Bebo IM Debuts, and Users Are Grumpy

If it’s Bebo that you prefer to the larger social networks of the world, but want to enjoy the equivalent of Facebook Chat within your own friendly circle, how’s this. Bebo’s Emma Carlsgaard let it be known that a feature dubbed Bebo IM is now live. You can interact with contacts much the same as you would with a standalone instant messaging service.

The functions involved are simple enough. Chat with one or more persons. Block people you dislike. Report vagrants. All that fun stuff. Some words of warning, though. Site members who’ve responded to the announcement are largely unimpressed. A number of users complain of its being dysfunctional. Others want it shut off. Only a minority of respondents appear to enjoy what’s come of Bebo developers’ labor.

The IM option is relatively inconspicuous. It’s open by default and and sits in a partially collapsible box in the lower right corner of your browser window. Simply click on the miniaturized icon representing an IM contact list and you’re shown a summary of your friends. Click a name and start talking. Close any open windows when you’re done.

If the initial user commentary is anything to go by, you may encounter buggy operation. But you may not, so give it a try, we say. Nothing to download, after all. There’s definitely merit to the popular suggestion of keeping with your preferred IM service for the simple fact that it is what’s known. Oppositely, Bebo had to deliver an answer to Facebook’s own service one way or another. Whatever the case, it seems some extra time in the cooker likely would’ve ensured a more celebratory debut.

How to Chase Hurricane Fay Online

So you’re a modern day storm chaser. “Twister” remains in your top 5 favorite flicks ever. You trawl YouTube for highlights, send off 140-character-long remarks about everything from monsoons around Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim, watch for news of tornadoes in the American Midwest, and follow coastal onslaughts brought on by hurricanes of intensities grand and grander. Put on your wetsuit then, because a hardy sea creature called Fay, presently traveling through Cuba, is slated to hit southern Florida early next week, and the volume of information available to Web-savvy observers is extensive.

Of course, you can visit the de facto forecaster for many a weather watcher - Weather.com - for relevant information. The site is home to news reports, an interactive tracker, videos, and satellite data. All the standard stuff. If you’re situated in the target zone, for whatever reason, and you’re one to document such occurrences, you can upload videos for site visitors to see.

Another base of operation on the Web, MyFoxHurricane.com, run out of the Floridian city of Tampa Bay, seems to do Weather.com one better so far as visual material is concerned. The front page is literally stuffed with satellite readings, both static and time-lapsed. And like Weather.com, MyFoxHurricane offers coverage of all regions most vulnerable during the year’s peak hurricane season: the Eastern Atlantic, the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and the entire southeastern seaboard of the US. The site also gives users the ability to view live video, watch a “supertracker,” chat with fellow visitors, and even transfer hurricane data to Google Earth if you choose. The site presents links to various governmental and non-profit organizations as well. One such destination is NOAA’s National Weather Service website.

The National Weather Service website is, visually speaking, predictably basic, but it’s a useful resource nonetheless. For a quick way to look at multiple perspectives taken by NOAA of the situation pertaining to Hurricane Fay’s presumed path of travel north through Florida, the NWS is perhaps one of the best places to go. No video to consume, from what we can gather, but if you’re interested in the goings on surrounding the cyclone, you can glean some unfiltered output in the ‘State’ link under the ‘Text Messages’ designation.

AccuWeather is one more source for information on storms, which, like all of the abovementioned destinations, has done the duty of putting Fay front and center. It has gathered the requisite satellite and radar data, video updates, analysis, and warnings for advanced preparation, and, if need be, evacuation. It should be said that the layout of AccuWeather is somewhat of a strong point for the service. Nearly everything one could wish for is immediately on tap.

Mobile

As for mobile readings and alerts, both Weather.com and AccuWeather make for quality information engines. Each service’s mobile-specific websites are free to use (they do require mobile Web connections, however). For iPhone owners, the always-available Weather application, which consults AccuWeather, does lack in detail, so if you find yourself wanting for an enhanced view of Fay’s situation this week, WeatherBug [iTunes URL] provides a free application download.
There is also Twitter to consider! Sure, it’s had its ups and downs, some particularly newsworthy in and of themselves. But as with the geological tremors that swept parts of California late last year and earlier this year, there’s no question that the microblogging service we’ve developed undying love-hate relations with will prove useful to anyone concerned with Hurricane Fay and her abusive intentions.

