Microsoft announced Windows Live Profiles today, which takes some lessons from social networking sites and FriendFeed. The new profile page provides a central hub for all your online activities on Windows Live. More interestingly, your profile can also aggregate updates from other services, such as your Twitter account, your blog feed, reviews from Yelp, or photos you have posted on Flickr. You can also feed any standard RSS stream into your profile. While Microsoft doesn't state this explicitly, these new profiles really tie all of the new and old Live Services together into a social networking site.
Microsoft today announced a new photo sharing product, Microsoft Live Photos, which integrates very nicely with Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery desktop photo application, and is yet another product in the long list of Windows Live services that Microsoft introduced today. In many respects, Live Photos clearly competes directly with Yahoo's Flickr, though while it has a lot of Flickr's features, its focus is more on sharing pictures with a small group of friends or family than with the whole Internet. We have been using Live Photos for about two months now, and our overall impression is extremely positive.
It's inevitable. News surfaces about a new iPhone or Android application and almost immediately it's followed by "When are we getting our BlackBerry app?"
And with good reason. For all the buzz about Google and Apple handsets, BlackBerry remains the dominant force in smart mobile devices. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that MySpace has released an application for the BlackBerry platform. What is surprising, however, is how long it has taken.
Microsoft just announced the availability of a number of new and updated online applications in its Windows Live suite: Windows Live Photos, Profiles, People, and Groups. In addition, Microsoft also announced that it will allow its users to integrate content from a large number third-party services, including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, StumbleUpon, TripIt, Twitter, and Yelp. Microsoft will begin rolling out these new services to U.S. customers in the coming weeks and expects them to be available globally in 54 countries by early 2009.
During the election season, Barack Obama's campaign got a lot of kudos for its use of social media tools. As we noted in our post entitled Obama's Social Media Advantage, both Presidential candidates used the web and social media tools to connect to their followers and organize their campaigns - but Obama got much more mileage out of it. Furthermore, after the election result Obama's team immediately launched change.gov. It's a new site for the President-Elect that appears to be crowdsourcing the political agenda, for example by asking the American people to share their stories and their goals.
Not to be outdone, or left behind, this week the Republican party launched a new website that makes use of social media tools. Let's take a look...
Judging by the number of people lined up to talk with Nickhil Jakatdar, CEO Vuclip, and the interest from judges immediately after his presentation today at the Under the Radar conference (Mountain View), it seems Vuclip may be Under the Radar's next dealmaker.
Why is Vuclip so cool? Because the company's objective to make it completely frictionless has been achieved. No login, no fee, and an easy to use interface has made Vuclip a hit with consumers. During September 08, Vuclip claims to have had over 100 million page views and served in excess of 17 million videos worldwide. We had a chance to talk with Jakatdar after his presentation.
This is so cynical it just might work. Google announced this afternoon that YouTube will now allow video publishers, no matter who they are, to bid for sponsored placement for their videos on the site. The program will be based on Adsense technology and is essentially just that - paid search results for user published videos.
This is a radical opening of the previously white-listed YouTube monetization strategies. Have you made a video of your band performing its new single, or your company's new product demonstration or your nonprofit group's expose of corporate misbehavior? If you'd like to have that video highlighted on the site, now you can - for a price. What price? What can you bid?
Yahoo today announced that it is bucket testing a new design of its front page. The new design was built on top of the latest version of Yahoo's UI Library, which, according to Yahoo, will accelerate performance and give third-party developers the ability to easily create applications for the new front page. It is not clear when this new design will become widely available, but for now, it is only available to a random subset of Yahoo's users.
Deals are in the works to make Microsoft the default search and advertising provider for Verizon mobile phones, one of the biggest carrier networks in the US. That would mean Redmond replacing Google, something that many users may not be happy about.
A related deal could put Windows Mobile in places that Google Android could be, as well, and the decision will come down to money more than it will quality of service for users. We like a lot of what Microsoft is doing these days, but we prefer the Google search experience and are hopeful for Android-driven innovation. Thus we hope that Microsoft can't pay its way into the center of hundreds of millions of more phones.
For a lot of students, the history of ancient Rome is not exactly a gripping subject. Google, together with the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) is trying to change this. Starting today, Google Earth will feature a new layer, 'Ancient Rome 3D,' which is based on the IATH's 'Rome Reborn' model and which displays a 3D model of the city as it existed in 320 AD.
