The Social

Justin.tv founder Justin Kan

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET News)

Streaming-video site Justin.tv wants to help you filter through the noise: it has added Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace integration to its service. This way, members can sync up their accounts to filter chat room content and pinpoint their friends from those social sites, as well as spread the word about what they're watching by pushing out Facebook and MySpace status messages or "tweets" on Twitter.

This is important for Justin.tv because the live-streaming land grab is still very much on. There are plenty of competitors like Ustream.tv and Mogulus, as well as mobile-focused products like Qik and Kyte. Justin.tv had an early lead because of founder Justin Kan's stunt in which he attached a camera to his backpack and streamed his life 24-7, but now it's got to keep up, technology-wise.

"We think live video provides a compelling environment for integration with social media services like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter," Kan said in a release. "Instead of passively watching a stream of status updates like on CNN.com, Justin.tv users can actually have real-time conversations with their friends and other social media users about the content they're viewing, which is a far more engaging experience."

Plus, it'll mean that links and messages pertaining to Justin.tv will appear in Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter feeds. Facebook and MySpace both recently rolled out data-portability products called Facebook Connect and MySpaceID, respectively. Twitter, meanwhile, has had a flexible application program interface (API) from the start.

Wow. With all the drama and in-fighting among cable companies, TV content creators, and Web video companies this week, you'd think the whole industry was one big junior-high cafeteria. Oh, wait, it kind of is.

First, Hulu--a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.--pulled its content from TV.com (which is owned by CBS, publisher of CNET News). Then it did the same with Boxee, a company that makes software designed for watching online video on TVs via set-top boxes. The reason for these measures appears to be either mounting pressure from the TV content owners that have licensed their video to Hulu, or mounting pressure from the cable companies, or both, or something like that.

Now, we've got a report in The Wall Street Journal indicating that cable giants Time Warner Cable and Comcast are in talks with some of the companies that operate pay-cable channels, for a plan to make some of the networks' content available online to subscribers. It'd probably be on a streaming, ad-supported basis, and probably available for free to existing subscribers.

I've been watching all this with quite a bit of curiosity and amusement. You see, I canceled my cable subscription and ditched my TV a few months ago, and have since been relying on a combination of Netflix (which may offer a streaming-only option as early as next year), iTunes, Hulu, and randomly dropping in on friends' apartments if I really, really want to watch something live. If I show up with a pizza and a nice friendly smile, most of them are OK with it.

In this Digital Age, cable subscriptions just seem a bit convoluted to me; no offense to the people who run the Game Show Channel or Boomerang, but those aren't my cup of tea and I'd prefer to not have to pay for them.

If this shadowy, in-the-works cable deal involves any kind of Web-only cable subscription where, say, you can pay by the stream or by the channel, I'd be all for it. And if the content providers finally work things out with the set-top box makers and Web video hubs, it could be terrific for me and other people who've gotten totally fed up with Stone Age TV offerings. For now, however, it's just a dramatic mess and recent signs are indicating that it's taking steps backward as opposed to forward.

Consequently, I'm riding out the storm for now. I'm holding off on purchasing any kind of set-top box--or a television, for that matter--until the future-of-television compass stops wildly spinning. In a few years, I'm sure, the solution to it all will seem like it should've been obvious the whole time.

Isn't that always how these things are?

The final Media Meshing party on Thursday night.

(Credit: Kate Miltner (flickr.com/photos/loggedhours))

NEW YORK--I hereby insist that we all stop using the "Recession? What recession?" line, which seems to be used every time any company has thrown any moderately lavish party in the last two months. Not only is it overused, but I think folks have caught onto the fact that things have legitimately changed.

Here in New York, the last blowout launch party in the city was for T-Mobile's Android phone in October. Company holiday parties have been scaled back like mad, leaving fewer opportunities for that great New York sport known as party-crashing. But socialization hasn't stopped; it's just changed its tune.

There were a few events of note this week. Note the trend: no more open bars!

The Goods for Good charity event at the downtown City Winery.

