Longstanding social network LiveJournal published a report Friday that asked its users what makes the site unique. Written by a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Culture, and Communication department at New York University, the report contends that a defining characteristic of LiveJournal users is their "passion" for connecting with others. "LiveJournal's feature set encourages real, engaged, committed, long-term interaction with the site and friends met through the site, creating passionate users who care deeply about LiveJournal," the report said. Unfortunately, many of those "passionate" users seem to be moving to Facebook at a rapid rate.
News discovery service Socialmedian announced Friday that it has been acquired by XING, a business social network that has proved extremely successful in Europe. According to the company, Socialmedian's founder, Jason Goldberg, will relocate to XING's headquarters in Germany and take on the role of vice president of application platform. Socialmedian will stay a standalone service and remain under the creative control of Goldberg and his team.
Yahoo made an interesting announcement Friday, saying it has acquired a 30 percent stake in Network Management Company, an India-based telephone information service. The company did not give any reasons why it has decided to take a stake in the 411 service or if it has plans to expand it internationally to compete with Google's own 411 offering, but Network Management's CEO, T.S. Narayanaswamy, claims Yahoo's funding will create a "world class" team at the firm.
Starting Friday, GreatAmericans.com, a site that tries to inspire Americans through role models in the Armed Forces, is providing users with an opportunity to send recorded celebrity messages of thanks to loved ones serving the country in uniform. The site features messages from a number of "celebrities", including John Ondrasik, the founder of the band Five for Fighting; and Kim Cameron, lead singer of the Side FX Band. Visitors to the site can view celebrity messages, enter the name and information of their loved one, and send the thanks directly to them. The site also allows users to upload video of service men and women.
After gaining a lot of press initially, Yahoo's experimental live streaming site, Yahoo Live, will be shut down on December 3rd. While it does not appear that the closure of this Yahoo Brickhouse project is directly related to the current economic downturn, belt tightening at Yahoo may have played a role. The leading factor in Yahoo Live's closure was, most likely, its inability to gain a lot of mainstream traction. For example, the top stream on Yahoo Live, at the time of writing, has 58 viewers, while the top stream at Live's competitor, Ustream, has over 8,000. Surely with this sort of stagnant growth, Yahoo was forced to axe the project.
The site will be holding a town hall on Wednesday to, "toast Yahoo! Live."
Yahoo dropped on Thursday night a new service on the world: Yahoo Live. Conceptually it's very much like uStream and other live video-streaming products. Anyone can set up a video channel and embed the player (though, oddly, not the text chat that goes with it) on their own page.
One of the really cool features of Yahoo Live is its multi-camera viewing panel. In addition to the video feed you tune in to, four other video channels--of other people watching the same stream you are--appear below the main video. You can jump to those channels quickly, and change the lineup of the secondary video channels by selecting names from the main video's chat window.
Talk to the hand. Not all streaming video channels are fun to watch.
Yahoo is launching the service with an API, allowing people to mash up their own streaming video services. That's very cool, and unusually forthcoming. Most services don't go public with APIs, if ever, until the site has been live for a little while.
Unfortunately, Yahoo Live launched with a serious capacity deficit. I had the service go from functional to "our servers are smoking" several times when the user count broke about 800. Hey, Yahoo: This is why the private beta was invented. If you don't want to put Yahoo-sized capacity into a new product, don't pretend that it's ready for a public viewing.
No word yet on how Google/YouTube will react, or whether a mobile version will appear.
See also: Justin.TV, Kyte, Qik, Flixwagon, Comvu, Mogulus, and Operator11. Care to lay odds on which, if any, can survive independently, or which will get acquired by Google, Facebook, or MySpace?
Track Yahoo Live's progress on the site's blog.
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