(* Source: Robin Wauters *)

Robin says...

I’m not going to discuss the economic meltdown and its devastating effect on technology companies and internet startups in this post, but rather something that crossed my mind earlier this morning: “Web 2.0″ seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely apparent.

So why do I say it’s fading? For one, because the number of startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either. That’s not really tangible, so I took a look at the number of mentions of the phrase across the web, and they seem to be decreasing significantly, reflecting my feeling on this.

Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0″ by 2011.

Also noteworthy: take a look at the geographic regions that have generated the highest volumes of worldwide search traffic for the term over the years - it’s Asia, with the top 5 regions being India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia (in that order). Furthermore, Google Trends pegs the number one language in which people search for stuff related to the topic of Web 2.0 to be Russian before English.

And just in case you’re curious: “Web 3.0″ doesn’t seem to picking up much.
Let’s all rejoice.

Google’s “Insights for Search”, a beta service that analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered - relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time - gives an even better overview:

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(* Source: Nick O'Neill *)

(* Source: Eric Alterman *) 

Widget providers increasingly are bypassing portals and distributing content directly to user-controlled pages, requiring portals to evolve. KickApps' founder explains.

The universe of websites has a very long tail, and soon it will be clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary mission of every major portal. Widgets will play an ever-increasing role in this evolution.

Prediction: Portals like AOL, MSN and Yahoo will eventually generate more impressions and ad inventory by exporting widgets to third-party websites than by serving retail traffic within their own domains.

Most people are still trying to figure out what widgets really are and their importance, but few are looking at the role traditional internet portals will play in this new ecosystem. The major content portals like AOL and Yahoo used to define "distribution" when it came to web content (as both creators and acquirers of original content). Then widgets came along and increasingly "distributed" that distribution power to individuals and their personal pages (e.g. social networking pages, blogs).

The problem for traditional portals is that content producers and third-party widget providers increasingly have convenient ways to bypass portals by distributing content and other user experiences directly to consumer-controlled pages. While the major portals often own social network traffic (e.g. AIM Pages) and feed aggregators (e.g. MyYahoo), that traffic increasingly is splintered by third-party content and widget providers. In short, the entire web community is aggressively fishing in portal waters, and there are good reasons to expect that trend to accelerate.

More here 

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(* Source: Marta Strickland *)

Behold the amazing power of Sprout, a quick and easy way to build all those widgets, jukeboxes, and mini-sites you've been dreaming of, both for clients and personal projects. My first endeavor into using the service, aka my first Sprout, was a widget of passion.

Even before going on my big fall eurotrip, I decided that upon returning I was going to chuck out the idea of the traditional scrapbook and latch onto more web 2.0 ways of recording my experiences. By using Sprout, I was able to develop a "mini-site" of most of my digital vacation artifacts (music, photos, videos, maps, research) within a few hours, and to their credit, most of that time was spent in designing, collecting, and uploading.

The actual interface within Sprout Builder made the entire process intuitive and quick, and when I was finished, I was able to instantly bring my Sprout into my Myspace page, Facebook page, Netvibes account, and now here on ThreeMinds. Although it has a few bugs and limitations, I was more surprised at how much it COULD do and how much it did well. Any users of Photoshop or Flash will be able to dive right in, but I think it would be easy to pick up for most anyone.

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(* Source: Michael Arrington *)

Mike says...

San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike launched a “news feed” for favorite artists this week. Users can now see exactly what their favorite artists are up to - when they go on tour, release new songs or videos, etc, the news is presented to them in the feed.

Users can select their favorite artist via the iLike website or on their social network applications. Or the service decides what you like based on your playing habits on iTunes (they have an iTunes plugin - if you listen to a song ten times, it thinks you like the artist).

The news feed for favorite artists can be viewed via the iTunes plugin, the website, the social network applications, or via a new iPhone app (just go to iLike on an iPhone and log in).

The company continues to dominate the Facebook music scene. Their U2 page on Facebook has 1.9 million fans. Compare that to just 168,000 friends on the MySpace U2 page, and 933,000 on Last.fm. The fact that a previously unreleased U2 song was first heard on iLike didn’t hurt those numbers, either.

In July 2007 iLike had 4.5 million users of its Facebook application. Today they have 14 million. But more than half of their new members today are coming from their iLike.com site and other social networks - OpenSocial gave them access to Bebo, Hi5 and soon MySpace. On their website alone they see 3.5 million worldwide monthly visitors, which isn’t bad considering most users interact with iLike via their iTunes plugin, or on Facebook and other social networks. Last.fm, which was acquired last year for $280 million, has 4.7 million.

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(* Source: eMarketer *)

MySpace and Facebook are less than five years old. Will widgets stick around that long?

Posted by brian tiong at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: eMarketer *) 

So far, widgets and applications are garnering far more attention than actual ad dollars. Although consumers are increasingly using them, eMarketer estimates that US companies will spend only $40 million in 2008 to create, promote and distribute widgets, up from $15 million in 2007.

The Web Widgets and Applications report tracks the trends that are driving this unique and intriguing, but not yet lucrative, area of Internet development.

Widgets are popping up everywhere online. Since Facebook opened up to third-party applications in May 2007, nearly 15,000 applications have been developed. Overall, some 100,000 developers are working on widgets and applications worldwide.

Widgets are new, hot and fun. But there are already raising concerns, including “application burnout,” measurement difficulties, distribution challenges and deceptive techniques used by some widget developers to increase their installation rate.

The widget and application business can really grow—it has some growing up to do.

More here 

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(* Source: b-side *)

B-side is an official media partner for Music Matters - The Asia Pacific Music Conference that is happening from the 3rd of June 2008 in Hong Kong.  Last years conference saw over 600 mover and shakers in the music world come together to share their views on the ever changing & challenging music space in Asia.

I was there last year and the segment I enjoyed most was the special appearance of the legendary Nile Rogers and his unplugged performance of his hit songs over the past 2 decades.  Truely inspiring.

This year, B-side is supporting this conference with the below free widget and email newsletter on what's happening in the digital music space. Go ahead...take it, spread it.

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(* Source: Kristen Nicole *)

With a reported 26,000 widget developers and 12 million daily widget views, along with a 15% market share of Facebook apps and 60% of Bebo apps, Widgetbox undoubtedly has a wide reach and is established in its space. Typically among the first to offer extended widget applications for integrated use in social networks’ platforms, Widgetbox has maintained much of its market share by providing its own widgets for such integrated use, while extending these same options for other developers.

Even with all of this effort, however, Widgetbox is still overshadowed in some areas by Clearspring, according to the most recent comScore Widget Metrix report, though there are current questions regarding the manner in which comScore has qualified widgets, their manner of distribution, and their viewership counts. Nevertheless, this latest round of funding will surely go towards accelerated efforts in continuing to grow its reach across platforms and devices. In terms of its widget suite of offerings, Widgetbox has been right there with the rest, launching a toolkit for creating Facebook applications, an ad-revenue sharing program, and a distribution method that reaches across various networks and web-based publishing tools.

