Betaworks, a type of incubator program based in New York, has just released the public beta of a simply integrated chat tool for site owners, called Firefly. The simplicity comes by way of no download requirements for end users. If they happen to be on a Firefly-enabled site, then they can start the chat option and just start typing. Click anywhere on the webpage and you can type there. The result is a collaborative pop-up chat conversation that can get pretty overwhelming if there are too many people chatting at once.

There is color differentiation for different chat users, so you can better follow any conversations that are going on, but if you’d like to make yourself stand out, there is the ability to choose an avatar or upload an existing avatar from another website. There’s also Twitter integration, so if you’d like your chat comments to become part of your Twitter stream, Firefly has included the ability to sync the two accounts. For Firefly chatters that are more apt to hold conversations on multiple Firefly-enabled sites, the Twitter integration is probably an attractive option.

When you’re chatting with multiple people at one time, a chat history is absolutely vital. There are two ways in which to access a Firefly chat history–on the current website where the Firefly menu shows the progression of the ongoing chat (think a video-player time bar), and on Firefly’s site where the full chat history is archived.

Though the interaction for Firefly chats are rather limited and the shelf life of any shared content here is short-lived, the basic offerings for fleeting conversations that Firefly allows can be fun and entertaining. Given Firefly’s current support for things like semi-customization and Twitter integration, it’s also clear that the company is thinking of practical ways in which users can leverage their participation in a given conversation, moving beyond the mere act of chatting online.

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Squarespace, the Web publishing platform that offers a variety of tools from design templates to hosting and data reporting, is launching Squarespace V5 today, with a handful of new customization options and partnerships with Oracle and Peer1 to offer extended features to its customers.

As a publishing platform, Squarespace is also looking to change the very concepts surrounding website publishing, hoping to allow users to create sites with a process that’s more aligned with the human thought process, which, according to Squarespace, is semi-structured publishing. That allows a great deal of room for customization, merging many of the existing models already in use by other website publishing tools such as WYSIWYG editors and template designs with the structured back-end CMS for building a fully functional website.

Squarespace V5 expands on the custom options made available through the company’s fluid approach to website creation, with a live editing interface, pluggable features that work for all aspects of Squarespace’s site building, including search and data collection. There are more than 60 new style templates to choose from, all of which are fully customizable by users.

A couple of new partnerships grant back-end grid architecture powered by Oracle Coherence and hosted by Peer1 Network for improved support for a wider variety of sites, regardless of size. To see how Squarespace can be implemented, you can check out the video here, or stick around for Kevin Rose’s announcement in the coming hours, as his diggnation show on Revision3 will be taking advantage of Squarespace’s site creation capabilities.

The aim with Squarespace’s tools are to offer a platform for simplified design options that are available to all user types, despite technical knowledge. As platforms such as Squarespace and Secondbrain create a more accessible process for site creation, the need for easy, all-inclusive services are being met with continued development coming from the platform space.

Everything from advertising and analytics to redistribution and application creation will eventually become part of this one-stop shop concept that these services are approaching, targeting those website publishers that don’t have a strong technical background but would still like highly customizable and easily implemented options for their online presence.

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Bizak is a new analytics tool that’s hoping to bring in some practical features to its approach towards startups. With bizak, you can calculate how well your business will do based on its existing status, along with the comps of other businesses in the related industry. This is a service geared towards the web 2.0 startup crowd, so bizak can’t be applied to any business out there.

But in looking at what your competitors do, along with the market trends, bizak is hoping it can provide you and the investor community with the necessary tools for making the right decisions when it comes to startups.

Now, Mark has warned us to stop saying that we’re in a recession, but the market’s slowed growth certainly has a few people worried. Even if you’re not worried, having a web-based analytics tool do some of the work for you is usually a helpful thing to have in your corner. Not enough businessmen keep tabs on what their competitors are doing in their respective industries, despite services like Compete that aim to provide the tools necessary for doing so. Calculating things like valuation aims to take things a step further, however.

Bizak isn’t the first to tackle this–a handful of other startups like Frogpond offer similar communities where users can both network and gain perspective based on comparative analysis of businesses. And as with Compete, Alexa and other stat providers, there will undoubtedly be discrepancies amongst the multiple services, based on their own independent algorithms and qualifications for things like measurable benchmarks.

As such services improve, we’ll likely seem them being included in certain other services similar to Vator.tv and other communities where entrepreneurs and investors are likely to meet for a broader look at what’s going on in the space.

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uvLayer’s video application, built on Adobe AIR, launched a couple of months ago as a downloadable application for viewing and organizing video content according to your personal preferences. Even though this looks really cool, I was concerned about uvLayer’s two-step download process, as well as it’s lack of accessibility as a web-based tool.

uvLayer is looking to solve this with the release of a web-based application, which has the same fluid (relatively) interface and overall feel of the downloadable application. This should help uvLayer aooeal to more users that would like to utilize the service’s video aggregation and organization tool. But is that enough?