(Credit: Goods for Good)

• On Monday night, a relatively new nonprofit called Goods for Good held its annual benefit (read: everyone paid to get in) at a new downtown venue called the City Winery. (It is, in fact, Manhattan's only winery.) Goods for Good's mission is to gather unwanted corporate supplies en masse, from pens and notebooks to conference swag, and donate it to schools in developing countries.

It wasn't a tech event, per se, but there's a reason I'm including it here: The organizers said that they're not really on Silicon Valley's radar, but would like to be. At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, we saw the emergence of SchwagginWagon, which encouraged conference attendees to donate the free stuff they got on the show floor and then didn't want. Goods for Good's angle is a little different, since they are interested in bulk supplies that would otherwise be thrown away and that could actually be put to use in a classroom. Check 'em out if you're interested.

• Blip.tv, a video-sharing platform that pulled in another round of financing just in time, threw its holiday party at a low-key downtown bar on Wednesday night. There was no open bar; company executives were surreptitiously handing out drink tokens instead. Within a couple of hours, the place was pretty much a mosh pit--even when the free drinks ran out.

• Prankster-slash-boulevardier Richard Blakeley, by day the video editor at Gawker Media, decided earlier this month to call off his series of monthly "Media Meshing" mixers. There's never been anything lavish about Media Meshing; it's a cash-bar event at a relatively divey bar called Sweet and Vicious. But Blakeley's rationale was that it's a bit gauche to be throwing a series of media parties while people continue to lose their jobs. Gawker itself has gone through rolling layoffs this season, sparing Blakeley but axing many of his cohorts.

So Thursday night was the final Media Meshing, at least for a while. There are persistent rumors that someone else with less recession sensitivity will take the reins. Or not. But in either case, the economic reality has clearly hit the after-hours scene.

"I haven't had a drink all night," one of Blakeley's Gawker colleagues told me, shaking his head. Knowing that such behavior was uncharacteristic, I asked him why. His reply was, "Because nobody's offered to buy me one yet."

After broadcasting live Twitters during the U.S. presidential debate, Current TV had to go one notch higher for election night.

The cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, has partnered with both Twitter and social news site Digg for the evening of November 4, during which it will feature a "multimedia dashboard" with live messages from Twitter, headlines from Digg, and video from both Current and "video status update" start-up 12seconds.tv. In keeping with the network's young target audience, electronica act Diplo will be performing DJ sets throughout the night, too.

The funny irony is that Digg reportedly once walked away from a $100 million acquisition offer from Current.

"The new pace of democracy is real-time," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint release. "Current is helping Twitter amplify the opinions, news, and trends that matter right now. Together, we're influencing more than media--we're evolving conversation."

Election night on Current will also feature (naturally) commentary, projected results, and a state-by-state map. So it won't be all fun and games and Kevin Rose, y'know.

A look at MySpaceTV's new direct-record tool.

(Credit: MySpace)

MySpaceTV, the video-sharing section of News Corp.'s MySpace, has announced the addition of direct video uploads. This means that you can now sit in front of your Webcam, navigate to MySpace, and hit a "record" button, blab on incessantly about how the Jonas Brothers are ruining American youth, and you've got yourself a piece of Web video.

Many other video-sharing sites, including Google's YouTube, have similar features already. The real advantage to the presence of direct uploads on MySpace, however, is the fact that they can then be quickly embedded in member profiles, "bulletins," and comments, capitalizing on the fast-growing video commenting trend.

MySpace also announced that MySpaceTV videos' maximum file size has been extended to 512 megabytes; that's half of what YouTube allows, but YouTube also caps them at 10 minutes in length, which MySpaceTV does not.

Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.

Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's Wii console.

Now go ruin your productivity level. As for me, Stumble Video just told me I might want to watch some Daft Punk videos.

(Credit: HBO)

It's official: as reported yesterday, Apple has inked a deal with HBO to sell episodes of the premium-cable network's original programming in its iTunes Store. You can now use Apple's digital-retail hub to purchase episodes of The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, The Wire, Rome, and Flight of the Conchords.