With Clearspring’s widgetizing options and Sprout launching a web content-widgetizing utility at DEMO earlier this week, and several moves towards more analytical ad optimization for widgets, it’s clear that instant widget gratification and behavioral ad targeting are two of the hottest areas of exploration for widget companies, so I imagine Widgetbox will become even more heavily involved on these ends.

 

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(* Source: Mark Hendrickson *)

Ah... the great thing about web2.0 is that whatever you're thinking, somebody has also thought about it already.  Here is a good example as just the other day, i was thinking someone should make self service widgets... here it is.

Mark says... 

A new application called Sprout, launching in private beta at DEMO today, promises to make the creation of Flash applets a whole lot easier.

Sprout is a browser-based, WYSIWYG editor for Flash with an interface reminiscent of Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Designers can use it to create, publish and track Flash widgets, websites and mashups, thereby obviating the need for them to work with programmers who would cost time and money, and who might not execute designs satisfactorily.

The application itself is entirely Flash/Flex-based and won’t require account registration for first-time users (that is, once the private beta period is over). As can be seen in the screenshot to the left, the interface consists of a staging area for construction of a so-called “sprout” (don’t call it a widget!), as well as several panels for tools, components, pages, properties, and more. I found that my experience with Photoshop served me well for creating a sprout (embedded below) that displays TechCrunch feeds, since the same editing concepts are applied by both programs. That said, it would be nice if Sprout had undo capabilities and proper layering, as found in Photoshop.

While all WYSIWYG editors lack at least some of the functionality achievable through direct programming, Sprout overcomes this limitation in part by providing a library of “components” that can be integrated into a given creation. The company has lined up general components such as video, slideshows and RSS feeds in addition to components from 3rd party web services such as Meebo, Yahoo Maps, PollDaddy and Ribbit.

Sprout is marketing its release as a better way for designers to create distributable widgets. The company has partnered up with Clearspring, Gigya, and SpringWidgets to provide both easy distribution and tracking/analytics. Sprout creators can track the usage of not only entire sprouts but the elements, such as buttons, within those sprouts. They can also use the application to make changes to sprouts that have already been distributed across the web.

While Sprout’s current focus is on the widget use case, its capabilities don’t end there. Since you can create sprouts of any dimensions, there’s nothing stopping you from creating entire websites using Sprout. Its pages and linking functionality certainly lend themselves to this type of creation. And since Sprout has incorporated 3rd party services, it can also be used to create mashup pages/portals. The range of possibilities will increase when Sprout releases an SDK in the following month, allowing outside developers to add to the components library.

Sprout should be publicly available in the next few weeks. Until then, the first 200 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will gain access to its private beta. A video demonstration of Sprout is provided below, alongside the RSS feed sprout I created for TechCrunch (hosted on their demo server so it may go down).

 

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(* Source: Duncan Riley *) 

First the news on Googles' new platform to compete with Facebook late last year, then a whole bunch of other social networking sites (incl Myspace) then jump on the platform bangwagon, a data portability workgroup is then formed to help all these companies talk in the same language and now... Facebook pulls another rabbit from it hat.  Clever? only time will tell.

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neill at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Comscore *) 

The widget space is evolving as quickly as the audience is growing.  Have a look at some numbers Comscore has put together this time round...

Comscore reports... 

MySpace.com Widgets Reach Largest U.S. Audience

In November 2007, nearly 148 million U.S. Internet users viewed widgets, representing 81 percent of the total audience. MySpace.com widgets had the widest audience, reaching more than 57 million Internet users, while Slide.com ranked second with 39.2 million viewers. Google.com has the sixth widest widget-viewing audience with more than 19 million viewers.

*Facebook.com excluded from list due to different measurement methodology

** Clearspring is a widget platform and has independent objects; both are included in its total

“Top Friends” Tops Facebook Application Rankings

The inaugural Facebook application rankings revealed that more than 20 million Facebook visitors, or 61 percent of the site’s U.S. audience, engaged with an application in November. Visitors between the ages of 18-24 were twice as likely as the average Facebook visitor to engage with applications, while those aged 25 and older were less likely than average to exhibit this behavior.

“Top Friends” by Slide was the top ranked application during the month, with more than 6.2 million engaged viewers (18.5 percent of the Facebook audience), followed by Movies by Flixster with 5.2 million (15.4 percent), and SuperPoke! by Slide with 3.6 million (10.8 percent). Slide contributed three of the ten most engaged Facebook applications in November, while RockYou! contributed two.

* Rankings based on number of people that actively engaged with the application during the course of the month, which includes interacting with the object, downloads of the object or views of the application information page. The rankings may differ from Facebook.com’s own “Most Active User” rankings, which are based on daily active users.

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(* Source: Dan Neumann *)

As convergence descends on the living room we are starting to see a lot of televisions designed to deliver web content over a broadband connection, bypassing a standalone PC. New models introduced by Sony, Samsung and Sharp at CES all showcased various ways of digesting online content. Of the three manufactures, Sharp’s Aquos Net offering was most the most promising. Televisions with Aquos Net include a browser by Netfront optimized for slightly lower resolutions of LCD TVs. What’s nice about the use of Netfront is that the company provides an SDK to help developers port and preview content to embedded platforms. In addition to the Netfront SDK, Sharp is providing its own SDK and developer program to support development of widgets. Sharp’s widgets are similar to desktop widgets in that they are downloaded from a gallery and are designed to be viewed while watching live TV.

I think Sharp has made some good choices with this product. By providing developer support from the outset they are likely to wind up with more content than competitors with closed delivery infrastructures. Let’s hope more manufacturers follow Sharp’s lead and, even better, that real standards emerge in the channel. It’s already a headache optimizing content for multiple browsers.  

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(* Source: Dan Taylor *)

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(* Source: Victoria Murphy Barret *)

Since RockYou’s founding two years ago, 90 million social networkers have downloaded its applications. For this, RockYou is making more than $100,000 a month in revenues showing ads alongside its mini-applications for brands like AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) and Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), as well as by plugging other developers’ mini-apps (for a fee). The pitch to advertisers: We are where the kids hang out. Yet RockYou doesn’t know much else about its customers. Facebook doesn’t share data about members’ ages, locations, education or anything else it might know.

Jia Shen, the 27-year-old co-founder of RockYou, sat down with Forbes.com recently to talk about how to make money selling snack-size software and what Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) new open platform means for Facebook and MySpace.

Forbes.com: How did RockYou begin?

Jia Shen: We started two years ago noticing that everyone on MySpace was trying to “bling out” their pages. But there was no easy way to do it. We decided to put together a slide show tool. It took one week to build. I worked while I was on vacation in Japan. In one month, we had 100,000 people using it. Then in three months there were one million.

Impressive growth. But were you making any money?

None. You can’t advertise on MySpace. Facebook changed that. So now we’re like any other Web site: We make money on page views. Sony Pictures wanted to promote the film Resident Evil and used our Zombies application for a sweepstakes event.

We also advertise other applications and take a cut. Yahoo! created an application that lets you post music videos on your Facebook profile page. Yahoo! had 8,000 downloads after one month, which is pretty slow. We started promoting the application in banners above our own applications. In a single day on our network of applications, Yahoo! got 120,000 downloads.

What is your initial reaction to Google's new open platform for social networks?

