TalkingApes

Another MySpace killer? Virb.com could make a strong run

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People are enamored with MySpace.com because it’s a behemoth. The fact is, though, that customizing it is hard, it has limited functionality and it’s owned by FOX (who will undoubtedly commercialize it and take away all the aspects of the site that people like presently).

Enter Virb.com.

Virb is like myspace in that you create an account, blog, upload videos, pictures, etc and connect with your friends. When setting up your profile page, however, they take away all the guesswork by giving either a WYSIWYG interface to change your layout, colors, etc. OR a custom place dedicated for you to input your HTML code to change your layout. They even give you a list of labels to include in your template, so for example, if you want to place a module of your top friends and 5 additional random friends in a div below your blog posts, all you need to do is put in $VIRB_topFriends(+5 Random) and it does that for you. They provide a list of available codes so you don’t have to guess.

If you are a Mr. (or Mrs.) Smartypants, you can even create your own module for inclusion in your pages.

It seems to do everything you’d want MySpace to do, and then some. It seems to be a little stronger in the customization category than Ning.com, which does have some features that I like better than Virb, like the Forum and the RSS integration. However both are more interesting, visually appealing and more user-friendly than MySpace.com.

List of Features from Virb.com:

Follow VIRB° as it continues to grow and new features are added. We’ve got a lot of stuff in the works and of course we can’t tell you EVERYTHING that’s coming, but here’s a glimpse of current and upcoming VIRB° features.

New Stuff

Invite Multiple Friends to a Group Much needed, grow your groups! (3/08)

Embed Your Virb Videos Offsite Widescreen video wherever you want to put it. (3/05)

Coming Soon

Blog Import via RSS feed will save you hours of Copy/Paste.

Expanded Features for Groups …after all Virb is about interaction.

Saving Multiple Profile Styles/Layouts …that last customization was really cool, you might want to use it again.

Not-as-new Stuff

Flickr Photo Feed means that using more than one photo sharing site doesn’t have to be twice as much work.

Multiple Taglines rotated randomly because we know you’ve got more wit than just one line.

Embedding of Approved Media gives you the ability to embed media from trusted sources, starting with Google, YouTube, Vimeo and Odeo.

Top Friends allows you to keep your best friends stuck on your profile… and you can rotate other friends into additional slots randomly.

Save Blog Drafts, then publish them when you’re ready.

Comment Categorization makes it easy to see who’s commented on your profile or media.

Basic Layout Editor gives you the ability to rearrange modules through a drag-and-drop interface.

Batch Edit for Friends allows you to update filters for many friends in one screen.

Announcement Filtering allows you to receive announcements from chosen friends only.

Recent Activity Filtering allows you to be notified of profile updates from chosen friends only.

Tailored Linking between Orgs and Members connects people to the organizations and projects that they’re a part of.

Gradient Removal on Virb Bar increases the flexibility of profile customization. (advanced CSS users only)

Lights Out Button darkens the page while you watch a video.

Remove Customization Button helps you get around messy or ugly profile customization.

Wide-screen Video player adjusts to the dimensions of videos that are uploaded.

VirbTunes for iTunes Tracking shows your friends what music you’ve been listening to and helps you find music.

Recent Activity lets you know when your friends have added new photos, videos or blogs.

Announcements are a quick way of getting a message to all of your friends.

Basic Style Editor is for anyone who isn’t a CSS pro. We like to make things easy!

Advanced HTML/CSS Editing for those of you are the CSS Pros. We like to make things flexible too!

Albums for Photos & Videos to keep things nice and organized.

Relationship Tags for Friends is an easy way to organize your college buddies or work friends… and to cross-reference them if you like.

Batch Edit for Photos simply saves you time keeping your photos organized.

Personal Music Player allows you to create a playlist of your favorite musicians on Virb.

Profile Music Player is another way to let your friends know what you’re listening to and adds a little audio to your profile.

Upcoming Shows lets you know which of your favorite musicians are playing in your area.

Module Nicknames show your creativity by letting you name your modules whatever you like.

Unlimited Personality Tag Sections let you go nuts tagging yourself… unrestricted.

Custom Modules are in case you want to put something in your profile that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Privacy Settings are important to keeping you safe and surrounded by friends.

I have 14 friend invites left for Virb. Presently you don’t need them, but in the event that you do in the future, if you are interested in obtaining one, just reply to this post and I’ll send you one. You can check out the very basic profile I created HERE. I will be refining and investigating its features for the next few days, at least.

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Company develops “puke-ray” gun

WIRED Blogs: Danger Room

However, rather than causing intense pain, like the Active Denial System, Invocon is advertising a weapon that boasts the ability to go through walls and incapacitate everyone in a room by making them lose their balance. “Second order effects would be extreme motion sickness,” the company notes.

Basically, you’re safely in your house, an invisible beam hits you, you feel dizzy, and fall over (or puke).

Wow, a gun that shoots a ray that can penetrate walls and make you puke. Well, losing your balance is the desired effect, but puking is a neat side effect. Could you imagine what would happen if this got into the wrong hands?

Damn you for inventing the puke ray. Damn you all.

