webware

Flickr, a popular photo-sharing and -hosting service owned by Yahoo, is to photos what YouTube is to video: it is the quintessential picture site. The service provides a virtual gallery (or many virtual galleries, if you prefer) where people share and explore each other's photos, and the result is an active and engaged community with a vested interest in digital photography.

Flickr offers a plethora of features, which vary depending on whether you subscribe to the free service or the pro version, which runs $24.95. Basic users can share and host hundreds of their own pictures on Flickr … Read more

Vimeo is a video hosting and sharing site. Users can upload high-definition video that plays in a gorgeous wide-screen player with minimalist controls. One thing that sets it apart from other services is that it was one of the first sites to offer HD video. It also gives video creators the option to let registered Vimeo users download the original file to their hard drive for offline viewing.

Vimeo is also a social network, with a friends and subscription service, along with a way to both rate and share videos. This information goes into a new feed that you can … Read more

Picnik is a really slick piece of Webware for tweaking and editing photos, and it offers a truly lovely user interface that's refreshingly simple to use. You can pull in photos from any URL or upload them from your home computer. There are a variety of basic photo editing tools like cropping, resizing, red-eye correction, and a handy autofix button to make a picture look better without fussing around with each setting.

When you're done tweaking your photo you've got a few options: you can save it to your hard drive, print it, e-mail it or even … Read more

UStream is a video-broadcasting platform that lets anyone with a Webcam and a fast connection create their own live video show. It mixes a video stream with user chat, asynchronous commenting, and places for show creators to post archived clips and links to their other work. It's completely free to use and has been a launch pad for people looking to create video shows with no professional equipment or experience required.

What makes the service especially useful is that it blends live and archived footage seamlessly. Users can watch a show as it's happening, or simply go back … Read more

YouTube is the most well-known video service on the Internet. YouTube lets anyone share videos online, either from their hard drive or recorded using their computer's Webcam. It uses Adobe Flash and a simple video player that starts playing videos the moment you launch the page housing the video.

No doubt about it, YouTube has paved the way for a variety of other services and evolved its own services with new features such as user profiles, video rankings, and a system that lets anyone reply to a video either with text or another video. You can also easily embed … Read more

Justin.tv is a live video blogging site that combines a live video feeds and public chat rooms. It launched with head blogger Justin Kan's daily schedule--which loosely resembled a content programming guide. Entertaining bits of content are archived for later viewing, complete with a blog post with context for what's going on. The entire production was run through Kan's backpack, which holds a laptop hooked up to an EV-DO card, and people had the option to call or text message Justin with feedback or comments about what's going on.

Mundane moments aside, Justin.tv was … Read more

LaLa has come a long way since its original inception as a music locker and discovery service. Now, it's a full-on music service that lets users listen right inside of the browser. It blends a discovery engine with an online marketplace to let you explore new music and buy MP3s for playing offline. Better yet, the interface is super clean and simple, which means that anyone can play without having to know the intricate ins and outs of a overly detailed online jukebox.

The original functionality is still in place: LaLa scans your hard drive for music and then … Read more

Amazon's MP3 store has been one of the most straightforward, no-nonsense digital music download sites since its inception. The service offers DRM-free MP3s a la carte or as entire musical albums, with every file digitized at an impressively high bit rate of 256Kbps. Also, you can expect each track to have fully fleshed-out ID3 tag information, including album art. Because there's no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon become one the top-five music sellers worldwide.

In order to complete a purchase on the store, users must install a small … Read more

Nexus Radio is a free music software application that lets users download music and discover streaming radio stations from around the world. It also doubles as a media player, and recording tool that can record in-line audio from your computer, or from the radio streams to which you're listening. In addition, the app plays fetch--create a filter and it will capture songs or artists according to your keyword choice. That spells "free music discovery" to us

Like competing music jukebox software, Nexus Radio has its own plug-in architecture that allows third parties to create their own add-ons. … Read more