We’ve been helping Google for a while on this. In theory, it should be very cool. We tested it out with an application called Emote (Editor's note: This is a collection of happy, sad, flirty smiley faces). Before all these networks required different code, and it took us three days to re-write the same application for Facebook to get it to work on Orkut. With the new standards, it took us just 30 minutes to make the same application work on Plaxo. The real test comes two months from now. How many companies will really give us real estate on their Web sites?

Will Google's open platform give a boost to less popular social networks like Orkut, Friendster and the Hi5?

Sure, if it yields them more applications, it gives people more reasons to flock to their sites. Web traffic isn’t yet a zero-sum game

Is this bad news for Facebook? Will developers spend less time on Facebook apps?

People are making real money on Facebook. So there’s risk in going elsewhere. Am I really going to spend time going after Orkut’s Brazilian audience? I’m more likely to focus on the U.S. market. Facebook is still growing nicely.

Do you worry that the social networking sites, particularly Facebook, will start launching their own applications and compete with outside developers?

It is always a worry, but something that we've lived with since day one. MySpace eventually built a competing slideshow, but we already had big penetration, with a diverse set of widgets. Facebook does do little feature creeps here and there. But everything they've done so far has been non-competitive.

What will Microsoft get from its deal with Facebook? (Microsoft announced in October a $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, and is serving ads on the site.)

This isn’t traditional brand advertising. But my belief is that Microsoft didn’t want only access to the ad network. Microsoft wanted to make sure no one else got Facebook. (Google was reportedly bidding.)

What were you doing before RockYou?

I came to Silicon Valley in 2000 after majoring in computer science and electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins. The first start-up I landed at failed in three months, so did the second. I thought I was the kiss of death.

But I have a short attention span, so it was fine by me. This company is changing so much I may as well be working at a different place every three months.

Posted by brian tiong at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Kristen Nicole *)

Cruxy, the marketplace for independent artists to sell their own content, is releasing a Virtual World Widget today.

The Cruxy Virtual World Widget will work inside virtual world games such as Second Life, There.com and World of Warcraft. For you Second Life fans out there, you know that there is a lot of stuff you can do to create your own presence and turn a decent profit as well. Cruxy is banking on that drive. Their Second Life player looks like an mp3 player and can be worn by your avatar wherever they go, so you can listen to music. They’re hoping that musicians will use this as further promotion for themselves, leaving them in public Second Life places for others to take, or distributing them to only those avatars that show up at your Second Life concert. Going along with true Second Life nature, the player is fully customizable.

Cruxy’s other new releases include a multi-format social player to present audio, video or image content, a purchase-enabled widget for consumers to buy a download without leaving their current web page, and a Play this Page feature, allowing a browse view or search to be dynamically loaded into the player. A user can take that player’s code with the newly loaded playlist directly from your MySpace page. Cruxy has topped it all off with a new API that includes every component Cruxy has to offer.

Admittedly, Cruxy has come a long way since their initial launch last September. Their Virtual World widget is niche, but a good move considering the typical marketing economy within Second Life and the inevitable shift to systems such as Second Life for the future of social networking. Whether or not their other new tools will help with marketing back on the regular Web is yet to be seen, but we like that they’re advancing the promotional value of their service and extending it to users.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Valleywag.com *) 

How do these free widgets that we see on facebook make money?  Thanks Valleyway on this insider on how RockYou, facebook most successful widget targets companies that want sign ups. 

Those who can't do, teach. And those who teach, when it comes to Facebook, are charging handsomely for the privilege. RockYou, a maker of Web "widgets," those Web pages in miniature that clutter up blogs and MySpace pages, has not, apparently, figured out how to make money directly off of the Facebook apps they've created like Super Wall and Zombies. The Sequoia Capital-backed startup has, however, figured out how to make money from Facebook app developers. How? By charging them to sign up users by advertising their apps on RockYou's Facebook apps. The fee? Half a buck per user. It sounds like the perfect Ponzi scheme: As long as venture capitalists and clueless big companies are overpaying for startups based on the number of Facebook users they've signed up, it should work brilliantly. After the jump, slides from RockYou's pitch to fellow application creators.

"It's all you!" RockYou proclaims. Unless, that is, you're a Facebook app developer too inept to figure out how to get your app embraced by Facebook users.

Take, for example, Yahoo. Until RockYou came along, Yahoo's music-video app for Facebook faced resounding indifference.

RockYou has provided such amazing Facebook apps as Horoscopes and Zombies. If you've been "bitten" by a Facebook friend who wants to turn you into a zombie, now you know whom to blame -- RockYou.

Want to sign up users? It will cost you. At the largest volume discount, RockYou charges $0.50 per user signed up. That's roughly comparable to cost-per-click advertising on Google, which would be reasonable if, say, you were actually selling something, as opposed to trying to get people to sign up for your free Facebook app. And how does RockYou expect you to make up the money you've just spent on that user? Why, that's your problem. Perhaps you can charge that much for explaining to another startup how to make money on Facebook.

Full deck here (PDF).

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(* Source: Techcrunch *)

Some early success stories with Googles Open Social initiatives.

Erick Schonfeld says...

Ever since Plaxo joined Google’s OpenSocial platform a couple weeks ago, the number of connections on Plaxo has skyrocketed from about 200,000 to over a million. Here is a graph from Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea (nice hockey stick, John):

Posted by brian tiong at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Techcrunch *)

By facebook allowing anybody and everybody to build widgets on their platfrom, it levels the playing field and creative ideas seem to be taking the lead.  Here is an student example.  Sounds like somebodys gonna get a job offer real soon.

Nick Gonzalez says...

Dave McClure has been teaching a class on Facebook applications at Stanford over the past semester. The class is made up of about 50 students who teamed up to produced 25 applications. We got a look at the applications earlier. Today we received word that one of them, KissMe, has crossed 1 million installs as of 6:30pm this evening. Another app, Send Hotness is likely to break 1 million in the next few days. It’s pretty amazing considering a lot of professional apps barely register.

KissMe - kiss your friends, basically by inviting them to use the application. Apparently this is the most popular application of the whole class in terms of the number of users it has (100,000).

Send Hotness - figure out your ten hottest friends; invite your friends to help you with rankings. You must invite at least ten people to see the rankings.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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(* Source : Techcrunch *)

Erick Schonfeld says : 

Facebook just got a whole lot friendlier for music artists. With the launch of Facebook Ads, it is welcoming bands and musicians to set up their own public Facebook pages where members can sign up as fans. Alas, there will be no standalone Facebook Music service. Instead, Facebook is treating music artists just like any other brands, which can also set up their own Facebook pages, collect fans, and market to them directly.

Yet, when it comes to music artists, one of Facebook’s most popular application developers, iLike, is doing the exact same thing. Already, any band or musician can create an iLike artist page on Facebook that includes their most popular songs (filtered by what your friends like), upcoming concert dates (click on a date and see if any of your friends are going), an artist blog called iCast, related artists, and a Fan Wall where Facebook members can leave notes. In fact, half-a-million have done so. And starting today, iLike will create duplicate versions of these marketing pages for them that work with Facebook’s new brand destination pages. Right out of the gate, iLike will generate 160,000 pre-populated artists pages that the musicians or the labels themselves can modify, or leave as is.

