Social software – Page 5 – Digital-Lifestyles

Joost v0.9 Out: Grab Your Name Quick

There’s a new version of Joost just out today – v0.9 – and amongst the changes, is the switch from using an email address to login to using a username.

Any of those who were slow getting on the Skype-train and ended up with a crummy username take note, you need to act fast to get your name of choice.

To add to the pressure of this, Joost are also giving an extra five invites away to each Joost Member, so the names are disappearing fast.

What else is different with the new version?
The first thing you’ll notice when it starts up is that it now opens in full screen.

The ident has been moved from its previous dominant central position to the bottom right hand corner. The upcoming programme name has now taken its place now middle centre.

There’s been a little fiddling with the icons. Of particular note is the design and function of the one to the right of the channel name. It still brings up the programmes that are available on the channel, but it now has a back button that takes you to a menu of channels – logical really.

Content rating also appears to have been added – or perhaps I haven’t previously looked at any content that needed rating.

Picking The Prodigy, Smack My Bitch Up (Live), I was met with a screen asking me to confirm that I was indeed over 18 (quite why it was needed to see this is anyone’s guess). Interestingly the muted video appeared to run in the background, while I was working out exactly just how old I was.

Those of you who have been watching the development of Joost, will notice that the adverts are getting just a little bit longer and more corporate. The latest addition appears to be an advert for IBM notebooks, while it is visually interesting (for the first viewing), it’s hardly cutting edge funk-ville.

The only downside we’ve found so far is that it crashes – not something that we had a problem with in Joost or The Venice Project before.

Ooo … and we’ve seen there’s a promo video up on the Joost site too (new to us). It’s here below for your delectation.

[QUICKTIME http://static.joost.com/videos/joostvideo.mov 320 240 false true]

Joost

Omnifone Announces Rival To iPhone/ iTunes Service

You may not have heard of them yet, but feisty Brit mobile music company Omnifone have announced one of the first big challengers to Apple’s soon-come iPhone/iTunes Store service.

Called MusicStation, the new service will dish up an “all you can eat” menu for European users, with music downloads starting at £1.99 ($3.88) per week

Initially launching their service in Europe and Asia this year, the London based company says that it’s already secured partnerships with 23 mobile network operators giving them access to a customer base of 690 million subscribers in 40 countries.

“MusicStation will give users of any music-capable mobile phone the ability to legally access, download and enjoy an unlimited amount of music, from a global music catalogue supported by the music industry, all for a small weekly fee, wherever they are,” enthused Omnifone Chief Executive Rob Lewis.

“We will ensure the vast majority of Europeans have the freedom to choose MusicStation by the time iPhone arrives in Europe. We will give consumers the choice they deserve,” he added.

Users subscribed to the service can search, download and play tunes on their mobiles with the option to sync content with home PCs to create playlists sharable with other MusicStation users.

Unlike the iPhone service, MusicStation lets users download tracks over the air across a data network, giving music-hungry punters an instant fix, wherever they are.

“By leveraging the hundreds of millions of handsets sold every year by operators to deliver MusicStation into the global market, we believe we can give Apple a run for its money in digital music provision,” chest-thumped a tiggerish Lewis, adding, “except that with MusicStation users don’t need a credit card, computer or broadband connection.”

Predictably, music tracks will come with digital rights management and be delivered in the eAAC+ format (that’s enhanced advanced audio coding, in case you’re into knowing that kind of thing).

As well as music, the service will feed punters personalised news, new release details, ticket sales and concert listings, along with recommendations for new songs based on their listening habits.

With songs and playlists being held on a centralised server, content can also be recovered and downloaded in the event of some steenkin’ tea-leaf nicking their phone.

MusicStation say that music content will be supplied by both major and independent labels – including Universal Music Group – as well as local artists.

http://www.omnifone.com/

Vodafone Mobile Services Expansion: The Why

Vodafone has made three days of surprising announcements. Three of them for Web services soon to be accessible over their mobile network (MySpace, eBay and YouTube) and the other relating to the building out of their 3G networks in the future (analysis).

We thought it would be worthwhile taking a look as to why this might be happening and why it’s come at this time.

Why the push?
Well, lots of other companies are moving in to tread on Vodafone’s toes – example – Virgin Mobile now with NTL/Telewest TV/broadband/telephone service – as all forms of communication converge.

Vodafone is pretty much a mobile only company. They’re trying to change this, through deals with BT to offer fixed-line broadband and similar offerings in Italy and Germany. In the converged game, they’re pretty weak.

