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| Animoto Replaces Xmas Cards with Videos Posted: 02 Dec 2008 05:14 AM PST
The whole holiday theme option is in fact incorporated into Animoto’s music library as well, with its own holiday genre. What’s great about the new holiday Animoto themes is that they’re very crisp and are well designed. Customized with your own images and music selection, you may like the new Animoto holiday themes enough to replace those Walgreens-printed cards you send out year after year. |
| MySpace Teams with Flock, Vidoop to Push OpenID Posted: 02 Dec 2008 05:00 AM PST MySpace announced its support of OpenID earlier this year, with certain hopes for its potential alongside its own Data Availability initiative. Such an integration makes sense, especially in light of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to become the central platform for online social interaction. So how can MySpace hope to stay ahead? Deeper OpenID integration. This time, a partnership with the Flock browser and Vidoop’s authentication solution will provide a more seamless experience for cross-network applications but for a user’s browsing experience as well. Called the Identity in the Browser open source project, this is an opportunity for all three companies to push OpenID into the next realm. As authentication sites like Vidoop provide a number of additional services that work right alongside OpenID, I can understand why it was chosen as one of the partners. For instance, one particular Vidoop feature allows you to set up your own email address to use for OpenID authentication, greatly simplifying the use of OpenID for individual users and increasing its potential for wide-spread adoption. The IDIB project is also quite indicative of MySpace’s potential position as a catalyst for rapid and wide-spread adoption, as it ties back to MySpace’s Data Availability. “This project perfectly complements our Data Availability efforts and we have a vested interest in seeing OpenID succeed as we are committed to making the Web a more open and social place" says Max Engel, product lead for the MySpace Data Availability Initiative. |
| Why MySpace is Monetizing So Quickly: They’re Dying Fast Posted: 01 Dec 2008 09:31 PM PST
While that may be the case, Jon Fine and Michael Wolff engage in a lively debate about the future of MySpace.
Whether or not Michael Wolff is accurate, it’s definitely an interesting perspective. MySpace has been quick to monetize the site while Facebook has been sitting back and casually breaking even, at least that’s the public image they portray. Most of the advertising monetization opportunity currently exists within the United States and Facebook is quickly catching up to MySpace domestically. The article definitely lends credence to the anti-MySpace argument but Jon Fine appears to be a bit more level-headed in the discussion, suggesting that MySpace’s case is similar to AOL’s. While AOL is no longer what is used to be, the company still has a large presence on the web. What the value of the users within the AOL network is definitely debatable but there is no debating the company’s absolute size. It is surely not the hot company it used to be. Do you think MySpace will die a slow death or are the naysayers completely distorting the picture? |
| Bopaboo Reviving the Used mp3 Marketplace Posted: 01 Dec 2008 12:50 PM PST
This sounds silly to some, especially when you think about the word “used.” The files aren’t really “used,” and you’re not really transferring authorization to play an mp3 to another person since you get to keep your copy of the file. But with the $5.00 credit bopaboo gave me to try out the site, I was able to get the entire 808s & Heartbreaks album, along with about 10 other songs. From a conceptual level, there’s nothing really new here. The same way you go to Amazon.com and purchase a used book for a $1 as opposed to $25 for a new copy, you can go to Bopaboo and get a “used” track. Sellers can be rated and scored, so when your decision comes down to price and trustworthiness, you’ll know who the best seller is. Now, there are other services that do various aspects of what Bopaboo offers, from Spiral Frog’s free downloads to Amie St.’s direct selling models that reflect the true market’s supply and demand. So if you’re one to pay for your digital music, determining whether or not to use Bopaboo may boil down to user experience. Bopaboo doesn’t leverage any outside recommendation systems and doesn’t have an internal recommendation engine either. Searching for music can be cumbersome and time consuming, depending on what you’re looking for. And once you have purchased music, you’ll need to download each song individually, while remembering where you left off. All downloads are kept in one giant folder, so three separate transactions will be combined in your download box, organized alphabetically instead of by purchase date. |
| Gannett Proves that Social Media is Good for Business Posted: 01 Dec 2008 10:25 AM PST
Even taking these two examples of Ripple6 and Mogulus, we see a two-pronged approach for the acquisitions, with Ripple6 focusing on the enterprise solutions as a service and Mogulus acting as a user-generated platform for aggreating and broadcasting content across the web. Any data provided by research conducted via Ripple6 could prove quite useful for Gannett’s other properties, such as USA Today, as well as potential advertising solutions for other investments including Mogulus. The continued roll-out of microsites used by businesses are inevitably reliant on social media, for any kind of marketing to be used online. So even as advertising decreases across old and new media alike, finding better and more accountable solutions for data gathering and execution will be important for many businesses out there, and Gannett is seemingly looking for the best way to prepare for the future. While the amount of the Ripple6 acquisition have not been disclosed, Gannett has stated that Ripple6 will continue to offer its services to its clients and third-party publishers independent of Gannett. Being under a larger parent company, however, has many benefits for growing its technology and gaining new clients as well. |
| Power.com. Too Late to Compete with Facebook Connect? Posted: 01 Dec 2008 09:01 AM PST