So if you are a music artist, you now have to make a decision: Do you go with the iLike page as your main Facebook page (and take advantage of the nearly 10 million members who use the iLike app), or do you go with your own advertiser page on Facebook? Case in point: the new Facebook page for 50 Cent (shown left) had only three fans when it first went up just after midnight, compared to 1.2 million fans on his iLike page on Facebook.

Well, it turns out that iLike does not care which page artists choose to call their home. Any widget on the iLike artist page—popular songs, upcoming concerts, the iCast blog, even the iLike button—can be plopped into a Facebook artist page (also known as a canvas page). And every link in each of those widgets takes you back to the Facebook application pages that iLike controls.

This is not an unintended consequence. I asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday about the potential here for Facebook to be competing with its own app developers. He responded, “What is the effect on app developers if we are making it possible for bands to have music pages? It increases distribution because your app can be on that page.”

Fair enough. But where does that leave Facebook in the fight for the hearts and marketing dollars of the struggling music industry? Already, I like iLike’s chances in this battle. But it doesn’t end within the confines of Facebook.

More here 

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(* Source: Marta Strickland *)

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(* Source: B-side *)

Facebook may have the lead right now but they have a walled garden approach with the apps only working on their own platform.  Google with OpenSocial hope to change that with a common API that allow developers to develop widgets that work everywhere.  Hmmm... let the battle begin.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Kristen Nicole *)

PanRaven has teamed up with Universal Mowtown Records to create a promotional story for Nelly, who’s getting ready to release his first album in 3 years, “Brass Knuckles.” You may remember that PanRaven is an online tool for creating stories, similar to scrap-booking services like ScrapBlog.

With this particular partnership, a story of Nelly’s filming of the video for his most recent Single “Wadsyaname” is being published on PanRaven’s website, as well as Nelly’s website and MySpace profile. PanRaven is also promoting the story through its Facebook application. The story contains exclusive, behind the scenes footage from the filming of a music video.

And in an effort to encourage users to virally spread this promotion, PanRaven and Universal are holding a contest. The person that spreads the promotion the furthest and widest across the web will win a trip to a future filming session of a Nelly video. The runner-up gets some autograhped merchandise. Not too shabby, as far as prizes go. Kanye West, 50 Cent and Bruce Springsteen have all held similar promotions on MySpace in recent weeks.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Mashable *)

Kristen Nicole says :

MyItThings, which is a user-generated lifestyle magazine of sorts, will soon be offering a widget for your Wish List and Virtual Closet, which can be placed on other websites, blogs and social networking profiles, like MySpace and Facebook. A few of these widgets are holiday-themed, so MyItThings is taking advantage of the holiday season and letting you spread some Christmas cheer (i.e. your gift list).

The new widget is powered by Clearspring,so you know there are easy sharing options, including embed code for a variety of social networks and blogging platforms. Wishpot and Glimpse have similar wishlists and widget-sharing options as well.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Jordan Chark *)

Avatar creator Meez is back in the news this week, but there are dozens more avatar creation tools gunning for this market. Today we attempt an overview of that market: please add more suggestions in the comment section.

Weblin- Create an avatar and use it as your virtual self within web pages in real-time, interacting with other Weblin users who share the same interests.

Meez.com- Create a 3D animated avatar for export directly to most web profiles, blogs, etc.

Second Life- Use this extremely popular virtual world to do just about anything, but first, you have to create your avatar. Here, avatars can be customized almost entirely, with plenty of room to create a most accurate likeness of yourself.

Mypictr- Use any image and resize, crop, customize, and export it to many other web 2.0 social networking sites and profiles, like Facebook, and Digg.

Gizmoz- Create, animate, and share photorealistic, great looking avatars, and even video clips featuring them. The animation and overall look of the avatar is sourced from a real picture, actually ending up almost like a personal CGI generator.

Mii Editor- Create your own “Mii”, the avatars characteristic of the Nintendo Wii.

Simpsons Avatar Maker- “Simpsonize yourself” by creating an avatar in the classic style of the Simpsons.

Gickr- Instantaneously create an animate gif file by either uploading your own pictures, or sourcing from Flickr.

Gravatar- Create an 80×80 pixel avatar by uploading an image which is then associated with your email address, appearing on Gravatar enabled websites and blogs without additional effort.

IMVU- Create and dress up your personal avatar which can then be used in their virtual chat-rooms or with their visual messenger client.

fix8- Create, animate, and dress up your avatar primarily through interfacing with your webcam in order to capture real movement and look.

Zwinky- Customize your personal cartoon avatar and share it across the web.

Digibody’s Caricature Maker- Use the components of a caricature to create your unique caricature avatar.

Faketown- A pixel-art, avatar based, MMORPG, similar to second life, but much less realistically.

DoppelMe- Simply assemble an apparently “hand drawn” avatar image for use anywhere.

SitePal- A pay-based 3D, animated avatar creation service aimed towards business looking to create a personal presence on their website.

Gaia- Another avatar-based MMORPG, this one, anime-styled.

imbee- The social network for young people includes an avatar creator featuring images of animals from the National Geographic Kids library.

Myrl- A social network based on avatars in the “metaverse”, supposedly using avatars to connect with the web by virtue of collaboration. Close to it’s beta launch, this definitely looks like something to keep an eye out for.

Kaneva- Yet another avatar-based virtual world, Kaneva looks like a valid Second Life alternative.

Blogscoped- Chat with others in this virtual, visual, chatroom, which makes efficient use of user avatars. While it may not appear to be that “web 2.0″ it uses PHP, MySQL, Ajax, and the Google API, which effectively categorize it as so.

MojiKan- A somewhat odd MMORPG for customizable 3D pet avatars.

Frenzoo- Customize and use one of their well-designed avatars in chats as well as a variety of other environments.

Clickbeurs (Dutch)- Create an avatar and apply for a job through virtually chatting with potential employers, a somewhat odd idea.

Mr. Picassohead- Create stunning, Picasso-like paintings which are easily transformed into avatars.

Whyrobbierocks- Create a “stereotypical” avatar for use on various social networking sites, IMs, etc.

Weeworld- Interact with some quite uniquely designed avatars in a virtual world primarily based on chats and mini-games.

Voki- Create an avatar, record your voice, and share. A possible alternative to something like Sitepal, but geared more towards a less-business-oriented audience.

Honorable Mention

While all of the sites (except for a couple, added for their significantly customizable avatars and creation engines) above are primarily based upon the principle of avatar creation and customization, I’d like to quickly mention the importance of your “avatar”, or probably more aptly named character in many popular MMORPGs. The likes of which are probably most easily recognized in games like World of Warcraft.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Kristen Nicole *)

Webcam avatar community fix8 has raised $3 million in a series a round of funding from Vickers Venture Group, which is a Singapore-based private equity firm. We first covered fix8 here.

