restricted, college network. I had to sign up for McSocial aka myspace to keep my online life relevant.
Just as fast as I was up and running on myspace with 100+ “friends”, I was working away as a big bad consultant. I spent my days at clients’ offices which means that 1) It’s very risky to go on a social networking site and 2) the client has a firewall that returns the friendly message in size 48 red font when trying to visit any of the social networking flavor of the week sites:
THIS WEBSITE IS BLOCKED (TYPE: DATING)
That meant that all my social networking when at work was reduced to IM conversations with people on “the outside” telling me about pictures, blogs, etc which I would ultimately forget to check when I got home hours later. And if I did remember to check, there are too many people to keep track of!
Enter Spokeo. Spokeo has in a way taken Facebook newsfeeds to a global level. It does not give the minuscule details that Facebook does but it does allow me to get the latest and (maybe not) the greatest going on with many of my friends’ blogs, social identities, pictures, videos and etc. Just like I use my RSS reader to keep track of the overwhelming amount of news, Spokeo keeps track of the overwhelming amount of irrelevant, ridiculous, why do I waste my time of this kinda crap information in “social news”.
So what do I think of Spokeo? I think it is a great idea but it is missing some key pieces.
- Facebook: This network is now open to all and becoming increasingly more relevant. Still my favorite over mycrap…I mean myspace.
- Infinite scrolling: Why do I want to hit next page when I am scrolling through updates? Just like Google Reader has this, Spokeo should too!
- A screencast? This is kinda a new idea and it wouldn’t hurt for a little more hand holding.
- More irrelevant information. While there was an uproar about the newsfeeds on Facebook, I like that it gives me a quick summary of what is going on. Provide this feature across all my networks, blogs, etc.
- Global messaging: Allow me to send and receive all my social networks messages from one location. Don’t ask me how to do this, that’s your problem to figure out!
Spokeo does a lot of things right. It saves time since it aggregates updates on all my online “friends”. It is not yet blocked by the firewall at work. And the search function works much better than the search on Wink
Personally I won’t be using this tool all the time until they add support for Facebook and a bit more granular info about what is going on with my networks but I do think Spokeo is the start of social networking feeds. Keep an eye on this one!
The AJAX start page is old news….pageflakes, netvibes, Google IG, live.com….it’s been done. Yourminis.com is the first Flash startpage I’ve run across and it’s really cool…but I’ll never use it (edit: In the current form).
Yourminis.com (from the Goowy.com team) takes fractionally longer to load in my completely nonscientific method of looking at the counter in Winamp. Once loaded the first thing I noticed was the color and the motion. I feel like I stumped into the state fair after a few drinks. There is a lot going on the here. Just like any startpage, you can add tabs across the top to sort your “minis” which can be picked from the left column.
There are plenty of video minis to feed you the latest from youtube and the likes, as well as rss, webmail, flickr, podcasts and etc. The whole things comes together very well and allows you to view some external content inside the Yourminis site, which isn’t an entirely new thing but a nice implementation regardless.
Overall the whole interface is very fluid, but I just don’t feel “hooked”. Maybe flash is overkill for a startpage or just that I don’t see anything “new” here to take me away from my trusty old AJAX startpage. Call me old fashion, but I need a little foreplay before getting into all the crazy web 2.0 action.
