The Web Services Report

Pandora's model of determining what you might like to listen to with an algorithm is being challenged by companies like Slacker, who use human music experts to build and fine-tune playlists. Songza Sets is another company that is trying to combine the human touch with an on-demand, streaming distribution model. Songza Sets presents daily, hand-picked, 12-song playlists that follow a certain theme. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable listening experience that lets users discover great new music.

The themes for Songza Sets are fairly creative to this point. For example, one set is made up of indie songs that … Read more

Facebook's iPhone app is one of the most popular apps for the device. Version 3.1 brings some killer features to an already strong offering. Push notifications and address book sync, new in this version, are welcome additions.

Push notifications are a very logical addition. They have become Apple's compromise for not allowing apps to run in the background. Instead of having to fire up the Facebook app all the time to see if anything is new, you can now opt to get push notifications for new messages, wall posts, friend requests, friend confirmations, photo tags, events, and … Read more

Flixster has acquired movie review site Rotten Tomatoes from the IGN division of News Corp., according to a statement released Monday.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Flixster is a user-generated movie review site. They also feature a robust mobile offering, which includes the most popular movie app for the iPhone, as well as apps for Android, Palm Pre, and Blackberry. The combination of Flixster's user-written reviews and Rotten Tomatoes' critic reviews are likely to complement each other well. Given that Rotten Tomatoes' scores are already incorporated into Flixster's offerings on the Web and on mobile … Read more

Quark and other similar design programs are infamous for having a very tough learning curve, making it extremely difficult for amateurs to pick them up and make anything of quality. The company is looking to make layout and design more accessible for the general public with the introduction of Quark Promote. The goal of Quark Promote is to allow individuals and small business owners to quickly and easily create promotional materials.

Quark Promote's online template gallery features professionally designed templates for everything ranging from business cards to letterhead. Once users pick a set that they like, the Quark Promote … Read more

Over the last few months, you may have noticed the Meebo Bar gracing the bottom of some Web sites, mostly large blogs, or other similar big content sites. That's because previously, the Meebo Bar was only available to select partners, so the little guys were mostly shut out. Now, Meebo is making the Meebo Bar available for all Web sites, with a specific focus on blogs.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Meebo Bar, it's a JavaScript plug-in that sits at the bottom of Web pages. It enables a lot of different social interaction and … Read more

YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site.

While it's nice to see YouTube embracing Facebook more and more, it stops a bit short of being an impressive Connect implementation. YouTube is getting there, but seems to be lagging behind a little in this department. An implementation that shares, on Facebook, what you are watching, on YouTube, would … Read more

URL shortener, bit.ly, has a new service out, called bitly.tv. Bitly.tv displays a collage of the most-linked videos (through bit.ly) of the moment. Users can also sort by the top videos from the last day or the last two days.

The site looks really slick and is well presented. When you click on a video, a light box pops out, which plays the video as well as displays a variety of sharing options (Facebook, Twitter, e-mail) and shows a live stream of tweets about that piece of content. The live stream is especially compelling since you … Read more

One of the hottest use cases for Twitter, as you well know, is businesses communicating with their customers or potential customers. Up to this point, Twitter really has not introduced any new features to support these business users, but as a part of an initiative to roll out more business-specific features, Twitter on Monday introduced "Contributors." Contributors allows business accounts to designate other Twitter users, usually employees or PR, to tweet on their behalf. Twitter is currently testing this with "a limited subset of folks."

The screenshot above is what this new feature will look like, … Read more

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post running down the best places to store your files online. Of the six that I covered, two have since closed up shop and one has changed its name.

It's a constantly changing space. Since then, we have seen a lot of new entrants into the online file storage and backup game. Norton Online Backup is a fairly new product that is getting a very strong upgrade Wednesday with version 2.0 of its product. The new version includes support for Mac and Windows, 90-day file versioning, and the ability to … Read more