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Update: Microsoft Office 2003 apps, Explorer hit with new crash bugs

Update: Microsoft Office 2003 apps, Explorer hit with new crash bugs

February 26, 2007 (Computerworld) — Microsoft Corp.’s Word 2003 and Excel 2003 can be crashed by attackers who feed the business applications malformed documents, Symantec Corp. reported today.

In separate alerts sent to subscribers of its DeepSight threat system, Symantec warned that the bugs — both discovered and disclosed by a Russian researcher with the moniker “sehato” — could be exploited by attackers to bring down the Office applications.

Microsoft denied that the bugs were actually vulnerabilities.

I guess these companies thinking about upgrading might want to really look at the cost-effectiveness of doing so relatively quickly.

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my.BarackObama.com – Social networking for the next president?

BarackObama.com – Hey, myspace, shmyspace… I social network on my.barackobama.com, the social network of champions!

But seriously folks, what’s next? We now have a social network for a presidential candidate. Can this be good? It will undoubtedly be overtaken by people trying to tear Obama down. Why give them the chance?

I always applaud the usage of technology, and I’m excited that Obama (one of the few candidates I’m interested in finding more about) is embracing it.

Somehow though, I feel like this is going to backfire.

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BetaNews | Viacom to Promote YouTube-like Features on Sites

BetaNews | Viacom to Promote YouTube-like Features on Sites
Viacom is wasting no time in moving on from dealing with YouTube, as the company is planning to aggressively promote new functionality on ComedyCentral.com in the coming months, and others in the future.

Functionality will be provided directly from the site itself that allows users to embed and share videos much like the popular social video site. Users will be permitted to show the video for a period of one month after it is posted.

Big media sites are starting to buckle-down and demand their content be taken off of YouTube because they’ve seen just how lucrative it can be. I know that in the last month, most of the clips I tagged as favorites on YouTube have been taken off, making that site nearly useless for me. I don’t really care about user generated content — I want to see professional content in bursts. There are a few scenes in every show that you’d like to see again… too bad you couldn’t tag scenes with keywords so you could jump straight to that section, (maybe you can someplace and I just don’t know about it).

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Web 2.0 sites that make the internet super-awesome, part 2

A few months ago, we posted “6 sites that make the net super awesome”. I’d post a link to it… but it’s gone. Vanished. Deleteified.

But I’m back, pimping a few other sites that I think make the internet super awesome.

Project360.com is a web collaboration and management tool that is similar to Basecamp, except Project360 looks better, has more functions, is cheaper and more useful. Want to download a spreadsheet of what everyone in your group is working on or has worked on? no problem. Project360 has you covered. It saves a lot of time, and can save your neck if someone drops the ball. Price – $35.00/month for 35 projects and unlimited users.

If you can’t get enough weather, (and if you don’t watch local tv which has the weather on every 5 minutes it seems), then you can get your own accuweather widget to place on your own blog from NetWeather.com. Is this super-awesome? Not really, it’s more along the lines of “pretty cool”… but still, I wanted to mention it because it is useful on football gamedays when you need to know if it’s going to rain, snow, etc and you need to know who to bench/start on your fantasy team, or how you should dress to attend the game.

Back to the Super-Awesome with SNAP, the web site previewer that is absolutely a cinch to add to your site and is extremely useful. SNAP previews sites in a little popupwindow on hover. Test it out (you probably have already) by hovering over a link on this blog.

If you’re a blogger or have a website, they you must be using FeedBurner.com to manage your RSS Feeds. If not, you might want to check it out. FeedBurner will take any feed and fix it up with all kinds of enhancements.

If you want to see the future of the internet and personalized information, check out Spotback.com. You create an account, tell it what you like “sports, technology, etc.” and what you don’t like, then you rate articles based on how interesting you think it is, and presto, you have a personalized news site that learns what you like.

Once again, one of my favorite sites, the site I recommend to someone at least once a week is FeedDigest.com (who isn’t accepting new applications at the moment). It will take feeds, or a couple feeds, put them together and allow you to create acustomizable output for you to use elsewhere. It is extremely easy to use, and you don’t have to know any coding to place its javascript on your site.

Meebo.com is a site I use every day. Everyone wants to talk to their friends online, but sometimes you either can’t due to corporate restrictions or don’t want to load 4-5 different messaging programs on your computer. Meebo is your solution because it allows you to connect to all of the chat networks like Yahoo!, AIM and MSN.

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Advertising Age – Local TV Goes Mobile

Advertising Age – Digital – Local TV Goes Mobile
Internet Broadcasting, which creates websites and sells ads for 79 local TV stations, has forged a venture to get news and weather onto the so-called third screen. The Minneapolis-based company has signed a deal with Crisp Wireless to deliver content to phones and other wireless devices. Internet Broadcasting, itself owned by three major station group owners — Hearst-Argyll, Post Newsweek and McGraw Hill Cos. — will deliver local fare such as weather radar images and sports headlines and scores.

