Webware

Stickam, a company that allows users to stream their lives online, announced Monday that it has launched an application programming interface that will let users incorporate the company's service into any Web site or app. According to the company, users can use its video-streaming function on their sites without worry of bandwidth, server infrastructure, or Flash development, since it will all be hosted through Stickam. The API is available now as a public beta for the first 100 registered developers at no cost. Once the beta period ends, Stickam will charge developers an undisclosed fee based on a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Human-powered search engine Mahalo announced on Monday the launch of Mahalo Answers, which allows users to submit questions to the community, which will then be answered by other Mahalo users. Mahalo Answers is quite similar to Yahoo Answers, but it does feature one twist: users can offer "tips" (in Mahalo dollars) to those who post the best answers. For its part, Mahalo will take 25 percent of the cash exchanged between users.

Hot or Not is an extremely popular site that allows users to rate a person's appearance based on a posted picture. Responding to its popularity, a new site called Twit or Fit has launched, which will provide Twitter profile pictures that will be graded based on the person's physical appearance. Visitors can decide to look at only men or women or view the top 10 highest-rated people. Twit or Fit also provides the option of announcing grades through the user's Twitter profile.

On Monday, Intel announced the results of its Internet study, which found that most U.S. adults would rather have Internet access than watch TV or engage in sexual activity. About 65 percent of respondents said they cannot live without Internet access, and 71 percent claim it is important or very important to have Internet-enabled devices. The vast majority of the respondents believe the Web has become an integral component in the U.S. economy and a central part of their lives.

Hot Topic, a clothing and accessories retailer catering to those interested in alternative music, announced Wednesday that it has launched ShockHound, the company's first online music site offering millions of MP3s, band merchandise, music videos, and editorial content.

According to Hot Topic, Shockhound offers tracks from major record labels, like Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music, as well as independent labels. The company also says that artists will be able to upload and sell their own music directly to users without requiring a record label to act as the broker between Shockhound and the artist.

"Our goal was to create an authentic, online experience of music discovery," says Betsy McLaughlin, CEO of Hot Topic. "A place where fellow music lovers can come together and explore, share their likes and dislikes, read the latest music news, and enjoy exclusive content on their favorite artists."

One of the unique features ShockHound will offer is its editorial section. The site will feature reviews, music news, interviews, original programming, and music videos that are controlled by the editorial team on the site.

Although Hot Topic is well-known for its alternative rock products, ShockHound features music from all genres, so the service definitely has its sights set on competing with iTunes and Amazon.com's MP3 DRM-free store. But unlike iTunes tracks, each ShockHound song is DRM-free.

For those interested in buying tracks from Hot Topic's service, each song retails for 99 cents and can be downloaded on the ShockHound page.

Not every social networking concept strikes gold, even when the coalescing factor is the common interest of finding a good Internet cafe. In the case of WeFi, a hot-spot-finding application with a social community tacked on, various CNET editors have raised a collective eyebrow at some of the more intense methods of attaining human connection, but largely agree that being able to chat with verified friends or nearby Internet surfers adds a useful dimension to the search for reliable Wi-Fi access in comfortable coffee shops.

This First Look at WeFi for Windows laptops and WeFi for Pocket PC tours WeFi's easy-to-use interface and automated hot-spot-sniffers from two Internet-thirsty devices.

I'll admit it--one of my favorite sites years ago was Hot or Not.

Not because it combined the best facets of MySpace and StumbleUpon before either site existed, but because it was devilishly fun to put your own picture up there and get a general consensus of how other people thought you looked on a purely superficial level. Admittedly, there are serious flaws in such a system. Your picture could be not your own--and the camera can easily play tricks. What made the whole thing so damn fascinating were the stats. You got to see how you stacked up on a numerical scale, which at the time was revolutionary.

Following in Hot or Not's steps is FaceStat--a perversion of this idea, letting others rate you in a dozen categories, and best of all, making all the results public for everyone to see.

Some of the categories are downright sophomoric, like "does this person look intoxicated" or guessing their wealth and political party. These stats splash out across people's photos with little animations and can be browsed one at a time to see the specific percentages of how people ranked your shots.

One big difference from services like Hot or Not is that FaceStat uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to do the processing power, harnessing the power of the masses to do the legwork. Because of this, users are limited to just one upload a day, but will get results back in just a few hours. In our test we got our picture back in just 10 minutes.

To upload your own, just go here. You can add a shot from your hard drive, or Facebook. I have to give the site bonus points for not only letting you peruse your latest shots, but your entire folder of previous Facebook profile shots, which should make finding that shot of you that doesn't look anything like you far easier.

Let other people figure out your life story from a single snap shot using FaceStat, a Web 2.0 version of Hot or Not.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There are a lot of sites to scan if you're looking for real estate (a house to buy, or a rental), but one of the most useful, I think, is HotPads. The site was started as a rentals locator, but it has recently expanded to include homes for sale as well.

HotPads will shade neighborhoods by demographic info. In this case, average age of inhabitants.

Like other sites, HotPads displays properties on a zoomable and movable map. But where HotPads shines is its display of additional data. It will overlay heat maps showing data like household income and average rental price, and pop schools and transit stops on to the map as well. However, while the schools database is very useful, I found the transit data incomplete - in San Francisco it shows streetcar stops only, but no info on buses.

HotPads gets its data directly from large rental management and real estate companies, which it has now tapped to provide it with home sales info as well. Individuals can enter listings, too. I looked at HotPads results for some San Francisco neighborhoods and found an impressive number of listings, and significant but not complete overlap with Zillow and Trulia. All services show houses for sale that the others do not.

