by Kevin (kevin at urspin dot com) on 03.30.07 at 18:25
Welcome. My name is Kevin Cuxil and I am the CTO of urSpin. I figured the most appropriate first entry should be about why we started urSpin and what we offer to our users.
I'm not all that old, but I'm an octogenarian in "internet years." When I was at UCLA, I remember beta-testing the first version of "bruin online." It was basically eudora and netscape on a floppy disk. At that time, most of the e-mail computer labs had those monitors where all the text was a lovely phosphorescent green and the screen saver was a pattern of ampersands spaced in a way that spelled out "UCLA." Those were the simpler times of "Web 1.0."
For those who remember back to the early days of AOL and Yahoo, there were only a few destinations and, other than forums and chat rooms, you couldn't really post much without knowing HTML. Web 1.0 was structured because everyone went with what they knew. The portals treated it like television, where those who own the content and channels are dominant. To most, at the time, the portals and ISP's were all things to all people.
Then came the internet crash and the transition to Web 2.0. As it turns out, internet isn't like television and people don't like being spoon fed...who would have thought?!! Now, anyone with a computer can have a blog, most reading this probably have at least two email addresses, chances are you have digital photography on the web, and it's pretty likely that you have listened to or downloaded some music through the internet. I love Web 2.0 because anyone can express themselves and, until YouTube, I never knew how many seriously disturbed people were out there.
But, as web 2.0 sites continue to appear, it has become more and more complicated to interact with, let alone organize and actually use. I have photos in Flickr, videos at a couple of sites and more email addresses than any logical human being should even contemplate. And, that's not even the stuff ISP read or use on a daily basis. Web 2.0 is the antithesis of web 1.0 when it comes to content and self expression, but it has grown beyond what is manageable for the average user. So, we've come up with two solutions. Spinlets (spinlets.com) lets users connect and mobilize content outside the confines of a website. urSpin (urspin.com) then lets users customize and control their content, interests, and spinlets.
We have a lot of really great features and announcements about Spinlets and urSpin to come in the next few weeks. But, I want to be clear from the start: you will never see Ad-ware, Spy-ware, or advertising in our Spinlets. We're pretty busy testing and developing right now, but feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions or comments kevin at urspin dot com .
I'm not all that old, but I'm an octogenarian in "internet years." When I was at UCLA, I remember beta-testing the first version of "bruin online." It was basically eudora and netscape on a floppy disk. At that time, most of the e-mail computer labs had those monitors where all the text was a lovely phosphorescent green and the screen saver was a pattern of ampersands spaced in a way that spelled out "UCLA." Those were the simpler times of "Web 1.0."
For those who remember back to the early days of AOL and Yahoo, there were only a few destinations and, other than forums and chat rooms, you couldn't really post much without knowing HTML. Web 1.0 was structured because everyone went with what they knew. The portals treated it like television, where those who own the content and channels are dominant. To most, at the time, the portals and ISP's were all things to all people.
Then came the internet crash and the transition to Web 2.0. As it turns out, internet isn't like television and people don't like being spoon fed...who would have thought?!! Now, anyone with a computer can have a blog, most reading this probably have at least two email addresses, chances are you have digital photography on the web, and it's pretty likely that you have listened to or downloaded some music through the internet. I love Web 2.0 because anyone can express themselves and, until YouTube, I never knew how many seriously disturbed people were out there.
But, as web 2.0 sites continue to appear, it has become more and more complicated to interact with, let alone organize and actually use. I have photos in Flickr, videos at a couple of sites and more email addresses than any logical human being should even contemplate. And, that's not even the stuff ISP read or use on a daily basis. Web 2.0 is the antithesis of web 1.0 when it comes to content and self expression, but it has grown beyond what is manageable for the average user. So, we've come up with two solutions. Spinlets (spinlets.com) lets users connect and mobilize content outside the confines of a website. urSpin (urspin.com) then lets users customize and control their content, interests, and spinlets.
We have a lot of really great features and announcements about Spinlets and urSpin to come in the next few weeks. But, I want to be clear from the start: you will never see Ad-ware, Spy-ware, or advertising in our Spinlets. We're pretty busy testing and developing right now, but feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions or comments kevin at urspin dot com .
