Content and publishing

Tubes gets update, Vista compatibility

Tubes, the file-sharing tool we covered in January, pushed out a new update last night that adds support for Windows Vista and "300 [other] enhancements." Maybe one of the best new features is an auto-updater that will download and install new builds of the app without requiring user re-installation. After all, if you're going to install something on your machine, you should really only have to do it once (an idea iTunes could learn from.)

Adesso also announced that more than half a million people have downloaded the app since launch (PDF). There's still no Mac … Read more

Aspire to be a Slacker

What do you get when you take the ex-CEOs of Musicmatch, Rio, and iRiver America and lock them in a room with a stack of data about the digital-music landscape? How about a revolutionary new music service and a portable device to go along with it?

Enter Slacker, a company chock full of digital music experts (mostly transplants from Musicmatch and Rio), and its two babies: Slacker.com (an online music service) and the Slacker portable device. That's quite a few Slackers, and it's also the point. As it turns out, about 70 percent of music enthusiasts don't want to spend hours creating the perfect playlists, which means most of you are slackers just like me. (Ha!) To break it down even further, 51 percent of MP3 player users update their content only once a month or less, and 46 percent don't update more often because they don't have time. Several services have aimed to address this issue, such as MTV Urge with its Auto-Mix feature and Rhapsody with Channels. … Read more

Art meets news on Universe

Who says you have to view online stories as lists of headlines or search results? I recently wrote up several different sites that help you visualize search results in new ways. Now there's an interesting experiment to visualize news as well, called Universe.

An art project more than anything else, Universe uses the Daylife news database (and a user-supplied search term) as its source. Then it displays news in a unique and strange formats. The "stars" view, for example, shows a scrolling field of stars and constellations. When you click on one (without any indication of what … Read more

Six ways to improve Twitter

We covered Twitter in early January, and since then it's gotten a lot of buzz (especially at SXSW this week.) As cool as it is, there are several ways to improve the experience. You can make viewing posts faster, read "tweets" through RSS, and more. Check out these Twitter accessories:

1. Twitter apps and widgets: Get Twitter out of your Web browser and onto your desktop. For Windows users we recommend Twitteroo, a simple and small desktop app that's good for monitoring and posting to your twitter feed. Vista users also can try Twadget, which runs … Read more

CircleUp partners with online sports network

CircleUp, the RSVP-like service that launched at Demo 2007 a few months ago, has announced a partnership with e7 Sports, a management service for small sports teams. CircleUp will be added to the list of tools coaches can use to elicit responses from a bevy of parents and players about things such as uniform sizing and carpools. It's the mailing list re-done, this time with a centralized way to see other people's responses.

If you find yourself trudging through massive e-mail threads and having to hit reply-all, CircleUp would likely be more helpful. The service provides some simple … Read more

MySpace News: It was only a matter of time [UPDATE]

MySpace is preparing to launch an integrated news service--with self-aggregating content and social bookmarking--in the coming weeks. MySpace members will be able to post the stories on their profiles, discuss, promote, and submit their own written content to be seen and ranked by other MySpace users (see NewsVine). The new service is reminiscent of Digg and del.icio.us, with social bookmarking for news stories that can be promoted with user voting.

It was only a matter of time before this happened, considering MySpace has been owned by news mogul Rupert Murdoch since 2005 and gets 230,000 new registered users a day… Read more

Comeeko is the best Web 2.0 site in the history of the universe

Warning: This will be addictive. Earlier today I read about Comeeko on ShinyShiny, and let's just say I haven't gotten much else done at the office for quite some time. (Sorry, editors.) Comeeko is a fun and super-easy way to arrange your photographs into comic book panels and then share them with your friends. It's highly Ajax-y: we're talking drag-and-drop functionality, easy uploads, and the like. You can't get up to a particularly high resolution (i.e. to print, or to order prints) but Comeeko makes it easy for you to share it on a … Read more

Hands-on editing with Adobe's Remix [VIDEO]

Note: This post has been updated from it's original publishing. It now contains a hands-on video overview of Remix.

Adobe's Remix is a new Web-based video editing tool that will be provided free to all Photobucket members in the coming weeks. Remix allows you to string together and edit short video clips. We covered the announcement of the online video editor last week, but got our hands on it this morning.

Remix is essentially a stripped-down version of Adobe Premiere Elements. You get a timeline with clips and transitions, along with a source bin containing all the media … Read more

Nearbie: social bookmarking for real life

Nearbie is a new social bookmarking service that lets users broadcast status updates, and keep tabs on friends. Nearbie goes one step further than some other sites that do this (see Dodgeball, Groovr and Jaiku) to show you how user-submitted material is connected to people or places in your geographical location. Users can submit all sorts of things such as event notices, local landmarks, personal stories, and pictures. It's a lot like a blog, but with far more structure. The hope is that when enough people begin to use the service, users will be able to discover more about … Read more

News Roundup: Unbox for Tivo goes live, Friendster + Google, Web radio deathwatch?

TiVo users get unboxed. TiVo users looking to spend their hard-earned money on digital downloads of movies and TV shows online can now do so without leaving the couch. Last month's announcement of the partnership to bring Amazon's Unbox service to TiVo owners has been fulfilled, and now TiVo users can pick from more than a thousand pieces of content to download straight to their set-top box. ( News.com)

Friendster makes Google its ad, search supplier. Google has unseated Yahoo for advertising supremacy at Friendster, one of the oldest social networks that still has 37 million registered users. … Read more