How are other companies, (like Media General for example), going to compete with this when their sites are so far behind already? The Mobile frontier is the next great format, especially with the iPhone and devices like it on the horizon. Still, many media companies haven’t even embraced RSS, Blogging (done the right way) or even dynamic content across all affiliates.

Bravo to Internet Broadcasting for realizing what people actually want and doing something about it.

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WIRED SCIENCE | Pilot Episode | PBS

WIRED SCIENCE | Pilot Episode | PBS

If you didn’t know, WIRED (my favorite magazine, tech, sports or otherwise) has a show now on PBS. You can watch it online HERE. What is great, is that I don’t have to have cable to watch it. More and more I’m breaking the stranglehold cable TV has had on me for the last 15 years. If only the NFL Network streamed itself over the internet.

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Is this where the newspaper business is headed? Foldable and bendable displays.

Being in the newspaper business, (kinda), you are always thinking “what is the future of the newspaper business?”. Many people think it’s the web, but is it, really?

This is where we go backwards by going forwards.

Undoubtedly you’ve heard of things like those bendable and foldable displays coming out “in the future” where you’d just have a sheet of plastic and your new newspaper would magically appear every morning. Plastic Logic is making this a reality.

“Plastic Logic is building the first commercial manufacturing facility targeted at flexible active-matrix display modules for ‘take anywhere, read anywhere’ electronic reader products. It will utilise Plastic Logic’s unique process to fabricate active-matrix backplanes on plastic substrates which, when combined with an electronic-paper frontplane material, will be used to create display modules that are thin light and robust. This will enable a digital reading experience that is much closer to paper than any other technology.”

– http://www.plasticlogic.com/products.php

Can you imagine a website that looks like a newspaper that is displayed on something that isn’t disposeable and infinitely reuseable? It would put all the emphasis back into the layout of the newspaper instead of how it should (or could) be displayed online. Also, would it update the paper as the day progressed, with new articles appearing, possibly having something more important bump the lead article off the prime spot? There are a lot of new ways of thinking that the industry as a whole will have to start thinking about, and many forward-thinking companies do already.

Here is a video showing how flexible the Plastic Logic display is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwld9lGKSz4]

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YFLY.com: A real competitor to Myspace.com?

Yfly.com, a potential competitor to the internet giant MySpace.com, launched this week. From the Minneapolis StarTribune:

The difference: celebrity and technology. Yfly is touting itself as the official online home of athletes, musicians and Hollywood celebrities. The site has made deals with such stars as singers Nick Lachey and Justin Timberlake, NFL quarterback Matt Leinart and MTV personality Kristin Cavallari.

Yfly will offer fans the opportunity to interact with stars on “certified celebrity” home pages and plans to develop online marketing campaigns around the celebrities. The site is targeting users between ages 13 and 26.

Yfly also is using a new operating platform, Ruby on Rails, that its creators say is superior to MySpace’s technology.

“It allows the users to run more applications and make the site more interactive,” said Dutch Thalhuber, operations director for Space150, the Minneapolis digital-marketing firm that created Yfly and is handling marketing and advertising for the site. “This is the biggest Ruby project on the Web right now.” Upstart site takes on Web giant MySpace

YFly operates using Ruby on Rails, a relatively new open-source framework that’s built for programmers to write code favoring convention over configuration.

Other notable web applications running Ruby are Basecamp (project management), Campfire (group chats), 43Things (goal achievement), Odeo (audio management) and Shopify (e-commerce). Yfly’s creators think that with this superior technology and a focus on authenticated celebrity presences, it can realistically contend with MySpace.com for internet supremecy.

YFly boasts that they are the only site with authentic celebrity profiles and content, boasting the likes of Nick Lachey, Chris Brown, Matt Leinart, The Subways, JJ Redick, Justin Timberlake, Kristin Cavallari and Pharrell Williams. Profiles are viewable to non-members, but to use the features, one has to be a registered member. Yfly is currently open to registration of young adults 13-19 years of age only.

Those worried about security, (especially of impressionable and sometimes un-thinking young adults) will be glad to know that Yfly has already thought about how to best protect you and your information. Internet Security expert Parry Aftab is working with Yfly to make sure everyone stays safe and has fun.

YFly.com is dedicated to making their site fun, innovative and safe for its users. It has the most innovative programs to teach teens safe, secure and responsible technology use. These include “ThinkB4UClick”, “Best Foot Forward” and “Don’t Be Stupid”, as well as public service messaging and announcements designed to teach them to look out for themselves and each other online. But no matter how careful a site is, whenever lots of teens hang out online, it’s inevitable that some things will go wrong. Some teens forget their manners and smart behavior when they’re online. They may do this thinking they can’t be discovered or held accountable. They may think they are invulnerable or not realize the risk involved. Sometimes they don’t think at all.

That’s why YFly.com has a powerful reporting system designed to refer reports from the teens to those in charge, including me. Ultimately it is up to users (even teen users) to act responsibly and not put themselves at risk in cyberspace (and up to parents to protect our children). We will help parents and teens learn how to do that. Expect many more guides coming soon. We’re typing and coding as fast as we can.

YFly – Safety

technorati tags:myspace.com, yfly.com, celebrities, social-networking, ruby

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