TripVerde, a company that provides online carpooling services in an attempt to reduce U.S. vehicle mileage by 3 percent to 5 percent in three years, announced Monday that it has launched a new site to connect those people who plan on traveling to Washington, D.C., for President-elect Obama's inauguration in January. According to the company, it will pair up like-minded people from the same region to carpool to the event. In order to be considered, visitors need to sign up for TripVerde's service and fill out information about themselves. Once complete, TripVerde will find individuals with the same interests and start the process of connecting them.
JS-Kit, a company that adds interactivity to Web sites through widgets and other tools, announced Monday that it has added a new feature to its service that allows users to add pictures to their comments on more than 600,000 sites the company partners with. According to the company, each image will be "auto-thumbnailed," but users can click on that image for full-size viewing. The image addition is available now on all those sites JS-Kit currently works with.
Even though MySpace banned Project Playlist late last Friday, the company had some good news to share Monday: it has inked a deal with Sony BMG to offer its users legal access to the label's entire library of tracks. It's a step in the right direction for Project Playlist, since the company is trying desperately to stay afloat after EMI, Universal, and Warner Music sued the company earlier this year. There's currently no indication those labels will negotiate with Project Playlist, though.
Web publishing platform Posterous announced Monday that it has launched a group blogs feature that allows users to add friends to its list of authorized users, allowing them to post Web sites and other information to their shared page. The company also announced that it has raised $725,000 in a round of financing that was led by XG Ventures.
Posterous is a new blogging tool that forgos some of the traditional dashboards and will simply let you write the post in your favorite e-mail tool. Any photos, music, or videos you attach to your message will show up in a new blog post, which can later be administered on the Web. There's no sign-up, and in fact the first time you send a message to post@posterous.com it'll automatically create your blog and Posterous account for you.
Once registered you'll still get a way to create posts in your browser. There's a simple WYSIWYG editor, and a way to go back and edit previous creations. Like Tumblr, there's also a network of other users you can subscribe to, so their posts show up in a centralized stream. In many ways, Posterous resembles Tumblr, albeit with less structure when it comes to figuring out what you want to write about.
Writing blog posts via e-mail is definitely not a new thing. Google's Blogger product has had this for quite some time now, and will support both links and images that get pushed straight to a live post. Hosted WordPress blogs and Tumblr itself also support this feature. However, none of these products support comment forwarding, which lets you keep track of community discussion while you're away from your computer. In Posterous' case you'll get a new e-mail for every new comment with the option to reply. If you do (through your e-mail client of course) that reply will be pushed live as a threaded comment. Not too shabby.
[via DownloadSquad]
An example of a finished Posterous post. Any included photos get slapped into a photo gallery.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Social bookmarking can be a tiring ordeal. Submitting links to services one at a time might be a little overwhelming if you're using more than two or three at a time. What if there was a way to post that link to 34 services from one place? Wonder no more--Social Poster gives you a relatively quick way to accomplish that.
Social Poster provides users with a bookmarklet they can click from any site that will grab the link, title, description, and any tags it finds. Users can put a check by any services they want to post to, which will create a listing of customized links that users can click to go straight to the submission form for each site. Alternately, if you're logged in to one of these sites already, you can click the "post" button which will post the link instantly on several of the services. Assuming you're registered with the site, you might save a click or two.
Ideally I'd like to see a service like this store your logins and do the submitting without having to jump you off to the parent site. My real question is how valuable this is going to be for most people. The real hardcore bookmarkers out there probably already have a bookmarklet or two, and nearly all sites these days already have submission links built right into their stories, like we do below. Incidentally, the service also provides one of these links that can be integrated into sites, allowing users to automatically jump to the service to submit on the site of their choosing. I've embedded an example button below.
[via Download Squad]
Users can pick from 34 different social bookmarking services to share a link from. Social Poster will grab all the important information such as the URL, title, and text, too.
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