Oddbark is like craig’s list, with some added bells and whistles. For one, it doesn’t look like the web circa 1937. But more importantly, you can phone in ads. And get txt messages when postings expire.

But that ain’t enough to convince people to move from trusty CL, unfortunately. In New York City, there were only two items for sale on the entire site. Needless to say, if I’m looking to buy or sell, this ain’t gonna be where I look. Sucky. ‘Cause the site’s actually better than Craig’s.

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 Get the Sucky Startups Dashboard Widget Here…

The honor of the suckiest startup of the group, in my oh so humble opinion, goes to Drop Box. First of all, I have to say the ideas from Y Combinator’s demo days seemed more differentiated than TechStars’. I was actually excited about some of the ideas, assuming the execution lives up to the sound clip.But Drop Box is entering an important market that no one gives a crap about and no one spends money on. From MySpace onward (the online storage incarnation of the company)…there are zillions of players that all charge too much for backup. The “Time Machine”esque portions of the service seem cool enough, but I don’t think it’s going to overcome the fact that people ain’t gonna pay. So for that, they get my vote.   

TechStars demo days yielded some decent ideas. I’m not sure that MadKast is one of them (though I heard they were the first to launch). Here’s why I don’t see much of a use…it ain’t all that hard to send a link via email. It would require high penetration for it to become the standard way to share links/blog posts via this widget. But if the existing solution (email) isn’t very broken, I’m not sure what kind of penetration to expect. Furthermore, I don’t see a clear business model.

Maybe I just don’t get it. It wouldn’t be the first time. I tried to put it on this blog, but I don’t think it was working properly.

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TechCrunch says “Texty is a dead simple but useful new internet service that you can use to quickly create and edit content on a web page with zero HTML or programming skills.”

I say that it’s a waste of time. What’s the point?

The way it works is that you write your snippets at texty and then get an embed URL to paste in other webpages. Where ever that embed code is placed, the text (or content) snippet will show up.

Here’s why it’s pointless. If someone has an HTML page, they can just write the content directly in the page a hell of a lot easier than going to texty and then pasting embed code. If they have a blog, they already have WYSIWYG editing. Ditto on social networks.

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It’s a novel concept–renting books online “like NetFlix.”

How much does one pay for the privilege of reading used books with others’ greasy fingerprints?

The cheapest plan starts at $20 per month!!! Hehe…The “recommended best value plan” is $36/month.

BookSwim has stated its goal is to rent 1,000,000 books by 2010! I’ll be very very impressed if they make it with a zero or two chopped off.
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