Qwerky

Web 2.0 Love Letter

Before the melodrama came the mush. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Web 2.0 Love Letter. A tad late for Valentines, but who cares?

Bandwagon, formerly known as Xacktunes

Bandwagon is up!

From the Flickr of avlack.

Get a free online music backup account for Bandwagon if you blog about it and post the logo before February 22 PST.

Actually, “online music backup” is a loose term since they’re only open to OS X (10.4) + iTunes users, so that’s probably why they dropped the “xack” from Xacktunes (did that make any sense?). I also don’t normally blog about paid products without a free version whatsoever, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up. Plus points for knowing at least one of the developers from college, and even more ’cause it’s Philippine-made. Wink.

The name isn’t so qwerky as it used to be, though. Let’s see… for Xacktunes, the formula is a combination of Bastardized English, Consonant Swap (X for B), and Compounded (Backup + iTunes). Whew, that was a lot. It’s not very often you see qwerky Web 2.0 names with a combination of formulas for its name. But now, it’s just a real word, Bandwagon (Metaphoria, I guess). Too bad! I think a more appropriate name would be a recently featured webapp about music.

I hope they haven’t changed Xackup yet.

IMified

Where IM stands for Instant Messenger. Where, if you haven’t figured that out by now, you probably wouldn’t “get it”.

IMified is actually descriptive of the web service, for a change, but still creates a non-existent name in the process. The proposal: do everything from inside an IM window. Befriend imified and start noting, reminding, todoing, backpacking, basecamping, 30boxing, stikkiting, rememberthemilking, calendaring, or blogging (a choice of T, B, WP, LJ, or MT).

Of course, make sure your messenger isn’t blocked by your company firewall first.

Score 7/52; Formula: Bastardized English; Circle No.: 3, The Pseudo-Abstract

Musicovery

Tune your online radio listening experience with a rainbow of moods and genres. It’s your choice to be positive, energetic, calm, or dark when you flip that virtual switch, or switch that virtual taste. Funky relational map—where that current song playing belongs in the scheme of themes—included. Play around and explore it for more Musicoveries.

Score 5/52; Formula: Bastardized English, Compounded; Circle No.: 3, The Pseudo-Abstract; Plus Points For: Qwerky colors; Minus Points For: Flash Player dependencies

Zillow

The word Zillow doesn’t exactly convey images of dream houses and land parcels, but at least they made sure they had an explanation for it. Now how tricky should virtual buying and selling of real estate should be? The Z-language ought to help, so they say. And while not as cushy as the letter P, it’s enough to start the PZillow Talk (need a dictionary?).

They’re cray-Z about you. After all, using your name as a verb in true Google fashion is a positive sign of Web 2.0 greatness, right? Next to mentioning it in the same breath as Google, that is.

But does everybody agree that you, dear Z, the be-all and end-all of real estate on the web? Z careful, verbing your noun isn’t always a good thing.

Score 6/51; Formula: Bastardized English, Consonant Swap, Metaphoria (”Zillow” evolved from the desire to make zillions of data points for homes accessible to everyone. But a home is about more than data - it is where you lay your head to rest at night, like a pillow. »); Circle No.: 2, The Metaphor;