Now several tech startups are trying to increase the odds of connection.

How? By combining intimate knowledge of your comings and goings with understanding of your likes and dislikes – then connecting you with likeminded people and perfect places.

What do they ask in return? For most, an opportunity to push hyper-specific ads or discount offers.

Living in the City

It’s no surprise that New York – densely packed with adventurous souls and endless options – breeds companies trying to connect people and places. “It is about the end experience of being at that bar with your friends and having a good time,” said Dorrie Monglick, one of the young entrepreneurs who debuted at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on the Hudson River last week.

The app Monglick described, SpotOn (currently iPhone-only), was developed at an NYU entrepreneurship class last spring. It works by sucking in location checkins from Foursquare to see where you’ve been (Facebook is coming later). You can rate these venues by clicking up to four petals on a flower (in place of star ratings). Knowing what you like, SpotOn can offer deals, a la Groupon, but tailored to you. It can also take a cut on purchases of event tickets or restaurant reservations, for example.

Your friends see those ratings, and you see theirs. “These are my friends,” said Monglick. “These are not Yelp reviewers that I don’t care about.”

In the future, she said, SpotOn will also simplify group outings – if everyone has the app or at least an active checkin lifestyle. Knowing places each person likes, SpotOn can find those that they have in common, or that are at least likely to please.

What to do?

San Francisco startup Weotta (think “we should”) is entirely for coordinating outings.

After talking to “hundreds of friends and friends of friends,” said co-founder Forrest Wernick, “from their 20s to their 60s, men, women, single, married,” they found two questions common to outings.

The first, “What’s my mood?”, could for example be classy or causal. The second, “Who’s coming with me?” could be a date or a family, both of which I tried for New York City.

For a classy date, it recommended (among others) a singer named Keren Ann at the Bowery Ballroom. I don’t know her, but the clip they sent me to on LastFM was nice. They also recommended two great places for dinner and drinks – except both are actually restaurants.

One of the causal family plans was the Children’s Museum of the Arts, plus lunch and ice cream – except the lunch spot is actually a sweet shop. So not perfect, but not terrible for a service that just started.

For now, all this happens on a Web site, though an app is coming. According to Weotta’s surveys, most people make plans while sitting at work.

To find good venues, Weotta polls review sites like Zagat and OpenTable. According to the company, it can actually “read” the reviews to pick up nuances. To find venues especially for you, it looks at Facebook data such as age, gender and interests. They hope all that info will help in providing discounts and other offers that are likely to please.

Be my friend?

A mobile app called Sonar promises to find new friends for these activities.

Like the others, Sonar mines info posted to social networks, including Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter – looking at both concrete facts, like where you go and who your friends are, as well as analyzing what you say about any topic. Later, said founder Brett Martin, it could pull such info as music tastes from Pandora, food tastes from Foodspotting, and the events selected on ticketing site Eventbrite.

Combine all that with location data, and you could know that next to you is a friend of a friend on Facebook, a history buff, a foodie or anything else that may jibe with your life and personality.

One good thing about Sonar, Martin says, is that other people don’t have to use it in order to be found. It doesn’t rely on what they post to Sonar, but what they post publicly to any of several online networks.

So you could walk up to someone and excitedly introduce yourself, saying you live in the same neighborhood or eat at the same restaurant. And you’ll scare the bejeezus out of them as a likely stalker.

Perhaps better to keep it on the downlow and pretend you just happened to meet them. Even if technology can ensure that serendipity is no longer mere chance, you might want to act as if it were.

[Sean Captain is a strategist for consumer insights firm Iconoculture.]

I have memories from my days as a worker bee of having no idea how to find or get into services such as ADP’s online portal (shown above). And of discovering that the person who’d set us up with a particular service had left the company before anyone remembered to ask him or her about how to administer it. As a lover of Web services, it’s heartening to see them matter enough that outfits such as VMware are turning their attention to them.

Voyurl is a web service that obliterates the conventions of privacy on the Internet. Once you’ve signed up for the service and installed an extension in Firefox, Chrome or Safari, it tracks your every move and automatically posts your history on the web. You’re free to look at the browsing history of all users in one giant timeline, and you can follow specific users as well.

