Social-news company Loomia announced Wednesday that it has launched a new application called SeenThis, which connects news sites with social-networking sites so users can learn what their people on their friends' lists have been reading. Loomia's inaugural partners in SeenThis are The Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com.
Like many other "recommendation engines," Loomia's technology can suggest content items to a reader based on what he or she has already viewed. SeenThis goes a step further by using social-networking sites' APIs--the one that the current content partners are using is Facebook--to gather what people on a reader's friends' list or within his or her regional, company, or school networks have been viewing on a partner site. So, for example, a WSJ.com reader might see that eight people from his Facebook friends list have read the latest doomsday story about the housing crisis, or that members of his alumni network on Facebook have been browsing the travel section.
CNET Networks will be using SeenThis on its business news properties: BNET, TechRepublic, and ZDNet. NBC Universal, meanwhile, will focus on video so that viewers can learn which NBC.com videos their social-networking contacts have been viewing.
Perhaps because of the brouhaha that surrounded Facebook's Beacon advertising program, Loomia has stressed that SeenThis is opt-in only. A Facebook user, for example, has to install the SeenThis application before it starts tracking habits on partner sites.
The release from Loomia on Wednesday hinted that SeenThis will expand to other social networks as time goes on.
When Apple started putting iSight cameras on the top of its iMac desktops and portable notebooks, one of the fun apps that came along was Photo Booth. This tiny program emulates the experience of good old-fashioned photo booths, the kind you run into in malls and amusement parks. Seenly, which launched yesterday, is a fun service that does nearly everything Apple's Photo Booth does, except it runs in your browser, and as a result works on PCs too.
There are 10 presets to play with, from a simple mirroring mode to a timed nine-exposure shot that will snap nine separate pictures of you in the course of a few seconds. Your shots reside in a little queue at the bottom of the screen, where you can save them straight to your hard drive, or grab the links to share with others.
Seenly also has a Facebook application. Once installed, it performs just like the full version, although your shots can be posted to your profile or sent to friends. Your friends can paste their own pictures to your Seenly Snaps box, which contains the last three shots that have been taken. If you want to post more, you can bump the limit up to nine.
As good as Seenly is, it's missing two of the cooler features you get with Photo Booth. The first is the neat screen flash, which flushes the LCD with white to emulate a typical camera flash. The other is the group of warping effects that I think are the most fun of the bunch. Hopefully Seenly can add these in later down the line.
[via DownloadSquad]
Scare yourself and others with Seenly's photo booth.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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