Pricing

Personal accounts with one channel cost $10 per month (up to 10 concurrent viewers) and the company also offers accounts for small businesses at $100 per month (with 10 channels) and an account geared towards larger enterprises at $1,000 per month (which allows for 100 channels with 1000 concurrent streams). Not-for-profits, as well as education and religious organizations can also get access to this account for $1,000 per month.

Compatibility

Because of the company's reliance on its proprietary P2P architecture, however, users will have to install a plugin when they want to watch your streams. Currently, Dyyno doesn't offer a plugin for Macs, so this might be a deal breaker for quite a few potential users for now, though the company expects to ship its Mac plugin soon. While Dyyno works well in Firefox and Internet Explorer, we should also point out that Google's Chrome also isn't supported yet.

Easy to Use, Excellent Video Quality

When it works, however, Dyyno works extremely well and just as advertised. To share any part of your screen, you just drag and drop the Dyyno logo from the desktop client to any window and the sharing session will start. If you want to switch to another application, just drag the logo over to the next application. The video quality was generally excellent and you can also manually set the output resolution (up to 1024x768) and frame rate (up to 20 frames per second). In addition, you can also broadcast sounds from your computer as well.

WebEx

Because Dyyno can easily stream video from any application, including webcams, video players, and games, it makes for a very flexible platform. In addition, Dyyno also offers a solution for Cisco's popular WebEx online meeting solution. This brings all of Dyyno's capabilities to WebEx and makes it easy to integrate Dyyno into a platform that a lot of companies have already invested in.

A Few Missing Features

We did miss a few features, though. It would be nice, for example, if channels featured a chat room, something we have come to expect from similar solutions. It is also currently not possible to embed a video stream on another site. The company tells us that these features are forthcoming, but for the time being, they are sorely missed.

Overall, though, assuming you are on a Windows PC, Dyyno offers a high-quality solution for anybody who needs to stream video from a desktop directly to the web.

Windows Live users will also soon be able to aggregate updates from MySpace, though according to Microsoft, this integration is still a few months off.

Just like before, your friends will be able to see your updates from these services on their Windows Live home pages, though your friends can also opt-out of your updates, or updates from select services. If you are a prolific digger, for example, your friends can choose not to see an update for every single story you dugg.

If you have a Windows Live account, this link will take you to a page with all the new web activities you can now import. As usual, Microsoft is rolling these updates out slowly, so your account may not feature these new services just yet.

Functionally, the biggest update to Windows Live is that users can now easily invite friends on other social networks into their Windows Live network (and vice versa).

Web IM for Hotmail

In addition, Microsoft also released Web IM for Hotmail today in a number of countries, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Brazil.

Looks Like This Strategy is Working for Windows Live

In many ways, this update makes Windows Live into even more of a mainstream version of the current non-beta, non-real-time version of FriendFeed. You can easily aggregate most of your online activity and your friends can easily follow all of your updates on their Windows Live accounts.

According to both Compete and Quantcast, Windows Live has seen its traffic grow rapidly since it updated its services last November, and the addition of these new web activities will surely not hurt the site's traffic.

Using the Wall

To get started, simply browse to the desired place and click the new Wall tab. Then click on the embedded Brightkite Wall to go full screen. Organizers can even customize the Wall beforehand, if desired. The message and location name can be modified, the shortcode can be selected for use within the U.S. or outside the U.S., and checkins can be turned on or off.

Of course, Brightkite has a much smaller user base than Twitter, which could have made this new feature a non-starter. However, Brightkite has that problem covered. With the Brightkite Wall, anyone can participate by texting a pre-defined shortcode provided for you by the service.

Better Than Live Blogging?

Brightkite's Wall may soon beat Twitter to become the microblogging platform of choice for live events because it offers a much richer stream of information. Instead of just displaying 140-character notes, Brightkite's Wall also displays photos. Combined with notes and checkins, this makes the Wall a much more engaging experience.

