Social Networking Your Way to the Bank? Using Myspace, Facebook …
Jun 30, 2008 Social Media, Social Networking, Video, Web
So I thought about it and began to do some research on this whole social networking phenomena.
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Social Networking Your Way to the Bank? Using Myspace, Facebook …
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Tags: auctions, bank, britney-spears, free, jennifer-lopez, jessica, jessica-alba, jessica-simpson, katie-holmes, nicole-richie, social, Video, Web
EMI Music Sues Hi5, VideoEgg and Ten Defendants To Be Named Later
Jun 28, 2008 General
EMI, which is looking less like a music label and more like a lawsuit label, is at it again. This afternoon they filed a lawsuit alleging “massive and blatant” copyright infringement by Hi5, VideoEgg and ten John Doe defendants to be named later. The core of the suit is over copyrighted EMI content that appears on Hi5, particularly music videos.
EMI is a particularly litigious company. In the recent past, they’vd sued or threatened to sue AllofMP3, YouTube, Apple, MP3Tunes, XM Radio, Infospace (can’t really blame them there) and even The Beatles.
One person close to the litigation says that the parties have been negotiating with EMI for well over a year to avoid litigation, but that they were unable to reach agreement. The shakedown attempt before litigation is standard practice these days. But what is a little different here is that EMI is going deep into the supply chain to find other deep pockets.
VideoEgg, for example, provided video functionality to Hi5 in the past, but the deal ended in April 2008, and they no longer work together. The ten John Doe defendants are presumably other service providers, and/or executives of Hi5, VideoEgg and those other companies. The fact that EMI included VideoEgg in the lawsuit shows that they care little about current infringement – they just want a payoff for stuff that happened in the past.
VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez says that they comply with all DMCA takedown demands, but never received one from EMI. VideoEgg also used AudibleMagic , he says, to identify and proactively removed copyrighted material.
The lawsuit complaint, which was filed in New York, is below.
EMI Music v. VideoEgg, Hi5 and others – Get more Legal Forms
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Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed
Jun 28, 2008 General
A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.
Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.
But here’s the problem – Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.
But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature – when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy – Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.
So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.
This message, for example, is one that I would have written to Twitter if the Reply feature was working. Instead I posted it to Friendfeed, and the conversation picked up without a hitch.
If I was Twitter I’d be very worried about Friendfeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter.
Twitter was mentioned on yesterday’s Daily Show (at about the 10:00 mark). Let’s all hope that when we look back, that mention by Jon Stewart didn’t mark Twitter’s peak, just as Friendfeed ascended.
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Whoisi – Community Edited People Profiles and Tracking
Jun 28, 2008 General
Whoisi is a central site that allows users to add people and their associated web feeds, and then track any number of these people and their feed items using a follower model. Whoisi is a side project by open source evangelist and Mozilla contributor Chris Blizzard. Currently it supports feeds from Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa and any Atom or RSS feed. Once you have added a number of people that you follow, it presents their feed activity in a time-based interface similar to FriendFeed and MugShot, making it easy to track a large number of feeds.
In Whoisi, any visitor to the site can define a person or an identity, and add the feeds associated with that person for other users to find and follow. To prevent vandalism, there is a revision history so that changes can be reversed. The database already has a large number of names within it – and when you search for a friend or feed you’d like to follow, if they are not already on the site, you can add or edit their feeds easily. Users do not need to signup for an account with Whoisi, as user data (such as followers) is all session-based using a browser cookie, which means you can’t move your follower list between browsers.
You can edit and customize any persons profile with “aliases” to provide alternate names or groups. What this means is the TechCrunch feed can be tagged “Michael Arrington” or “Mike Arrington.” You can also have a TechCrunch group, so Nik Cubrilovic’s feed could be tagged “techcrunch:nik.” The grouping feature is very simple and it could be developed further by users and used for other purposes.
Whoisi is a very clean site, as there is little on the site except for data. An open API is provided that publishes RSS feeds for each defined user, so that the data can be integrated into other applications.
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Swurl’s Lifecasting Generates Your Blog For You
Jun 28, 2008 General
Everyone likes to share their thoughts and activities with friends and family, but, narcissists aside, most people don’t have time to spend hours each week blogging about their life. Swurl, a new startup that just launched in public beta, is looking to fix this problem.
Swurl is essentially a lifecasting aggregator that pulls your current activity from web services that include Last.fm, Flickr, Amazon, and nearly twenty other sources (you can see the full list here). The site is reminiscent of Tumblr and FriendFeed, automatically adding a new short post whenever you update one of the aforementioned services, and allowing users to comment on each update.
But CEO Ryan Sit says that Swurl isn’t so much about keeping your friends constantly updated on your current activities (Ã la Friendfeed). Instead, Swurl is more like an automatically generated blog and scrapbook that you’ve created for your friends and family. It’s a subtle distinction that may not be not be readily apparent, but it’s safe to say that Swurl isn’t just a FriendFeed clone.
As entries get added to Swurl, the site will automatically detect what kind of content it is and “enhance” it accordingly. If you rent a film from Netflix, Swurl will append a link to the movie’s trailer on YouTube. Photos from Flickr will be shown full size in an automatically generated slideshow. You can use the impressive calendar function to visualize when actions have occurred, and there’s also a nifty “infinite scroll” that eliminates the need for a “previous” button – get to the bottom of the page, and the site will automatically load the next few entries without having to refresh.
One of Swurl’s key (and perhaps misunderstood) features is its ability to pull an entire entry, rather than just a snippit, from the services it supports. If you create a blog post, it will be recreated in its in entirety within Swurl – something that won’t appeal to users looking to monetize their blogs. But for the vast majority of internet users, blogs are about sharing thoughts, not making cash. You’ll need proper credentials to add a blog to Swurl in the first place, so content-creators won’t need to worry about having their material swiped.
Swurl joins a number of competitors in the life and activity streaming spaces, which include FriendFeed and Spokeo. And while it does sport some similarities to these services, the site is well done and stands a fair chance at silencing its critics.
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