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Ringback Buddies

(Credit: Verizon Wireless)

If you're not a fan of the preloaded ringtones on your cell phone, Verizon Wireless is providing an alternative way to get more catchy tunes on your mobile. On the eve of CTIA Fall 2008, the carrier announced Ringback Buddies, a Facebook application that lets you browse, purchase, and manage ringtones and "jukeboxes" from the social networking site.

You can install the Ringback Buddies application by searching for the word "ringback" on Facebook, and from there you can do a number of things. First, you can see what songs your friends like or want, purchase them as ringback tones, and then assign them to your friends so they hear the track when they call you. There's also a Top 10 list of popular tones and jukeboxes (a group of tones) that you can preview or buy.

While free to add the app to your Facebook page, individual ringback tones are available from Verizon Wireless for an annual fee of $1.99 while prices vary for premade jukeboxes. In addition, there's a 99-cent monthly subscription for customers using ringback tones.

I'm pretty excited about Vringo's new Facebook app for a number of reasons. First, I'm a big fan of Vringo's video caller ID service, which lets users choose a video ringtone (vringo) that plays on their friends' phone when they initiate a call to said friend. Second, this new app carries Vringo's concept of personalizing the moment of phone-to-phone contact by syncing your address book with your friends' Facebook profile photos.

It takes about 5 minutes and quite a few steps to set up the service, but the directions are clear and fairly straightforward. You download one app to the phone and one to Facebook, and follow instructions to sync the phone contacts list with your Facebook friends list. It's not automatic, however. Vringo's Facebook app produces side-by-side lists of your buddies, which you match together before re-syncing your phone. The next time a friend calls, their Facebook photo blinks on for a long second, and then displays again while you're on the call.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It'd be better if the image stuck around until you answered (maybe it was shy during my tests?), and if the syncing process were streamlined. Vringo's original service still nets higher points for originality and "wow" factor, but Vringo Facebook is a good fast, free way to add a little more life to calls.

Vringo Facebook is in pre-release beta for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones. You can get in line for the invite-only phone download at http://www.vringo.com/AppServer/fb/index.jsp.

>>See all the hot cell phone news from CTIA

The only things you need to send a Facebook photo to any cell phone are 3Guppies' (review) Facebook app and a working U.S. or Canadian phone number. The app does a curious thing, pulling up all the photos in your friends' albums as well as your own. Grabbing the photo previews it in a mobile screen frame, though you needn't worry too much about it fitting--3Guppies Mobile automatically scales photos on the destination phone.

You can crop, title, and tag the image and choose to store a copy in the 3Guppies locker for later reference if you have or sign up for an account. Once the photo has landed on the phone, it can be downloaded or sent on its way to sunnier pastures. 3Guppies has hustled behind the scenes, striking compatibility deals with 28 carriers for 1,200 phones in North America.

MySpace users have a slightly different product, an embeddable photo album widget that's then linked to your phone number. Once associated, photo, video, and text auto-uploads from your phone to the widget, essentially creating a miniature multimedia blogging platform. You can also send MySpace photos to any phone.

Like many of the products showcased at the CTIA Wireless Conference, 3Guppies plans to invite ad support, but that's a good three months out and CEO John Dearborn isn't entirely sure how traditional or creative the ads will end up. They may surface as small banners on a WAP site or as a simple link, or could manifest as more interesting sponsored skins surrounding an activity window.

3Guppies Mobile app sends any friend's Facebook photo to any phone.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Thumbplay, a sales hub for mobile ringtones, videos, and games, will announce tomorrow at the CTIA conference in San Francisco, California, that it has also become a free database for user-generated content.

Account-holders can upload and store media from either their cell phone or computer to their Thumbplay "locker." From there, they can send images and clips to friends via SMS or e-mail. Users can also download content from fellow Thumplay members for free, and grab code to affix the image on any personal Web page that accepts HTML embedding. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a way to assimilate another user's contribution into your personal media gallery. UPDATE: They can, however, be stored in a separate folder for favorites.

Thumbplay will also reveal two upcoming Facebook apps, whose presence will complete the circle of what is essentially a free storage and sharing service with some social networking characteristics.

The first of these is Thumbplay Share, which will display photos from your personal locker and automatically update them when you add a new image to Thumbplay.com. Photo Portal does the reverse, allowing users to send photos from Facebook albums to any cell phone.

The apps won't be publicly available until an unspecified date later this week, though Thumbplay's President and CEO, Are Traasdahl, stopped by CNET's San Francisco office to demonstrate. They look pretty effective so far, but more word on that when I get a chance to try them out in the wild.