Inner8 is a recently launched social-stock picking service. CEO Doug Doyle says the company’s mission is to provide an online alternative to the traditional investment advisor, who, he says, typically underperforms the market at large. Obviously, that’s never been more true than in recent days, making Doyle’s goal to, “steal share from the advice industry,” quite modest. If, that is, there remains any industry to steal share from.

Inner8 is indeed a good source of investment ideas, but it’s no replacement for an advisor. It’s too technical and too involved. You can’t just put your money in its hands and walk away. Not that you should do that with an advisor, either, but if the goal is to provide users with the same appearance of full-service management that they get with personal advisors, Inner8 is a failure.

This investor, whose investing style is a 99 percent match with mine, is only 25 percent accurate in his predictions. Maybe I need to take advice from people with different mindsets.

But it is a solid stock community, and worth exploring by anyone who is fed up with either advisors or with the current tools for selecting investments, and who realizes that they would do well to spend some time with their money if they want it to work for them.

The site has two main feature areas. First, it’s a social stock site. You tell the service what your investing profile is like (though a questionnaire) and it will find other users who are similar to you. Then you can see what they’re recommending. You can also have it select the users who are the most unlike you, if you’re looking for a fresh perspective.

Second, it’s a prediction market. But its mechanics are greatly simplified from most other prediction markets, where you wager fake money on real outcomes and where the best performers are the ones who have won most of these virtual bucks. In Inner8, you select a stock, and then, from a slider, predict the price of it one month out. The system tracks your performance and calculates your accuracy score over time. Doyle says it’s a better system than the standard social stock site method of rating users’ portfolios based on ROI, since those can be heavily skewed by hail-Mary investments that happen to strike it big. I agree in principle, although I do like to take advice from investors with skin in the game, and Inner8 doesn’t yet connect to real portfolios at all.

Inner8 is well structured, although too technical and complex for the intended audience, in my opinion. Still, if it collects a solid community of users it will reward them with good advice. People who have money in the market have a responsibility to that money to play a more active role in its management than the advice community encourages, so Doyle struck a chord with me when he said, “It genuinely pisses us off, the good money that people are spending on financial advice. And it’s not helping.” To that end, Inner8 is a good service for the times.

The product will be pitched at the Finovate conference about online financial tools in New York next week. It should be a rockin’ good time. A paid version with additional features (I’m predicting portfolio tracking and real-time stock data) is scheduled for 90 days from now.

There is useful and interesting data on the Inner8 stock pages.

See also: The mob is my broker: Cake launching crowdsourced stock fund.

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Here we go again. A new company, Reframe It, is launching its Web markup product on Wednesday. Like ThirdVoice and Stickis before it, Reframe It lets you highlight a piece of a Web page, comment on it, and discuss those comments with other visitors to the site.

I found using the service a good community experience, although I believe the concept is dated. For one, nearly all sites now have their own communities and discussion threads, and adding another discussion system could actually splinter a community instead of drawing it together. Furthermore, Reframe It currently works primarily through a browser plug-in (on Firefox and Internet Explorer). Betting on software to carry community is a long shot.

On this New Yorker article, the user highlighted text (in yellow, left) and then commented on that clip in the Reframe It sidebar at right.

The company, though, is actually oriented around making that software dependency into a strength. CEO Bobby Fishkin wrote to me, “Within mass communities we can let members discuss the news as a community, filter for only comments by members, improve fund-raising by helping improve engagement, and drive traffic for these nonprofits with free branded groups.” By which I think he means that he envisions Reframe It being used sort of like a tour bus for the Web, in which groups can see everything out there, but stick together nonetheless.

The service also integrates with other social networks, Fishkin says, so when you’re trolling the Web with Reframe It active you can easily filter out comments from people outside your circle.

All well and good, but I stand by my assertion that the technology has no hope for widespread adoption as a standalone browser extension. To be fair, the company has a widgetized version of the product that publishers can add to their sites. This lets visitors to the site flag items on pages and chat about them. They can’t, though, just go to any site on the Web and have the same experience, as they can if they have the extension. But the tool for publishers is Reframe It’s best avenue for success, even though it competes with other native comment systems (the ones you get on any blogging platform) as well as third-party comment products like Disqus. Alternatively, I could see this concept getting necessary traction, even as an extension, if it was very closely married to an existing social-network platform like Facebook. Reframe It needs a viral distribution push that I don’t think it will get otherwise.

See also: GooseGrade lets readers copyedit your blog.

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The TimesPeople toolbar shows the latest activity in your social circle.

(Credit: NYTimes.com)

The New York Times has started rolling out TimesPeople, a sharing-and-recommending tool that the publication first announced earlier this year. It’s essentially an extension of the free user accounts that are already required to read the Times‘ Web site: You can now build up a friends list, recommend stories to people you know, and see what they’ve been recommending or commenting on.

