Private group messaging apps are hot. The Monday after Skype acquired year-old startup GroupMe for a reported $85 million, a team of innovators who lead the ultimately unsuccessful but very important charge to popularize RSS feeds has regrouped to build and launch a new group messaging app called Glassboard.
Glassboard launched in the iTunes, Android and Windows Phone app stores this morning and it's a good, solid, simple app for communicating across multiple different topical "boards" on your phone. If you've got a group of people you want to communicate with for a short or long period of time, from your phone, with commenting, media and location sharing, then Glassboard could be the app for you.
Serendipitous discovery engine StumbleUpon has just launched an Explore Box on its Web version, which allows users to find topics to explore by typing them in. StumbleUpon delivers a new website or video with one click of a button, and it uses a deep list of topic tags, or 'interests,' to keep track of the kinds of content users like. The best way to fine-tune one's StumbleUpon results is by manually subscribing to a bunch of interests first. The Explore Box allows users to filter results in new ways on the spot.
There's no Explore Box on StumbleUpon's celebrated iOS and Android apps yet, but StumbleUpon is even more powerful on the desktop browser where it began. For a service that magically delivers new content with one click, a search box might sound like too much work, but it's not. The Explore Boxis just a starting point for stumbling upon a specific topic, and in a way, it's just as magical. Under the results of a query, the box displays some more topics "you might also like." Hey, why not? See what happens. *click*
News360, a news reader app available on most mobile devices and tablets, has just announced version 2.0, which adds a layer of personalization to the news shown to each user, whereas it was just an aggregator before. The update also launches a beta Web version of the service, so you can use it on the desktop. Finally, the new version adds a timeline view, which allows you to track a story's development over time.
When News360 launched, it simply pulled in coverage of stories from multiple sources, like Google News does, as well as Twitter discussions of the topic. It offered a few ways for users to go more in-depth, with image galleries, great definitions of terms and the ability to manually add more personalized feeds by topic. It certainly provided more content than a human-curated service, like Newsy, but it lacked that human quality of editorial discernment. The new personalization layer in News360 is still automated, but it harnesses the user's own human qualities.
Vimeo, probably the best site on the internet to watch artistic short videos, announced an expansion of its lean-back feature called Couch Mode today. The feature, which offers a browsing interface that was initially optimized for Google TV, can now be enjoyed anywhere. Couch Mode makes it easy to move from one video right into the next, without using the traditional website navigation. You can access it from the corner of any page on the site.
Vimeo's Ryan Hefner said in a blog post today that Couch Mode "works great" on iPads and Android tablets. In my testing of the feature today I did not find that to be the case.
Digg, the social news site that was once the darling of tech-loving web users everywhere, has faced a rapid decline in interest as the rest of the Web grew up and it remained relatively slow and impersonal.
Today the site added a big new feature it thinks could help: a highly customizable, real time Newswire. Want to see the freshest videos about technology that have been validated enough to get 10 or more Diggs but aren't so popular that they've been dugg more than 50 times? Text posts about business with more than 50 Diggs? Those kinds of views are now easy to set up and read in real time. That's just one of several several big new features that went live on the site this morning.
If you use web conferencing services to view other peoples' desktops, you know how clunky they often feel. Long load times, heavy demands on your CPU, browser incompatibilities at launch - no fun. That's why it's exciting to see web office company Zoho launch a new lightweight HTML5 web conference viewer that runs in the browser. It seems to run really well, too.
Zoho said this morning that the new viewing option is faster than the company's Java, ActiveX and Flash options, it's secure and can play nicely with corporate firewalls. Presenters can set up meetings to display in HTML5 by default, but this new option is only for viewers. Participants seeking to present their own desktops will need to switch to the Java or ActiveX options.
I don't hate the Toshiba Thrive Android tablet, which is probably the nicest thing I can say about it. Although heavy, it has a lot of ports. And it feels less heavy than it looks, I found. It runs a newer and more stable version of Android Honeycomb than some of its competitors do, too, so there are handful of geeky new features to enjoy. Overall, it's not a bad Android tablet.
But at the end of the day, the question still remains: who will buy this tablet over the iPad?
Universal Music Group launched a new website today called Digster.fm, where a team of music editors curates playlists that can be listened to through music service Spotify. Spotify is great, curation is a creative act with incredible potential, and I had some hope this new effort could point towards the future of competition between music industry players. Yeah! Come on, Universal, let's see who can make the most awesome curated playlist website!
This one, however, is terrible. There were errors throughout the log-in process (you can't listen to music until you log in either), it required I give the site access to Tweet from my account and the Digster.fm Twitter account has been Tweeting out links all afternoon to websites that posted their raw press release.
Do you think you could write shorter, more useful emails if you composed them inside software that supported structured documents, easy screenshots and image annotations? That's the theory behind a new app just launched in Beta this afternoon called Clarify.
Clarify was built by Blue Mango Software, the company behind the widely-loved documentation service Screen Steps. The company says that Screen Steps traditionally aimed for both documentation and communication; Screen Steps will from this point on focus on documentation and Clarify will be the communication product. For now Clarify is free and it seems to work pretty well.
Push me, pull me, real time web: we've now got enough options available to us when choosing how to consume our favorite web content that we may as well start mixing things up a bit, no?
Push delivery technology company Superfeedr today released a new Chrome browser plug-in called Msgboy. (The first 200 people to use this link can get it.) The plug-in accesses your browser's history and uses it to make a big list of web pages you like and feeds you're subscribed to. Then it uses Superfeeder's XMPP and Websockets technology to push new updates from those sources to your browser, in the form of a Chrome Notification. Click the plus and minus buttons in the pop-up and you can quickly train it to know what kind of notifications you want or don't want to see. I've been using it this morning and like it a lot. There are a lot of feeds I've subscribed to that I don't remember to check very often anymore; now they are in the corner of my screen all day.