This weakness is leaving their previous highly-profitable dominance of the mobile space threatened.

They’ve been aware of the benefit of differentiating their service through providing access to content for a while, but these recent moves mark a serious step forward.

Previously it’s been about them providing the means of accessing content from third parties, games, music, etc. These most recent deals are about access to services.

I know content is being accessed, a la YouTube, but they’re actually providing access to the service … one that happens to be providing content.

What’s the benefit?
There’s many advantages to Vodafone on this.

Short term it’s about making people associate Vodafone with being on the leading-edge – “Wow, they’ve got MySpace and YouTube!”

It’s unclear how far this benefit will extend into the future, as more phones become easier to browse the Web, where these services live.

eBay, MySpace and YouTube all have fanatical following. When people become embroiled in them, they _must_ find out what has _just_ happened. They’re a modern day replacement for TV soap-operas.

Obsessions like these drive people to choose mobile phones that enable them to get access – and Vodafone will be shouting this from the roof tops to encourage people to switch to them.

Interestingly, those three services are also used by a great deal of people who don’t have a strong technical understanding. People who don’t know that the whole Internet is available through the Web Browser on their mobile phone. This changing is just a matter of time.

Another short-term benefit for them is the amount of revenue they’ll end up generating. We imagine that it’s cost Vodafone a pretty penny to get exclusives from all three services, but this will be made up by the seriously boosted data charges that they’ll be clawing in.

MySpace is pretty rich with bandwidth hungry media – lots of photos, and many many pages to check. Same for eBay.

The real earner for them will be YouTube. You’ll struggle to find an application that uses as much data as video and with the ability to pass links to favourite videos, subscribers will be helping their friends run up big data charges too.

MySpace Mobile Vodafone Deal: Further Details And Opinion

You may have seen the announcement of the tie up between Vodafone Europe and MySpace Mobile we ran a short while ago.

We think this is a pretty big story, so we’ve been chatting to Vodafone and Myspace to get further details and thought we’d fill you in.

The UK will be the first market in Europe that Vodafone will release it in. The dates of the release are being very closely guarded. We tickled and cajouled in an attempt to get it tied down further, which resulted in us finding out it will be the second half of the year. Perhaps later, rather than sooner.

There will be a subscription fee, as is the case in the MySpace Mobile deal with Cingular in the US. The details of costs are currently unannounced.

MySpace Mobile runs on its own application, not through standard Web access. We’re not aware that this has been seen in the wild, so the completion of it may account for the yet-undisclosed release date for the Vodafone service.

Access to the app will be via the yet unannounced ‘selected handsets’ and it will be available for download from Vodafone Live!

Impact
While it might initially appear to be a great deal for Vodafone to capture the youth as customers, there may be clouds on the horizon. In a recent visit to a youth club, it was surprisng to see all of the collected 13-16 year olds using BeBo, with not one on MySpace. When asked why, they replied that they just found setting up and running BeBo a lot easier than MySpace. We can only assume that Vodafone did some decent research on who actually uses it, rather than what MySpace told them … didn’t they?

It’s not clear how much of a market there will be for this. As mobile phones handle Web browsing increasingly better, the need for a dedicated application drops away, as people simply use their Browser on any network. It’s been seen that a well-written dedicated mobile apps can still maintain an advantage – like Google’s mobile email client – due to the restricted interface intrinsic with mobile keyboards.

What will the features be?
The details of what MySpace-ers will be able to do …

MySpace Mobile Features:

* Upload and View Photos
MySpace Mobile allows Vodafone customers to select photos stored on their mobile device and upload them to their MySpace profile. They can also view photos already uploaded on any MySpace profile.

* Respond to Mail
Vodafone customers don’t have to wait to log on to a computer to read and reply to their MySpace messages. From their mobiles, they have the ability to send messages to their MySpace friends, read and reply to messages sent to them.

* Manage Your Community of Friends

MySpace Mobile allows customers view and manage friend requests. They can also perform basic friend searches giving users the opportunity to “click-to-add “friends into their network. They simply locate a MySpace profile they wish to add as a friend, and then select to add this user as a friend.

* Post Comments or Blog Entries
Update your blog live throughout the day by posting new entries on the move, or make comments to other users’ blogs or MySpace profile pages. To post a blog or comment, people simply view the appropriate section and click “Post” to create the entry. Users can save their work at any time, and any information entered will update both the mobile service and the online MySpace profile page.

