Posts Tagged ‘User Generated Content’

Diaspora, the anti-Facebook

May 13th, 2010

Straight out of NYU, four engineering students have decided to take on Facebook with an open source personal web service that put’s individuals in control of their data, called Diaspora.  Chronicled in both The New York Times and Mashable, these four ambitious young entrepreneurs have set their sites on what is becoming the new Microsoft on the Internet – Facebook.

The Diaspora team — Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy and Raphael Sofaer — strongly believe that sharing information via social network and maintaining a reasonable level of privacy should not have to be mutually exclusive.  Their project Diaspora is to build a social network that allows everyone to install their own “seeds”, which is a personal space with the user’s photos, videos and anything else they like, within the larger social network. Their “seed” would be fully controlled by the user and they can choose who they share their data with, if at all.

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Posted in Facebook, Startups

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YouTube’s Top 10 most viewed videos of all time

May 7th, 2010

It’s Friday and we thought we’d give you all a little taste of the sometimes fascinating videos on YouTube – for your viewing pleasure. These are the top 10 most viewed videos on YouTube of all time (as of May 7, 2010). Enjoy.

1. Lady Gaga – Bad Romance (Total Views: 198,742,929)

2. Charlie bit my finger – again ! (Total Views: 186,898,133)

3. Evolution of Dance – By Judson Laipply (Total Views: 142,910,485)

4. Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris (Total Views: 122,722,268)

5. Pitbull – I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho) (Total Views: 119,031,633)

6. Hahaha (Total Views: 118,334,011)

7. Miley Cyrus – 7 Things – Official Music Video (Total Views: 117,768,950)

8. MIley Cyrus – Party In The U.S.A. – Official Music Video (Total Views: 115,932,107  sorry, YouTube turned off the ability to embed this video)

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Posted in YouTube

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Phillies fan tasered, news at 11…from YouTube

May 5th, 2010

Earlier this week a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies jumped on the field while the game was in progress, was chased down and tasered by security and escorted from the stadium. This is actually not a unique experience in the world of professional sports, or for Philadelphia fans. All TV broadcasts of the game cut away from the fans antics as FCC law instructs them to so other rouge fans don’t have any wild ideas. Problem solved for network TV and the G-rated masses of viewers who would be corrupted by such hijinks (insert sarcasm icon here).

But wait, not so fast. In this case, the running fan was captured by numerous fans’ smartphone video cameras and the footage was quickly uploaded to YouTube for the world to see.

What happen next was quite interesting. Hundreds, if not thousands, of news organizations – including those same TV broadcasters – started showing the YouTube videos that captured the event. Anyone else see the obvious hypocrisy here?

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Posted in Mobile, YouTube

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Fotopedia close another round of funding and shifts “images for humanity” to the web

December 1st, 2009

fotopediaFotopedia, a cross between Flickr and Wikipedia, just raised $1.1 million in additional funding from Ignition Partners, Banexi Ventures and founder Jean-Marie Huillot, as reported by TechCrunch earlier today.  The company had raised $2.3 million in seed funding previously.  Fotopedia, which is the brainchild of Hullot – former CTO of NeXT and Apple’s application division, turns your photo albums into collaborative Web pages with different topics and subjects.

The latest from Fotopedia is a very compelling social photo Wikipedia platform that gives users the ability to turn their photo albums into a web page entry on the Fotopedia site.  You can add tags, associated Wikipedia entries and Google Map information to your own Fotopedia web album as well.  This new platform moves Fotopedia completely onto the web by eliminating the need to install their former desktop client.