There are a number of video aggregation tools, and the majority of them have a head start on uvLayer, as well as interactive social sharing tools and recommendations in terms of search and discovery for users to find more media to consume. uvLayer is making steps to address the social sharing aspect by adding integrating with IM clients including AIM and GTalk, as well as applications for existing social networks like Facebook (which uvLayer already supported).

We were already aware of uvLayer’s plans for layering in support and integration with other social services, which wil be an important step for uvLayer’s hopes for expansion. An ability to further leverage one’s friends on AIM or Facebook will allow uvLayer’s recommendations, which involve te ability to see what their friends are watching in real time, an opportunity to grow much faster than it would have otherwise. I’m still waiting to see how uvLayer will turn this into recommendations and additional search metadata, but uvLayer is getting on the right track.

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UnLtdWorld is a newly launched social networking tool that takes a very direct approach to crowdsourcing, for the provision of resources amongst users. If you think of many niche sites out there, a good number of them will have a resources section where users and visitors can find other websites or physical locations for furthering their interest in that particular niche. Think of UnLtdWorld as an entire network built around that resources section.

The purpose of this site is to provide people with the information they need in order to make a larger social impact, namely in the real world. Going to the site, however, doesn’t make you painfully aware that you’re on a site geared for activism. Instead, your network is merely a giant directory of resources. Know of a good organization that helps with fund raising? Or a venue where parties can meet for an event? Add it to your own network. If you need any resources, search others’ accounts for them.

Of course, the most important aspects of UnLtdWorld are its search and organization capabilities. UnLtdWorld addresses this by allowing users to create groups, which is a natural format for organizing information for a given topic or cause. User profiles are another way in which information is organized, so you can see data pertaining to the various interests that users have indicated on their profile page. Pretty much every word on UnLtdWorld is a link that pulls up search results or additional information for that given keyword.

Another interesting aspect of UnLtdWorld is yet another way in which action-oriented features are prominent on the site. The Lab is a platform that allows you to gather some basic stats for whatever you may need. It’s an open platform, so the data displayed here can be used by other members. If you need demographics on age and gender for a particular area in order to backup claims to support your cause, you can head over to the Lab. This is somewhat similar to Avanoo, but in a more directly integrated manner.

The biggest hurdle I see for UnLtdWorld is the fact that it’s heavily reliant on its users to input a great deal of information–much more so than what you’d find on a typical social networking site. To aid in the overall process, some external search tools for finding addresses, maps and images would trim down the minimum amount of time users would need to spend inputting data, and other automated processes that integrate with third-party services (Yahoo Groups Import) to this end would probably be a great encouragement for users.

But the one thing I was hugely surprised by is UnLtdWorld’s walled garden approach to accessing all the data its users are inputting. There’s no way to search the site for information unless you’ve registered as a member. Most people that see UnLtdWorld or hear about its underlying concepts would assume that UnLtdWorld is really a user-generated search engine of sorts, where information is gathered around particular topics, causes and events. But its search capabilities are severely limited if its data is closed off from the rest of the world.

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Vocal Nation is a personalized feed reader that we mentioned a few months back in our Mashable list featuring online political resources. As a dual-purposed site for aggregating news and discussing various topics, Vocal Nation is now launching the second version of its site, with a focus on its newly implemented voting system.

In an effort to differentiate itself from Digg, Digg clones and the Digg voting system all together, Vocal Nation’s new feature helps set it apart in two primary ways: an automated submission process and a sliding scale used for voting. While the slider isn’t as straight forward as a thumbs up/down approach to voting, it nevertheless aims to bring a more complex approach to community feedback.

The automated submission process is actually an extension of Voting Nation’s feed reader, and probably looks to minimize the amount of self-promotion available for individuals on the site. There’s also a manual submission option, which would be for the creation of an article directly within Vocal Nation’s site, similar to creating a blog post. Feeds and users each get their own profile pages, which can be helpful for filtering options and recommendations, though I imagine that recommendations will eventually become a promoted and somewhat automated process on Vocal Nation as well.

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SocialPicks just got funded not too long ago, indicating the general acceptance of social stock. To push that acceptance further, SocialPicks has partnered up with Reuters to launch an online social network for investors. The new joint network is called Stock Buzz, and it is a place for users to share ideas, exchange market research, and track investment performance against others within the community, just like SocialPicks.

There are a few sections featured on Stock Buzz, like the Top Picks, Rock Star Investors, a section for Q&A and another for listing additionally interesting stocks for other users to take advantage of. So it appears that in SocialPicks’ attempt to gain market share in its own right, it’s branching out a bit beyond the typical reigns of social stock online communities.

