SOMEWHAT FRANK

Movial Social Communicator: Share Anywhere

Have you ever taken a photo or seen a video and wanted to immediately share it with your friends while on the go? Obviously you could upload it to Flickr or Facebook or a number of other sites but more than likely times you probably would fire off an email to your friends to share it with them. Your friends would then get your message at various times depending upon when they actually go to check their email which means you are not instantly communicating with your friends.

Movial is looking to help make sharing easier with the recent launch of Movial Social Communicator. Social Communicator offers a desktop client and mobile application that syncs all your mobile phone contacts and empowers users to send videos, photos and news directly to their friends at their current location.

myAOL Intro at the Widget Summit

I spoke a few weeks ago at the Widget Summit in San Francisco on a panel dedicated to discussing the personal homepage space. The session was an hour long discussion with a cast of industry experts. I had a chance to get ahold of a video clip of my introduction. Additional footage will be coming out soon but I wanted to preview this video introducing myAOL to the Widget Summit crowd.

Vyew: Save & Widgetize Collaborative Work Sessions

Vyew, a Berkeley, California browser-based collaboration and conferencing platform start-up, offers a feature-rich virtual workspace for collaboration. Originally launched as SimMeeting, in September 2004, Vyew was renamed in October 2005 to and has continued to improve its web conferencing tools and first-of-its-kind asynchronous collaboration capabilities.

Vyew recently launched out of Beta and today introduced version 2.5 which improves the tools and Vyewbook functionalities which help to organize and share your collaboration sessions. Interestingly, Vyew has created "Vyewlets" which are read-only widgetized versions of a VyewBook. They can embedded outside of Vyew on blog posts, Web sites, social networks, and any online page.

Vyew is currently offered for free with light advertising served within the application. If the ads bug you and you want a business version subscription prices starting as low as $6.95 per month.  For additional information on Vyew, check out one of the fine Vyew demos.

Bottom-line: Vyew for a free to low-cost online virtual collaboration suite with group collaboration capabilities and widgetized sharing capabilities.

What Is Next For The Web?

What's next? This is a question that many may be asking. At the 2007 Next Web conference (June 1, 2007 in Amsterdam) they are hoping to find some answers. In the meantime, check out this video (above) which was posted here. It was recorded via iChat Video as Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Media, Steve Rubel from Edelman and Micro Persuasion, Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress, Marten Mickos the CEO of MySQL, Eric A. Meyer (CSS and HTML guru) and Jay Adelson, CTO and co-founder of Digg.com share their insights on this exciting subject by tackling 5 basic questions in almost 20 minutes.

Yahoo's New Patent, Google Reports On Feeds, Web 3.0 Explained, Mobile Examined, Dash & EggDrop Fun

Photo of the week: Create a 2 gigabyte ChapStick as explained by The Machinist.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.18.07

Patent Monkey: Yahoo Ready to Smash Up the Mash Ups
Yahoo was recently granted a patent that could cause a bit of a shake-up to other web portal companies if acted on. The patent covers the ability to give users control over customized templates that are saved and stored on a host server and the idea that real-time information is  stored on the host server and delivered to the user in the template.

Google Is Now Reporting Feed Subscribers
Google has started reporting subscriber counts for Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage. What does this mean? This is one more data point to help you understand how many people have asked to receive your feed (aka "subscribers"). The number that Google is reporting is the total number of Google users who've subscribed to your feed in Reader or with Personalized Homepage. Somewhat Frank has seen a huge spike in subscribers via FeedBurner as Google products were previously not part of FeedBurner subscription counts. TechCrunch's subscriber count spike is even more glaring as it went from about 178K to 261K overnight. Thank you Google!

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
Read/Write Web predicts the formula for the next web (web 3.0) will be as follows: 3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search. Do you agree?

Xdrive Shows and Autocopy Beta Tests
Xdrive Shows is a new web-based application available on Xdrive that allows you to combine pictures and music into multimedia slide shows.  Watch a Xdrive Shows demo here. Autocopy, a new feature in the latest version of the Xdrive desktop client software, enables automatic uploads of music and photos directly from your PC to your Xdrive account. Give Xdrive Shows and Autocopy a whirl here.

Mobile Search Not That Hot?
Andy Beal looks closely at a recent UK survey of mobile phone users which suggests that there may be no where near the amount of people using their cell phones for search as previously thought. Do you search the web on your mobile device?

Building Social Applications at Climb to the Stars
Stowe Boyd presented this past week at Lift on the topic of Building Social Applications. He has put his presentation slides out on the web for your viewing pleasure.

Dash fills coffers for Web-connected car navigation
VentureBeat reports on a new GPS device that will be connected to the Internet too. That is pretty sweet if you ask me. The device is expected to be priced within the $500 to $800 range, along with the existing leading GPS devices.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 Goes Gamma
Yahoo launched a new gamma version of Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0, after the new service initially launched in beta just a month ago. The gamma version enables users to search directly from maps and share oneSearch results, news articles and the service directly with friends.

RSS Reader Triggers Airport Security
Josh Hallett recently found out the hard way that is you are using the paid wifi in the terminal and you open up a desktop-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, the network assumes your flurry of RSS-grabbing activity is a suspicious event.

Bored? Organize An EggDrop
Make Magazine just created a handy .pdf and video explaining how to perform your very own EggDrop. I haven't heard about an EggDrop in years, it brings back memories of middle school.  So if you are bored or wants to do something different give an EggDrop a try.

Empressr For Slick Online Presentations

Empressr offers the unique ability to create, share and store Flash-based slide presentations online with ease. Empressr aims to impress by offering the ability to incorporate rich media features, like streaming video and animation into an online presentation. Empressr has incorporated an easy to understand set of steps to help users create crisp looking presentations without prior knowledge of Flash technology. Empressr is free to use and store up five presentations on its secure servers and premium options are available additional presentation storage space. Finally, Empressr presentations use addressable URL to offers users the ability to share presentations with easy.

Empressr is easy to use and offers a great solution for anyone looking to create solid presentations without purchasing PowerPoint or other types of presentation creation software. The only negative I could see was that you cannot currently export your Empressr presentations for offline use. This could be troublesome in the case that a conference hall or other venue does not have an Internet connection. However, it appears Empressr understands this concern and is looking to address this issue with future enhancements.

Bottom-line: Empressr is an online application that allows you to easily create, share and store presentations. Take Empressr for a test drive for yourself here.