Webware

One of the things that put late night talk show host Conan O'Brien on the map was a segment where he'd take a picture of someone's face and superimpose another person's talking mouth over it. It was creepy, it was awkward, and now you can do it too with a service called Mashface.

To make your own horrific creation, you pick from one of the ready-made photos of celebrities and politicians. For now you're limited to just these photos, but I'm assuming users will be able to upload and mark up their own photos in the future. Once you've found the right shot, you simply record up to a minute of audio and video from your Webcam, and it can be placed in layers on top of the photo. This includes things like your eyes and mouth, although depending on the photo, you can use the tool to mimic hand gestures too.

The tool lets you tweak both the size and shape of your recording, along with the color tone, so you can try to match your skin with the person you've chosen. This works pretty well, but getting a perfect match is tough.

The creation I made only took a few minutes to put together. The final product was processed and pushed live just a few seconds after hitting the publish button. The service attaches a little promotion at the end of your clip, but otherwise it's completely free and the videos can be placed elsewhere like what I've done below.

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File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."

Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add "modules," a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.

But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.

This is not the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called "Mixd" that had only been in operation for a few months.

Intel wants to make the whole Web editable, just like a single Wikipedia page.

The chip giant on Tuesday will make a beta available of Intel Mash Maker, a free browser extension that allows users to modify Web pages and combine information from different sources. Its first beta works with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, though at this point the features are far more mature in Firefox, Intel said.

The product, which originated in Intel's research labs, is similar to existing mash-up tools like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly in that it has a graphical design tool.

What's different is that the actual mashing up of information on Intel Mash Maker happens on the client, rather than the server. So instead of making a different Web application to, say, plot real estate listings on Google Maps, Intel Mash Maker lets people add a widget that adds visualization to the real estate listing site.

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Most of us remember mix tapes as those carefully curated cassettes that collected our favorite music together into one 90-minute playlist. Ask a DJ about mix tapes, however, and you'll hear about a whole other side to the art, involving matched beats, seamless crossfades, and other nuances of literally mixing music together. If you're looking for an alternative to mix tape sites such as Muxtape and Mixwit, ThisIsMyJam offers people a way to create mix tapes that emphasize the science of blending songs together.

Based off of the Musical Brain API, ThisIsMyJam allows you to create interwoven music mixes that take into account song attributes such as tempo, key, timbre, genre, and more. There are plenty of drawbacks, such as a limited selection of music, no direct song uploads, and a maximum song playback duration of 20 seconds, but despite these limitations, ThisIsMyJam illustrates a novel approach.

Surprisingly, we found the appeal of ThisIsMyJam to be its degree of difficulty. It's one thing to throw together an iTunes playlist, but creating an overlapping mix of music requires some trial and error. It took us more than a few tries to come up with a mix that didn't make us cringe during discordant song transitions, but the process of reexamining the mix, removing duds, and adding new songs made the final result feel more creative than simply throwing a playlist together and hitting enter.

At the end of the two-step ThisIsMyJam process, the resulting mix comes with its own static URL, a dynamic "Latest Mix" URL, and code for embedding the mix into your own Web site (illustrated above).

Via CreateDigitalMusic.

At its annual Lotusphere conference, IBM on Wednesday showed off an early version of Lotus Mashups, a tool designed to let businesspeople, rather than professional programmers, quickly assemble Web applications.

The application will let people combine, or mash up, data from enterprise applications and the Web. It uses a browser-based visual tool and a set of pre-built widgets for displaying information.

It is scheduled to be released in the middle of this year.

IBM has been pursuing the idea of giving end users in businesses powerful enough tools to build their own applications.

These Web applications may be relatively simple and only be used for a short time. But IBM executives have said that it represents a significant business opportunity for its Lotus collaboration software division.

For example, a person could build a mashup that combines weather information with a retail management system to adjust inventories based on project weather patterns.

IBM first started with end user-driven software development when it introduced QEDWiki two years ago, a product with a similar goal.

Lotus Mashups will use the QEDWiki technology, which IBM's Emerging Technology group first developed, but it will be a separate commercial product, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM's collaboration technologies.

"We want to push the potential of mashups into the business domain," Heintzman said. "We expect to put forward no only catalogs of widgets but catalogs of mashups."

Heintzman said he thought it could be possible that in the future, IT departments will analyze the applications created by end users and "harden" them for broader deployment within companies.

Last year at Lotusphere, IBM introduced other products inspired by Web 2.0-style consumer applications, including Lotus Connections, social-networking software for businesses.

Updated at 9:15 AM PT with comments from IBM. Screen shots added.

SmashMash is a new multifaceted visual editor. It can add motion to still photos, create slide shows, and edit videos and audio. A hybrid app (it can work inside a browser but uses a large plug-in), SmashMash is impressive for its capabilities, although in this early beta stage it's hard to actually make attractive content with it, and it's a bit buggy.

