eSnips, the sprawling media-sharing platform, just announced the release of music players to post tracks to social networks - these come with a selection of nicely designed skins. Theyre promoting them as a way for independent artists to distribute their music, but no doubt users will want to upload copyrighted music, too. eSnips also announced 12 new music communities - Electronic, Hindi, Reggae, Metal, Gothic/Industrial, Hip-Hop/Rap, Elvis, Jazz, and Blues.
MySpace Retail - Another good reason to open a MySpace store: the latest stats out of Hitwise show that the UK fashion retailer Topshop is driving a noticeable amount of traffic from MySpace. Maybe they should roll out some widgets, too. Yedda Funded - Israeli startup Yedda, which is supposedly building a semantic search engine based on its Yahoo Answers-style Q&A service, has raised $2.5m in a round led by Genesis Partners.
Jaiku, a ?social phonebook? that we previewed back in August 2006, has left beta and launched officially. The Finnish startup provided a service for Nokia S60 phones that did one thing very well - displaying your availability status ("presence") and location to your friends. Think of it as IM presence for your phone. Jaiku also uses BlueTooth to find people nearby and provides a calendar.
This MySpace economy is seemingly limitless. Today it emerged that RedPoint Ventures Associate Fouad ElNaggar is raising funds for Entertonement, a company he founded while he was at UCLA business school. Entertonement is defining an interesting new market: providing free ringtones for MySpacers. Its a great site, and one of the best "YouTube for ringtones" attempts so far.
If youre aged 17-25, Facebook is the place to be. 69% of US females in that age group say Facebook is their favorite site, while 38% favor MySpace and 22% like YouTube best. College-aged guys also prefer Facebook (56%), while YouTube comes in second (19%) and Yahoo is third (17%) - MySpace, meanwhile, is only the sixth most cited site.
Three more social services have been funded and a familiar podcasting company has been acquired today. First up, CD-swapping site LaLa, which seemed a few years late to the game, has raised $5.7 million in Series B funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Ignition Partners. These guys have tried hard to make themselves relevant to the 2.0 crowd, but it just doesnt work for me.
It may be another video-sharing site with an odd name, but Zooppas concept has merit at least. The site, which launched officially today, is a venue for user-generated advertising. The site stages contests sponsored by big name brands, and users upload creative ads for those brands to win prizes. Its a similar idea to Brickfish, another brand promotion site we were contacted about last week.
Will Reuters next venture into social software receive a warmer reception than the opening of an office in Second Life, which some saw as buzzworthy but pointless? Well find out soon, because Reuters has stated its intention to build a financial social network for fund managers, traders and analysts. Theyll start by targeting the 70,000 subscribers to Reuters (financial?) feeds, says the Guardian in a fact-free article, and presumably expand to the wider financial community.
We said this was coming a few weeks ago (see YouTube-BBC), but now the deal is sealed: the BBC is putting some of its content on YouTube. But whats surprising is that the BBC has put some very high quality content out there: this isnt just archival material, but three separate YouTube channels for the BBC, BBC Worldwide and BBC News. The deal is non-exclusive and should run for several years, says the Beeb.
Dada.net, a social network thats seen tremendous growth over the last two months if the traffic graphs are to be believed (seems to resolve to Dada Mobile), just launched a service that pays users a share of the ad revenue. Dada claims to have 7 million users from around the world, although the companys HQ is in Italy. The new feature, Dada Friend$, uses the Google AdSense API we mentioned previously.
GreatGamesExperiment, which launches in public beta today, is a social network for games. The aim, says creator creator Jeff Tunnell, is to provide a hub of great games - just as content producers can upload their clips to YouTube to get more eyeballs, game creators can upload their games to GGE and grow their audience. Great Games Experiment hosts Flash games, old classics and mainstream commercial titles - that means some games can be played on the site, while others cant.
I like Nearbie. Not because its a particularly outstanding new social network - its very similar to many social sites built around people, photos and events - but because it creates a new paradigm for thinking about social networks. Launched officially yesterday, Nearbie allows you and your friends to post events and link them to a place and time. Perhaps you visited Starbucks Fillmore Street in San Francisco yesterday - post about it and share that with your friends and the world.
You gotta love the way founders always say the company is staying independent - and even hoping for an eventual IPO - at a time when tech IPOs are still rare and companies are getting acquired all over the place. Like Bebo CEO Michael Birch, who says in an interview published today that hed turn down a hypothetical YouTube-sized offer from Google if it came along, and instead will set his sights on an eventual IPO.