For those virtually attending the event, watching the Brightkite Wall could end up being even better than refreshing a blogger's post featuring their "live" coverage of the event. A live blog only gives you one point of view and set of images. Even if it's a group effort, it's not the same as being immediately tapped into the thoughts and reactions of all the event's attendees as you are with Brightkite.

Potential Problems

Our only concern for this new feature is that it doesn't appear to be any sort of administrative control over who can configure what. If some rogue conference attendee wanted to, he or she could highjack the Wall by customizing their own personalized greeting for all to see. That could lead to problems, especially if the message was profane or offensive.

Another concern is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of archiving system in place, so while the Wall may be a great real-time view into the thoughts and activities that are taking place at a particular point in time, going back to view older images and notes could be a challenge if the same locale (address) is used over and over again for subsequent events.

The Wall feature is still in beta, though, so as people begin to use it and submit feedback, it may be updated to even better reflect people's needs than it does now.

With the new iPhone app, available in both a free version and a paid version which allows for more control over what you watch (OrbLive free just streams random files), you can now stream your media over 3G in addition to Wi-Fi and EDGE. Given Apple's approval of this application, they've set a precedent for approving apps that stream live video over 3G. They could now no longer block approval to apps like Slingbox, for example, as doing so would be illegal and anti-competitive. If they approved the OrbLive app knowingly, then we can expect a slew of 3G-enabled live TV and streaming media applications in the near future.

Of course, the new OrbLive app may have been admitted into the App Store by mistake, so before shelling out the $9.99 to purchase it, you may want to wait and see if the app is yanked in the next few days. We hope that's not the case, because live TV on the iPhone over 3G would be truly incredible. But this is Apple, so you never really know. 

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've remained proponents of live streaming video, claiming more than once that it is "going to be huge." If that's the case, why is Yahoo! pulling the plug on Y! Live so quickly?

One answer might be the competition. Yahoo! has seen little traction from its user base for the service during a period when services like UStream and Mogulus seem to be growing exponentially. Midway through Yahoo!'s Y! Live experiment, for example, UStream - one of the leaders in the space - boasted nearly 10 million unique viewers per month for its live video streams.

And then there's the slumbering giant that is the promise of YouTube's live streaming.

Long story short, Y! Live never really gained enough of a following to warrant the Brickhouse team continuing to spend development resources on it, according to today's announcement:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So where will the Brickhouse team be focusing their efforts now? It's a safe bet that current Brickhouse darling fire eagle - a service that helps users share their location information with others - will be garnering more attention, especially with the ever growing popularity of geo-aware devices and software entering the market, these days.

And there's always the chance that another Yahoo! experiment will get the green light. What might that be? We'll just have to stay tuned to Yahoo! Next* to see.

The main feature of this new search interface - the ability to reorder search results at will - is decisively different from the rumors about a digg-style Google interface that tend to reappear regularly. In U Rank, your changes only appear to your friends and don't influence the overall search index.

The emphasis of U Rank is on collaboration and sharing. U Rank keeps a history of all your searches, but these are not shared by default. U Rank also allows you to create lists of search results by allowing you to copy a given search result to another search. You could, for example, create a list of personalized search results for a search term like "Best Digital Camera."

Definitely Still a Prototype

U Rank is clearly still a prototype. Search results take a long time to load, and some very basic user interface issues clearly still need to be worked out. There is, for example, no way to move a search result from the second search page to the first, and the interface for dragging and dropping items sometimes doesn't work well. To be really useful, it would also be helpful if you could organize your friends into groups, so that you can share your searches on lists more selectively.

However, this is also a very interesting experiment that takes search into a different direction by putting a lot of emphasis on social interaction. If your searches tend to be very broad, you would probably have to have a lot of friends to ever encounter an annotated or reordered result, but we can see how this new interface could be very useful if you are working in a team that is focused on a very specific topic.