Right now, all six seasons of Sex and the City are available for purchase, as a promotion for the spin-off movie opening at the end of May. But iTunes currently offers only the first seasons of the other shows, as well as The Sopranos' final season. (Flight of the Conchords has only had one season so far.)

A number of popular HBO shows, like the entertainment industry comedy Entourage, are not available for sale.

This is the first time that Apple has agreed to variable pricing in the iTunes Store. Sex and the City, Flight of the Conchords, and The Wire are priced at the standard iTunes $1.99, but The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome sell for $2.99.

There are seemingly more "livestreaming" services out there than people actually using them, but that hasn't stopped Ustream.tv from raising $11.1 million in Series A funding. The cash comes from venture firm DCM, as well as existing investors Labrador Ventures and The Band of Angels.

To be fair, Ustream has pulled away from the pack a bit: it's the streaming service of choice for some high-profile live Web events like the Digg Town Hall.

With the new cash, Ustream will focus on product development and "meet(ing) growing market demand for an interactive-broadcasting platform." In other words, it's to better compete as the space grows tighter.

New rivals such as Qik have more streamlined mobile capabilities built in, and big tech companies such as Yahoo have started introducing their own in-house streaming rivals.

AUSTIN, Texas--"Dude, this sucks."

You could hear a whole lot of people saying that on Saturday night as the first real evening of South by Southwest Interactive Festival's after-parties kicked into gear. So how come it sucked? Well, it was the crowds. The lines outside the Google party at Light Bar, the Avenue A-Razorfish party at Six Lounge, and the 16Bit party at Scoot Inn were so long that they instigated plenty of woeful conversations about whether SXSWi had gotten so big and so mainstream that it just wasn't any fun anymore.

Gary Vaynerchuk's wine-soaked 'undergound' SXSWi party.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

I, for one, was about ready to call it a night after getting my toes stepped on one too many times at Scoot Inn. But then, while attempting to catch a cab back downtown, I ran into a couple of people, including WineLibrary.tv's Gary Vaynerchuk, who became locally famous for the liquor store he owns and Internet-famous for starting a video blog in conjunction with it. He and his buddies weren't about to stand around for a half hour just to get into the 16Bit party.

"I'm not dealing with this s***," Vaynerchuk called out in his Sopranos-worthy Jersey accent. "This isn't New York or L.A.; I'm not waiting in this line. Everybody come to the Marriott for free wine!"

So a few friends and I followed Vaynerchuk's instructions and headed to the hotel, where we were expecting to find a handful of dudes drinking cheap pinot noir for an hour or so before heading off to bed. Turns out that the eccentric sommelier, with the help of buddy Frank Gruber and the perpetually camera-toting Brian Solis, had set up a lively little shindig off the lobby of the hotel and had accompanied it with the seven--yes, seven--cases of wine that Vaynerchuk had shipped to Austin from the brick-and-mortar Wine Library.

It wasn't listed on Facebook or Upcoming. There was no badge check at the door. Heck, even the hotel didn't anticipate the hordes of geeks that would show up when Vaynerchuk and his guests Twittered the heck out of their fellow SXSWi attendees. (They kicked everyone out around 12:30 a.m.)

But it was one of those great, unexpected parties where nobody was getting turned away at the door, everybody seemed to know everybody, and everyone was having a fantastic time (apparently the game of choice among the Web 2.0 set is "Werewolf," which I knew as "Murder in the Dark" back in my junior high slumber party days) and there was no line at the bar because the "bar" consisted of Vaynerchuk standing on a chair and handing people bottles of wine with reckless abandon. One of the hottest conversation topics of the night was, understandably--why do SXSWi attendees bother with signing up to attend a zillion parties at the city's hottest nightclubs, when the highlight of the evening is an "underground" event in a hotel meeting room where everyone only knew about it because they'd heard on Twitter?

A word to the SXSWi-wise: don't get so obsessive-compulsive about making sure that guest list gets amassed from that online invitation. Sometimes the real fun doesn't get organized.

Not making plans is so totally Web 3.0.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).