Webware

Facebook members can now vote on the second round of finalists for its FBFund seed funding competition, which will give out a total of $225,000 to five grand prize winners. The 25 companies currently in the running have already pocketed $25,000 apiece for the applications they have proposed for Facebook's third-party developer platform.

This is the second annual FBFund competition, but the first one in which members have been able to vote on their favorite apps. They can vote once per day, and can watch promotional "commercials" about what each one of them does. Voting involves installing an app called "FBFund08," which members can embed on their profiles.

The 25 finalists run the gamut from multiplayer games to college search to event planning.

Not only is the voting system a way for Facebook to promote and reward high-quality apps, but it's also a promotional strategy for Facebook to drum up more member interest in the developer platform and prove that some apps are actually worth installing. Some critics say interest is dropping, and the platform has suffered from months of negative press about "zombie bites" and other goofy apps.

Here's an interesting tidbit: The FBFund08 app was not created by Facebook, but by Wildfire, one of the app development companies in the running for an FBFund grant. Facebook effectively acquired the app from Wildfire to power the poll. But, Facebook representatives assured CNET News, that won't give Silicon Valley-based Wildfire any unfair advantages.

The $10 million initially invested in FBFund comes from Facebook investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund.

PBS and YouTube are encouraging U.S. voters to take something more than a sense of civic duty with them when they head to the polls on Nov. 4: they want them to take video cameras, too.

The Google-owned video site has partnered with PBS for "Video Your Vote," a project that encourages voters to videotape their polling experience and upload it to the Web. Select videos will be shown on Jim Lehrer's The NewsHour on PBS.

"Voters have documented each step of the 2008 election on YouTube and this phenomenon will culminate on November 4 as people head to the polls to determine the forty-fourth President of the United States," Steve Grove, YouTube's head of news and politics, said in a release Wednesday.

"This partnership with PBS, an organization known for offering rich perspectives, will help voters examine all aspects of voting from the registration processes, to reforms, to technology and election administration, to the actual casting of ballots." Grove elaborated in a video interview with blog Beet.tv.

Gadget company Pure Digital Technologies has agreed to give away 1,000 of its Flip Video cameras to participants who agree to make nine short videos for Video Your Vote: three before voting, three at the polls, and three afterward. A few start-ups, like user-contributed news site GroundReport, have jumped on board as well and are also offering free Flip cameras to readers who participate.

YouTube has a separate campaign, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, called the "Democracy Challenge." That's geared more toward aspiring filmmakers rather than voters armed with handheld cameras.

The video-sharing site already has a track record for political influence. In the 2006 mid-term elections, a widely circulated video of then-Senator George Allen using a bizarre racial epithet at a campaign rally made the rounds on YouTube, and according to some critics, it cost him the election.

But be careful: Some states have laws governing cameras at the polls. We don't think "Google said it was O.K." will be adequate defense.

When I was a kid, youth-voting organization Rock the Vote teamed up with MTV when it wanted to reach young audiences. But in the 21st century, it's MySpace: the News Corp.-owned social network has announced a contest called 'DemROCKracy,' in which bands that use the site as a promotional tool are invited to encourage their fans to register to vote.

Here's how it works: from now through August 14, bands with profiles on MySpace can install a tool on their pages that lets their fans register to vote. The first 25 bands to have 150 people register to vote through the tool will have their music featured in custom playlists on TouchTunes digital jukeboxes--you know, the kind you see in bars--and then the grand prize winner will get to be the opening act at Rock the Vote's "Ballot Bash" concert at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25. They'll also get some new guitars courtesy of Gibson.

Despite the fact that the show is at the Democratic convention, both Rock the Vote and MySpace's political arm say they are nonpartisan.

MySpace is hoping the contest will spark the interest of some of the many small-time bands that have a presence on the site and have used it to build up loyal fan bases. "Not only will the competition link MySpace's thriving music division with an active and successful field effort but it will also offer small bands, a core constituency of MySpace, the chance to open up for top talent," Lee Brenner, executive producer of political programming and director of the "Impact" political channel on MySpace, said in a release Tuesday. "This competition with Rock the Vote is furthering the democratization of music and the ability of bands to engage their fans through MySpace."