In other words, it’s a social news feed for Times readers. You can also sync it up with your Facebook account to push your feed–stories you’ve commented on or recommended–to your profile on the social network.

We first reported on the debut of TimesPeople in June, when it was still being tested as a Firefox plugin. Now it’s been fully worked into the NYTimes.com site with no download required.

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In this screenshot from Facetime, clicking the link for a photo album could get your computer infected.

(Credit: Facetime)

In yet another new way to infect people, criminal hackers are using a Twitter page, according to one security researcher.

In a blog, Chris Boyd, director of malware research for Facetime, explained how a Twitter page is being used to lure victims. To lend credibility to his discovery, the Twitter page lists 17 followers, however each appeared to be fraudulent. Boyd said Twitter had been notified.

The messages, written in Portuguese, attempt to get visitors to download a photo album. In order to view the album, you’ll need to download a Flash update, which is really the infection files themselves. Boyd and his team have identified the infection as Orkon.

Once installed, the infected files do various things to the compromised desktop, such as attempt to gain your Orkut account log-in information, or displaying a browser image of a man identifying himself as the “Trickster.”

Orkut has been targeted in the past. Here, the infection itself is not so interesting, as is use of Twitter as a vector. Boyd recommends that even if you don’t use Orkut, if you see a Twitter page referencing an Orkut photo album, stay away.

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Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunctMuxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.

The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they’re visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a little extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.

Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you’ve put in the addresses there are quick links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don’t know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it’s in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly quickly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he’s hoping to build an iPhone application that makes use of the device’s GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.

Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he’s got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.

Compiled here is a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Each one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Magnolia’s Larry Halff (right) and Citizen Agency’s Tara Hunt announce plans to open up the social-bookmarking service in the coming months. To see the whole presentation click the credit link below.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Daniel Terdiman)

On Friday social-bookmarking service Magnolia announced plans to open up its source code to let anyone add its bookmarking functionality to their site or private organization.

To cut through some of the tech talk it’s akin to WordPress.com offering WordPress.org, a downloadable version that can be hosted on the user’s own servers . More importantly, the project should help speed up the development of both the hosted and user-installed iterations of the service by tapping into a community of avid developers.

Some of the things to look forward to in this next version include:

• A new stream view that shows you the freshest bookmarks of people you’re friends with on one single page.
• Support for both OAuth and OpenID, with the latter making it easier for people to sign into hosted builds of Magnolia.
• Sidebar customization
• Theming

The open-source version won’t be available to developers until sometime in September, with a beta version (read: consumer friendly) on track for December and into the first part of 2009. In the meantime, if you’re a developer looking to get your mitts on the code it will be made available here.

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First of all let me just say Web.2.0 and Social Bookmarking are here to stay and there are millions of people using it exclusively to find the information that they want on the internet. The search engines like Google and others, use algorithms to tell you what they think you are looking for. Social Bookmarking is users driven by tagging and pinging by other users like you and me, using Folksonomy methods to organize and categoryse the information in a way that is important to the user. This is one of the reason why it is so satisfying to the searcher, getting a result that a lot of other users have deemed important to the particular tags you are looking for. Not some algorithm version of what the search engines think you are looking for. One of the primary reason people use the internet after all is to find relevant information! This is a very democratic process and eventually a consensus is achieved among users to what is important to particular tags or keywords. So guess what you get as a webmaster using this sort of traffic, super targeted and relevant traffic, is what you get, if you use the right tags of course, and the searcher gets relevant information. A Win Win situation. This has the effect of making the search engines like Google and others, less relevant, and the user of Social Bookmarking websites keep on using them, because they get the relevant information they are looking for.

So how does one get started in social bookmarking! First thing, join web 2.0 communities like Digg PR8, Technorati PR7, De.icio.us PR8, StumbleUpon PR7, Ice Rocket PR7, Fark PR8, Furl PR8, Kaboodle PR 6, Diigo PR 6, Dog Ear PR 4, Clipmark PR5, Squidoo PR5 and many many more, and participate by tagging and voting on information and providing fresh content to be tagged and voted on by other users. These are all web 2.0 websites that you can Piggy Back on to get social bookmarking targeted traffic to your websites. One word of caution to people reading this, one should be careful not to try to game the system or cheat by participating in user groups that vote on each others articles to get better ranking on Web 2.0 website top pages. Digg for one is taking counter measures to deactivate these types of users that have been doing this up to now, and rightly so. You can read more here on my blog http://www.Web20Portals.com if you are interested in finding out more information on Web 2.0 and Social Bookmarking. Well, I hope this answers you questions on Social Bookmarking . Good Luck with your future Social Bookmarking and Web 2.0 endeavors. I am certain they will be well rewarded.

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