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September 2nd, 2008 at 3:36 pm

It is often exceedingly difficult to establish and launch a startup. It is also a task to secure funding to sustain the effort. This is the challenge that four-year-old Angelsoft is on a mission to conquer. Even more so now with its launch of Angelsoft 3.0. Today’s release is meant to enable entrepreneurs to more easily find financiers through the use of a group finder (comprising 400 parties at present) and direct communication through the so-called common application.

Angelsoft founder David Rose puts the release in terms that connote the most ideal middle ground yet. Something very streamlined and low on tedium and much fruitless searching on the part of the startup, that connects a broad base of angel investors in one channel or cloud. Public profiles of investment groups are made available, and news feeds are published to give money seekers a closer, more familiar view.

Call it a facilitator. Angelsoft isn’t essential for entrepreneurs and angels together to use, but it can help ease the process. The ratio of startups to cash simply makes Angelsoft a logical option to test. And the less time spent on travel than work, as it were, the better for everyone.

Angelsoft 3.0 Introduction Video from Angelsoft on Vimeo.

Source:Mashable!

authorSTREAM, the site that allows you to send PowerPoint Presentations straight to YouTube, your iPod, and your blog, has released today its newest feature: Present Live. Present Live allows you to share your PowerPoint Presentation with a selected group of friends and contacts on the Internet in real time.

Source:Mashable!

Ping.fm finally announced its open beta today and not everyone is rejoicing. When I first started monitoring these services that allow you to send messages across multiple platforms I was happy. I thought, like many people still do, that these services would unite us with friends and colleagues that are using different social networks, without everyone having to move their profiles to the same service. After watching people use these services for a few months now, I’ve changed my mind.

Services like Ping.fm and hellotxt aren’t helping us make our conversations platform independent, they’re making our conversations more impersonal and are further fragmenting our networks.

First, from the perspective of users following you:

Are you committed?

When I see someone post a message from Ping.fm to any service that I’m using (let’s say Twitter and FriendFeed), what I assume is that the person is not committed to any network in particular, and is sending the message out to all of them hoping it will stick on some and not on others. This makes the messages impersonal, uninteresting, and self-serving.

Are you listening?

Furthermore, it is generally also the case that the same people using these services are not actively monitoring what other people have to say to or about them on each of these networks. This means, while the user is sending his/her message out to all the sites, the same user is not reading what everyone else on each of these networks has to say and will most likely not respond to all direct messages or replies unless others know what network the user monitors most actively.

And now from your perspective:

Are people committed to you?

Using a service like Ping.fm also means that the conversations you start and take part in are not focused on a specific community and therefore you aren’t very likely to cultivate a loyal following or get substantial engagement with any community.

Are people listening to you?

Whenever I see a message with a Ping.fm url in it, more often than not I simply skim over that message because I know the message is not targeted specifically towards me, or even a single community. It’s mass-broadcasting (now on a cross platform level) and it has lost its social and communal appeal.

Add to that the fact that these fragmented networks you have on multiple sites are not as mutually exclusive as you think. A ping.fm message that you send out to twitter, friendfeed, plurk, and pownce is probably going to be received by some new people on each site, but also a lot of the same people multiple times.

That said, these cross-posting sites aren’t the only ones at fault. The developers and creative minds behind the social networks that these services allow you to send messages to, are just as much at fault. Quite frankly we don’t need 10 services where 90% of the features are overlapping. The me-too services fragment the social media community as well as the conversation, and the cross-publishing services amplify the problem by making the existence of these me-too sites okay and further fragment the community and make the conversation more impersonal.

Sending messages ‘one-to-many’ on a particular service (i.e. twitter) is quite impersonal as it is, with people broadcasting messages without knowing who (if anyone at all) is reading them. Now consider one-to-many across multiple services and social groups and each of the problems gets exacerbated.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow him on Twitter.