Registering to vote and actually showing up at the polls are two very different things. But since last year, MySpace has been stepping up the effort on youth voting and political awareness as the 2008 election draws closer: the most recent projects have been a reporting contest gearing up for the conventions, in conjunction with MSNBC; an election site powered by NBC; and regular member polls pertaining to politics.

Polls Boutique, which is a play on words from the 1989 Beastie Boys album, is a free polling service that's great for creating simple polls with statistical depth and a great sense of community. Like Polldaddy, which we use extensively on Webware and used for Webware 100 voting this year, and more recently on CNET News.com for the iPod survey, Polls Boutique lets users build and deploy polls to blogs or social networking profiles quickly and easily.

What makes it notable is that you can add all sorts of media to your polls such as photos, audio, and video clips. It also has some really great statistical analysis that lets you see the make up of your voters, both gender and age. There are also options to drill down by specific age group, geographical location, and even astrological sign (we're not counting votes from Sagittarius voters in the poll below--sorry). These numbers come alongside easy to read and simplistic charts that can be parsed quickly.

Today the service has launched a customizable widget that lets you change the colors, fonts, and background image. The design process itself is a cinch, although you can't change things like the height, width, or the font on the answers--things that really let you match a widget to the look and feel of your site. However, you can set the background to be transparent, so it will blend in to your post as it does on the example widget I've embedded below. Be sure to check out the view full statistics option to dig deep through user votes.

PollDaddy Answers puts a lot of opnion in one place.

PollDaddy makes a polling engine I like so much that I asked them to provide the technology for the Webware 100 awards. Thanks to them, I couldn't be happier with the way the voting is going. As of this writing, we've recorded more than 980,000 votes. (Go vote!)

Today, the company is taking its technology and opening it up in an interesting way: polls that users create on free accounts are now accessible from a centralized PollDaddy site, and each poll also gets its own page where users can not just participate in it but add comments on the poll being displayed.

The goal, said PollDaddy CEO David Lenehan, is to, "create a community similar to Yahoo Answers, but with the emphasis on polls as opposed to open-ended questions and answers."

I like this new feature since it exposes polls on small sites to more users, and it also lets sites share polls, making results potentially more reliable. And the central clearinghouse of polls makes for good SEO bait. It could drive traffic to the polls' host sites.

PollDaddy is also launching an OpenSocial app next week, which will make it easier for users to drop polls on personal sites, and presumably share results across them.

But I do have two reservations: First, polls are not Q&A services, and it's a very different thing to troll through a database of poll results than to look for answers to questions that you may have. I looked through the polls currently on the system and found very few that were worded in a way that anyone but the original pollster would understand the results of. In other words, everyone knows how to ask an open-ended question, but it appears to me that few people know how to set up a good multiple choice opinion poll. Maybe that's my training in experimental psychology speaking, though.

Also, if you want to use a PollDaddy poll to collect opinions just from your own site's users, be advised that with the free PollDaddy accounts, you cannot opt out of this poll-sharing scheme. To keep your poll focused, you'll need to upgrade to a paid account. TechCrunch also pointed this out.

In other PollDaddy news, Scott Rafer is now an advisor to the company. Rafer recently flipped MyBlogLog to Yahoo. That experience bodes well for PollDaddy's future.

Iowa what?

Amid the frenzied press coverage over Thursday's too-close-to-call caucuses in the Hawkeye State, 153,226 MySpace.com users have already cast their (unofficial) votes.

In a set of "virtual primaries" held on Tuesday and Wednesday, Republican Rep. Ron Paul and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama were declared the winners of the News Corp.-owned social-networking site's polls.

The poll was conducted entirely through MySpace's Impact political site. And for those who have been following Election 2008 on the Web, neither "victory" is particularly surprising.

On the Democratic side, MySpace users selected Obama nearly 2 to 1, with the Illinois senator taking 46 percent of the vote, followed by Hillary Clinton with 31 percent and then John Edwards with 8 percent. Obama's triumph among MySpace's young and tech-savvy user base is no surprise--he has proven a favorite among many young voters hoping for change, as well as a sizable portion of left-leaning geeks.

