26 New Web 2.0 Start-ups – Another Web 2.0 Showcase

Following on from my post earlier this year, 84 Websites You Might Not Have Heard Of, here are another 26 websites you might not have heard of – aka Web 2.0 Showcase 2.0. This time I’ve done round-ups on social recommendation sites, event planning, media sharing, music and health with a couple of social networks and applications thrown in.

Event & party planning

• SetDot – party/event invite tool – it’s in private beta, but you can sign up for an invite. Not had a chance to play properly but first impressions are good – it’s basically a better version evite.com
• Socializr – awful looking ‘event and party sharing’ site… apparently created by the founder of friendster and has had some good press, but it looks like it was designed (I use the term loosly) by a perl hacker.
• Renkoo – cutesy looking event planning with email, IM and SMS integration, which helps you get together with your existing friends – social events where you know who you want to hang out with, but you don’t know when and where. Unfortunately it looks like it was designed for five-year-olds.
• Evite – the ‘original’ event planning and party invite site – and as such it’s a bit more web 1.0 than 2.0… but it’s still more popular than the new up-starts.
• Planyp.us – it’s got the silly name, so plus points there and it definitely looks the part with lots of shiny and rounded corners. It works by notifying your friends by email, sms, rss, or by integrating into your online homepages and calendaring tools, so everyone always knows what’s going on.
• EventWax – more about organising semi-pro events than personal parties – it lets you create e-tickets (free or paid) and manage your attendee list – it’s a kind of CRM for event organisers and works very well indeed.
• UpComing – a community for discovering and sharing events – to find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference. It was bought by Yahoo a couple of a years ago and last week they relaunched a new version with Yahoo integration.
• BestPartyEver – event planning tool with a focus on helping you find ‘party vendors’ – eg venues, DJs, caterers, party supplies and fancy dress – and with a database of 88,000 vendors in the US they should be able to help!

Recommendations – social shopping, recipes, places, etc

• GroupRecipes – a recipe sharing community site, its USP being their “food prediction algorithm” which suggests recipes based on your tastes – a kind of StumbleUpon for recipes.
• TrustedPlaces – a London-centric community for those with or seeking opinions about places – often restaurants, bars, etc.
• TrustedOpinion – shared recommendations from friends on a wide variety of subjects – movies, nightclubs and restaurants for example.
• CrowdStorm – a start-up from the founder of Kelkoo UK, CrowdStorm is a social shopping network that helps you find what to buy by measuring the buzz around products, and by getting recommendations from friends. They define buzz as reflection of the interest the community shows in a product, as determined by the activity (ie recommendations) around that product. And an excuse to get attractive girlies wearing bee costumes…

Media Sharing

• ShareA – a privacy centred online community for sharing photos, blogs, videos etc, securely.
• PikSpot – social media sharing but focused around ‘groups’. Shows how the same tools can power quite different sites (aka groups) eg YouLaf and UndoTV. Unfortunately for you, it’s in private beta.
• Yedda – a questions and answers site, similar to Yahoo Answers, except it apparently personalises topics for you and pro-actively seeks answers.
• DrumTable – aimed at people in their ‘second half of life’ who want to share their life experiences through stories, images and videos. Sounds a bit boring to me.

Health, moms, etc

• RevolutionHealth – AOL founder Steve Case’s health community site. If you’ve ever wondered what a $125m website looks like, this is it… It came out of beta last week with some well made tweaks.
• CafeMom – yet another community for moms… but quite well executed.
• OrganizedWizdom – health-focused social networking site with doctor-reviewed information on 6,5000 subjects supplemented by user-generated ‘wisdomcards’ – inspirational stories, practical health tips and actionable wisdom that usually comes from first-hand experience or deep knowledge of diseases, conditions, medications or health procedures.

Applications

• Twitter – on the one hand, a piece of frivolity for you to update your friends on what you’re doing every 5 minutes – on the other hand, a powerful platform integrating SMS messaging, Instant Messaging , Email and web based updates. Touted as the next flickr.
• FotoWoosh – web based system to convert 2D photos into 3D worlds – looks totally amazing but you have to take their word for it at the moment as it’s in private beta – but check out the video.
• CrazyEgg – website user tracking tool which lets you visualise exactly where people are clicking on your site. Tools like this can be incredibly useful for improving usability and information architecture but used to come at a premium. CrazyEgg is one of many start-ups in the space but is apparently one of the best.

Music

• NoiseTap – a music community owned by TicketMaster, with digg-style voting, the aim being to share the latest news, rumours and opinions.
• iLike – Social Music Discovery, a bit like last.fm, the difference being iLike has an artist community called GarageBand

Social networks

• NurseLinkup – the first of apparently 500 websites that social networking company itLinkz plans to launch, each centred around a certain demographic, profession or interest group.
• UbiPlanet – a social network targeted at those who want to communicate with existing friends rather than the wider web, developed in France but also (mostly) available in English.

If you’d like to keep an eye on all the Web 2.0 startups then check out Go2Web20.net, Dexly.com and Mashable.com – but be warned, there are dozens of new sites launching every day and nearly all of them are worth watching..

More next month!