Socialcam, the mobile social video-sharing app by Justin.tv, hit the App Store two months ago and quickly became a favorite (for me, at least) for quick mobile video sharing. Like Instagram, however, it lacked just one thing - a website.

Today, Socialcam got just that and it makes it easy to go beyond just watching a single video. Now you can sit at home and browse your friends' profiles to see what else they've posted.

You couldn't, however, click on that link and then browse through other videos shared by that person. Now, you can. Here is my Socialcam profile and it's completely open to the public.

Why is this good? Sometimes, mobile feels like a great point for creation, but not the best for consumption. Do I really feel like browsing profiles and perusing videos on my phone? Sometimes, yes, but not always. If I have a computer, why not take advantage of the full-screen experience?

Oh, and if you were wondering about that bathroom video, it's awesome. Disco bathroom. For you San Franciscans, I highly recommend it.

Sharing video with friends can be a pain. I can't count the number of times I've waited for minutes on end just to have Facebook tell me the upload failed for some unknown reason or another. And while it's easy to upload to YouTube, it isn't connected to my social graph and the videos just float out there in the void.

Justin.tv, the live streaming video site, has taken a crack at socially sharing video with Socialcam, an app that could quickly become as popular for sharing video as Instagram became for sharing pictures.

The first thing you might notice upon opening Socialcam is just how similar it is to Instagram. You login with Facebook, the app suggests some friends, and you're off. The app is bare-bones simple. There's a feed of all of your friends' videos, a feed of your videos, a feed of followers and friends, and a camera button to record video. When you record a video, you can title it, choose what networks to share it on (Facebook, Twitter, email and SMS) and you're good to go.

The moment you finish recording and decide to share the video, the app begins uploading the video in the background, that way you don't have to wait around at the end while it uploads. You're busy adding a title, description and even tagging friends while it handles the upload. Videos can be of any length and size, and the app must be doing some decent compression, because the video upload took no time at all.

Just like Instagram, the app also allows for the most basic, yet necessary, level of interaction. Friends can comment and "like" videos and that's about it. It might be the perfect level of simplicity and features, which is a formula for winning.

Socialcam is available for both iPhone and Android.

But imagine what will happen to mobile streaming video as the next generation of high-speed wireless networks and devices become the norm.

But wireless infrastructure is about to take a leap forward as two so-called 4G technologies - LTE (Long Term Evolutions) and WiMAX - roll out. Sprint and its partner Clearwire plan to cover 120 million customers with high speed, Internet-anywhere WiMAX access by 2010, a technology that with upgrades could rival LTE speeds.

Mobile Web use mirrors fixed Web use, said Joel Brand, VP of product management at Bytemobile. About 75% of 3G Web users are connecting with laptops and netbooks, he said, with the rest accessing on smartphones. A full third of video on these devices is delivered by YouTube, he said, another third is from adult content sites and the last third comes from a broad mix of sources.

Next generation networks will certainly encourage the popularity of video, but it will probably also change the way we watch. For short, expedient, low-definition videos, YouTube is king. But higher mobile Web speeds will encourage users to seek longer, high-definition videos from services like Netflix and Hulu.

Higher speeds also mean live-streaming services like Ustream, Justin.tv, Livestream and Qik become more a lot more usable. Faster speeds will encourage individual users to stream more video, made even easier because so many users accessing via laptops or with Apple devices that have front-facing cameras. Livestreaming sites will also see huge opportunities for broadcasting live events like concerts, sports games or newscasts to users who can't watch at home in front of their TVs.

The next generation of wireless networks will surely see more users accessing video - but it's likely that a lower percentage of it will be from YouTube. Do you stream video on your phone? How do you see yourself using video as mobile wireless speeds get faster?

Photo by Giorgio Montersino

Even if you are not interested in Dyyno's own portal, today's release makes it significantly easier for anybody with an interest in streaming content to Justin.tv to stream a live Skype video chat or live event with just one click. The software comes with presets for streaming movies, games, documents and photos, but you can also choose your own bitrate, framerate and resolution (up to 1080p HD).

As the company's CEO Raj Jaswa told us earlier this week, Dyyno wants to position its service in the middle between Justin.tv's free solution and relatively expensive services like Telestream's Wirecast solution. Dyyno will give its software away for free to the first 10,000 users and then charge a $199 one-time fee for the service.

San Francisco's Justin.tv announced today that almost one and a half million people have downloaded the company's live-video-stream-viewing app to their iPhones in the first month it's been available. From Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, to the Future of Money conference, to a lot of content I don't care to watch, Justin.tv is definitely getting traction. This isn't the only company fast finding a lot of consumer interest in mobile video streaming, either.

The point is: People love live streaming video to mobile handsets.

Justin.tv said today that it has made major stability updates to its app (sometimes these things still feel like tin cans with string between them), and added push notifications to alert users when their favorite live shows are broadcasting. The iPhone app already contributes about 20% of the company's total new account sign-ups.

We don't know how many downloads the Ustream app has seen since it first entered the iTunes app store and was featured prominently there, but if we assume that the same one half of one percent of users will have rated the Ustream app as have rated the Justin.tv app, then Ustream would have seen well more than 11 million downloads so far. Presumably if the app had in fact passed 10 million by now, we would have heard about it.

The moral of the story, though, is that live streaming video sent to mobile phones is here and people like it. Live video broadcasting from mobile is much, much less popular of course, but content creation is always less popular than consumption.

It's exciting to imagine how a more mature mobile, live-streaming video market will look. I'm ready to watch all kinds of things happen live on my phone.

As tech investor Chris Dixon said on Twitter this morning, the Twitter drama that's unfolding is fascinating because it's a struggle between a product that wants to be an open protocol and a company that wants a return on more than $100 million in venture financing. You might find that drama interesting, or you might just be excited to see cool stuff get announced. Either way, it's great news that the rest of the world will get to watch live online.

Using technology from Vobile, an online video publishing company, Justin.tv partners (including FOX), will be able to use VideoDNA™ "fingerprinting" technology to watermark their digital content. If the content is spotted elsewhere on the site, Justin.tv will automatically remove the infringing channel. Think of it as DRM for real-time, streaming media.

"This has been part of our long-term effort to work with copyright holders... How can we help them automate the process of removing content?" said CEO Michael Seibel in a recent interview with NewTeeVee.

Vobile's solution, VideoDNA, is a compact, unique digital signature, a.k.a. a fingerprint, that can be attached to online video without changing the source content. To identify an unknown video, its fingerprint is found and matched against the entries in the reference database, known as the Vobile DNA Database. If a match is found, the querying application is provided with comprehensive data on the match. The VideoTracker component of this solution is intended specifically for content creators and has reportedly been adopted by many major Hollywood studios.

Using this huge library of fingerprints, Justin.tv has worked with publishers to integrate digital fingerprinting with live, streaming media. It's a complicated solution requiring the proactive responsibility of the copyright holders.

Check out NewTeeVee's video interview with Seibel below, and let us know in the comments what you think of the new measures for copyright protection of live, streaming media.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.