You may remember that fix8 lets you create animated avatars with your webcam by reading your expressions and gestures. There are loads of tools that you can play around with, including fix8’s wide selection of avatars, and other accessories like voice manipulation, graphics and editing tools. These clips can then be embedded in your website or social networking profile, or use it for your instant messaging client like AOL, MSN, Skype or Yahoo Messenger.

fix8 has recently teamed up with Pringo for distribution purposes, Stickam , also Shanghai Media Group to create AuditionsTV, which makes interactive tv audiences able to participate during live or taped programs. Coming up, fix8 will be offering a mobile solution, which will surely extend the ways in which its avatar creation tool can be used for communicative purposes. See here for more avatar creation sites.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Mashable *)

Kristen Nicole says :

Gigya is creating an updated version of its online widget tracking service that will allow developers and web publishers to define and track any type of activity within widgets. Used in conjunction with Gigya’s Wildfire, developers can track widget performance in a more extensive manner, from its initial installation on a user’s page, to the clicking of a link within a widget and the viewing of a widget’s video.

This will, of course, enable you to better lay out your widget strategy, see how widgets are being used across platforms and social networks, and more easily respond to the market. In setting all of this up for your Gigya widgets, you can even choose your own name for various actions, so you’re tracking widgets in a way that makes the most sense for you and your distribution purposes.

Gigya’s Wildfire tool was launched in recent weeks to let developers create applications for use on Facebook. With MySpace and other networks getting ready to open their platforms as well, tracking tools for widgets and applications will become more important, especially as metrics move to become more inclusive of widget distribution, which is when advertising potential comes into play as well.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Kristen Nicole *)

Music Gifts is a pretty cool Facebook app launched by MediaMouth. It lets you find music, listen to it, create custom lists and mixes and share all of this with Facebook friends.

But it also is a gifting application, too. And not a fluff gift that’s really just a graphic that sits on your profile. While those are cool (and very addictive), Music Gifts takes gifting a step further and lets you purchase music for your friends. They can get the music in digital or physical format, which will be sent to their home address.

MediaMouth has distribution and retail deals with EMI, Universal, and several indie labels as well, and digital copies of music are sold DRM-free. As with all other music applications currently residing on Facebook, many are wondering if the social network’s rumored mp3 store will have any affect on their existience or success.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Rafat Ali *)

Facebook is working on an artist platform to be launched later this year, which in essence is supposed to be better than what MySpace allows with its platform, according to multiple sources I have spoken to since this morning after a slightly off-the-mark rumor came out earlier. The platform will allows bands and labels to create artists pages, and allow various widgets to be embedded for music promotion, organizing events, etc. Among those widgets would be iLike, the most popular app inside Facebook, but will also include iTunes widgets for sampling (to being with), and eventually buying music through Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - News). The service will still have the utilitarian sensibilities of the Facebook platform, the sources stress, rather than the more chaotic and flashy platform that MySpace has.

For now, this squarely takes on MySpace, not iTunes as the rumors said this morning. Facebook will have an actual deal with Apple, though it is conceivable down the line it could start selling music through the artists' platform.

Whether users will gravitate towards Facebook from an already thriving and deep music community on MySpace is what remains to be seen.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : David Fishman *)

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(* Source : Adam Headstrow *)

Imeem, the service that offers a widget for sharing your music playlist, has reached a deal with Sony BMG to legally offer their music to users. In exchange for allowing Imeem users stream Sony BMG music in their widgets, the record label will get a cut of the advertising revenue. Imeem previously signed a similar deal with Warner Music, after the record company first tried to sue them.

Additionally, the company is reportedly in talks with Universal Music Group and EMI Group about similar content deals.

[via Forbes]

Posted by brian tiong at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Techcrunch*)

Roi Carthy says :

Zlango

For those of you unfamiliar with Zlango, the company created a new language based on slightly over 200 icons in categories such as People, Actions, Places and Feelings. The Zlango offering was originally aimed at injecting life and excitement into the ever popular but boring SMS, however, the company’s jump into the Web space indicates an understanding that engaging users requires Zlango to extend itself beyond a pure mobile play.

Today’s launch kicks off Zlango’s roll out of a number of social-oriented features. Two of the most notable features available today are:

• Zlango Composer – A Flash driven composer featuring an on-the-fly “Text to Zlango” translator (see screenshot), making it a snap to create fun messages. Messages can be shared, emailed or embedded across a number of social sites (thanks to integration with Gigya).
• zMess – Zlango’s version of a micro-blog. This is an area for users to view public messages, or private ones with groups of friends. Unfortunately, support for threaded comments is not included.

On the business front, the most notable achievement of the year is a partnership with Nokia to preload the Zlango into handsets. Zlango is now also deployed at all three Israeli operators, and has inked deals with operators in the Philippines, Ukraine, Malaysia, Finland, and Indonesia.

Posted by brian tiong at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : IMediaconnections.com *)

Britanny Lawson says :

Get the lowdown on the five most popular Facebook widgets and what this trend means for brands and marketers.

Facebook has upped the ante in its latest effort to gain supremacy over the social network scene. The website's creators opened up the applications setting on May 25, 2007 for users and companies alike to upload widgets that can be embedded in any user's profile. Currently there are over 3,400 applications available to users, ranging from slideshows to horoscopes to personal aquariums.

The widgets are designed to engage users for longer periods of time on the Facebook website by creating activities for people with similar interests. Essentially, Facebook's profiles have changed from a place where you just read about someone to a place where people can engage in activities. This change is effective in generating traffic for Facebook, as well as for the companies creating user apps, and has been termed the Facebook Effect.  

The Facebook Effect is seen in the dramatic increase in web traffic to the top five company applications:

1.) Slide, Inc. has capitalized on the cornerstone of the social network sites -- picture sharing. With over 2.7 million active users daily, the company's Top Friends slideshow application is Facebook's most popular. Their widget, which is exceedingly simple, is available on every social network site, and reaches over 65 percent of all widget-users. Facebook is by far their largest patron and since the end of May has seen an increase of over 265 percent in daily unique visitors, according to Quantcast.

2.) Video by Facebook is the second most active application on the network. This tool comes on the heels of the success of YouTube and allows users to upload their own video content. Video has just below one million active users daily. Facebook's creators have seen the success of social media sites that employ user-generated video and harnessed this technology to generate more user activity on their site.

3.+4.) FunWall! and My Questions? are also in the top five, with a quarter of a million users daily. At a glance, they appear to be created by independent Facebook users. However, this application is funded by Slide, Inc.. The FunWall is a take on the basic wall feature in which users could post comments on each others' pages. It has replaced the basic wall because users can write graffiti and post movies or pictures, which has been a theme throughout social network sites. My Questions? allows users to ask all of their friends a generic question and see the responses on their page. Slide, Inc. has established that it is a heavyweight in the widget marketing platform by creating three out of the top five widgets.  

5.) iLike, Inc. allows users to upload their favorite music and has seen its traffic double since the end of May. This reveals another possibility for the widget platform -- the diversification of the point of sale for companies. Record labels such as SNOCAP have made it possible to sell music anywhere that HTML can be embedded into a web page. This could spell success for artists and music companies. 

The question, then, is how Facebook and companies such as Slide, Inc, and iLike plan to turn this popularity into financial success. As sites such as Nielsen have changed the way in which they rate websites by placing more emphasis on time spent on a website than on clicks, this could translate into ad success for Facebook. These applications keep users active on creators' respective pages as they take quizzes about their friends or play video games that are out of distribution. This will increase Facebook's rating on the Nielsen sale, and in turn increase the appeal for click advertisers. 