Trulia also has neighborhood heat map data. See also GeoCommons.

Big on Digg yesterday was a face mutations site called Mutating Pictures that would let you rate how much a randomly thrown together pile of geometric objects looked like a human face. Voting up a picture would in turn create more "offspring," or similar variants of the chosen picture, while simultaneously "killing off" the lower ranked faces. The result is a user-controlled evolutionary system at a very basic level.

Today, almost ironically, we've got a mutation of the site called Face Maker that attempts to solve the same problem using an either-or model. Instead of voting on the hot-or-not sliding scale of one to ten, you pick which one looks "more" human. Like Mutating Faces, Face Maker will kill off the lesser choice, and spawn more recruits from your choice.

The cool thing about both projects (besides the unintentionally awesome Rorschach-inkblot-test-meets-fractals look and feel), is that you can view the progress in real time. You can see before and after pictures of facial progress, and even trace it back by generation. If faces aren't your thing, there's a also freshly launched "animal" section, which gives you the chance to figure out if the random shapes look more like a duck, or a teddy bear. Creepy.

Choose wisely; whichever one you don't pick goes extinct, and the victor shall have children.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

While people without clothes on dominate a great deal of traffic online, the same can be said about those with clothes--otherwise known as the world of fashion. StyleMob, a new social network for street fashion, is opening up its doors on Thursday. Aimed mostly at female users, the service is a social network about clothes and people who like to show off their outfits. Users can pick who has the most style, and submit their own outfits or fashion inventions for others to rate and comment on. There's also the virtual equivalent of a fashion police with groups of users called StyleCouncils who will pick apart an outfit and provide feedback--good and bad.

Consider it a mix between Hot-or-Not, and Del.icio.us--with a dash of Joan Rivers.

StyleMob lets you vote on entire outfits, or various clothing items.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A great deal of the site revolves around the voting system, which lets users vote whether or not an outfit is good or bad on a scale of 1 to 4. Users are also able to bookmark clothing items they like and tag them for sorting. The highest ranked items show up on a daily wall of fame, and the occasional user will get picked by StyleMob's editors to be the daily MobStar, or person of interest.

Like any social network, users get to fill out all sorts of profile information, although StyleMob focuses on things like favorite designers, places to shop, and fashion tips. Each user also gets their own "Lookbook," which is essentially a photo gallery for clothes, both theirs, and those of friends. All of this is held together with a friend system, and a large set of forums where you can discuss all things fashion.

Will StyleMob float? I think so. There are already over 6,000 users who have been testing during the service's three-month private beta, and I'm sure that number will go up when the service opens up its doors. There are also plans to include contextual ads, and clothing store tie-ins. Facebook and MySpace command a great deal of time and traffic from this crowd. It's the strange addictive quality of browsing through other people's pictures that have made services like Flickr and Hot-or-Not so popular with people from many demographics. I'd expect to see a similar attraction to StyleMob.

Related:
Shopcasting can flaunt your style, but the wardrobes need help
FashMatch: One click away from fashion 2.0

Two start-ups that caught our eye at last night's SFbeta here in San Francisco were MizPee and DateMyPet.com. Not so much for their services, which to be honest, aren't the most necessary we've seen, but rather their ingenuity for finding some interesting ways to direct people towards something they're looking for.

In the case of MizPee, that direction comes in the way of bathrooms. Yes, MizPee helps you find and rate public bathrooms. Like HotSpotr, another SFbeta demonstrator of the past, users can login to the service on their mobile devices and hunt for available toilets by plugging in their city and street address. It will then track down a list of the nearest toilets, along with cleanliness ratings (on a scale of one to five toilet paper rolls), and a quick note about whether or not a purchase is required for use. Users can also give the toilet their own rating.

The service is also linked up to a coupon-and-deals-finding service that will let you know if there are any discounts or specials at nearby businesses.

DateMyPet.com is kind of like Dogster and Catster, although not limited to a certain breed of pet. In fact, users can search from nearly a dozen types of common pets, including fish and exotic animals. The creators made the site after several failed relationships where their partner's incompatibility spurred from dislike for their pets. The site takes a social networking approach, with combined profiles for both users and their pets.

A little while ago I wrote up Nintendo's "Everybody Votes" channel, a small Wii application that lets users pit themselves against the masses in a multiple-choice voting system. One of the things it did so brilliantly was let you see how your answers stacked up against others after the polls had closed. Along similar lines comes Tapatap, a new contest service that lets you go up against others in contests that use an "A-or-B"-style voting system.

Each contest has a theme, and the most popular ones are listed on the contests page. The site also hosts sponsored and monthly specialty contests that offer prizes to the most active and skilled users. Users pick the photo that corresponds to the contest theme at its best. For example, one of the contests that's on there right now is an either-or matchup between cartoons from the 1980s. Your votes are compared to that of other users, and if you've voted with the majority, you get points. Users can get even more points by going on streaks, which increases their points multiplier. The system also keeps track of which users get the longest streaks on any given contest.

Any user can create their own contest; they're also able to add photos to any existing ones. Users can keep track of votes on their submitted photos and see what contests they're entered in.

In addition to the Web version of Tapatap, there's also a mobile version that lets users vote and browse contests from their phones.

Tapatap is a lot like Bix, but Tapatap doesn't have support for videos, although it's a feature they're adding in the fall. Tapatap is also planning to roll out an embeddable version of their contests in the form of a Flash widget for use on social-networking profiles, including a version for Facebook. I can't say I find sites like this particularly useful, but they're certainly fun.

The age old question of which lolcats meme is better can finally be answered with this user-generated contest service.

(Credit: CNET Networks)