UPDATE: We have 500 Nostradamical invites for Mashable readers. Visit the site and use the code MASHABLE to get access.

Nostradamical, a UK startup that’s currently in private beta, is ironically a little late with its Ruby on Rails-powered, “crowdsourcing”-inspired predictions site.  And predicting its success depends on the site’s ability to plug into other audiences rapidly.

The short, lazy description: it’s “Digg for predictions.”  The long one, courtesy of the Nostradamical site:

- Use collective intelligence to predict future world events.

- Create your own events. Tag and publish your predictions.

- Create lists that group together predictions under one theme (e.g. My Oscar Predictions).

- Rise through 7 levels of status and gain fame as an ‘Oracle’ of the future. Promote your blog or website.

The essence of that: make a prediction, and watch good predictions rise up as other people vote on their likelihood.  Vote correctly and you earn cred.  

Wisdom of What Now?

Incidentally, this is fundamentally not the way the Wisdom of Crowds works. That theory says that the most accurate prediction is made when users vote independently, without having seen the votes of others.  A Digg-like system, as mentioned many times on Mashable before, creates a herd-like mentality where your opinion is influenced by the people who came before you.  

And Yet, Salvageable

Yes, it’s not novel and it’s not technically a Wisdom of Crowds app as the About page claims.  It has a silly name, too.  But, the Nostradamical team sure as heck knows how to build a Web app, and that’s half the battle.  Everything works, it looks good, and it’s fun to play around with.

The secret, I think, will be to plug into other ecosystems to gain a user-base…blog partnerships ala PollDaddy (a polling company that got a great deal of traction by working with blogs like Mashable), Twitter syndication, Facebook apps, an API and the rest.

The Likely Outcome

Alas, most startups don’t get enough runway to achieve that critical mass and figure out the revenue model later.  No, if Nostradamical is to survive, it’ll likely do so by foregoing the consumer market (or at least treating it as a loss leader) and end up building prediction markets for internal use at companies.

Don’t believe me? Go check up on this 2007 list of 20+ Prediction Markets…where are they now?

If you’re feeling short of funds, get ready to be short of time today, too.

For those who’d like to reserve the same username across multiple sites (and keep it outta the hands of pesky namesquatters) comes UsernameCheck. The pitch: see whether your username is available or taken across 63 web services.

And if you, like me, spot scores of sites where your moniker is still up for grabs, you’ll no doubt feel compelled to fritter away the two-and-a-quarter hours it just took me to “catch ‘em all”. With only 150 of you feeling the same compulsion, we could collectively waste more than 300 hours. (Can I get a “woot”?)

One small insight gleaned from those misspent minutes: signup forms still suck. Most are longer than they need to be, and those sites using OpenID, the unified signup system, actually made the signup process more convoluted than those with standard registration.

OpenID has a long way to go, and you have a long, boring, signup form-filling Saturday afternoon ahead of you. (Sorry.)

LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who has been talking up open social networks in presentations recently, has published a sort of mini-manifesto for portable, open social networking. The problem, he says: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site, but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work….Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. Essentially, he’s saying that you can’t move your friend data from one site to another.

The solution? Non-profit and open source software that collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph. (We recently referred to this as the Open Friends Format). This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users).

Through these APIs, then, a developer could request all your usernames from across the web, request aggregated friend data, filter it, sync friends across your profiles and so on.

When joining a new social network, you’d log in with OpenID (or possibly any existing account) and it would show existing friends who are already on that network, asking whether you want to add them. Users would also be offered management tools for their networks and would be able to import, export and download their data.

Better still, Fitzpatrick has already started to work on some of this stuff, including a Firefox extension and a prototype of the APIs. And recent reports were that Brad was heading to Google to continue the work, presumbly for Google’s SocialStream network.

It’s an idea that has slowly dawned on people over the past year, and open standards are the only way to solve the problem. I doubt that any of the large networks will care much for sharing their valuable user data with others, but there are surely thousands of tiny social sites that will jump at the opportunity. Since the founders of those sites tend to read Mashable, we’ll obviously be covering the space pretty closely. The buzz, however, will likely be among developers, not end users, for the next year or more: educating the average MySpace user on the issue is a little trickier, and may be an insurmountable task.

Check out the comments on this post for a lot of insights from Mashable readers on social graph portability.

Recommended: MySpace News - MySpace Launching News Site

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Ed note: this news was supposed to be embargoed until Monday, but we’re publishing early since others have already done so.

On Monday ClickTale, which provides movies of your visitors’ activity on your website, will open to everyone and launch the “ClickTale Heatmap with Link Analytics”. This new tool gives you extremely detailed insights into exactly what visitors are doing on your site.

As we mentioned when ClickTale “launched” privately back in April, it’s a visual stat tracking service similar to CrazyEgg that began with four heatmaps: attention, total time, visitors (percentage of all visitors that looked at every area), and pageviews (number of pageviews recorded at every area on the page). What’s more, it offers recording and playback of visitor interactions, ala TapeFailure. The multicolored charts let you know what areas were “hot”, in case you should want to reposition your ads or content to take advantage of that.

In addition to all that, Clicktale’s Link Analytics tool will go live on Monday. As the name suggests, this is all about the user’s interaction with the links on your site. A sample of the metrics provided are as follows:

Hovers over Links - counts users hovering over a link. This is particularly useful when lots of people are hovering over a link but deciding not to click.
Hovers to Clicks - a conversion metric. Tells you how many of those “hovers” turn into actual clicks.
Hesitation - the average time between hovering over a link and clicking it.
Time to Click - the average time between the page loading and a user clicking a link.

In short, these are very different metrics from those you tend to get in the standard stat packages. But maybe they need to be: there are so many companies offering web stats these days, while the popular Google Analytics already provides very basic heatmaps, albeit without the new stuff introduced by the startups. For now, we’ll categorize this under “cool”, but give it a few more weeks before we figure out if it’s actually useful.

Screenshots of the new Link Analytics tool are below. The numbers next to the cursor show the metrics mentioned above. Prices range from free to $99/month, depending on how many recordings you want to create.

Recommended: Piczo Layouts at Mashcodes!

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