network

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

What's YoName?

Is googling your best friend from preschool going nowhere? If you suspect that he might be lurking on a social-networking site, you can try to find him with YoName, a people-search engine that looks across MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Friendster, Match, and Xanga.

There are other social-site crawlers, such as Upscoop beta, which shows who in your Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL address book uses MySpace, LinkedIn, or other sites. There's a lot of buzz already around the unreleased Spock people finder. Loopster and ProfileLinker beta sift through various networks and let you see when friends update their pages. … Read more

Kyte.tv launches: live blogging tool meets social network

Kyte.tv is a new service that lets people create their own TV channel. It's a bit of a mashup between a live blogging tool, a social network, and some of the live Internet TV channels we've been seeing lately with Justin.tv, and UStream.tv. Although, instead of strapping a camera to your head, you can use a cell phone.

The mobile client is a small Java application for several Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones that allows Kyte.tv users to upload photos and chat with others in a Kyte.tv channel. The mobile live blogging component is called "Lifecasting" which lets users upload pictures from their camera phone in real time. You can set it to automatically take a picture every few minutes, or every time you click the shutter. Either way, photos will show up on your channel instantly and viewers will get a visual notification that you're "live."

Kyte.tv channel owners can create as many channels as they want and add music, photos, videos, polls and text. A channel consists of a display screen, a playlist, and integrated chat room. Each channel also gets its own custom URL and branding, which is chosen by the channel owner. Alternately, there's embed code to place the entire Kyte.tv experience on a social networking profile or blog post (like we've done after the break).

One thing to note about adding music: you can't upload your own tracks. Instead you have to pick from a small selection of music from indie music service IODA. It's a lot like the music integration you get with Photobucket's video Remix tool.

What Kyte.tv has done really well is the live chat room. While it's lacking admin controls and private conversation options, you're getting the same chat experience on your computer and your phone. It's also really easy to use, as long as you're handy with your phone's keypad.

Kyte.tv is a fun service that opens up a lot of options for live blogging. Like we've seen with Twitter, mobile blogging has exploded with the help of easy-to-use tools that can be used and accessed on multiple platforms. Likewise, live video broadcasting has become something normal people can do with services like Pocketcaster and UStream.tv. Kyte.tv is happy medium between the two.

We'll be broadcasting live at various points during the day, so to visit our Kyte.tv channel, just click the read more link below.… Read more

OpenDNS attaches keywords to your router

OpenDNS is rolling out an addition to its alternative DNS service I covered last September: Its new Shortcuts feature lets you program it to recognize keywords typed into to browser's address bar. For example, "w" could redirect to Webware.com. You can also add simple variables to the keywords, so "st" followed by a ticker ("st ibm") would look up a stock price on your favorite financial site, not just the Google default. Keywords can even fire up applications on a PC and pass parameters to the application.

Sounds clever, and it is, … Read more

Mix faster, MixerCast

MixerCast is a new Web based tool for creating sharable slide shows. It pulls media from several different popular Web services like flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and Getty images, and lets users customize the look and feel with basic design templates. The show can then be shared with others through a direct URL or embedded into several social networks.

I've played with a ton of these tools since I started on Webware, but this is one of the few that actually emulates the feel of a desktop application. In this case, it feels a lot like one of Apple's consumer applications from the iLife suite. You can pick various elements to drag and drop into the template, like photos, videos or even a map from Yahoo (which, by the way, I found to be a little buggy).

MixerCast is definitely aimed at the social networking crowd. A few of its themes and templates, including one that's a full-on Pepsi advertisement, forgo a slick, clean look as you can get with a competing, mixed-media sharing tool like SplashCast. It's still really simple to put together a rich slide show, and share it with others, which makes it worth a try.

I've embedded a MixerCast module below, with pictures from last night's Digg 1 million-user celebration here in San Francisco. More screen shots of the user interface are shown after the jump.

See also: RockYou

[via DownloadSquad, via GigaOm]

… Read more

BuyYourFriendADrink update: It works!

I'd initially been skeptical about BuyYourFriendADrink.com (BYFAD), the Web site that just opened today (see previous coverage) in which you can remotely order drinks for your friends that they can redeem at participating bars by showing the bartender a code in a text message. It's available at about 40 bars in New York City and the surrounding area, and the company plans to gradually expand to other urban areas over the course of the year.

I'd been pretty confident that the site itself would work, but I hadn't been entirely positive that the bars involved … Read more

Happy hour by SMS, with BuyYourFriendADrink

How many times have you been IMing with a friend or co-worker across the country, placed a bet ("If that Sanjaya guy gets the boot tonight, you owe me a beer!"), completed said bet, but had no immediate way to fulfill it because the other person involved was miles away? Well, now there's a brand-new solution--but just for New Yorkers, for the time being.

BuyYourFriendADrink.com was launched today and announced on the New York edition of e-mail events service Thrillist. BuyYourFriendADrink, or BYFAD, is a way to purchase libations for your friends online, which they can … Read more

Piczo goes multilingual

Piczo, which is a San Francisco-based social networking site for teens that touts extensive, parent-friendly safety features, has started to reach beyond the U.S. and U.K. The company announced an initiative to expand into other countries by introducing international versions of the site, and today, Piczo announced the first phase of this expansion: into Germany, France, and Spain. There are already sizeable chunks of Piczo's 25-million-member base from those three countries, according to an official release (including 1.2 million in Germany), but now they'll be able to opt into using the service in their home … Read more

eSnips launches Radio widget

Social networking and content-hosting site eSnips has rolled out a new feature in time for Web 2.0 Expo: eSnips Multi-Channel Radio plays music uploaded to the site by users.

Currently the channels are organized by music genre, but eventually users will be able to create their own personal radio station, which can include material across multiple genres of music.

All original material hosted on the site is eligible to be played on the channels. Users can "favorite" a song and rate whether they liked it or hated it. Each channel in a genre plays the 40 most … Read more