But in Thursday's Iowa caucuses, Obama doesn't enjoy such a clear advantage--the outcome remains too close to tell.

Ron Paul, however, is a different story. The Texas congressman is considered quite the long shot, failing to poll above more than a few percentage points nationwide. But his libertarian views and vocal opposition to the war in Iraq have found a welcome home on the Web, and MySpace is no exception. In the social network's virtual primaries, Paul won by an impressive margin with 37 percent of the vote, followed by more legitimate offline contenders Rudy Giuliani (18 percent) and Mike Huckabee (16 percent).

"Exit poll" questions in the MySpace primary revealed that 83 percent of participants plan to vote in their states' actual primaries, and 91 percent plan to vote in the general U.S. election. They also named the economy and jobs, the war in Iraq, and health care to be the three most important issues facing the country.

Representatives from the social network, which has launched an extensive youth-voting initiative and political awareness campaigns for the 2008 election, have stressed that the results of the primary represent the "MySpace generation," and consequently probably don't reflect the nation as a whole.

Additionally, it should be noted that while the poll was offered only to members of MySpace's main U.S. site (not its international editions), it did not require respondents to be of legal voting age. And while MySpace has said the average age of respondents is 29 years old, such a figure should be taken with a grain of salt because no age verification system was in place.

But when it comes to the political leanings of avid social network users, MySpace's results may not be far off base. Rival social network Facebook has also launched a politics site in conjunction with ABC News, and ongoing presidential-candidate polls show Obama and Paul as the front-runners there too.

The update to Digg yesterday brought with it a handful of tweaks, although notably absent was the much anticipated photos section. Keep in mind that you'll still find Digg saturated in photos, there's just not a bona fide section for them, or way to view pictures on-site. While confirmed on the official Digg blog that a special photo section is on track for October (two months from now), there's already a handful of sites to get your fix for photos made popular by real people. Here are seven of my favorites:

Reddit Media isn't actually endorsed or created by Reddit. Instead it pulls from Reddit's news feed, and searches out picture previews for stories that have words like [PIC], [picture], and [video] in the story title. In addition to photos, you'll also find video clips among the popular items. You'll find many of the items that show up on Reddit Media and Reddit in general are the same that make their way to Digg, although this is currently a better way to browse because of the small photo thumbnails next to each story that show you what you're in for.

Picli is a very slick-looking service that most accurately emulates the Digg experience. There's an upcoming batch of photos you can browse and vote up. The front page is populated with the last 15 most popular pictures, which are made up of professional, or good looking amateur shots. Many of the shots that tend to make the front page are landscapes, macrophotography, and black-and-whites. For all its beauty, Picli is noticeably missing the humorous and outrageous shots that you tend to see on Digg's front page, making the site feel more like Flickr's interesting photo roundup page instead.

Phoja uses a system similar to Picli, except with a twist. You can upload shots to the service from your mobile phone, and there's an emphasis on user commenting. To encourage participation on submitted photos, the service integrates Google AdSense and awards the top-ranked commenter for each post a share of the photo page's ads. The site is pitching itself as a way to get advice while on the go, by leveraging the wisdom of the crowds. Their examples include gadget-buying advice on the go, and book shopping, although I see commenting as more as an asynchronous activity--especially considering people won't necessarily see a photo until it makes the front page.

Linkinn may not have the prettiest home page of the bunch, but you can view huge sets of photos without having to leave the site. It takes on a similar system to Digg with a front page, and simple one-click "Like it" buttons with thumbs up. Similar to Reddit Media, and Digg itself, there's also a section for user-submitted videos which can also be watched in-site. There's also a referral system setup where you can get points for any inbound links, submissions, and user comments, along with a top listing of users doing the most of each.

Photozook may not be the most technically advanced of the bunch, but it features large and clear photo thumbnails for each story post. Like Digg, the front page is populated with the most recently popularized shots, and users can vote, comment on, and favorite any shot. One of its cooler features is Photo Ticker, which is essentially a clone of Digg Spy. You can keep an eye on all the latest user uploads, votes, and comments in real time. There's also a handy tag cloud to sort through submitted shots, assuming submitters have taken the time to tag their shots.

