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ping.fm: Update all your social networks at once

November 28th, 2008

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Sites like Twitter have scores of competitors and it is possible that for someone to effectively socially network, they will have to use sites other than their preferred one. It is obviously quite a chore to have to update Twitter, Facebook, Pownce etc separately.

Commenter reactive pointed out ping.fm, a website which in fact I use. ping.fm allows you to update one site, through a variety of means, which will then pass those updates on to 32 other websites.

ping.fm amazingly allows updates to be textual or graphical (you can set ping.fm to upload images to Flickr etc.). The ability to send videos is going to be launched soon.

Download Facebook Videos

November 18th, 2008

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Facebook users can upload and embed videos on the popular social network. Facebook does not provide ways to download or export the videos and they even state in the Facebook faq that users will not be able to download or export videos.

Some might want to do so on the other hand for various reasons. Facebook Video is a Firefox add-on that is currently in experimental stage that can be used to download, convert or embed videos from Facebook.

The add-on adds a few new options to video pages, wall and inbox. It does that in a very unobtrusive way and the new elements look like they have been there all the time. Video pages will contain links beneath the videos to download a video from Facebook to the computer or to convert the video from flv format at Zamzar before downloading it. The very same pages display the embed code to embed videos outside of Facebook and the public link to the video to send to contacts.

Social Network Status Generator

November 17th, 2008

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Have we come this far already? Desperate times require desperate measures it seems. To impress, one has to be witty. This is especially hard on social networks with millions of other users who want to impress as well.

According to the developers of Generatus their product is ideal for the imaginatively challenged. Generatus is a social network status generator which turns the overly repeated and boring statuses like “Martin is working”, “Drinking Coffee” or “Jim is visiting his grandparents” into something witty and original.

Simplicity was probably the main design idea behind Generatus. Males can simply hit the Generate button while females will have to click on the female to generate female statuses (not sure if there is truly that much difference to justify that, it is probably used to make use of the right grammatical person in the sentences). It is also possible to use tags to get a status that relates to the selected tags.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Facebook Plugin

November 15th, 2008

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The Windows Live Photo Gallery Facebook Plugin enables the direct upload of photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery to Facebook. Two applications are needed to make this work. Windows Live Photo Gallery [link] and the Facebook Plugin [link] have to be installed on the computer. There is no need for a Windows Live account but at least one Facebook account is obviously needed to upload the photos from the computer to Facebook.

The plugin should be installed when Windows Live Photo Gallery is not running. During first usage a Facebook account has to be linked to the Windows Live Photo Gallery application. This simply involves logging in to Facebook when the Windows Live application asks you to. A few other options will pop up during that process. An album has to be created if none is currently available. There is also the option to automatically accept images that get uploaded this way or to manually approve them instead.

Manually approving the images would mean to accept them on the Facebook website after transferring them from Windows Live Photo Gallery to Facebook.

Is It Reasonable To Offer 1 Terabyte of Storage As A File Hoster?

September 29th, 2008

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Offering the biggest storage capacities of all the file hosts on the Internet will surely drive some traffic to a file hoster’s website. Oosah did just that with the announcement that they would offer 1 Terabyte - that is 1024 Gigabytes - to everyone signing up for their file hosting service. And while they surely have calculated with a mean storage usage instead of the maximum it would still be apparent that a free file host would have serious troubles coping with the demand.

The upload limits are 250 Megabytes for video files and 50 Megabytes for mp3 and images. The user guide is still speaking of a 2 Gigabyte limit per user which contradicts the information on the homepage of the service most likely because the user guide has not been updated with the new information.

The options offered by Oosah surely look nice. Besides the storage capacities the service offered Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Picasa integration, an iPhone client, playlists, galleries, slideshows, public and private sharing and a easy to use web interface.

MySpace Music Venture

September 15th, 2008

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Joshua writes about cool interesting stuff over on his own blog Extendably. Feel free to check it out, I’m sure you’ll like it.

No matter what your opinion is on MySpace, the announcement of the MySpace Music store and service is big news.

Perhaps the real question should be, “Why so long?” After all MySpace was the place to be for Death metal bands and sincere singer/songwriters for the last 5 years. In fact it still is the place to be, however the quality of the MySpace music services has been truly lagging when compared to other services.

The last year seems to have been spent with MySpace fixing up many of the issues which turned people off the service and onto Facebook. A more consistent, redesigned website, applications, MySpace IM, auto-playback of profile songs turned off by default and other annoyances.

Growth has still been flat now for the last 6 months and MySpace is the initiative News Corp hopes will bring MySpace back into the spotlight and boost revenues.