Yes, there are privacy safeguards. At any time, you can shut the extension off, stream your history anonymously or just share links on a site-by-site basis. But the main idea behind Voyurl is that there’s nothing wrong with sharing your activity on the Internet or snooping on the activity of others. (Voyurl’s motto: “It’s okay to look.”)

When I signed up for Voyurl, I figured that being watched would influence my behavior. But as the day wore on, I was surprised by how quickly I’d forgotten all about it. Every once in a while, I’d remember that my entire browsing history was in public view, and I’d scramble to my Voyurl home page to see if any of my links were interesting, embarrassing or just revealing. So far, my timeline is mundane; you can get a sense of what stories I’m writing by looking at the clusters of links, but you won’t find any blackmail fodder — at least, I don’t think.

Likewise, I found the general stream of Voyurl user activity to be pretty dull. It’s like an RSS reader with only minimal curation — you can filter out specific topics — or like StumbleUpon without the social feedback. Of course, right now it’s all early tech adopters, so they’re basically looking at the same websites that I am.

The real value of Voyurl would be in getting your friends to sign up and seeing what they do, and therein lies the service’s biggest challenge. After Voyurl’s founder, Adam Leibsohn, sent me an invite, I passed it along to some of my close friends. Only one of them took the offer, and he shut the service off after visiting a dozen websites. A lot of people are uncomfortable about sharing what they do on the Internet, even if they’re not doing anything wrong, so I can’t help thinking that Voyurl works better as an artistic statement about Internet privacy — tracking cookies and social networks have basically ruined the idea — than an actual service.

That said, Leibsohn set up a landing page for Technologizer readers to try the service while it’s in private beta. You can do so here.

I’ve been playing around with Drund in a closed beta for the last couple of months. Starting today, Drund will allow up to 10,000 new users to sign up without an invitation.

Drund is a website that looks kind of like Microsoft Windows. There’s a desktop with icons for favorite apps and a start button on the bottom of the screen with even more apps and operating system functions, such as a file browser and settings. But unlike Windows, Drund stores nothing locally. Instead of a photos folder, there’s Flickr. Instead of Microsoft Office, there’s a suite of online productivity apps from Zoho. For entertainment, there’s an app that pulls in video from Hulu, Netflix and Amazon.

In a way, it all sounds kind of like Chrome OS, Google’s forthcoming attempt at a web-based operating system, but Drund is different because everything is self contained in a single browser window. The apps are specially-created representations of other web services, made to run in an operating system within an operating system. You could even run Drund within Chrome OS, as you could within a browser on any PC.

The question is, why would you?

During my time with the closed beta, I’ve struggled to answer that question. I like the idea of having a single browser window with widgets for my favorite sites, such as Gmail, Twitter and Facebook, but Drund’s adaptations of those sites aren’t as fully-featured as the originals. In Gmail, for instance, there are no custom labels or threaded conversations, and Facebook’s app is unable to access Groups or Places. There’s no way Drund can keep up with these services as they become richer in features.

What I like about Drund is how it feels like an operating system. This could just be my conditioning as a long-time Windows user, but the idea of a desktop — a virtual space that exists beyond an array of browser tabs — is something I’d have a tough time letting go of with Chrome OS. Drund’s own online storage solution also seems like a fitting replacement for a local hard drive. (I wish it worked a little better. Zoho’s office apps, for example, don’t include a way to import images from Drund’s storage drive or from other apps such as Flickr.)

But as someone who’s happy with Windows 7 and comfortable with existing web apps, I don’t really have a need for Drund’s web-based OS. The whole thing feels more like a neat proof-of-concept than a product that’s ready for consumers. Perhaps that’s why, in an interview, Drund founder Lee Yi spoke of seeking investments from a “strategic partner.” More than a pile of cash, Drund desperately needs developers to build new apps and to flesh out the existing ones. Of course, that’s what every new operating system needs.