But it's got amazing potential. Just messing around? Take your still photos of people, make their lips move (see also Blabberize), and put words in their mouths. Or take a bunch of slides and create a Ken Burns-like slide show. You can insert videos in your productions and can do basic editing on them (compare to JumpCut). You can record videos and audio from a Webcam and you can apply and modify transitions between your media clips.

If you want to really get creative, you can even start from scratch and create your own animations. SmashMash's drawing tools are rudimentary, but easy enough to use if all you're trying to make are stick figures.

There is more media editing power in SmashMash than most people will ever need, and it's a more open experience than any online editor I've seen. Unfortunately, at this point you can't take advantage of much of the power without either crashing the app or watching it slow to a crawl. I hope to see the bugs fixed soon, of course. More importantly, the app also needs templates to help users start out. While advanced users won't want to be constrained by anyone else's idea of what their projects should look like, we all have to start somewhere in an editing tool like this one, and having framing into which we can install our own media would make the early experiences with SmashMash more likely to generate subsequent visits. For beginners who want to create montages or slide shows, in fact, I'd recommend they steer clear of SmashMash and head over to OneTrueMedia or RockYou.

However, if you want more freedom to gussie up your photos or videos, or you want to experiment with animation or other strange moving manipulations of your media, do check out SmashMash. There's really nothing quite like it.

SmashMash will have three versions: A lightweight, Web-only photo editor, a more capable full media editor that's browser based, and a download that will eventually cost $19 (it's free now). All of them will interface with the SmashMash servers for hosting of media, and SmashMash will provide embedding codes so presentations can be inserted into social network pages. Users will also be able to save their files, as videos, to their own hard disks.

SmashMash CEO Michael Land will pitch the product at the San Francisco New Tech Meetup on January 9.

MingleNow, one of the first few social networks to promote companies making their own social networking profiles, will be closing up its doors in early January. We wrote about the company at its late-2006 launch, and from the looks of site activity, things appeared to be doing reasonably well. While the company's blog post about the closure is ambiguous at best, a good guess would be that Yahoo (parent company of BlueLithium Labs) did not see much worth in maintaining a social network that directly competed with at least four of its other properties including Upcoming, Flickr, Mash, and Groups. It only got in that spot after picking up BlueLithium in early September to get its advertising technology.

The idea of MingleNow was to blend a social network with member profiles to those of local businesses. Members could post party pictures and tag them to events at local businesses, or find them the next day when they had been posted to the business profiles by whatever MingleNow photographer was at the event.

Admittedly, I was never fond of the site, but I do feel a little bad for its members who have just a few weeks to jettison their photos and contacts to other services. It would have been nice for them to provide some sort of escape hatch for their users, like what Yahoo photos did when it closed shop.

[via Read/WriteWeb]

Microsoft started an open beta program for its consumer-oriented mashup builder Popfly on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Popfly is a hosted application that enables people to assemble mashups by dragging and dropping components, rather than writing code. It's built with Microsoft's Silverlight Web browser plug-in.

When Microsoft released the alpha in May, it had prebuilt "blocks," or connections, to popular Web sites Flickr and MySpace.

Now it integrates with Facebook and people can create gadgets (also called widgets) that run on Windows Vista or Windows Live.

There are a growing number of these do-it-yourself Web authoring tools, including Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes. Here's a link to a review of three of those.

For business users, IBM has developed QEDWiki and Coghead, and other companies have created hosted application development services.

Zude, a new Web site by Fifth Generation Systems (5g), lets you make a collage of all your favorite items from the Web and present them in one spot.

The site took down its password-only entrance and went into "soft launch" last week. In other words, it's testing the waters to see who in the public sphere will find and use it.

And I'm just not sure who that is.

Similar to Paggi.com, Zude allows you to create your own, personalized Web pages or profile page--called a "Zudescape"--with text, photos, videos, audio files, widgets, gadgets, Web sites and feeds. As of now, the company is offering registered users an unlimited amount of pages.

Viewing access to your pages can be granted to the general public, limited to you only, or limited to Zude users designated by you.

The nice thing about Zude is that it offers the type of freedom many people probably wish their MySpace or Facbook pages allowed.

But the site is a little busy at first glance and may intimidate the average user.

It also took some time to figure out exactly how its page-building tools work. Zude currently works with Firefox and Internet Explorer, with support for the Safari and Opera Web browsers in the works. However, you must modify your browser to allow pop-ups from the Zude.com site and download the Zude extensions in order for the tool to work. No, really. The drag-and-drop feature that allows you to add objects to your pages will not work at all unless you make a pop-up exception for the site and download the software.

Even then, the site does take some getting used to, and adding content beyond the immediate offerings is very tricky.

This is one of those sites we'll probably check back with in a few months to see where it's gone after some deep, public user-testing and, based on user recommendations, some tinkering with the interface.