At the end of April 2007 Facebook had 20 million users; since then they have increased their user base by more than 50 percent to over 31 million in less than six months. Their daily uniques have doubled as well. This is in stark contrast to MySpace, which still has the lead over Facebook, but has remained relatively stable in the amount of unique clicks it receives each day. Is Facebook's rapid growth a result of its application platform? Perhaps. Regardless, Facebook's growth is putting the pressure on MySpace.

More here 

Posted by brian tiong at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mashable *)

ReverbNation has launched another new widget for bands and artists to promote themselves. Named TuneWidget, his widget nearly acts as a mini website in itself, offering all the necessary information for the band, including upcoming shows, song and video previews, and marked locations on a Yahoo map. The widget also displays band and information, like the band’s genre, location, label, and how many times the widget’s been played.

One unique and helpful feature the ReverbNation widget has is a “recommended band” display at the bottom of the widget. This lets artists cross-promote each other. Visitors can sign up for the mailing list from the widget, an grab the embed code to place it on their blogs or social networking profiles. Choose your network from the grab-it options the widget has for sites including Xanga, MySpace, and many more.

Posted by brian tiong at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Adam Ostrow *)

Donnerwood Media, the parent company of the Meez virtual avatar service, has raised $500,000 from Battery Ventures. Meez allows users to create custom avatars that can then be shared in IM and on most social networks.

Earlier this week the company announced a partnership with Vringo to create avatar ringtones. Meez previously raised $4.3 million, and we profiled the company last August.

[via]

Posted by brian tiong at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(*Source: Adam Ostrow *)

Starting today, US consumers will be able to listen to all the tracks on James Blunt’s new CD on the artist’s MySpace profile for free. They can then opt to purchase the entire album for $9.99, which will allow them to play the album on an iPod and also send the user the CD through snail mail.

The new Blunt album, “All the Lost Souls,” will be sold through a widget on Blunt’s page that is powered by LaLa.com. With nearly 250,000 “friends,” Blunt is a fairly significant artist with whom to try the new sales approach. Currently, the artist has a SNOCAP widget on his page featuring a la carte songs from his previous album.

While Warner has previously tried selling music through MySpace, the copyright protection on it made it incompatible with the iPod, making it a tough sell with most consumers.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(*Source : Kristen Nicole *)

Mixaloo is a site that lets you create a digital “mix tape.” Currently in private beta, I got to try it out for myself.

With this tool, you not only create mix tapes, but promote and sell them via widgets, earning you extra cash. With a library of about 3 million songs to choose from, Mixaloo is starting out with a hefty amount of music. And it’s not all indie. You’ll find most of your favorite artists, and depending on the record label, it looks like more artists have more songs available for resale through your widget.

Once you find an artist you’re looking for, you can then select the album, and then the songs. Searching for artists is easy enough: once you type in the first few letters of an artist’s name, Mixaloo will show a list of artists that match your query as you type. You’ll need at least 10 songs in order to create a mix for resale, and 15 will max out your mix tape. For each song you come across, you can listen to a sample of songs, see the album cover art, and see the runtime for each song. You can also name your mix tape, add cover art, choose from one of three widget designs, and edit things like text font, color and size for your cover art, and the widget color.

The widget itself is rather interactive, giving options to hear sample tracks, buy the entire mix, send it to a friend, or gift it to a friend. In order to buy or gift the mix tape, the buyer will need to create a Mixaloo account. Mixaloo keeps track of all the mixes you’ve created to sell, and those you’ve purchased. For promotional purposes, others can also grab the widget to place on their blogs or social networking profiles. As it’s powered by ClearSpring, there are easy, one-click options for the widget to be added to the various networks including LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook and more.

In some senses, Mixaloo can be used as a way to discover new music, especially as an artist you can submit your content to be sold through Mixaloo. In other ways, it’s limited, as you don’t really interact with songs on an individual basis, and there’s no social networking involved for deeper sharing options.

Posted by brian tiong at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Ellen Lee *)

Some add a little sparkle. Others showcase photographs from a family trip. Still more entertain with music and video clips.

Widgets are flooding the Web's social-networking and blogging sites, adding texture and personality to once-static pages. Think of them as the modern equivalent of decorating a locker door or bedroom wall.

Widgets are programs like photo slide shows that sit on top of another site. Created by companies such as San Francisco's Slide and RockYou, they can be added to a social-networking profile or blog to decorate the page.

Want to let people know about a favorite song? Install a widget from iLike that plays the tune.

Widgets are adding a dimension to the social-networking phenomenon. More than 69.6 million people logged onto MySpace in July, according to comScore Media Metrix, and 30.6 million checked into Facebook, using the sites to stay in touch with friends and meet new ones.

Widgets are helping make sure these members keep coming back.

More here

Posted by brian tiong at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : The Guardian *)

28 Weeks Later

Richard Wray says:

Next week's DVD release of the zombie-flick 28 Weeks Later will bring a revolutionary marketing widget, widely used in Japan, to the UK for the first time.

The film poster contains a square box full of black and white dots known as a QR - quick response - code. It contains information that can be decoded by the camera on a mobile phone with the right software installed. A huge poster showing nothing but a QR code has already gone up in London's Shoreditch to advertise the DVD.

These "bar codes" are widely used in Japan to store everything from web addresses and phone numbers to product details. Rather than laboriously typing in a person's phone number or an internet address into a phone, these codes give one-touch access to a wealth of information that can then be stored on a phone.

Japan's immigration service even stamps passports with codes detailing passenger's names and visa status. The 28 Weeks Later codes include details of the DVD's release and links to other material on the internet.

While many top-of-the-range phones such as the Nokia N93 already contain readers, anyone with a camera phone can install software that reads QR codes from companies such as i-nigma and Kaywa. They can even create their own codes.

For the mobile industry QR codes are both a way of making it easier for customers to get to their favourite websites using their mobile and a possible way of generating mobile advertising revenues.

Industry experts believe the time is right for QR codes in the UK. Over half the UK's mobile users have one while 95% of new phones sold include a camera. The first generation of QR codes in this country, however, are likely to be significantly larger than the 1cm x 1cm found in Japan, because most British camera phones have a lower resolution than in Asia.

Philip Makinson, consultant at industry experts Greenwich Consulting, said QR codes are likely to be little more than a bit of fun in the short term but could attract consumers to do more than just make calls and send texts.

"QR codes could help drive not only the take-up of high-end camera phones but make more people aware of the mobile internet and more conscious of the potential their phone has to store information about products and services," he said.

Posted by brian tiong at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mashable *)

Kristen Nicole says : 

BlipBack is a new site that lets you offer video comments on your website, blog or social networking profile page.

This service integrates with your webcam to enable video comments. The widget player is very similar to what you’ll see with most video widgets from YouTube and other video-sharing networks, though there are thumbnails for you to view the upcoming comments from others, along with the number of views and the rating for each comment. Your sorting options are to view from oldest to newest or vice versa, or view from highest to lowest rated or vice versa. You can also sort comments by most viewed, and an option to subscribe to video comments via RSS feeds.