Pandora Might Avoid Extinction by Getting More Social

Let me say from the outset that I am a thorough fan of Pandora and its browser-based and iPhone-friendly offerings. Both work exceptionally well. (Most of the time, anyway. Music recommendation isn’t a perfect science - with or without a so-called Genome Project involved in the process.) Yet the Washington Post has featured an exposé by Peter Whoriskey this weekend to the effect that Pandora, save for a swift change in royalty fees stipulated for Internet music Selling-Entertainment-Online Jan-08 playback by SoundExchange, the representative for a number of studios in the industry, will soon be facing a “pull-the-plug kind of decision.” So says the founder of the service, Tim Westergren.
That, I hold no reservations in saying, would be (all but) tragic. Pandora has added considerable value to the custom radio market, and its arrangements with mobile phone carriers and home theater Home cinema systems by Slim Devices (Sqeezebox) and Sonos are quite elegant methods for casual listening sans a PC.
Yet, I feel I must beg the question: Is the royalty system all that gives Pandora and the people behind it the kind of finite outlook they predict as a result of drastically increased licensing costs? Might it not be at least partly due to the competition’s much more expansive implementation of social services intertwined with music streaming and recommendation that targets Pandora for expiration? Is it, when all is said and done, an algorithm, or a set of algorithms, that music fans wish for? Or is it interactive, person-to-person frameworks by which to share and learn of favorite artists and new releases they crave more? Popular names like Last.fm and imeem are readily serving to such demand quite well.
For the time being, Pandora seems quite healthy, I’ll allow. Google shows that the last 12 months for the site have generally moved upward from a low of 200,000 visitors per day in July 2008 to 400k by July 2008. It then witnessed a surge to about 450k in the days immediately after. But a service like imeem, for instance, which carries quite a few social networking components in addition to its media-rich archives, has a sort of all-in-oneness to it, and Google marks it as having had 400k visitors in July 2007 turn to 800k a year later.
Similarly, Last.fm is also a popular destination for social music entertainment. Its name is well enmeshed in the market. Mind you, it is early neck-and-neck with Pandora, user-wise, so it would be silly to think it’s anything of an outstanding financial success. But in terms of assets, I would venture to peg Last.fm as a more promising wager going into 2009 and beyond. (Just for reference, Google Trends shows Last.fm as having experienced ups and downs over the last four seasons, but it has often maintained a rough 400k daily visitors.)

Shapeways Aims to Make 3D Fabrication Cheap and Easy (Invites)

Custom fabrication can be fun. Especially when it gets three-dimensional. Enter, Shapeways, a new startup molded by Philips Incubator Project and currently tagged as a private beta service. (We have lots of invites to share. Click the link at the bottom.)

For inspired originalists, there’s really nothing one can buy that satisfies that ever-present craving for uniqueness. This drives many to paddle the river of DIY (do-it-yourself) fabrication, where everything from knitting to t-shirt screening is accomplished for that one-of-a-kind look (with the hard work done by you or a much more resourceful processor).

Shapeways is made to perform much the same role as those outfits, albeit with 3D designs. The promise of Shapeways is to enable consumers to make stuff, virtually anything of reasonable size and detail, and have it in hand in 10 days or less for an average cost of $50-150.

Mind you, Shapeways requires its users to submit a little more effort in the design of products than, say, t-shirt graphics. Compressed JPEG photos won’t do. Users are asked to import files from 3D modeling software in STL, Collada, or X3D formats. At that point, one is able to specify material and size. Shapeways describes current options as “White Strong & Flexible (SLS), Cream Robust (FDM), White Detail and Transparent Detail (Object). Additional choices will come soon.

If you’re to consider only the intriguing and largely inexpensive inventiveness that might be realized through Shapeways, it seems quite worthwhile. But perhaps its designation as a “consumer co-creation community” is a bit far-fetched. Consumers, for one, have little interest or even reasonable aptitude when it comes to 3D modeling software. It’s simply too complex for the casual user to effectively grapple with. Also, some designer utilities tend to carry with them considerable cost. The very good ones, anyhow. So I don’t imagine Shapeways becoming something akin to Minted, Threadless, or Spreadshirt.
Besides, the tasks commissioned of Shapeways by its users would typically have too many design variables in play to enable a kind of streamlined efficiency as far as a production schedule is concerned.

This leads me to think that the primary role for Shapeways will be one of serving experimentalists, artists, and various organizational or corporate doodad manufacturing. Which is fine enough, really. It need not be hugely popular. Regular output for a portion of its membership will likely suffice.