In addition to the video feeds, there's also a live feed from FOX News Talk Radio. Another nice feature is the breaking news alerts. When the app is minimized, a small window will pop up from time to time when there's breaking news. The pop-up window will show the headline and the video. If you want to tune in, just click on it. If you ignore it, it will disappear in a moment or two. If that feature annoys you or you just need a break from distractions, you can easily turn it off from the Alert Settings in the app.

The last notable feature of the AIR app is the sharing feature. If you catch a video that you want to share with your friends, you can simply click the "Share" button to send them the video via email. Your friend receives a link to the video stream. The link delivers them to a page on the FOX News web site where they can watch the stream live.

If you want to check out this app yourself, you can download it from here. You will need to have Adobe AIR installed in order to install it.

The site now features tips and trick by members of the community, as well as Microsoft staff. Users can rate the contributions by other members on a five-point scale. In order to prevent abuse, content needs to be voted on by at least three community members before it is featured on the main community page, which Microsoft has dubbed the "Clubhouse," and which is only accessible by using a Windows Live ID. This content is also featured on the homepages for the individual applications that make up the Windows Live brand, though interestingly, some applications like Live Calendar and OneCare are not featured on the site.

Especially good content will also be pushed to the Windowslive.com front page by the editors. Microsoft assured us that it would allow negative posts to be featured on the site as well and that it would not censor any valid opinions - assuming that the users abide by all the terms of service for WindowsLive.com.

The Clubhouse

As of now, the central hub for creating and sharing most of the content for Windowslive.com is Live Spaces. In order for post from there to appear in the clubhouse, a user has to tag them with 'Clubhouse' and the name of at least one Live application. Indeed, it seems tags are the main glue that hold the Clubhouse together, as Microsoft also uses them to determine a list of possibly related posts. For now, the Clubhouse is only open to a select few member of the Windows community, but Microsoft will open it up for everybody in the coming weeks.

In the next iteration, Microsoft will also allow importing items from other platforms like WordPress and Blogger, Marty Collins told us.

In terms of the overall design, the Clubhouse is quite well done. One nice feature are the user profiles, which are pulled from Live Spaces. These profiles also lists a user's other posts and their ratings. In the Clubhouse, users can see all the latest posts tagged with 'clubhouse,' as well as the most highly rated posts.

It is interesting to see that Microsoft is willing to experiment in this area. On WindowsLive, it allows Microsoft generated content to stand next to user generated content, which could potentially open Microsoft up for some embarrassments. At the same time though, if Microsoft holds true to its promise of not censoring legitimate content, then this represents an important step forward in how Microsoft interacts with its customers.

PayPerLive could easily become the de-facto standard for bands who want to broadcasts concerts live as a pay-per-view event. The success of this service, however, will depend greatly on the quality of the video, but also the audio stream. If our experience with watching Leo Laporte's steams on TWIT is any indication, though, Stickam should do just fine.

Still, paying users tend to be a lot more fickle than those using a free service (and those can be quite fickle already), so part of Stickam's challenge will be to provide a stable, high-quality service that doesn't go down or stutter in the middle of a concert or consultation session.

The Live brand confusion is something that Richard MacManus first wrote about on his ZDNet blog in 2006. Why then, hasn't this been fixed yet? It has gotten better -- MSN Hotmail vs. Windows Live Mail vs. Windows Live Hotmail seems have settled on the latter name, for example -- but there is still a lot of overlap in the Windows Live family that makes it confusing for consumers.

When we were briefed a couple of weeks ago about the launch of Microsoft Live Mesh, we asked how the company planned to reconciled yet another file backup service with SkyDrive, Live Drive, FolderShare, SharedView, and Spaces, each of which have some amount of overlap at the service level with Mesh. The answer we got was itself confusing and muddled and basically boiled down to, those services can use the Mesh as their back end platform. The impression that we got, though, was that even people at Microsoft tend to be a bit confused about how the whole Live universe fits together.

The design differences across the Live Search sites highlighted today on the LiveSide blog may be minor, but taken as a whole they're a good metaphor for the branding confusion that Microsoft has created across its collection of online sites and services. If designers in the search division can't get together and decide on a unified design for a single family of Live products, it's no wonder the Live brand on the whole has become so sprawling and muddled.