If Drund can find a way to build on its concept and make its apps more useful, it may actually go somewhere. I’d love to have a web service that pulled up dozens of my favorite apps in a single window. For now, Drund is just kind of fun to look at.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is reporting on the site’s revamped version. It’s shifted the emphasis from decisions to recommendations, and is now focused on using the profile it builds about you from your answers to those silly little questions to suggest books, movies, TV shows, travel destinations, and other things you might like.

Here are some of Hunch’s “personalized recommendations” for me:

Hmmm…

• I’ve been to Italy, New York, London, and Tokyo already and enjoyed them all, but they’re five of the most generic suggestions possible. And I live a few yards from San Francisco–I guess you could make the case either that it’s a lousy vacation destination for me or one of the best of all. But in either case, it’s safe to assume that I already know about it.
• It’s possible that some of the credit cards Hunch recommends for me are good options, but probably not the Citi MmtvU Platinum Select Visa Card for College Students. As far as I can tell, Hunch doesn’t know whether I’m a student or not, so I’m not sure why it’s on the list.
• I suspect I’m not alone in being well-acquainted with pizza, lasagna, fruit salad, hamburgers, and baked potatoes and already knowing what I think about them.

In other words, Hunch doesn’t seem to know enough about me to make recommendations that are truly personal. I’m sure that the problem is in part that I haven’t answered enough questions for Hunch to have deep insight into what makes me tick. So I’ve been busy answering more questions. Such as:

I’m sure that as I answer more questions, Hunch will give me smarter advice. But I can’t help but think that the service could give me better advice about travel destinations, credit cards, and dinner ideas if it simply asked me questions about those topics. (Hunch’s initial version let users create decision trees that asked straightforward questions, and while that feature is still there, it’s been deemphasized.)

In general, Hunch has a high cutey-cute factor. Without using the service much, I’ve earned 2,326 banjos. Which is wonderful news. But I have no idea what a banjo is or how they help me, or why some banjos look like light bulbs and apples…

I still like the idea of Hunch and many things about its user interface. I think I’ll answer a bunch more questions and see if I get recommendations that make sense and tell me something I didn’t already know. And if you try out the service, I’d love to know what you think.

This is the umpteenth thing I’ve written about Google’s Gears technology, which enables offline use of Web-based services. It’s also quite possibly the last time I’ll ever mention it.

As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler noticed over the weekend, Google is officially saying that it makes more sense to focus on giving the upcoming HTML5 spec Gears-like capabilities than to continue with Gears itself. It plans no new features for the plug-in, and is ending support for the OS Snow Leopard version altogether. The moves end any remaining chances Gears had of becoming a big deal.

When Gears was announced almost three years ago, I was positively giddy over its possibilities. But the story of Gears turned out to be one of a nifty idea that never lived up to its potential.

What happened? Back in 2007, I assumed that Gears would get robust support in an array of Google services, inspiring other developers to follow Google’s lead. But the company never quite hopped all the way onto its own bandwagon: The offline version of Gmail is pretty impressive, but Google didn’t build a completely Gears-enabled version of Google Docs, useful though one would have been.

Google never worked that hard to sell Gears to users and developers, either. The Gears site does a lousy job of explaining why you’d want to install the plug-in (“Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop…”). As far I can tell, it never attempted to keep track of Gears-enabled services, short though that list would have been. The official blog had a grand total of one post in 2009. Even now, after Google has said that Gears is dead on the Mac and in near-limbo on Windows, the “What is the status of Gears?” section of the official FAQ talks about it being a beta that will lead to a final release.

At this point, Google’s shift to HTML5 makes sense. But by the time HTML5 offline features are a reality in every major browser, we may not need them much. Between EVDO, Wi-Fi, and in-flight Internet access, it’s now rare for me to sit in front of a computer that isn’t connected to the Internet. (I’m still disconnected on some domestic flights, all international flights, and chunks of visits outside the U.S. when I’m too cheap to pay for pricey wireless access–but ask me again in 2012 or so.)

Bottom line: Gears was a great idea in 2007, but it was always one with an expiration date. Its highest-potential years are already over.