Invites: If you’d like to get yourself early entry into Shapeways, you only have to do two simple things. Click here, and where required, enter the code: MashThis. We have 500 invites to give away. Take ‘em while they’re available!

— by Paul Glazowski

DashGo Connects Musicians and Labels to Social Media (The Startup Review)

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: DashGo

20-word Description: DashGo provides digital distributionSelling-Entertainment-Online Jan-08 and social networking analytics for bands and content owners.

CEO’s Pitch: DashGo.com enables bands to easily manage new releases and publish them to digital music services like iTunesitunes-overtakes-wal-mart-in-music-sales Apr-4-2008 .

For each of our clients we track performance across the top 9 social media networks. We standardize the data into the categories of “Profile Views,” “Streams,” “Friends” and “Comments” for timeline analysis. We are rapidly rolling outAcademy-Awards new features - next up is to lay benchmarking and sales data on top of this to help artists identify which sites and spikes in activity generate sales. In the future we plan to offer distribution directly to the social media networks as well, in addition to the digital music stores and ad-partners we currently serve including Last.FM, Meebo and YouTube .


Mashable’s Take: If you’re a solo act or a band of music makers (or studio), chances are you want to get your music out to as many listeners as possible through various channels on the Web. Santa Monica-based DashGo serves to help accomplish this.

Presented as a music label of next-generation making, DashGo connects with virtually all the top sales outlets - plus some lesser-known joints. The list includes iTunes (worldwide), Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon MP3, Napster, MediaNet, Snocap-Imeem, YouTube, Juno, Turntable Lab, Blast My Music, Amie Street, Songslide, Beatport, Audio Lunchbox, etc. DashGo tracks activity on social sites as well: MySpace, YouTube, iLike, Bebo, Facebook, Purevolume, Virb, Imeem and Last.FM.

Such coverage gives DashGo both a thorough sales spread as well as a comprehensive look at what occurs where on the Web, allowing the company to direct energy where necessary based on a good amount of information. Which can ideally lessen waste and boost marketing potency.

As an intermediary exclusively fixated to the digital space, DashGo’s pursuit is naturally the independent crowd. Artists in the sector are in a continuous race to rise above the fold, and are clearly seeking to raise their profile through online campaigns. DashGo’s purpose is essentially to buoy that desired objective with substantive logistical experience. How successful has it been thus far?

It’s list of partners is a literal potpourri of names. Content producers include: Delicious Vinyl, Krofft Pictures, Downtown RecordsThe-Suit-With-the-Golden-Ear May-07 , CBS Records, and GMG Entertainment (DashGo’s founder, Ben Patterson was an executive). And one of the more high-profile arrangements with a music group Patterson touts is Weezer. Patterson reportedly had a hand in digital marketing effortElection-Campaign-Money Mar-08 for the viral hit “Pork & Beans” video.

— by Paul Glazowski

DashGo

If Google Buys Digg, What Happens Next?

My prediction: nothing. Not a damn thing. If Google acquires Digg, which many sites are reporting as a done deal, it’ll be a little something I call a Vanity buy. Which would mean that Google doesn’t really need Digg ; it wants it. And if Google is smart, it’ll just leave Digg as it is.

The thing is, Digg and other social media sites are very much dependant on having an active, vibrant community. I might be proven wrong, but history has shown that these types of sites never get enormous; and their users are not too keen on clicking ads. In short, they’re not the goldmine everyone thought they would be (hence the thousands of Digg clones out there).

So - if the rumors are true - why is Google buying it? Because it’s cool. It has formidable traffic, yes, but the main reason why anyone would want to own Digg is influence. Let’s face it, it’s a very influential site: some are trying to game it, some are trying to win it (it can be a game, you know), some are trying to understand it and profit from it. But the fact that it’s such an enigma, with its users constantly redefining what works and what doesn’t, is one of the reasons it’s so popular.

The other reason why Google would want to buy Digg is the simplest of all: because they can. Digg is the first and best site in an entirely new niche, and if the price is not outrageous, Google can afford it, so why not own it? If nothing else, it’ll give them a great opportunity to find out about the inner workings of this specific and complex social media ecosystem.

Therefore, I think that it would be dumb for Google to try to do anything to Digg, especially immediately after the acquisition. It could cause a backlash from the community. If they acquire it, they can move some ads around and try to leverage the influence in some ways, but the best thing they can do is enjoy it and go with the flow.

by Stan Schroeder