social

Kyte.tv launches: live blogging tool meets social network

Kyte.tv is a new service that lets people create their own TV channel. It's a bit of a mashup between a live blogging tool, a social network, and some of the live Internet TV channels we've been seeing lately with Justin.tv, and UStream.tv. Although, instead of strapping a camera to your head, you can use a cell phone.

The mobile client is a small Java application for several Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones that allows Kyte.tv users to upload photos and chat with others in a Kyte.tv channel. The mobile live blogging component is called "Lifecasting" which lets users upload pictures from their camera phone in real time. You can set it to automatically take a picture every few minutes, or every time you click the shutter. Either way, photos will show up on your channel instantly and viewers will get a visual notification that you're "live."

Kyte.tv channel owners can create as many channels as they want and add music, photos, videos, polls and text. A channel consists of a display screen, a playlist, and integrated chat room. Each channel also gets its own custom URL and branding, which is chosen by the channel owner. Alternately, there's embed code to place the entire Kyte.tv experience on a social networking profile or blog post (like we've done after the break).

One thing to note about adding music: you can't upload your own tracks. Instead you have to pick from a small selection of music from indie music service IODA. It's a lot like the music integration you get with Photobucket's video Remix tool.

What Kyte.tv has done really well is the live chat room. While it's lacking admin controls and private conversation options, you're getting the same chat experience on your computer and your phone. It's also really easy to use, as long as you're handy with your phone's keypad.

Kyte.tv is a fun service that opens up a lot of options for live blogging. Like we've seen with Twitter, mobile blogging has exploded with the help of easy-to-use tools that can be used and accessed on multiple platforms. Likewise, live video broadcasting has become something normal people can do with services like Pocketcaster and UStream.tv. Kyte.tv is happy medium between the two.

We'll be broadcasting live at various points during the day, so to visit our Kyte.tv channel, just click the read more link below.… Read more

Mix faster, MixerCast

MixerCast is a new Web based tool for creating sharable slide shows. It pulls media from several different popular Web services like flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and Getty images, and lets users customize the look and feel with basic design templates. The show can then be shared with others through a direct URL or embedded into several social networks.

I've played with a ton of these tools since I started on Webware, but this is one of the few that actually emulates the feel of a desktop application. In this case, it feels a lot like one of Apple's consumer applications from the iLife suite. You can pick various elements to drag and drop into the template, like photos, videos or even a map from Yahoo (which, by the way, I found to be a little buggy).

MixerCast is definitely aimed at the social networking crowd. A few of its themes and templates, including one that's a full-on Pepsi advertisement, forgo a slick, clean look as you can get with a competing, mixed-media sharing tool like SplashCast. It's still really simple to put together a rich slide show, and share it with others, which makes it worth a try.

I've embedded a MixerCast module below, with pictures from last night's Digg 1 million-user celebration here in San Francisco. More screen shots of the user interface are shown after the jump.

See also: RockYou

[via DownloadSquad, via GigaOm]

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BuyYourFriendADrink update: It works!

I'd initially been skeptical about BuyYourFriendADrink.com (BYFAD), the Web site that just opened today (see previous coverage) in which you can remotely order drinks for your friends that they can redeem at participating bars by showing the bartender a code in a text message. It's available at about 40 bars in New York City and the surrounding area, and the company plans to gradually expand to other urban areas over the course of the year.

I'd been pretty confident that the site itself would work, but I hadn't been entirely positive that the bars involved … Read more

Happy hour by SMS, with BuyYourFriendADrink

How many times have you been IMing with a friend or co-worker across the country, placed a bet ("If that Sanjaya guy gets the boot tonight, you owe me a beer!"), completed said bet, but had no immediate way to fulfill it because the other person involved was miles away? Well, now there's a brand-new solution--but just for New Yorkers, for the time being.

BuyYourFriendADrink.com was launched today and announced on the New York edition of e-mail events service Thrillist. BuyYourFriendADrink, or BYFAD, is a way to purchase libations for your friends online, which they can … Read more

StumbleUpon launching site-specific Stumbling

This is weird. Last night it occurred to me that Webware should have a StumbleUpon-like feature: In other words, that there should be a button on the site that links to a random Webware review--because if you don't come to the site frequently, a write-up on a cool site we saw a month ago might be valuable to you, even if it isn't, strictly speaking, new. I also began to wonder if it wouldn't make sense for many other sites, especially blogs, to add a random-link feature to their front pages.