The rest of this post is a sort of wake for Gears, in the form of extracts from most of the stuff I wrote about the technology–for PC World, Slate, and Technologizer. Note that my tone shifts from excitement to caution to quiet despair…

June 7th, 2007: Google Gears in Action

Remember the Milk’s offline mode has whetted my appetite for more offline stuff in online apps. Thanks to Gears, I suspect we’ll see a lot of it–surely Google itself is working furiously on offline capabilities for Gmail and Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

June 15th, 2007: Gears of War

Given time, the developers behind RTM and Google Reader should be able to re-create more of the services’ goodness in offline mode. Realistically, though, you can’t completely decouple a great Web-based application from the Web. Flickr is Flickr because it contains petabytes of photos by millions of photographers; Netvibes is Netvibes because it’s constantly grabbing content from other sites. Net-less versions of these services would have to downsize their ambitions. Even so, if there were an offline edition of Flickr that, say, allowed me to manage only the pictures on my home network, I’d grab it in a heartbeat.

April 6th, 2008: The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears

If Google Gears is a bandwagon…it’s one that almost nobody–including the proprietors of most of Google’s own services–has jumped on yet..

July 17th, 2009: The Ongoing Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears

Gears is now more than two years old, and the list of services that support it remains remarkably short. Actually, I’m not sure if there is an official list of Gears-friendly services: Google’s Gears site refers to a “select group” of services, but doesn’t mention them. In this case, “select” is presumably a synonym for “short.” The Wikipedia page for Gears mentions fifteen Gears-enabled services, six of which are from Google itself. For the most part, they don’t replicate all their Web functionality within an offline browser–even Gmail, which may have the neatest Gears implementation to date, offers a reduced set of features.

November 30th, 2009: Goodbye, Google Gears (Sniff!)

Of course, Google has been dropping loud hints that Gears was a goner for awhile now. Apple’s Snow Leopard OS has been out for three months now, but as Milian notes, the standalone version of Gears for use with Firefox and Safari still doesn’t work in it. When I go to the Gears site on my Snow Leopard MacBook Pro, I don’t even get an acknowledgement that there’s a compatibility issue–the “Install Now” button just isn’t there.

December 8th, 2009: Offline Gmail Leaves Labs…But Doesn’t Arrive in Snow Leopard

I was hoping that Google’s announcement of offline Gmail’s formal debut would clarify the status of Gears in general and Gears on Snow Leopard in particular, ideally with an “Offline Gmail doesn’t work on Snow Leopard, but we’re working on it,” or at least with a “Sorry, Snow Leopard users, offline Gmail doesn’t work with your OS.” But nope–Snow Leopard isn’t mentioned.

Like I said back in November: Sniff.

Anil:

And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.

Like Anil, I’ll be delighted if Wave proves that my skepticism was misplaced. Right now, though, it does feel like a mishmosh of multiple interesting ideas, implemented on an epic scale. And most new things that have caught on on the Web (including Web sites themselves) started out simple, even if they eventually grew powerful and complex….

thisMoment is about sharing moments in time–events from your life that may have just happened, or happened a long time ago, or even be in the future. It lets you do so by uploading photos and videos, grabbing photos and videos you’ve posted elsewhere (such as on Flickr or YouTube), grabbing other people’s photos and videos, and introducing everything with your comments. You can specify the time when they took place, their location, and even how they made you feel. And you can make them public, share them only with friends, or even keep them to yourself.

Moments can be on any imaginable topic:

And are presented in a sideways-scrolling format with a timeline navigator that lets you view all moments created by a particular person in the sequence they happened:

As you’d expect, you can comment on moments and “Like” them:

(The abundance of stuff to do leads to an interface that’s…well, tall: I had to scroll down quite a bit before I found all of thisMoment’s features.)

Vince told me that he initially thought that most moments would be quite personal and shared only with a user’s friends and family, but so far about 75 percent are public. It looks like it could be a nifty way to record a not-so-private event–like a party, for instance–with an a set of features that’s richer than what you’d get at a pure photo-sharing site like Flickr.

One of the best things about thisMoment is that it doesn’t force you to sign up for yet another social network: It uses Facebook Connect, so you can sign in with your Facebook ID, and there’s a Facebook app that lets you create and view moments without leaving Facebook. (You can also embed moments on blogs, and an iPhone app is on its way.)

thisMoment is free–did I really have to mention that? It plans to make money through content deals (there are already moments from Road & Track, and People.com and other sites will build services on the thisMoment platform). Context-sensitive advertising will come along later.

