Did you know photo slide show service Slide.com is used to create over a million slide show widgets a day? With those slide shows comes serious business, pulling in a monster load of traffic. Taking a cue from that, photo host Photobucket has stepped up its in-house solution with a new slide show tool that's been significantly enhanced from the previous version.
Using some design elements from Flektor, which parent company Fox Interactive Media picked up alongside Photobucket in mid-2007, Photobucket users can now skin and theme their slide shows in various fashions to match the theme of the shots. As an added incentive to step up to the service's $25-a-year pro membership, paid users get an extra 20 shots on top of the 30 that everyone else gets.
Despite these new changes, I found the new slide show creation tool to be a little short on features. It's easy to skin the thing with one of the 20 new themes, but many of the themes don't offer control over transitions or skipping ahead through the photos. This might not be a big deal with a few shots, but once the number gets up to 50, it would be nice to have some form of navigation, regardless of what theme the creator has chosen.
I've embedded one of the new slide shows after the break. To check it out, click the pink "read more" link below.
The slide show editor is pretty simple to use, although it swipes a lot of look and feel from sister site Flektor.
(Credit: CNET Networks)... Read more
The next installment of MySpace.com and MTV's "presidential dialogue" series will take place at 10:30 a.m. PDT Monday, October 29, at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The featured candidate will be Democratic contender Barack Obama, a U.S. Senator from Illinois. Moderators will be MTV News correspondents Gideon Yago and Sway Calloway, along with Chris Cillizza, a reporter for The Washington Post's online branch.
The Obama dialogue will be streamed live on MySpace's Election 2008 page, on MTV's Choose or Lose election site, and to cell phone customers who have access to MTV Mobile. A recording will be broadcast on MTV at 7:00 p.m. PDT/EDT that day, with highlights shown throughout the day on the college-centric MTVU channel.
Students in the audience, obviously, will be able to voice their questions to Obama in person. But viewers watching the one-hour event at home--as was the case with last month's inaugural MySpace-MTV event in New Hampshire with Democratic candidate John Edwards--will be able to submit their questions in real time through MySpaceIM and MTV's Think social network.
Additionally, viewers will be able to record their approval or disapproval of the candidate's responses with a voting widget powered by Flektor, a company acquired by MySpace parent Fox Interactive Media earlier this year.
It's official: MySpace.com parent company Fox Interactive Media has formally announced its agreements to acquire image-sharing site Photobucket and slide show mashup creator Flektor. Financial terms of the purchases were not disclosed by Fox Interactive Media, which is a division of media giant News Corp.
Both acquisitions had been rumored for some time. The Photobucket deal, originally reported earlier this month, is inarguably the more significant of the two: Photobucket, after all, is the 34th most visited site on the Web, with over 42 million users and 17 million monthly visitors. Its history with Fox Interactive Media hasn't been smooth: There was well-publicized friction between the two companies when MySpace blocked Photobucket's embeddable video and slide show widgets in April, citing a terms-of-service violation related to a Spider-Man 3 advertising campaign. Later in April, Photobucket announced that an accord had been reached with MySpace, and within weeks, the acquisition rumors began to fly. The rumored price has been about $250 million.
In a post on Photobucket's official blog, co-founder Alex Welch wrote that "we expect nothing to change in our day-to-day operations," and that "the plan is to operate Photobucket as an independent, standalone company within FIM."
As for Flektor, reputedly a $10 million to $20 million purchase for Fox Interactive Media, initial reports circulated on TechCrunch several weeks ago. Flektor, which lets people edit audio, video and photos to create their own embeddable slide shows, was founded just last year.
Photobucket and Flektor, however, will not become MySpace properties as many of the early reports had hinted; they'll instead be Fox Interactive Media brands, alongside MySpace as well as IGN.com and Rotten Tomatoes.
Flektor is a new Flash-based content mashup tool. Users can pull in photos from several hosting services like flickr, MySpace, and Photobucket to make slick-looking, embeddable media slide shows for blogs, Web sites or social networks. It's a lot like Mixercast, and other media mashup services like RockYou and SplashCast.
Flektor's interface is drag-and-drop, and has a very short learning curve. To add media to your show, just drag imported media files down to a timeline at the bottom of the screen, where they can be rearranged or removed at any time. There are also "Flidgets" which can be inserted into your show to add live chat, a live broadcast from your Webcam, or cliched film effects like color bars or static. What's really neat is the ability to edit any picture with some easy-to-use sliders that let you do simple, on-the-fly alterations to your photographs--something you'd find on a Web-based photo editing tool like Picnik.
To add a little flair to your show, there are nearly 100 transitions, effects, and filters that can be put on top of or in between your media. You can also edit each effect and change its appearance. Out of the many transitions I've seen on some of these Flash editors (Photobucket's Remix in particular), Flektor has some really snappy and good-looking effects.
The main hindrance in using Flektor is how long it takes to communicate with the third-party services. Flickr in particular takes quite a while to sync up photos from various albums. On the upside, the MySpace integration is very simple; just give it a username and it will pull up photos members have uploaded in addition to any images that have been embedded in user comments. It's also easy to embed your Flektor player on a number of services, with a handy export page that provides special embedding codes for a dozen services (including Google's Orkut).
I've embedded a sample "Flek" I put together using some photo and video clips. For screenshots of the editing interface, keep reading.
[via Mashable]
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