Then this morning I read (… Read more

Yoono jumps into group-annotation fray

Yoono is soon to release a new annotation tool for their recommendation-and-bookmarking service. Called Buzz It, the new functionality will be part of Yoono's installable toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Buzz It closely rivals the usefulness and functionality of Clipmarks, and Grouptivity--giving users a way to archive and share content they find on the Web. The company was showing it off in the exhibition floor at this week's Web 2.0 Expo.

Clicking the new Buzz It button displays a dialogue box that lets you pull in various pieces of media, from whichever page you're viewing, into what Yoono calls a "memo." You can share each memo with others either by posting the memo to your blog or by sending it via e-mail. If you don't already have a blog, Yoono provides all its users with their own pages, complete with an RSS feed, to keep track of all bookmarked and noted items

Users also get a contextual menu option on any Web page to add a link or entire story to one of their memos. This eliminates the need to use bookmarkets or the Yoono toolbar itself.

This new feature reminds me a lot of Grouptivity, which I looked at yesterday. What Yoono has done very well, however, is to give people the option to bookmark several items at once and send those all in a single e-mail. I was pleased to find that instead of having to dig up e-mail addresses, Yoono had integrated Plaxo-like functionality to let you grab your contact lists from a number of e-mail providers. There's also a neat "save to my computer" option, which will export your selections into an HTML file you can open in any browser.

There are a ton of these personal annotation and recommendation tools cropping up, including del.icio.us', StumbleUpon,, and share2me, to name a few. While it's unfair to say there can only be one, Yoono's effort is very user friendly. To get notified of the public launch of the Buzz It-enabled Yoono, there's a sign-up on Yoono's blog.

More shots after the jump.

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Hands-on with MySpace News: Far from a Digg killer

The much-anticipated Digg-like news service from MySpace launched early this morning. The front page combines popular stories from the service's 24 categories and a user-democratized voting system for promotion and demotion. Stories are pulled from various sources by using technology from Newroo, an aggregation service MySpace acquired last year.

The voting system isn't based on simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, as on Digg, Netscape, and Reddit. Instead, MySpace News uses a five-star rating system, with "loved it" and "hated it" on opposite ends of the spectrum.

MySpace News also features a local events section for 12 major cities. We tried out the San Francisco page, and there were a number of events listed, but no dates or locations for them, just small text summaries.

Any time you click on a story, MySpace will redirect you to the site where the story resides, and add a small navigation pane to bring you back to MySpace (like Netscape did when it launched its community news site). The navigation pane has a rating tool, a listing of three related stories, and a link to the story's URL to send to friends. Interestingly enough, MySpace will take over the site's URL and give it a news.myspace.com designation, so if you send that link to friends, the MySpace News branding will come with it. Very sneaky.

Tuite a few things are missing from MySpace News. The first is integration with MySpace proper. There's no way to show which stories you've been rating (or reading) on your MySpace profile. Likewise, you can't see what your friends have been up to, something that is critical for a social network. There's also no way to submit stories. According to the FAQ, this will be added later down the road. For now, stories are fed to the service from blogs or Web sites and put into a pool to be picked up by users. Finally, there's no way to discuss stories that are on the service.

In other words, almost all the features that make Digg worth coming back to are missing from MySpace News. While the service will likely flourish because of its built-in user base of MySpace millions, it hasn't been built from the start to let its users take the reins beyond just clicking buttons. It's a very thin social news experience.

For more screenshots, keep reading.

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Grouptivity pulls social bookmarking card

Grouptivity launched an updated version of its content-sharing tool on Monday. Blog posters can now add a "discuss this" button on the bottom of any post, which will pull up the Grouptivity sharing dialogue to send off the post or article to others. This dialogue allows you to pick from various pieces of media (photos and videos) that you want to share, along with a full text copy of the content. There's also the option to send it off to multiple e-mail addresses, set up read confirmations, and author explanatory messages to your recipients.

If you've … Read more

Piczo goes multilingual

Piczo, which is a San Francisco-based social networking site for teens that touts extensive, parent-friendly safety features, has started to reach beyond the U.S. and U.K. The company announced an initiative to expand into other countries by introducing international versions of the site, and today, Piczo announced the first phase of this expansion: into Germany, France, and Spain. There are already sizeable chunks of Piczo's 25-million-member base from those three countries, according to an official release (including 1.2 million in Germany), but now they'll be able to opt into using the service in their home … Read more