In order to add your own comment, you’ll need a webcam, though there is an option to take a video with your camera phone and send it in to the address provided for each widget. This way groups can have a remote way to create collaborative video streams on a website, similar to Cellblock or Pickle.

The other option offered is a BlipBomb, which is a comments widget you can insert in comments threads across various social networks and blogging platforms. Having an automatic play option to view all the comments in the widget as a streaming channel would be a good feature for this service.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source : Mashable *)

Kristen Nicole says:

Posted by brian tiong at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mashable *)

Kristen Nicole says :

JamStudio has created a music widget for your MySpace page, letting site visitors mix music directly from your profile.

With this interactive widget, other users can remix the song you’ve created from your JamStudio account. You can change several levels of instrumentals in the song, including the guitar, piano, bass, drums, and more. Switch up the tempo or choose which instrument you’d like to play the melody of your song, sending the other instruments to the background.

Tools like these are great starters for online collaboration around music, and coupled with a music-centric website like MySpace, these tools could really take off. While site visitors can personalize the remix to their own likings, there’s no way to save remixes, or continue your tweaks on the main JamStudio site. Although, future features will incorporate the ability for vocals to be added to JamStudio creations, which will hopefully be integrated with the MySpace widget as well. Soundcrank is another company that has released a music MySpace widget today.

Posted by brian tiong at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: News.com *)

Caroline McCarthy says: 

Embeddable widget powerhouse Slide gained buzz as a way to display photo slide shows on MySpace, but then saw meteoric growth as part of the Facebook Platform initiative. Now, the company has announced that 1 million of its Flash-based widgets are added to the network's servers every day for non-Facebook social media platforms. Slide's Facebook widgets, which rank No. 1, No. 2, and No. 6 on the list of most popular embeddable applications on the white-hot social network, are not Flash-based and consequently were not included in the tally.

Note that this refers to widgets created, not "installed" or "embedded," necessarily--presumably, if you create a widget that's ultimately a screw-up, that counts too.

Still, that's a lot of widgets. Slide offers its standard SlideShow widget as well as other widgets like Guestbook, SkinFlix, and FunPix. The company has also snapped up independently created Facebook widgets, most notably "Favorite Peeps." According to ComScore, Slide widgets pull in more than 134 million unique viewers per month. (Millions of widgets, widgets for free.)

Posted by brian tiong at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Mashable *)

Kristen Nicole says:

BandsInTown, the network that lets you find and track bands you’re interested in, has undergone a major update to its site, incorporating several new features in order to make it more of a social network for friends. Read our initial review here.

With the ability to add friends, send private messages, leave comments on user profiles, events and venue pages, there are more ways in which users can gain first-hand information regarding the bands and events they’re interested in, while also making new friends. All users now have profile pages where they can share information about themselves, like their top favorite artists and their top friends.

A new BandsInTown widget displays the events you’ve added to your calendar. It can also show events that are specific to venues or artists. Record labels utilizing this widget can display an artist’s tour dates and locations. This widget can be placed on your blog, or social networking profile, like MySpace, hi5 or Piczo. Equally as important, more ticket sources have been added to BandsInTown, along with RSS feeds for each user, artist, and venue calendar.

As BandsInTown was already a good tool for finding and tracking artists and venues you’re interested in, based on a variety of search parameters, incorporating these social networking components will better allow the users to help each other in an online community. This gives it an advantage over sites and communities that rely too much on promoters and user-generated content for the provision of data, but still enables users to enhance the site with personal contributions. In related news, Oodle’s BandTracker has officially launched earlier this month.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Adam Metz *)

The mashup mixtape scene is rising from the underground and has certainly caught my attention of late but this is the first time I have seen a web2.0 mixtape.  Have a listen.

 
Adam says...

The tracks:
"It's The D.O.G." - Snoop Doog w/O.G. Daddy V
"Uh-Oh" - Ja Rule
"Big Spender" - Jay-Z/Freeway

And about 3 more, plus the voiceover by renowned futurist Joyce Schwarz and
Getabuz co-founder Steve Ehrlich.

 

Posted by brian tiong at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: David Feldt *)

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(* Source : Kristen Nicole *)

Me.dium, the browser add-on tool that’s aiming for more social web browsing, has added its service to be available for Internet Explorer users. Previously only able to be used by Firefox and Flock users, Me.dium can now reach a much broader audience.

That’s not all that Me.dium has going on today. It’s also created a widget for users to display their live web in relation to themselves and their website. The widget is in javascript, and can be placed on your blog, or your personal website. It reflects your circle of Me.dium activity as a sort of “behind-the-scenes” look at what’s going on. See who’s visited your site, and enable you and your site visitors to check out the sites that other Me.dium users are visiting.

It makes sense that Me.dium has created a widget for its users, and it makes more sense for Me.dium users to interact with it, and less so for site visitors, as most of the connections found on the widget are not directly correlated with content found on the initial site. The majority of Me.dium’s service could eventually be incorporated in this widget, which would make it more interactive and that much more appealing. Me.dium received $15 million in funding earlier this year, and has thus far used the funding to begin competing with other social browsing tools, such as The Coop and Clutzr.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Kristen Nicole *)

Oddcast, the developer of SitePal, is officially launching the Voki Platform, its free avatar builder. Read our initial review of Voki here.

The platform is for online communities to offer Voki avatars to their users, which can be placed on social networking profiles like MySpace, or sent via email and mobile devices. One benefit for the companies that implement Voki’s platform is the option of creating a branded playground for the avatars. Use the playgrounds for contests, discussion boards, and games as a social network for avatars within the existing community.

You’ll remember that Voki avatars are a bit more feature rich than Meez or WeeMee, in that you can add voice messages so that your avatar can speak. This is more similar to Gizmoz. Leave a voice message from your phone or microphone in order to make your avatar speak. In other avatar community news, SimpsonizeMe and Windows Live GoPets are both similar community offerings.

Posted by brian tiong at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(* Source: Kristen Nicole *)

Wikia is teaming up with Playxpert, the provider of in-game community management tools, to launch the Playxpert Wikia widget.

What Playxpert does is offer an in-game tool that appears as a semi-transparent overlay that displays as you play your game. It is widely used with the MMOG market, and enables players to communicate with each other via forums and chat, as well as manage their music or monitoring system diagnostics. It’s a customizable tool that lets users pick and choose what feature to include for a particular game. This widget, now combined with Wikia, will offer wikis for group collaboration efforts as well. Users can share stories and game information, track history, and leverage the larger community without leaving the game. The new widget will be available for download later this afternoon.

In other MMOG news, Curse and Guildcafe have both raised funding for their gaming networks, and further, Curse has added several social networking tools on its site, also partnering with Wikia.

 More related articles

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(* Nextgreatthing.com *)

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(* Source: Pete Cashmore *)

There’s money in them thar widgets: Clearspring, which helps you build, deploy and track widgets around the web, has raised $10 million more from a single investor, according to a regulatory filing.

We already covered the $5.5 million second round in March 2007, which included AOL founders Steve Case and Ted Leonsis as investors. That came on top of a $2 million round from Novak Biddle Venture Partners in April 2006. So, we’re talking $17.5M so far.

Clearspring has also been working with big name clients, including the NBA. Founder Hooman Radfar runs the Widgify blog.