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Posted in Startups

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RunKeeper raises seed round, social mobile fitness ready for primetime

November 30th, 2009

runkeeperFitnessKeeper, the Boston startup behind the GPS-based RunKeeper iPhone application, announced today a seed round of $400,000 from a group of local angel and venture investors.  While a $400k investment is small news by venture capital standards, this investment may have a bit more meaning behind it.  This funding marks the evolution of what I’m calling “social mobile fitness”.

runscreen

The mobile RunKeeper app gives fitness buffs the ability to train socially.  By using RunKeeper on your iPhone you can track your workouts – running, walking or cycling, build and communicate with your “Street Team”, and seamless update your progress by clean and simple integration with Facebook and Twitter.  This really brings a new level to not only iPhone training applications, but also potentially all mobile fitness applications.  Full integration with social networking applications really expands and enriches the fitness experience.

runshare

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Posted in Apple, Facebook, Mobile, Startups, Twitter

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Global animators use Facebook to create a groundbreaking new short

November 20th, 2009

n65108180022_1744At tonight’s opening of the new animated feature called “Planet 51″, moviegoers will be treated to a 5-minute computer animated short.  Not an uncommon preview to a feature film, but what is uncommon is how this short was created.  The Mass Animation short called “Live Music” was created from a collaboration of 58,000 people from 101 countries on Facebook.

This new, groundbreaking short was the first result from an ambitious project called Mass Animation to collaboratively create animation on Facebook.  The effort started in August 2008, when Mass Animation enabled animators from around the globe to join the creative process from anywhere by using Facebook as their communication and collaboration tool.  They animated with tools and models provided by Mass Animation, submitted and view them through an application on Facebook and voted on the best animated shots.  In the end, 51 animators’ shots were selected for inclusion in “Live Music.”  Check out the “Live Music” trailer below.

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Posted in Facebook

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YouTube Direct empowers citizen journalism

November 17th, 2009

youtubedirectYouTube has just announced on its blog the launch of YouTube Direct, design to empower the ever growing citizen journalism movement.  Self describe by YouTube as “a new tool that allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users”, YouTube Direct is poised to link videographers and media outlets in a virtual video marketplace of user generated video content.

YouTube Direct will change how media outlets capture and report the news.  The new platform allows news organizations to expand their coverage areas with citizen journalism at little to now cost.  ABC News, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, NPR, and San Francisco Chronicle are among the organizations already using the platform and now you can too.

YouTube’s provided the following demo of how it works:

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Posted in YouTube

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Foursquare unveils API to the public

November 16th, 2009

foursquare_logoEarlier today, Foursquare announced it would be opening up their API for the public.  Up until now, only a handful of developers have had access to the location-based service startups platform.  Foursquare’s hope with this move is to create a robust app-based community of developers that will leverage their unique platform.

Along with their announcement of the API, Foursquare also unveiled their existing app gallery to demonstrate a number of apps that developers have already built with the API.  So far, the following apps are in the Foursquare gallery:

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Posted in Mobile, Startups

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Listiti launches Twitter Lists e-mail alerts

November 5th, 2009

There has been a lot of noise recently with respect to Twitter’s new Lists feature.  The cool new feature does have some appeal to it already standalone – but hasn’t really been leveraged in a truly meaningful way.  That is until Listiti launched their new “Google Alerts meets Twitter Lists” application.

listiti

The brainchild of entrepreneur Xavier Damman, originally from Belgium who just moved to San Francisco, California, Listiti is an extremely practical and useful implementation of the Twitter Lists platform.  The service allows users to keep track of their favorite Twitter Lists via e-mail notifications – hence the “Google Alerts” portion of their tagline.

Listiti is incredibly simple to use and is an excellent way for people and companies to keep tabs on areas of interest, monitor their brand online and many other useful and focused methods of real-time data interpretation.

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Posted in Twitter

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Firefox plugin finally lets you ‘Dislike’ on Facebook

November 5th, 2009

How many times have you come across a wall posting on Facebook that you just don’t agree with or like at all?  There’s nothing more irritating to many of us than observing the bandwagon ‘Like’ attribute that Facebook has had forever.  Not to be a total curmudgeon, but sometime you just want to state your ‘Dislike’ opinion.  Well thanks to Mozilla, you now can!

mozilla

Released today via the Mozilla add-on developers website, you can now ‘Dislike’ on Facebook.  Thanks to French developer, Thomas Moquet, the new plugin is available for Firefox versions 2.0 – 3.6.  Check out a screen shot of the plugin in work below:

dislikeI want to thank Mozilla and Thomas Moquet personally for finally giving us the power to be a little more human on Facebook.  Now maybe people will think twice about posting the most idiotic babble on their wall – one can only hope.

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Posted in Facebook

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