ie8 fix

democracy

Meshly: Another Twitter? Kinda

Meshly is a new nanoblogging platform that's built around publishing via instant messages. Users can create and publish posts in AIM, Google Talk, or Windows Live Messenger using IM bots. Creating posts is like having a conversation with someone. Type "post" to the IM robot and it will ask you to fill out the post title, body, links, and tags, before it publishes the content to Meshly's post queue.

Once post are there, other Meshly users can vote to decide which ones are interesting. Stories that have piqued enough user interest will be promoted to the … Read more

CampusRank tries out Facebook rating system

CampusRank is a new service for ranking fellow college students, using a variety of yearbook-like categories. The service ties into Facebook, making use of the social network's application programming interface, so users simply log in with their Facebook account to begin voting. CampusRank launched quietly last week, and is making its official live service announcement tomorrow morning. The service is limited to just under 300 college networks, and does not allow private groups or company users.

CampusRank lets users choose from 34 categories to nominate friends for things like "Most Athletic," "Most Friendly," "Best Hair," and so on. And by friends, I mean that CampusRank won't let you nominate people from your school who aren't on your Facebook friends list. You can't even look them up--a major flaw in my opinion. To sort through the people who are your Facebook friends, CampusRank provides a quick list to scroll through. Once someone has been nominated, there's a ranking system where other CampusRank users can rate them on a scale of 1 to 10.

CampusRank is an interesting take on combining social democracy tools and social networks in one space. However, things get mired down by the friends list limitation and by requiring Facebook users to venture off-site to use the service, two things that need to change before the service can really take off. Screenshots after the jump.

Related: Mosoto, HotOrNot

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Spotplex: a selective Digg

Spotplex is an interesting take on social-voting sites. If you're familiar with Digg's system of user voting for story promotion, you'll notice that Spotplex takes a slightly different approach, counting click-throughs per link to promote stories to the front page. For blogs or Web site owners, submitting stories is automatic if you add a piece of code to your site. Spotplex then crawls and adds your content to the list of upcoming stories.

Spotplex has an arguably better system for site owners to add stories and to keep track of how popular a story is without using … Read more

YouTube adds Reddit-like features on Super Bowl minisite

YouTube's Super Bowl ads page is looking mighty fancy this year. They've created a new voting platform called Supervote. If anything, it's looking a little bit like Reddit with hot or not voting that moves each ad up or down based on user votes.

The page was set up as completely separate from the actual viewing gallery.

What interests me about this is whether or not this might become a permanent fixture on YouTube. There's already a star system for voting on YouTube videos, but having user-chosen list on the front page of YouTube as a … Read more

News Roundup: Google Video ads, AT&T IPTV, MySpace Mexico, Netscape 9.0

-- Google expands video ad test. Not to be confused with ads placed in user-generated videos on Google Video and YouTube, these video ads from Google will be embedded videos on the page that users must click on to begin. Google is now partnering with content providers such as The Wall Street Journal and Epicurious.com to bring Adsense video ads. (CNET News.com)

-- AT&T to ramp up IPTV rollouts. While Joost and Babelgum have made some noise among the blogs, the prospect of watching IPTV programming on an actual TV is coming closer to being a … Read more