I ran across a hiccup or two while using thisMoment–when I tried to import my Gmail clients, Google gave me a warning and a cryptic error message, but it seemed to work. And like I said, there’s a lot to discover; it’s pretty dense with functionality. Overall, though it’s promising. If Twitter is about moments so fleeting that most aren’t even worth thinking about an hour or two after they happened, thisMoment is about recording the ones you and other folks will want to remember months, years, and decades from now. It’s a basically good idea, and as far as I know, nobody’s tackled the challenge before.

These were the analyses bestowed upon this blog when I punched the URL into Typealyzer, a free Web tool that reads the text of a blog (though any page will do, really) and determines a personality to match. Apparently, we’re “The Guardians.”

“The Guardians are often happy working in highly structured work environments where everyone knows the rules of the job,” the description reads in part. It also says we “listen to hard facts” (good, as far as journalism goes) and “can have a hard time accepting new or innovative ways of doing things.” For a tech blog? Yikes.

Typealyzer was created by Mattias Östmar of the Swedish media analysis R&D group PRFekt. An article in BusinessWeek says his site uses word frequency analysis to come up with a blog’s personality type, based on the Myers-Briggs model.  Östmar’s goal, according to the site’s manifesto, is to “learn more about what motivates and gives us a sense of meaning on a psychological level.” Aside from learning about each other, Östmar hopes providers of goods and services can better reach their audiences.

I’m not thrilled with the analysis we got, so I plugged my personal blog into Typealyzer, and I’m apparently one of “The Thinkers.” Can’t argue with that. Ed Oswald, judging from his blog, is a “Mechanic.”

And Harry? For some reason, typing in HarryMcCracken.com, no joke, confuses the algorithm. “The only supported languages are English and Swedish,” it says. Sorry boss! (Okay, it’s because the URL redirects to another address. He’s actually a “Doer.”)

For this story–which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose “Whatever Became of…?” books I loved as a kid–I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant–if “extant” means that they remain for sale, in one way or another–and didn’t address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

If you’re like me, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that some products are still with us at all–and will be saddened by the fates of others. Hey, they may all be inanimate objects, but they meant a lot to some of us back in the day.

Click on to continue–or, if you’re in a hurry, use the links below to skip ahead to a particular section.

Hardware Holdouts
More Hardware Holdouts
Software Survivors
Sites, Services, and Stores

Hardware Holdouts

Dot-Matrix Printers

What they were: The printer you probably owned if you had a PC in the home from the late 1970s until the early-to-mid-1990s. Models like the Epson FX-80 and Panasonic KX-P1124 were noisy and slow, and the best output they could muster was the optimistically-named “near letter quality.” But they were affordable, versatile, and built like tanks.

What happened: Beginning in the early 1990s, inkjet printers from HP, Epson, and Canon started to get pretty good–their output came far closer to rivaling that of a laser printer than dot-matrix ever could. And then, in the mid-1990s, they added something that killed the mass-market dot-matrix printer almost instantly: really good color. (I still remember having my socks knocked off by the original Epson Stylus Color when I saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1994.) There was simply no comparison between even the best dot-matrix printer and a color inkjet.

Current whereabouts: Nobody ever thinks about dot-matrix printers anymore, but they haven’t gone away–my local Office Depot still stocks them, in fact. That’s because they have at least two valuable features that inkjet and laser models can’t match: The fact that the dot-matrix printhead hits the paper with a hard whack means they’re perfect for printing multiple-part forms, and their use of tractor-feed mechanisms rather than dinky trays lets them print thousands of pages without a paper refill. Consequently, small businesses everywhere refuse to give them up. It won’t startle me if there are still Epsons productively hammering out invoices and receipts a couple of decades from now, assuming we still use paper at all.