With $8 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and two years in stealth mode, Brazil-based Power.com has had enough foresight to do more than just update your status across Facebook and MySpace. Rolling in Orkut and Hi5, along with a handful of multimedia sharing options for sites like YouTube and MetaCafe, Power.com looks at the whole of your social networking experience for its aggregation purposes. That means that your messages are aggregated, along with groups’ activities, community updates, application changes, and more. But as a third-party application, Power.com will find itself competing with services like Flock or Minggl, as well as Facebook Connect and the rest. While users were getting frustrated from social network aggregators, Facebook, Google, MySpace and OpenID were busy finding ways to open their platforms and work cooperatively across networks. While we haven’t reached the open platform utopia just yet, there’s a lot to be said about Facebook connecting users with their Digg, Last.fm and Yelp accounts, versus a service that updates Facebook and MySpace at the same time. As we’ve seen with the ill-fated demise of Matchmine, another third-party service that was moving towards an open approach to media recommendations, Power.com could end up in a bad position as an outsider as the networks themselves find better ways of optimally working with each other. Nevertheless, Power.com has seemingly put a lot of thought into the features it does offer, which are exceedingly more inclusive than most other social networking aggregators I’ve seen to date. As Power.com is already building out its feature set according to the expectations of networks’ own open platforms, this scial networking aggregator could prove to be quite helpful in the end. |
| Who Will Protect the Children? Posted: 01 Dec 2008 06:00 AM PST So, the latest thing is age-verification for minors, where sites like MySpace and Facebook confirm the identities of members under 18 and restrict access only to other children or parent-approved adults. Sounds good and solves a basic online security problem, and a big one at that, right? Well, yes and no. As the New York Times reported last week, "Online Age Verification for Children Brings Privacy Worries" since the cost of doing this kind of business can be kind of steep – at least under current proposals. The Times discussed one company in particular, eGuardian of Ontario, CA, which "asks a parent to submit the birth date, address, school and gender of a child, then it asks schools to confirm the information." The security of data repositories is no doubt improving by leaps and bounds (I really have no idea, but I would certainly hope so), and the idea that the collected profiles on 750,000 eGuardian members are vulnerable to hacking or, worse, the vicissitudes of rogue employees is presumably a diminishing concern. Nonetheless, part 1 of the privacy problem always seems to come down to the control of information, much more so than its ultimate use or misuse. Privacy is a burgeoning area of the law – and for that matter, of life in the social media universe – precisely because of this problem of having to give up in order to get. Except that vulnerability in a public space has never been something that's REALLY new. I don't really like the "quiet car" in the Amtrak train or the "family section" at Yankee Stadium, mostly because I sort of miss the point of going to the game in the first place if you can't always be at risk of getting beer thrown on you. But that's me. But it's also true that the offline marketplace has adapted in those and other ways to stated and unstated consumer concerns about safety and security, and privacy. The Washington, DC Metro in has been mildly – but only mildly – pilloried for its newly announced policy of random bag-checking on metro cars and buses. ("If James Madison was waiting for an Orange Line train from Vienna, he might boil [the 4th Amendment] down to: The government better have a pretty good reason for wanting to know what’s in my knapsack, because otherwise, it’s none of their business. (Maybe first he’d ask why the escalator didn’t work.)") Why so mild a public outcry? I'm not sure it's apathy, more than adaptation, but also the sense that PUBLIC travel in transportation can and should be better secured. Online social media – a non-governmental organization, of course – seems a medium uniquely market-driven to make these things work. Based on anecdotal experience of breaches of public and private databases, I'd honestly be concerned about giving some random startup access to my child's most important information. But I'd also be hopeful that the solid experience of secure transactional services like PayPal would bode well for the development of an effective and safe online privacy mechanism for social media age-verification. Actually, the immediate hackles with companies like eGuardian apparently came from their unabashed intent to sell their collected user data to marketing firms for use in targeted online advertising. The usual qualifiers are rolled out about providing "no specific information about users" and opt-outs, and other arguments are touted like this one from Ron Zayas of eGuardian, quoted in the NY Times story: "When children go to Web sites today, they are already exposed to ads. We make sure the ads are appropriate for children. We do not increase the volume of ads shown, nor do we 'sell them out' in any way to advertisers." Not ridiculous points, true, and one might have sympathy for a company trying to build a technology with an actually viable business model. So who can say whether the "Good Housekeeping" or "etrust" seals of approval approach – the (theoretically) independent credentialing authority approach – are necessarily better ways to go, but they do seem to better stave off the expected privacy attacks like those discussed by the Times. Andrew Mirsky is principal of Mirsky and Company, a new media and technology law firm based in Washington, DC with an office in New York City. Andrew advises media and technology clients on all legal aspects of business operations, including corporate and finance, intellectual property, contracts, and human resources. Andrew is also founder of Media Future Now, a (roughly) monthly gathering of DC professionals, focused on finding ways to keep media-centric businesses agile, innovative and future-focused. |
Animoto, the service that lets you turn your images into a professional video, is launching a new feature that will get you into the holiday spirit (as if you needed help in that department!). Taking the concept of the e card, Animoto is taking things to the next level by offering holiday-themed greeting cards from your Animoto videos. 
At least that’s what Michael Wolff, author of the Rupert Murdoch biography, “The Man Who Owns The News,” 
I’ve always wondered if a marketplace for “used” music digital files would fly. There are some sites out there like GrooveShark which do support a marketplace for such activity, but it isn’t necessarily the primary premise of their service. Bethesda, Maryland based 
Gannett announced its acquisition of white label social networking provider Ripple6 last week, continuing the shift of new media being further integrated into old media traditions. Having created solutions for business and enterprises to layer in social media and networking capabilities for internal or consumer-facing solutions, Ripple6 has the technology that Gannett is interested in specifically for market research and marketing purposes. 
It’s been a while since we’ve seen the launch of a social network aggregator, but alas Power.com has emerged into a public beta today, hoping to offer enough features to outshine similar services we’ve seen in the past. 
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