I dont get it. The NYTimes reports in Saturdays edition on Ciscos purchase of social networking provider FiveAcross, and adds that theyre buying the tattered remains of Tribe.net, the San Francisco-based social network that fell out of favor and was reported to be the subject of an acquisition by NBC - a deal that was never completed. The NYTimes calls the match up of a networking company and a dead community site a "curious pairing", which is understating it a little.
Other startups may betting on one great widget for success, but market leaders RockYou and Slide are diversifying rapidly. Today, for instance, RockYou notified users of the launch of three new features: an animated Flash countdown timer, a corkboard widget (yes, they call it a widget) and the ability to create musical slideshows. The first of the bunch lets users create a Flash countdown timer to a party or event, something thats been popular on MySpace for a while.
Im not hot on downloadable apps. I dont care how great they are: a download just creates a barrier for the user, and its hard to think of many downloads that have taken off in recent years - Skype, StumbleUpon (an extension, so not really a full app, and it took years to get traction) and VideoEggs publisher, perhaps, plus the obvious P2P apps. But it seems to me that those downloads with good web-based alternatives lose out.
Ive really been trying hard to get to grips with these mashup services weve been reviewing lately - Teqlo, Yahoo Pipes et al, but they just seem so high level at the moment. Dapper is among those thats slowly winning me over: it has proven useful for tricky little problems like aggregating social networks, tracking blog stats, aggregating video clips and the like (see the full list).
Weve seen many attempts to bring all your social networking accounts together, and every time Ive tried to argue that there isnt much mainstream demand yet. That said, a super slick implementation that blows away the competition might just win me over. SocialURL, which just appeared on the scene this weekend, is perhaps one of the strongest entrants in this market. It allows you to add your usernames from Bebo, MySpace, Piczo, hi5, Cyworld, LinkedIn, Xuqa and the rest, plus your IM names.
I know were supposed to be respectful of other cultures, but this is abhorrent to me: according to an email we got today, China has blocked LiveJournal to prevent bloggers from giving political commentary. We know this because the block coincides with the National Peoples Congress meeting in Beijing - the site has been blocked since Friday, according to the connectivity testing site GreatFirewallofChina.org.
Patents 2.0 - Two "Web 2.0" developments merged today focused on the patent system. First up, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is piloting a voluntary scheme where companies accept comments and Digg-like voting on their patent applications. Its known that the patent office is both overloaded with work and inexperienced when it comes to the area of software - two factors that have led to ridiculous patents being granted.
We complained in the past that despite streaming 7 minutes of The Simpsons on MySpace, Fox wasnt allowing users to embed the player on their own pages. Likewise, Fox has fenced off all its TV content, putting it at myspace.com/fox and forcing users to download the Fox Full Throttle player to view it (were told the user experience is poor). But now it looks like Fox will tie together the two elements, allowing users to embed Fox shows on their MySpace pages.
Mpire, a deal finding site thats generated a lot of buzz, will announce the launch internette reklam tomorrow of Mpire Labs, a place to develop innovative new ideas similar to the ethos of the YouTube TestTube project (which itself is based on Google Labs). The first public project to be launched by Mpire Labs is Shopwave, a Flash-based tool for browsing items.
You just know the world has gone video mad when dogs get their own YouTube. More specifically, WorldWide Fido, which launched this weekend, is an online video dog show in which owners (or dogs that can work computers) upload clips in various categories, add photos and accept comments and votes. Of course, the dogs have their own profile pages, although theres no external embedding of clips or the ability to submit them to social news sites (must...avoid...Dogg.com...pun).
If were going to slam a company for its terrible code, wed better set the record straight when they make improvements. Today CrickeM, the video site for cricket, will launch with a different name: CricTV. The site itself has also improved: theyve dumped the old code and tried to make the site "more like YouTube, less like MySpace", according to the CEO.
Famster, which aims to be a safer social site for families, is continuing along that path today. The site is due to launch Famster IM, an IM for kids that can be monitored by their parents. Famster IM uses two way buddy approval, chat logging and controlled username creation to keep parents in control of their kids activities. The administrative user on the site (usually a parent) can create usernames, approve or deny buddy requests, activate logging and view logged chats.
Hudson Valley-based PumpAudio is a company Im hearing about more frequently these days - in conjunction with RockYou, for instance. Today the independent music licenser will announce a partnership with Photobucket to provide copyright-cleared, independent music to Photobucket users who create and share remixes of their photos and videos using the Adobe remix technology on Photobucket. Photobucket is licensing hundreds of songs from a catalog of more than 75,000 tracks.
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