Imgppl is a really simple, and well done photo-voting site that employs a voting system very similar to Reddit's. Maybe one of the most peculiar aspects of Imgppl is that no user registration is required, or even offered--meaning you can vote, submit, and comment on photos on the site freely. Development on the site seems to have been at a relative standstill since late March, but people are still submitting photos to the service every day.

Biggsmash is about as close to a Digg clone as it gets, because it's pretty much a carbon-copy clone of the last iteration of Digg sans user controls, Digg labs, and a soul, of course. Biggsmash gets all its stories off the Digg API feed, and attempting to Digg, comment, or blog about any story on Biggsmash will send you back to the original story page on Digg. The one thing it does have that Digg doesn't is a section for photos, which it manages to separate in a similar fashion to Reddit Media--grabbing keywords from the title.

Hundreds of Web developers, designers, and ordinary geeks gathered this weekend to build usable applications for Apple's iPhone. The barcamp.org event was hosted at Adobe Town Hall and featured dozens of sponsors. The hack-a-thon began on Saturday morning, and wrapped up late Sunday afternoon when each team had a chance to present its app.

Some teams included a group of Yahoo! developers, and others included complete strangers who had just met the day before. I give credit to all teams who participated, but here are the 10 most memorable creations:

10. iPhoneVote This application was the first one presented at the hack-a-thon, and it was used as a voting system for the event. You would tilt your iPhone in portrait mode to vote yay, and tilt it horizontally to give a negative vote. There was a laptop set up in the front of the room, and it was updated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think the app reset each time a new team would present, so the votes just tallied up into the 80s. Even though it wasn't used for its official purpose, it was a great burst of hope for future apps like this, and boosted the morale of the developers in the room.

9. AppMarks If you have an iPhone, make AppMarks your Safari home page. The interface models the iPhone front door, but instead, each icon links to a Web app or HTML bookmark. I mentioned AppMarks in this blog post a few days ago. AppMarks is cool, but I want to see more functionality. If the AppMarks people want users to add AppMarks as their home page, they need to always be thinking of new features. There are other products, like Mojits, that are right on their heels.

8. PickleView The only sports application presented was called PickleView. Ryan Christianson from the Walt Disney Internet Group explained that in baseball, a pickle is a play in which a base runner is trapped between bases with fielders tossing the ball back and forth and usually ending with the runner being tagged out. Most will remember it well from the 1990s classic,The Sandlot.

Their iPhone app visualizes a box-score view of your favorite teams’s stats, and then displays a mock Twitter feed of PickleView's friends. I am not sure if that's how this app works, but the developers have a cool concept.

A little while ago I wrote up Nintendo's "Everybody Votes" channel, a small Wii application that lets users pit themselves against the masses in a multiple-choice voting system. One of the things it did so brilliantly was let you see how your answers stacked up against others after the polls had closed. Along similar lines comes Tapatap, a new contest service that lets you go up against others in contests that use an "A-or-B"-style voting system.

Each contest has a theme, and the most popular ones are listed on the contests page. The site also hosts sponsored and monthly specialty contests that offer prizes to the most active and skilled users. Users pick the photo that corresponds to the contest theme at its best. For example, one of the contests that's on there right now is an either-or matchup between cartoons from the 1980s. Your votes are compared to that of other users, and if you've voted with the majority, you get points. Users can get even more points by going on streaks, which increases their points multiplier. The system also keeps track of which users get the longest streaks on any given contest.

Any user can create their own contest; they're also able to add photos to any existing ones. Users can keep track of votes on their submitted photos and see what contests they're entered in.

In addition to the Web version of Tapatap, there's also a mobile version that lets users vote and browse contests from their phones.

Tapatap is a lot like Bix, but Tapatap doesn't have support for videos, although it's a feature they're adding in the fall. Tapatap is also planning to roll out an embeddable version of their contests in the form of a Flash widget for use on social-networking profiles, including a version for Facebook. I can't say I find sites like this particularly useful, but they're certainly fun.

The age old question of which lolcats meme is better can finally be answered with this user-generated contest service.

(Credit: CNET Networks)