For the traditional media end, a number of companies have invested time, energy and money into their own online resource hubs for stocks, even purchasing them to add into their portfolio of web properties. Few have launched their own branded community, however. And considering Reuters’ recent plan for building out its online presence, which was highlighted with CNN’s decision to no longer distribute content from Reuters. Since then, Reuters has launched a video search tool with facial recognition, as well as signed on Attributor to protect its content.

Is this a good direction for Reuters, or a shot in the dark? The demographics for Reuters and stock communities are quite similar, so it’s not too far of a stretch in this regards. The community nature of SocialPicks-powered Stock Buzz is an effort to further engage Reuters users, and if Reuters is looking to grow its web presence, engaged users is key.

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Xakasha is a new timeline community that lets you create your events in an easy-to-browse fashion. The service really centers around the visual experience of each added event, along with some basic networking features for connecting with others. What you get is an event timeline that has a hint of blogging tied in. The purpose is to create a visual representation of your life, in chronological order. On the visual end, Xakasha is somewhat like Rememble. From the chronological standpoint of organizing your life’s events, Xakasha is very much like EachDay.

For each event, add in the basic info, like date, title, location, duration, and description. From there you can add images and videos. There are a few different options for adding images: single upload, express upload (multiple images at once–think Facebook-style image uploading), and mobile pix upload. Videos can be imported from YouTube, and support for other video-sharing networks will come later. The fun part comes in when you’ve got multiple events in your account.

These are viewed in a 3D timeline, similar to Space Time, that somewhat mimics a mini desktop, which customizable backgrounds. Use your mouse wheel or the arrows to stream through events, which are depicted mainly my the cover image and the year in which each event occurred. On the networking end, you can view others’ events, comment and rate them, and even adopt them for your own.

While you can add friends and even take an affinity quiz to find your soulmate, the networking features on Xakasha are secondary to the timeline creation, viewing and sharing tool. One thing that makes specific viewing and sharing tool more useful is inclusion of improved search and filtering, especially on a user-to-user basis. To make it easier for users to create timelines, import options from various social networking and media-sharing sites would be helpful as well.

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ClickTale, the analytics tool for measuring your site visitors’ browsing sessions, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from European venture capital firm YL Ventures. We mentioned ClickTale back in August when its service first went live, offering stats on aspects of your website and user behavior that aren’t typically measured.

What you’ll find with these stats from ClickTale are numbers on the length of time visitors spend hovering over a link in comparison to the conversion rate for visitors that click the link. This is the type of data that takes raw numbers and compares it against itself so that you can make deductions about certain aspects of your site. Do you need to change the wording of a link, or perhaps the size? Would an associated image help increase that conversion rate?

All this rolled up into a heat map can give you a pretty good visual on the behavior of your site visitors. And a deeper level of analytics is something that several other companies boast, but few can actually deliver. Nevertheless, specialized and deep analytics are where its at. There are several ways in which detailed data can be used, for a broad range of web users. From business owners needing stats from Google Analytics to AOL’s acquisition of Quigo in part for its analytics tools that can be extended to users. Spotplex is offering analytics tools for bloggers looking to self-promote, while YieldBuild is using analytics to determine the best placement for your site’s ads.

So when it comes to ClickTale continuing to set itself apart (and this goes for the whole of analytics-based services), will it come to a point where the analytics will need to be combined with additional (automated) tools for their clients? As companies roll out ad networks in order to cut out middlemen and retain more revenue, and as content owners and distributors partner for distribution purposes across networks and devices, will the same one-stop-shop approach eventually be extended to analytics? I think, to a certain extent, we’ll see peripheral services very similar to YieldBuild being offered by analytics companies, giving an automated process that acts on the data it’s collecting for you,and from there it will become even more specialized.

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Bebo can’t be the only one having fun with open platforms for developers this week. Some of the first networks that had signed up for Google’s OpenSocial have launched their OpenSocial sandboxes for you to play in.

So add hi5, Ning and Plaxo to your list of OpenSocial-compatible sandboxes, right next to Orkut. We’ve seen the first (buggy) implementation of OpenSocial on Plaxo and hi5, and we were pretty excited when OpenSocial finally opened its doors.

Now, as developers begin to actually build on OpenSocial, what with all the hacks and continued efforts for larger networks (including Netlog, Bebo and Netvibes) to still roll out their own developers’ platforms, we’re anxious to see if the new sandboxes will help or hinder the OpenSocial movement. If you’ve got something to run on multiple websites that are part of OpenSocial, let us know how these sandboxes are working out. Are they rockin’ or barely missing the mark?

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