The high hopes vendors like Kyte have had for User Generated video are crashing on the rocks of underwhelming consumer response and the market is shifting to a more traditional commercial media model. Will consumers come around in the future? Kyte says yes, I'm not so sure.

Simply put, large numbers of non-professional users have not started producing video content outside of YouTube and other vendors are now shifting towards publishers looking to make money. For the immediate time at least, user generated video will probably remain centralized by in-house services from major social networks (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook) because that's where the audiences and ease of use are. The forthcoming YouTube Live will continue this trend.

More high-end feature sets and publishing experiences will be in demand almost exclusively by big media companies and a small group of aspiring professional video broadcasters. One of the premium features Kyte is announcing today is premium Facebook applications, something also offered by competitor SplashCast. Kyte has worked out an interesting solution to updating Facebook app splash pages, but that's just one of many problems publishers face on Facebook. Meanwhile it's advertising that is going to make big media partnerships pay off for companies like Kyte and the places where the viewers are, MySpace and to some degree Facebook, still drastically limit the visibility of 3rd party delivered ads.

It's a tough place for small video services to be in, but there's enough money flying around that someone will have to figure it out someday. Everyone else will then follow but white label video publishing ala Kyte Premium will become commoditized once that happens.

Today's funding announcement includes new investments from Disney's Venture Arm SteamBoatVC and Nordic telecom giant TeliaSonera. These two put in a relatively modest $6 million more on top of previous money from other investors. The total Kyte funding now stands at $23.5 million. The company's planned expansion internationally will probably burn through that pretty quickly, making a rapid solution to the advertising question an imperative. User generated content is not nearly as easy to monetize as big brand content, something Kyte confirmed to me today was their experience as well.

Kyte's New Technology

The new Kyte video player is substantially less ugly than the old one and publishers now have the option to publish through premium branded players and stand-alone Facebook video applications. Kyte is also rolling out e-commerce capabilities in the premium players.

Video industry watchers will also want to know about live streaming. Kyte now says it will include live broadcast streaming from both mobile phones and webcams by the end of this month. The functionality is in private beta now but will be limited to the same Nokia phones that Qik is available on now.

Kyte offers good technology, but users interested in it shouldn't expect to receive substantial support and innovation in your favor. User generated video is just not taking of for small players the way it was expected to. Today's announcement extends the trend we discussed earlier this week, video is becoming more international and more commercial than was believed to be the case initially.

The clunky launch of Yahoo! Live last week has a lot of people talking about live video online. There's a long list of services that you can use to do web based public broadcast of live video, but those services aren't what you'd use for small group, private sessions. Forrester explained the landscape well in a report last year, "Legacy videoconference systems of all types have failed to live up to their promise because of technical complexity and user interface issues." The tech problems are being solved and a free, cross platform solution with recording is great - but interface issues remain.

There were lots of little issues that I and the people I chatted with experienced, including substantial interface confusion, occasional pixelation of international participants, file transfer/path strangeness and some people reported undesirable CPU demands.

That said, Oovoo is a service that immediately demonstrates its usefulness when you get a group of people on that have something to say. It's got a very Skype-on Windows type of interface, it's got a good feature set and the video/audio quality is generally very good.

The fact that Oovoo requires download of a desktop client seems like a drawback for very casual users. In almost any case where I am looking to do a quick multiperson video chat I will refer people to MeBeam and maybe Tokbox - both very easy to use web apps. There are a lot of options.

If I am going to do regular private chats and want to record, do file transfer, etc. then I may set up Oovoo with a group of people. People comfortable with trying out new web apps, and comfortable with video conferencing, probably don't have much need for Oovoo except for the recording feature which right now is Windows only. If you're working with people who don't feel as comfortable in that world though - then this high quality, more formal desktop service may treat you well. In those kinds of circumstances the fact that it's both Windows and Mac friendly will be much appreciated.