If you think a new web app comes out nearly every day, you’d be partly right - it’s actually closer to about five per day. Google has popularized the practice of crowd-sourcing product development by releasing “beta” versions of unfinished products into the world for its customers to play with.  I admit to being a bit of a beta geek; the lure of being the first kid on the block to know about the coolest new web toy is irresistible to a futurist who loves to see around the corner to the future.  There are thousands of betas in the marketplace, which made finding a handful of them to feature for this week’s Friday Five more than a little difficult.  That said, here are five products in beta that we think are worth keeping an eye on.

Grand Central

Grand Central seeks to solve an increasing problem in the mobile age - converging multiple points of contact into one. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  The service provides a single number tied not to a phone or location, but to you.  According to the website, with GrandCentral “you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, as well as check messages by phone, email or online.”

(Thomas Friedman’s talk at Pop!Tech, subtitled in Kiswahili)

dotSUB

dotSUB is quietly staging a revolution on the web. Its mission:  to make online video content accessible to the millions of non-English speakers by offering open-source translation services. The idea is deceptively simple: think YouTube meets Wikipedia: users can upload videos, films (even TV programs) for either the rest of the world or dotSUB’s team to translate. Translation services are either “closed” (utilizing dotSUB’s team of freelancers) or “open” (posting a video on the site and letting volunteers translate it for free, wiki-style).  For a great example of the service in action, check out Pop!Tech speaker talks (called Pop!Casts) which are translated via dotSUB into nine languages.   

MetaNotes

MetaNotes is “social graph paper” on which users can paste stickynotes containing text, images, videos, and widgets, creating scrapbooks to track and remember any topic.  It won the top “Experimental” website at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Awards last week, the category which tracks “cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web.” While it still has a ways to go (i.e., it really needs private spaces for users to post notes); MetaNotes’ intuitive interface is familiar and user-friendly. And: it plays well with others, integrating with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Pownce, and Photobucket.

Google’s Experimental Search

Courtesy of the brainiacs at Google Labs comes the Experimental Search project which offers new visualizations of search results including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, G-Tech (the ambiguous but patent-pending-sounding term for “Google Technology”) extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view results in multiple dimensions. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB)

Aptly named, the Museum of Modern Betas is the go-to place to check out and track web apps that are in beta.  In fact, we think it should be called the Motherload of Modern Betas - since it opened in two years ago its listed over 4000 sites that are in beta, helpfully organizing them into categories such as Top 100, Most Anticipated, Recently Added and by Language.  The large number of sites it tracks makes getting in-depth information about each one difficult, but active links are provided.  The MoMB is a like a giant playground for the future of the web, perfect for those who don’t want to wait for the new ‘new thing’ to arrive.

P.S. - Last but not least, here’s a bonus track: keep Wello Horld on your watch list; it’s still in alpha and very hush-hush, but I want to go on record as being (one of) the first to say “I told you so!” when it launches.  

P.S.S. - If you’re wondering why I didn’t include PMOG as a beta to watch, stay tuned.  It’s so cool it deserves it’s own blog post.

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Who says we live in a loveless society?

In a day and age when the term “customer service” is at best an oxymoron the love fest continues at Digg, where users have rallied around founder Kevin Rose for his refusal to remove posts containing the worse-kept-secret code on the Internet.

“I support Kevin Rose and Digg” continues to be a top-rated story at Digg.com, the community news sharing site that has been the buzz of the blogosphere all week. For those just tuning into the story, here’s the cliff notes version to date:

In February a hacker named arnezami cracked the AACS, an encryption technology used to restrict access to and copying of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. Arnezami posted the so-called “processing code” (09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 - just in case anyone is interested) on an Internet bulletin board.

From there, the code started to spread around the web, to blogs and tech forums as well as mainstream media like Wired. Sniffing out lawsuits in the making, last month lawyers for the AACS-LA, a consortium that includes Disney, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Sony and others, began sending out cease-and-desist letters, claiming web pages carrying the code violated intellectual property rights under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Interestingly, the campaign to remove the code from circulation went largely unchallenged: Wikipedia duly complied, removing entries containing the code and restricting users’ ability to recreate pages. Digg fell in line too; acting on the advice of its lawyers it removed submissions about the code from its database earlier this week.

And that’s when things started to get interesting.

Digg users revolted. The removals were seen by many as caving into corporate interests and an assault on their right of free speech. In response, they flooded Digg with stories about or including the code, swamping the site’s main page for most of Tuesday. By the end of the day, founder Kevin Rose had a change of heart, posting this message to users:

“… after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

There area couple of interesting aspects of this story.

First, the obvious: the Digg maelstrom highlights the raging war on digital rights management (DRM). The story about the AACS being cracked wasn’t just reblogged; the code itself has been posted on every corner of cyberspace, making the blogosphere a giant collective accomplice and a 32-digit string of code a manifesto for the future of copyright and IP.

This is also a great example about the social life of ideas - that is, how ideas emerge and migrate throughout social spaces. Consider how fast the story spread: when the story broke on May 1, Technorati was listing slightly less than 300 blog posts where the code had been mentioned; the next day that number had jumped to over 800; today it’s above 1600. On Monday, April 30, Google search results for the code returned 1000 hits; by the end of the week it was over 1 million.?

The story was front-page news in the New York Times on Thursday and yesterday Alexa Internet reported that web traffic from the last week had propelled Digg into the world’s top 40 most-visited websites.?

Finally, in less than three days a DRM technology has transmogrified into an icon of social media expressed as music (viewed 181,000 times on youtube), fashion, a saleable “product” (up for bid on ebay).

But wildfires breakout in the blogosphere all the time. The question is: why was Digg the tipping point?

One reason is that Digg and other social media companies (youtube, del.icio.us, etc.) are built on “user-generated content” (UCG). In this business model customers are no longer at the end of the supply chain, they ARE the supply chain: they’re designers, producers and marketers all in one.?

By removing posts Digg managed to piss off both their customers and their suppliers at the same time.

It’s no surprise that Digg users feel they own the content - they do. The upside is companies like Digg inspire passionate users with a sense of brand loyalty that any Fortune 100 company could only dream of (anyone seen an “I (heart) Jeff Immelt” t-shirt lately?).

The open question is: what does this foretell about the emerging ethos of social media companies and their leaders? At the end of the day will Kevin Rose be seen as a sacrificial lamb or a soldier of Internet fortune??

Stay tuned: it looks like this mini-series is just getting started.