Webware

Web-based Nintendo Mii maker, I just lost an hour of my workday

It's no secret the Nintendo Wii has been doing extremely well as a gaming platform. One of the best things to do out of the box is play around with the Mii channel, a personal avatar creation tool for tailoring every aspect of your virtual persona. It didn't take long for an enterprising developer from Adobe to re-create the same experience online, which has resulted in the Mii Editor.

Mii Editor is a near-perfect recreation of the Nintendo Mii creation tool, right down to the interface. Users can change face shape, hair, eyebrows, eyes, and small details like glasses and facial hair. The entire setup runs in Adobe Flash, so there's no load time or need to refresh when making changes.

When you're done, there are several export options, including social-network friendly JPEG files and a URL permalink to send to friends. While some of the Wii magic is lost doing this with a mouse and a computer screen, making these things is a blast.

Related: Crave: Let it Bii

… Read more

Veodia: Lifecasting with more cowbell

It seems like the current Web 2.0 boomtown (figuratively speaking) is in broadcast tools that allow you to bring your self-programmability a few steps above the YouTube + 20-dollar webcam norm. We've seen Kyte.tv recently, which allows you to create your own live vlogging stream--a phenomenon that certainly got a boost from the popularity of Justin.tv. I recently heard about another emerging player in the business, Veodia, which appears to be catering to a slightly more highbrow breed of video blogger.

Veodia promises that it'll allow you to create professional-quality video in "one click,&… Read more

News roundup: MySpace, Yahoo, Amazon

MySpace and Photobucket make amends. The block on videos from Photobucket for MySpace users was lifted yesterday. According to a post on the Photobucket blog, "open lines of communication and procedures with MySpace" were made to make sure it doesn't happen again. The blockage affected nearly a quarter of Photobucket's 40 million registered users. Related: MySpace launched a version of its site today for Latino Americans.

Yahoo, Gracenote launch lyrics service. Yahoo Music users will now be able to pick up the lyrics to their songs after a deal was made with digital media company Gracenote. … Read more

I don't need 8hands to reach my friends

If more than one-fifth of Web startups are social networking sites, as the Webware 100 indicates, then a service pooling together your various online identities should be pretty handy, just like Trillian is for instant messaging. 8hands is one of the latest services designed to coordinate social networking contacts (see YoName too). It grabs your buddies from Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, TypePad, YouTube, MySpace, WordPress, and LiveJournal and displays them in a floating, IM-sized window. This free, 8.5MB alpha app took about five minutes to download on Windows XP.

8hands is supposed to rank your pals according to how often … Read more

Webware 100 stats: Too many social nets

Thanks to Webware's readers, there are now nearly 1,000 Web 2.0 services lined up for the Webware 100. That's enough to spot a few trends.

For instance: we have too many community-based startups. A full 23% of our nominations are in the Community category. There's a big takeaway from this for people building Web 2.0 companies: if you're thinking of launching yet another social network, please think again.

Of the 10 awards categories, the most underrepresented is Mobile. While it is true that it's much harder to create a winning business based … Read more

Google Earth gets new 3D layers

Google Earth has been updated with two new layers this morning. They come courtesy of the The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and are pretty neat. The first is America's Favorite Architecture, a listing of 150 monuments and buildings picked by the public as the most notable. The second is Blueprint for America, a project that aims to make over city skylines and everyday structures like bus stops. You can see some of the proposed projects (in 3D) as well as brief descriptions that will be updated as projects progress.

Google and the AIA have put together a short video … Read more

Meez teams up with Photobucket

Photobucket members will discover a new option when logging in this morning. The company has partnered with Meez, the 3-D avatar service to give Photobucket members a place to store and host their 3-D avatars. We don't normally cover personal avatar services, but when they partner with sites with over 40 million users, it's worth noting. Meez has approximately a million users (which in and of itself is no small feat), and the service has apparently seen quite a bit of growth in the last few months.

Users can pick from a ton of options to make their … Read more

Go toolbar crazy with Conduit

Here's a way to maybe keep your audience engaged with your Web site even when they're not on it: offer them a branded browser toolbar. Conduit's newish Community Toolbar feature makes it easy to build a toolbar (for free) that you can offer to your site visitors (also for free).

When I heard about this I thought, Great, just what we need: more toolbar clutter. Also, we have experience at CNET with toolbar downloads. For us, they weren't worth the development time. Conduit is a little different, though. Regarding clutter, you're only supposed to get … Read more

Put Google on steroids

With dominating Web search and the increasingly popular Gmail service, Google's dominion grows larger each day. The company makes powerful search and e-mail apps, but it's never been known for front-end interfaces.

Luckily for you, free downloads for Google Web search and Gmail can help you customize Google services to look and work they way you want.

You likely already know about the major Google software--Google Toolbar (for Mozilla Firefox or IE), Google Desktop, Google Earth, and Google Talk--but the lesser-known utilities and extensions often have the most interesting features.

One of the best I've seen … Read more