Today Twitvid announced that it is launching a new open social video network and redesigned site focused on helping users find their favorite videos. Twitvid wants to make it easier to upload clips and share them to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Twitter.
For now, Twitvid's frontpage interface looks more like Digg's (before the social newsrooms). It shows most popular TwitVids by views, along with a featured Twitvid and a Twitvid Tuesdays Winner. There is a list of popular members on the right rail. Twitvid is tossing this simplistic design for user profiles that focus on personalized video taste. Sharing will be more focused around personal interests rather than top rated content. Imagine the Facebook news feed, but only populated by video that has been personalized to your tastes.
Comunitee is a new social network with the news-obsessed reader in mind. It purports to deliver news based on the your reading patterns, cutting away the clutter that you see on social networks that were not built with news as the main type of content. Its name is a mashup of the words "community" and "committee," which is the driving concept behind this combination social network and news site.
In its attempt to be as simple as possible, Comunitee employs a combination of social network functions, including Lists (Twitter and Facebook), Circles (Google+), socially relevant news (Digg), personalized news apps (Zite, Flipboard, News360), news based on your social graph (Facebook), frictionless sharing (Facebook), discovery (StumbleUpon) and news based on your interest graph (Twitter).
The NCAA recently stated that the University of North Carolina "failed to adequately and consistently monitor the social media activity of its athletes." Now colleges and universities across the country are scrambling to better monitor their social media sites. But is it necessary for schools to maintain institutional control of their athletes' social media sites?
People today are sharing to social networks while they're watching TV. They're communicating with friends in real time (chatting, IM, tweeting) and asynchronously (commenting and posting). A new report from Ooyala predicts that these social elements will become a part of the content itself, appearing inside video players, in apps or on second screens such as tablets or smartphones. This vision for the future of social TV focuses mostly on sharing and discovering while watching. How does this vision differ for viewers and publishers?
Today Google+'s photo app launched a new feature called Find My Face, which purports to make tagging photos of you and your friends much easier. Thankfully, this isn't a super creepy facial recognition tool. Not only is it completely opt-in, which means that Google asks for your permission before turning anything on, but users can decide whether or not they want to make the switch using Google+ settings. Matt Steiner, the engineering lead on the Google+ Photos Team, made the announcement today on Google+. Find My Face rolls out over the next few days.
These days there really is a social network for everything. Formspring.me is centered around asking questions and receiving answers. Quora is focused on exchanging knowledge. Favo.rs is a new social network that hopes to build online community around a single concept: founders and professionals can gather here and offer each other help. It's so simple that it just might work. Serial entrepreneur Adam Rodnitzky co-founded Favo.rs, which is focused on entrepreneurs, small business people and independent workers who don't have the benefit of a large company's built-in network.
Evernote has announced two new apps to help you remember what you ate and the names of the people you are eating with, dubbed Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. The two new apps were released at LeWeb in Paris Wednesday morning. While neither of these new apps are incredibly original, both go to show that Evernote wants to become the destination for all the notes you ever want to take in your life, from a memorable meal to an interesting person. We explore Evernote Food and Hello below.
StumbleUpon is on a roll. As of August 2011, the U.S.'s biggest serendipity engine drove drive half of all social media traffic, surpassing Facebook, the social network that formerly held that bragging right.
Today StumbleUpon announces a complete overhaul of its platform and logo, as it aims to make the site more visually oriented and simpler to use. Now the user profile makes visible all connections, comments, interests, channels, likes, shares, inbox and history. All of a user's thumbs-up are visible through the profile. The new StumbleUpon also features channels, which are essentially sponsored Twitter-like accounts that a user can follow. Plus, the layout looks a lot more like its social network cousin, Pinterest.
Today Google rolled out the latest of its Google+ integration projects. This time it was YouTube, which at the same time launched a snazzy new design. The redesign is not only visually more colorful and appealing, it also promotes sharing in a big way. YouTube is enabling you to autoshare to four different social networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Orkut. But wait... notice anything missing there? That's right, Google+ is not included in the autosharing.
On the face of it, this makes little sense. Now I can 'like' a video on YouTube and it automatically shows up on my Facebook wall and Twitter feed. That's actually very cool. It saves me having to manually share things, yet I still control the autosharing (as I have to click the 'like' button in YouTube). Indeed this is frictionless sharing the way it should be - the user is in control of what gets shared, but it's made much easier for them. So why on earth isn't Google+ part of the autosharing?
Color, the photo-sharing social app that took the tech industry by storm when it announced $41 million in prelaunch funding shortly after SXSW in March, is almost complete with its pivot. As announced at Facebook's developer conference in September, Color has attached itself to the social network and wants to fundamentally change the notion of the status update. Augmented are the notions of the "elastic" implicit social graph and many vestiges of what Color was when it originally launched.
Color has now launched in private beta around the concept of visual Facebook status updates, called "visits." We explore the new color and its evolution below.