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(* Source: 901am *)

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(* Source: Reena Jadhav *)

The new rules of interactive marketing include finding ways to monetize the "my" generation of users who want control over their information flow.

Online marketers have done such a great job that we've landed ourselves in trouble. Online users are absolutely rebelling against the onslaught of information thrust upon them when they are online. Ads, banners, pop-ups, email, newsletters, the list goes on. Users are demanding more control over what information they get and how they get this information.

I call this new online generation the "my" generation. They want a my-centric web universe, my landing pages, my favorite things, my music, my friends, my life. So the new challenge for interactive marketers is to become a "my" application: personalized, pint-sized and portable.

Here are the three Ps of the new age interactive marketing:

Personalized: Imagine each visitor having a uniquely personal experience with your service and website. It drives loyalty and interaction because it's "mine." Make it a priority to allow personalized access to your site.

Pint-sized: Think capsules, small but potent; the hottest parts of your site and service in a bite-sized format so users can custom aggregate from you and other favorite publishers. Remember, with all the user ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) out there, less is more. So what are the top three things your visitors want to stay connected with constantly? Answer that and well, that's your pint.

Portable: Your users want to connect with you beyond the boundaries of your website. Think browser, desktop, mobile device and any other "my" application such as MySpace or Facebook. Users don't want to constantly come to your website; they want your website (content and services) to come to them. Being compatible, portable and accessible is the key to being top-of-mind for your customer.

So how do you get a personalized, pint-sized and portable version of your website to engage with the new generation? The answer lies in community toolbars and widgets.

Community toolbars
The concept of toolbars is not new and I am sure you are familiar with Google and Yahoo! toolbars. They occupy the most valuable real estate on the browser, providing incredible brand exposure and driving user loyalty.

Community toolbars are a particularly interesting option for publishers. This option allows publishers to offer powerful interactive functionality to their users via their own branded space on a user's browser. It has quickly become a hot trend with major brands, including Major League Baseball, Greenpeace, eBay, Fox Carolina TV and even Kevin Federline, joining the movement with their own community toolbars. Community toolbars are quick to create, free, completely customizable, quite small and portable to the browser. Take a look at an example of a couple here:

1) Major League Baseball Community Toolbar:
For baseball fans everywhere, this community toolbar allows constant connection with MLB radio, breaking news, tickets, live chat with other fans, scores, playoff information and much more.

2) TechCrunch CRUNCHbar Community Toolbar:
For TechCrunch addicts, the CRUNCHbar community toolbar is an absolute necessity. It hooks users up with content updates, podcasts and a constant stream of "CrunchStuff" from their favorite blog.

3) Lufthansa Community Toolbar:
The Lufthansa community toolbar puts customers one click away from the Lufthansa booking engine and has given Lufthansa an exclusive venue for advertising low fares, special deals and discounts on flights.

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(* Source: Businessweek *)

There's a land grab under way in Silicon Valley. Not in real land (even in Tech Town, home sales are sagging), but on the Web. What's fueling the frenzy is something that couldn't sound more prosaic: widgets.

In the Web world, widgets are modules of software that people can drag and drop onto the personal page of their social network or onto a blog. There, widgets typically look like a little window or box, packing a bit of the functionality that you would get with a stand-alone Web site or software package. The result can be as mundane as the WeatherBug, or a YouTube clip of your favoritevideo of a bulldog riding a skateboard, or your wish list from online jewelry retailer Blue Nile (NILE ).

 More here

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 (* Source: Mark Baard *)

That hipster you always see talking into his Bluetooth headset might soon be able to use a similar device to leap into Second Life without even stepping out of line at Trader Joe's.

Researchers at a recent virtual worlds conference at MIT said that special eyewear, display "badges," and speakers worn about the neck will allow us to live more fully through our avatars -- those idealized versions of ourselves that typically boast better proportions than the saggy originals.

Second Lifers wearing the gadgets will be able to attend "in-world" parties and gallery openings, whether they are sucking down beers at Cornwall's or stuck in Fenway traffic. Motion detectors and other sensors in the devices will also show your virtual mates what you are up to in the real world.

It might sound like public safety officers will need to shift focus away from the risks associated with driving while chatting on cellphones to the inherent dangers of operating in two realities at the same time. But conference participants said such concerns are premature.

"It's like you're not going to be allowed to be in a virtual world while driving in the real world," said Robert Sutor, vice president of open source and standards at IBM.

Linden Lab vice president Joe Miller described one of the early products that will bridge the two worlds as a wearable box that creates a "3D sound field" that allows the wearer to hear voices from his virtual world without completely shutting out the real people around him.

The prototype speaker device presented to Linden recently by a developer "is not ready for prime time yet but it's working pretty well," said Miller, speaking at "Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Society, Technology & Policy Converge," sponsored by MIT and IBM.

Linden is encouraging open source developers to create client software for mobile devices. And Blizzard Entertainment, creator of the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, is hiring developers with experience in Symbian and Adobe Flash Lite for its mobile interface initiative.

Conference participants said cellphones are likely to be the first mobile devices to create two-way connections between real and virtual reality.

More here:

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(* Source: Michael Arrington *) 

On Monday, MTV, Taco Bell and Gizmoz will jointly announce a new website and promotion: users will go to tacobell.gizmoz.com and create a fifteen second audition of themselves doing anything they like. Taco Bell will select three winners and create a new thirty second spot with Gizmoz technology that will be played at the MTV music awards in September. The site is live now, but all content will be cleared or the Monday announcement (so wait until then to create an audition).

All auditions will be publicly available and viewers can rate them. The three winners will be paid and given a years worth of Taco Bell food (hopefully not all at once).

Gizmoz is an impressive and fun widget platform - and it’s something MySpacers in particular are likely to crowd to over time. This kind of exposure is great for the company…and we hear that Taco Bell is actually paying them for this, not the other way around.

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(* Source: Bernhard Warner *)

Web personalisation has given life to a whole ecosystem of bolt-on applications. 

Proclaiming “the end of search” has become the hot prediction of 2007. The blank canvas that is the search engine is no longer sufficiently intuitive in our information-overloaded lives, the thinking goes.

Instead, we need a host of applications that bring us ticker-style newsflashes, personalised information feeds, weather forecasts, our friends’ whereabouts, our holiday snaps and a communal calendar in a single location. Hence, the rise of the “widget economy”.

Net measurement firm ComScore earlier this month took a stab at measuring the use of widgets – programs that pull information from one site to another. It claims that one in five net users, or 177 million people, used a widget in April, giving us the first measurable glimpse that these tiny pieces of code are much more mainstream than previously thought. It’s the rise of user-generated content – from photo-sharing to map-building applications – that is fuelling the growth.

In fact, the ComScore data would suggest the rise of widgets owes its ascendance to little more than our desire to share photos and peek through those of strangers. The nearly identical photo-sharing, slideshow-generating sites – Slide, RockYou, PictureTrail and PhotoBucket – each drew staggering, search-engine sized traffic numbers in April, ComScore reports. Video and music referrals are big too, as is anything that has to do with geo-tagging, an activity that will explode once everyone gets back from their summer holidays and posts their photos online.

More here 

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