Yes, I know. The NYC January Tech Meetup was like two weeks ago. Our retreat distracted me from writing this post, but there were a few cool things that were previewed that I want to share:
(1) Platial: "the people's atlas." Interesting social mapping tool that has some powerful APIs/hooks into popular blogging platforms. They've even opened it up with a roll-your-own Mapkit package. This sort of geo-location stuff is going to be, in my opinion, pretty important in 2007 and 2008. Interesting social maps already created, including this one to New Jersey's best hotdogs. Yeah, kind of cheesy right now, but I think this tool has interesting social organizing implications. However, I don't see any organizations/companies using it (just individuals)--yet. This is likely to get even hotter once GPS-enabled cell phones integrate with this service (coming soon, I'm sure). Interesting note: I heard at the Meetup that it's partially funded by Kleiner Perkins.
(2) Daylife: setting aside Michael Arrington's not-so-nice post about this website, the power of this website is (like Platial, above) in the visualization tools/hooks for (news) information. I think of it like a RSS feed for specific news content, but on steroids. For now, at least; it has the opportunity to become a better interface mashup of technorati and google (maybe). For example, the Huffington Post site's Newsranker service is powered by Daylife. I think this is a cool tool, and I heard from at the Meetup that what we're seeing is only the first 5% of what's planned, so I'm excited to see more.
(3) ChangingthePresent: a great idea; it's essentially a taxonomy-based portal for charitable giving. The premise seems to be, "I'd like to give $x small dollar gift to some worthy group, but I can't decide to whom." Changingthepresent.org helps you decide. I think the site isn't that user-friendly yet--it can use some additional design work, but it's a powerful idea whose time has come. Someone asked me today why I think they have a chance against something like actblue; my response is that (a) this isn't about politics, it's about charitable giving in general and (b) according to the founder, Robert Tolmach, they have a board of like 170 advisors from major non profit groups, including folks like Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club.
