Webware

Social networking via cell phones seems to be making a strong push lately. In the last few weeks alone we've covered Joopz, Groovr, PL8Scn, MySpace Mobile, and Gimme20, all services that let you use SMS text messages to communicate with others. Zemble, which launched its public beta version last month, is a free, group-based communication service that lets members send messages en masse to other members.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Similar to Joopz and 3Jam, Zemble lets you create your own group of phone or e-mail contacts and save it as a preset of sorts. Zemble calls these group presets "Zembles." If you send a message to your Zemble, other members of that Zemble will receive the message and be able to respond either individually to you or to the entire group.

Speaking of spam, Zemble says its a no-spam service, although during this month's New Tech Meetup last night in San Francisco, co-founder Doug Ludlow let on about company plans to generate income from the service using targeted ads at the end of sent messages. Currently, the service doesn't include these ads, but it seems their goal is to place an ad at the end of your messages, based on your demographic. Standard SMS messages have a limit of 160 characters, so it's hard to imagine how good these ads could be.

To avoid getting huge phone bills at the end of the month for your excessive texting, Zemble has some simple limitations you can place on both your Zemble friends and your overall Zemble usage. You can both enable and disable certain friends from sending or receiving messages, and set a limit on the amount of Zembles you can receive each month.

Zemble would be an expensive habit for most people on U.S. carriers. Casual text messaging still hasn't hit big here, but what is big is the cost. Most carriers charge in excess of 10 cents for sending and receiving, so despite Zemble being free, using it on a regular basis will increase your phone bill if you don't have a cheap messaging plan. I like the idea of sending multiple texts easily, I'm just not so thrilled about paying more at the end of the month.

Comic books are hard to take seriously sometimes. They're even harder for the casual reader to pick up, which is where Comic Vine comes in handy. Like Wikipedia, Comic Vine is a user-created encyclopedia that can make you an instant expert, but just about comic books. The big difference between Comic Vine and a site like Wikipedia is the community and user submission, which is where Comic Vine steps it up in a big--make that super--way.

You should see this guy in a flame war.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

User profiles on Comic Vine let you become a superhero or villain. Instead of listing the usual social networking details, such as what grade school you went to or your favorite band, you can tell people how a botulized can of refried beans gave you the ability to drink beverages through your nostrils and understand Motorola's naming scheme for its mobile phones. You can post pictures of yourself in your super outfit, as well as write blog posts about anything you feel like. The sky is the limit (unless your superhero/villain can also breathe under water).

Comic Vine provides an easy template to create comprehensive profiles for all things comic-related. You can find out almost everything about major comic book characters, in addition to biographies of the people who illustrated and wrote them along with other projects they worked on. You could get similar information from Wikipedia, but Comic Vine provides its frequent contributors the benefit of posting with less stringent moderation. In fact, after you've passed a short probation period, you're granted access to make live edits to the pages which show up instantly. You're also given points for adding content to the site, which means the more content you add, the more credibility you get with other Comic Vine members.

Comic Vine is a great niche site. Whereas standard wiki authoring tools or sites like Wikipedia can be bland or too broad, Comic Vine seems built to please both its contributors as well as the casual passerby. Seriously though, stay away from those refried beans.

At the San Francisco New Tech Meetup Wednesday, Podaddies CEO Nate Pagel presented his new company, which puts ads into user-generated videos so that people can make a few bucks from their wacky cats' antics.

The service inserts a call to its ad engine at the end of a video, and displays a streaming QuickTime ad from its library. No matter where the file goes, the ad call goes with it. But not the ad itself; this way, the company gets to serve the ad on demand and can track ad plays and bill the advertiser for them (and cut the videos' creators in on the action).

It's all well and good until the video is transcoded, as it will be if it is posted on a sharing site such as YouTube. Pagel said that "other than that," the ad stays with the video wherever it goes--when it's e-mailed, shared via a P2P service, or transferred by USB drive. But the most important video channel these days is YouTube, and Podaddies hasn't yet figured out how to survive placement on that service.

Even if that problem is solved (big if), there's another challenge: few video ads are worth watching. Cadillac had a sweet 5-second ad that worked great when paired with a 1-minute video, but to date many video ads are shrunken-down 30-second TV spots, and they just don't work when paired with short online videos.

Related: Monetizing videos: The rush is on