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Source:Mashable!

Online media sharing hasn’t begun to fully tap into its full potential on the social scale, given the ability to leverage collaborative capabilities, integrated applications, distribution, republication, cross-network use and monetization. But a lot of services like Kaltura, Photobucket, Splashcast and even Box.net are helping us approach social media potential in a pretty practical manner.

Currently in private beta, a new service called Heekya is joining this larger development trend with a story creation tool that doesn’t require direct social interaction but taps into the web community as a whole for the rendering of a given project, which can be created and recreated over and over again, by any number of users. In the video below, Heekya gives the example of a friend’s wedding, which is documented by the bride and groom and filled with photos, text and videos.

For the collaborative bit, guests from the wedding can take the Heekya story created by the bride and groom, and add their anecdotes, images, and videos as well. From this stance, a story can be recreated from several different vantage points, and distributed through multiple channels as a custom narrative by each person. Heekya seems rather simple to use, and its import and sharing capabilities will be key to its success—the easier it is for any given editor to pull from their existing content from across the web, the more accessible Heekya becomes to a very wide range of users.

Demo Story from DavidAdewumi on Vimeo.

Launched by David Adewumi, a former writer at VentureBeat, Heekya demonstrates a contributive form of telling a story that I can understand as a blogger that works in a team environment and participates in online social media sharing. I think there are a number of opportunities for exporting such content, which can become highly customizable to individual users. If you’d like to try out Heekya for yourself, send your request for a test account and mention Mashable.

Source:Mashable!

UserVoice is an interesting startup that sat down with us at SummerMash San Fracisco a couple weeks ago to explain what it is they do.

Are you familiar with MyStarbucksIdea? It’s a social media tool based off the Salesforce backend that allows Starbucks to easily connect with their customer-base in a seamless manner in the interests of better promoting good ideas to improve the company.

UserVoice takes this highly successful and engaging idea that Starbucks has been using, and white labels it. The question remains, though, why would you want this for your company when you’ve got so many other communications tools that are at the disposal of your customers to use. As it turns out, UserVoice’s Marcus Nelson has some pretty compelling reasons, like significantly increasing the engagement level of your customers.

Typically, when a company uses tools like forums, email or other more traditional communications means, ideas and engagement with the userbase hovers around the 3-7% level. UserVoice has found that these can increase significantly, as high as 70%, and that through some simple mechanisms in the system they’ve put into place have also cut down the irrelevant noise in those comments significantly.

You can watch the interview below in the second segment of today’s Mashable Conversations, following a wrap-up of SummerMash Austin that Sean and I did. To watch both, play the embed below or download the MP4.

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—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:UserVoice: Vote for Features You Wanna See [The Startup Review]

Source:Mashable!

Google has become a major force on the web. There is no denying that fact as more and more people are using its variety of services other than just search. Gmail, Google Docs, GTalk and web related services like Google Analytics. It has gotten incredibly wealthy from advertising based on its search. However it appears to be suffering from the same problem that many accuse Google’s competition of having – their seeming inability to communicate with the users of their services and especially those with Google Accounts.

A perfect example of this inability on Google’s part to communicate comes from a post early on Chris Brogan’s blog where he tells us about his colleague Nick Saber who got locked out of his account

Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That’s it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.

And that’s it.

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

I am sorry but I don’t care how big of a company you are your customers don’t get treated this way – especially when you are suppose to be such a mover and shaker on the web.

Now contrast this with startup companies like Disqus, Lijit, zappos and even FriendFeed where if you are have a problem with their products or services all you have to do is mention the problem on Twitter or FriendFeed or even your own blog and you have someone doing everything they can to solve your problem. Yet here we have one of the largest web companies around offering up absolutely nothing to a paying account holder of their services – this is just unacceptable.

I think Google needs to take some lessons about customer care from the young kids on the block.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Google: The $200 Billion GorillaGoogle Calendar ImpressesGoogle I/O Ticket Giveaway: Answer This Question and Get Conference TixKiko for Sale on eBay For $50,000Seedcamp’s 20 Startups RevealedGoogle Launches MyMaps - Platial Gets ScrewedThe Daily Poll: Which Web Company Would You Want to Work At?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 9:55 pm and is filed under google, startups, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.