Hayes Modems

What they were: Dial-up modems from the company whose founder, Dennis Hayes, essentially invented the PC modem in the 1970s. The commands he devised became such a standard that all dial-up modems use them to this day. Hayes dominated the modem business for years–it was as synonymous with the product category it pioneered as any tech company before or since.

What happened: Well, dial-up modems don’t matter as much as they once did, in case you hadn’t noticed. But Hayes’ decline and fall dates to well before the death of dial-up: The company stubbornly kept prices high even in the face of much cheaper competition, and thought its future lay in making ISDN modems, a market that never took off. It declared bankruptcy in 1994 and again in 1998, and was liquidated in 1999.

Current whereabouts: In 1999, Zoom Telephonics–the company whose dirt-cheap modems played a major role in crushing Hayes–bought the Hayes name. It continues to market a few Hayes-branded modems. But it’s a pretty obscure fate for a once-mighty brand–I didn’t know it was still extant at all until I checked.

MiniDisc

What it was: Sony’s format for pint-sized recordable audio discs, introduced in 1992. The idea was that it combined the best qualities of compact discs and cassette tapes into one high-quality, portable package that could contain up to eighty minutes of music.

What happened: MiniDisc found some fans–it was popular in Asia, and among musicians. But it never gained much support from the music industry, so few prerecorded albums were available. And within a few years of its introduction, it found itself competing with digital downloads–and while Sony introduced NetMD, a MiniDisc variant that supported MP3, it made it remarkably unappealing by adding copy protection to your tracks as you transferred them to disc. Why would you choose NetMD when a multitude of players, such as those from Diamond and Creative, let MP3s be MP3s? Good question!

Current whereabouts: In 2004, Sony upgraded the MiniDisc format with Hi-MD, a higher-capacity, more flexible standard that was backwards compatible with MiniDiscs. It garnered some admiration among audiophiles for the high quality of its recording capabilities. But as of 2009, only one Hi-MD device remains in Sony’s lineup, the MZ-M200. It’s aimed at musicians and journalists who need to make recordings on the go. The moment it disappears, we can officially declare MiniDisc dead.

Monochrome Displays

What they were: The black-and-white CRT that most businesses and many homes used with computers from the 1970s through the late 1980s–and they worked just fine, since most DOS applications made little use of color, and early Macs didn’t support it at all.

What happened: Graphical user interfaces, multimedia, and games all made universal use of color inevitable, but it took a long time before it truly conquered computing. Well into the 1990s, lots of folks who wouldn’t dream of using a black-and-white display with a desktop PC still toted monochrome notebooks. But today, even a $200 netbook has a perfectly respectable color display.

Current whereabouts: You don’t want a monochrome display. But if you did, you wouldn’t have trouble finding one–even Dell still stocks them. They’re still out there in large quantities, being used for electronic cash registers and other unglamorous but important text-based applications. And hey, monochrome is making its own unexpected sort of comeback: My brand-new Kindle 2 e-book reader has an e-ink screen that does sixteen shades of gray, and nothing else.

Hercules

What it was: An extremely popular line of graphics cards for IBM PCs and compatibles. Hercules first appeared in 1982, the year after the IBM PC was launched, and was known for its high-quality text; it was as synonymous with graphics in the 1980s as Creative’s Sound Blaster was with audio a decade later.

What happened: When fancy color graphics replaced spartan text displays, Hercules continued to be a prominent brand for years, though it never dominated as it did in the early years. But in 1998, it was bought out by competitor ELSA, which then went bankrupt and sold the Hercules brand to French tech company Guillemot. (Researching this article, I’ve come to the conclusion that one sale or merger is usually bad news for a venerable brand, and a second one is usually near-fatal.) Guillemot continued to make cards under the Hercules name for several years. But industry consolidation in the graphics biz was ongoing and brutal, and in 2004 it ceased production of them.

Current whereabouts: The Hercules name lives on, but on an array of tech gadgets that doesn’t include graphics cards: Guillemot uses it for notebooks, Wi-Fi and powerline networking gear, sound cards, speakers, iPod accessories, laptop bags, and more. I wish them luck. But it’s a little as if McDonalds stopped selling burgers to concentrate on tuna salad, Philly cheese steaks, BLTs, and Reubens.