* View Friends
Customers have the ability to view the friend list of any MySpace profile. The friend list contains a text listing of the friends, which when selected would show the profile picture along with a link to that user’s MySpace page, and the ability to add the friend to your MySpace contact list for quick bookmarking.

Vodafone Europe Gets MySpace Mobile

Vodafone Europe has signed an exclusive deal with MySpace to get MySpace Mobile on their service.

Although currently exclusive, MySpace are remaining elusive as to the length of the agreement. When we asked, they declined to be drawn on how long the exclusivity with Vodafone would last, preferring to tantalise with “our ambition is to get MySpace on as many platforms as possible.”

MySpace addicts will be able to feed their cravings when not glued to the computers.

To tantalise potential subscribers further, Vodafone will pre-load it on to ‘selected handsets.’

MySpace did a similar deal in the US with Cingular back in December 2006. In that deal Cingular charged their subscribers an extra $2.99/month, plus data charges for the privilege.

At the time of going to press it is unclear if there will be a similar charging scheme with Vodafone.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

More details shortly.

Flick Off AGAIN: Flickr-ites Still Don’t Want Yahoo! Accounts

That’s the response that Yahoo! (the owners of popular Web 2.0 photo sharing site Flickr) were greeted with when they announced that they would be forcing a merging of Flickr accounts with Yahoo! accounts.

Users who joined Flickr before its acquisition in March 2005 are known as ‘old skool’ users, and they use the original Flickr accounts to login, rather than the Yahoo! accounts used for those who joined after the acquisition. Old skool status is heavily valued in the community, and successive Yahoo! attempts to force migration from ‘old school’ accounts to Yahoo! accounts has attracted much controversy.

The migration of accounts is not a technical issue; Old skool members will keep their buddy name and are not forced to use any other Yahoo! services. Given that this is the case, it perhaps seems illogical that there is such a backlash. One old skool user’s view is in a post by Thomas Hawk, a keen Flickr user (and also CEO of a rival service).

Flick Off: We don't want Yahoo! accounts

Raj Parmer writes “I do not like the way Yahoo impose in this manner. I am an old skool member (which I was in a way quite proud of) but when it becomes mandatory to sign up to Yahoo, I will have to delete all my pics and close my account down and join with one of the other similar services on the net.”

The problem seems to be two fold. Firstly, Flickr users simply don’t want to be forced to give up their ‘old skool’ account; they are proud to have been part of one of the archetypal Web 2.0 products before it hit the mainstream, and do not want to see their status lost.

Secondly, there appears to be a wider problem within the Flickr community, namely concern about the direction in which Yahoo! might change the nature of Flickr. Yahoo! recently announced that it would be making use of Flickr images in its new Brand Universe program, a move which has concerned some users, and other attempts to integrate Flickr further into Yahoo! products are likely to be met with concern.

Unlike the last time Yahoo! attempted to merge old skool accounts with Yahoo! accounts (when they bowed to pressure and relented), it appears that this time they are determined. There may be a small number of old skool users who delete their photos, but there will be no major exodus.

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!

MySpace Face Four Child Lawsuits

MySpace is being hit with compensation claims by the families of four children who allege sexual assault by adult MySpace members after finding out personal information about them on their MySpace pages.

The families from New York, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas have filed seperate cases in Los Angeles. They’re being represented by Arnold & Itkin LLP of Houston, Texas and Barry & Loewy LLP of Austin, Texas.

They allege “negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation” by News Corp. and MySpace.

These cases don’t appear to fall into the ‘oh this might have happened’ category. Three of the cases have lead to the incarceration of the attackers, one whom is serving ten years in Texas. In the other case the two men have been arrested and are awaiting criminal prosecution.

Not the first claim
This isn’t a first for Barry & Loewy LLP. Back in June 2006 they filed the first lawsuit of its kind against MySpace, for a 14 year old girl who was also allegedly assaulted after contact through MySpace.

They claimed MySpace was “negligent in protecting teenage users despite numerous warnings of the dangers” and “had full knowledge that sexual predators were contacting young children on the website but did nothing to stop it.” The financial claim was $30 million in damages.

Concerns like these aren’t new to MySpace. Back in Feb 2006, parents were voicing their concerns.

MySpace have taken action. In December last year MySpace took action to kick off known sexual predators.

Be careful
Cases like these will bring into focus the potential dangers to those who reveal details about themselves online, although with a few simple rules, horrible incidents such as these should be avoidable. Most of them being the same rules you would apply in normal, non-online life.