Webby News

Every day, the social web continues to increase in size and influence with consumers. Social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube represent an ever-expanding forum for expressing sentiment, preferences, and trends, and play a key role in shaping consumer behavior. At the same time, marketers are grappling with how to harness the chaotic and constantly shape-shifting nature of the web, as traditional analytics and monitoring solutions are ill-equipped to access and understand the unstructured information that lives on social networks.

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Capitalizing on the rapid convergence of video and social networks, The FeedRoom, a pioneer in online video communications, and a leader in live video and rich media asset management, today announced a partnership with Clearspring Technologies, the industry’s leading widget syndication, tracking and monetization service. Under the agreement, The FeedRoom will enhance its social bookmarking capabilities and add expanded video content distribution capabilities to its popular FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform(EVP).arking capabilities
and add expanded video content distribution capabilities to its popular
FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform(TM) (EVP).

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I’ve been feverishly experimenting some new ideas this week, the most interesting of which is a mashup between Twitter and Disqus.

This should make Fred Wilson happy, since he is an investor in both companies. But that’s not why I did it.

Here’s why I did it. The 140-character limit is driving me crazy.

I need a place to express ideas that just don’t fit into 140.

There are some, believe it or not.

So here’s an example. Early this morning Mike Arrington posted a teaser on his exclusive personal Twitter account. “Get ready for a very, very big news day.” Well, Mike ought to know, everyone’s telling him stuff they tell no one else.

So I wanted to post a comment asking What’s up? What does everyone think this means.

So that’s what I did.

http://twdsc.us/2.html

Note the URL. Cute, huh? It’s a pre-shortened url. No need to push it through any of the commercial shorteners. New trend started by my friend Andrew Baron with his new superhot beta startup mag.ma.

Anyway. So far there are 11 comments with some very interesting theories about what’s up. If nothing else, it’s an inventory of ideas out there that people are expecting as announcements any day now. Google’s realtime search engine (would be great if it supported RSS both ways and weblogs.com compatible pinging). Microsoft’s new search engine Bing (for which expectations are really low, so it should be easy for them to impress). And on and on…

Add your own two cents.

And my next sub-project is to create a bookmarklet that makes it super-easy for anyone to start a comment thread on any Twitter post they like.

So Fred, whatcha think?

PS: Proof again that Twitter is the great coral reef of the latter part of this decade. It’s so easy to attach something to it, that might turn into a branch or perhaps an entirely new species!

PPS: I’m working my way through James Burke’s fantastic series Connections. Just watched episode 4, which ends with the beginnings of the modern computer. Hollerith, who invented the famous card that many people used to program Fortran and Basic (such as yours truly) decided to make them the same size as the dollar bill of the day. Because there was already so much machinery that existed to process them. Oh yeah. That’s the kind of tech I love. Build on what’s out there. More coral-reef thinking! Yehi.

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Here’s the full video of the Google Wave demo from this morning at Google’s IO conference in San Francisco.

Our full review of Google Wave is here. Exclusive interview with the founders is here, and our video and notes from the press conference is here.

After a short period of downtime this morning, which had me up in arms since I use the service on an everyday basis, personalized portal Netvibes has rolled out a new feature: Multiple Personalized Pages.

The feature is very simple: it lets you create several Netvibes pages instead of just one. The reasons for this are many; perhaps your original page simply has too many tabs and feeds for your liking; maybe you want to create several pages covering different topics (tech, health, finance would be my choices), or maybe you want to follow different persons (or groups of persons) and create specific pages for that.

You create new pages from the menu on the top left; once you’ve chosen a name for it, you can reach it from that same menu, and it behaves just like your regular Netvibes page. This feature could be quite useful for Netvibes addicts whose pages are cramped (and slow), and it’s quicker than creating a new Netvibes account, but you have to be willing to go from one to many little Netvibeses. Personally, I’ve gotten used to having one Netvibes page open in my browser at all times, and I’m not sure I like the idea of having more, but your mileage may vary.

The folks at Netvibes also claim they completely rewrote its core platform to perform to scale (new pages from users will create additional load to their servers), which should hopefully bring some speed improvements for the not-always-snappy service. Finally, they plan several more updates; first, they plan to release a completely new RSS reader, as well as some new features that should help users “personalize their Web on a broader scale.”

Tags: Netvibes, Pages, personalized portal

Plastic Logic is showing off a prototype of its thin-film electronic reader at the D7 conference. The main difference between what Plastic Logic is trying to build and the Kindle is that its screen technology is much thinner, lighter and can be incorporated into more flexible form- factors. I shot the video showing what it can do.

Check out the video after the jump.

When you need to send a voice note or a dictation to multiple contacts, Phonevite has always been a strong option. However, while it does have an iGoogle Gadget, Phonevite has mostly been limited to voice-to-phone sharing.

That was until today, when Phonevite opened the social media floodgates of its voice services. Starting today, you can not only send voice messages to your friends via phone, but you can also share recordings via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, email or just embed the audio directly to your website.

Once you have made a voice recording (either via a recording browser app or via phone), the recording will appear in your recording inbox. Now, however, you’ll see five small icons at the bottom for each of the key social services and embeds:

Facebook will post to your wall while Twitter will create the ready-to-share tweet. This makes it simple to send audio to all of your friends instantaneously. And of course, you can still send it to their phone if you need to send it directly.

Social media is an effective mass-communication tool, and Phonevite has tapped into its raw power to dramatically increase the potential of its products. Phonevite is no longer just for voice notes, but for rapidly distributing podcasts, interviews, and calls. It’s up to users and Phonevite, though, to tap into the potential possibilities.

Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

Tags: facebook, phonevite, twitter