Interactive congolmerate CBS has announced the launch of "social viewing rooms" today. These rooms combine videos (from CBS) plus chat and polls. So basically if you remember IRC and slap a video window on the side, you have this new concept from CBS. The idea is smart, the longer people remain within the CBS framework, the more ads they can serve up and generate more interaction with their users.

The social media rooms would have more appeal if stars from the shows were in the chats while the shows played live. Currently in the "lounge" are a variety of CBS shows including: soap operas, Survivor, CSI, Beverly Hills 90210 pilot (the original), The Love Boat and Melrose Place. One might think that a show like "The Big Bang Theory" would be perfect for this. I guess people would rather chat about how Kimberly killed the people in the apartment building!

Intel is the initial sponsor for the social media rooms. CBS notes regarding the sponsorship, "the Social Viewing Rooms let technology leaders such as Intel weave its brand into the center of the entertainment experience with a unique combination of user engagement and brand integration."

Hollywood Reporter believes that reality shows stand to benefit the most from these social media rooms. I’d tend to agree as long as the rooms match up with when the shows are on live. If not live, then it’s the same as chatting on IRC or any web-based chat service.

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I’ve dreaded this moment, but it was bound to happen. Facebook chat now supports Jabber protocol (same as Gtalk), and it was only a matter of time until someone creates a mobile version, something that’s sorely missing from the official version of Facebook for mobiles (that, and the Live Feed, could someone over at Facebook please get on it? Thank you.)

Now, Ebuddy has done it; it works in the standard version but also in the mobile version available at m.ebuddy.com. Screenshot below courtesy of Talking Mobile.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Digsby First to Support Facebook ChatFacebook Chat App Social.IM Snagged By iSkootFacebook Chat Now Works For EveryoneBreaking: Facebook Jabber Compatibility to Be Announced TonightPladeo Chat Now Available on FacebookMeebo Plugin Now Available for FacebookTokBox Brings Video to Facebook IM Chat

If the feelings of the most outspoken Bebo users are any indication, Bebo IM, the relative equivalent to Facebook Chat, has few fans. Very few.

What was introduced nearly one month prior to today to a notably negative reception by network members, Bebo IM was, according to employee Mike Watts, temporarily removed for maintenance 9 days ago. The same message was delivered 5 days ago. And hardly a peep has been made about the disruption. A look at recent talk on the Bebo Backstage shows why. The consensus might best be summed up in words of commenter Ross: “don’t bring it back, it sucks.”

Though the reasoning for the verbal opposition to Bebo IM may not encompass all users, it seems to be the case that users would tolerate the option of an instant messaging system, if it could be put in place or removed as the individual user sees fit. But of course if respondents were to keep the service off, Bebo, owned by AOL, would see quite a number of members disregard the development. Bebo then gains little love for IM no matter the direction it takes with the component. (A Bebo App by the name of Live Chat, alternatively, lists 24,770 users.)

With that in mind, is an IM service on board a social network purposeful on the whole? Or is it a needless distraction? Is it all about implementation? How does Facebook Chat stack up? Is the way MySpace IM functions more appealing?

How much do you miss Bebo IM? ( surveys)

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Bebo Logo EvolutionNew Look For BeboBebo Platform Opens To The PublicBebo Partners with Yahoo Search: Acquisition Imminent?Bebo, Orange to Launch Bebo MobileBebo Wants You To Be WellBebo - MySpace Alternative

During my trip to the west coast, I sat down with Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur for a demo of the new Seesmic mobile application. I was able to grab an exclusive video demo with Loic and I’ve embedded the demo below. The Seesmic mobile application allows Seesmic users to record videos, watch videos and reply to videos in the normal Seesmic message board threaded fashion utilized on the Seesmic Web site.

The service works on the Nokia N95 and other Symbian mobile devices. I asked LeMeur to compare the application to live mobile video streaming applications Kyte, Flixwagon and Qik. LeMeur explained that the Seesmic mobile application isn’t a live streaming application but rather a way to interact in the video conversation. When a video is uploaded via the mobile, users can select to have a message sent to their Twitter account information their friends of their new video upload.

If you are interested in learning more about Seesmic, check out my video interview with LeMeur from earlier this month. Here’s the video demo:

Special Alert: CenterNetworks Conference Coverage:
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This morning I was using the mobile version of eBuddy and I noticed that Facebook Chat was listed on the menu. This was the first time I saw Facebook listed in the options. I spoke with eBuddy CEO Jan-Joost Rueb to confirm that the Facebook Chat listing was new. Basically he confirmed that Facebook Chat is in a soft-launch period and that they will publicly announce the launch in the coming weeks. Rueb also noted that J2ME and Ajax versions will be updated soon.

While I had Rueb on the line (he’s in Amsterdam) he shared that eBuddy mobile has been downloaded over 7 million times and is beating Google Maps in downloads (based on GetJar rankings). Once eBuddy publicly announces the Facebook Chat launch, this should help increase their total downloads and usage time even further.

Editor’s note: eBuddy is a CN sponsor.

Special Alert: CenterNetworks Conference Coverage:
– DEMO
– Techcrunch50
– Event and Interview Videos

Owning a car can give you a great sense of freedom… then you have to figure out where to park it! More and more tools are popping up on the Web to help you locate both long and short term parking. Here are 15 services that cover everything from free spots to event parking, long term parking, and more.

Do you use the Web to find parking? If so, tell us about your experiences in the comments.

Parking Comparison Sites

AboutAirportParking.com - Has listings for over 400 parking lots near over 100 international airports.  Can add optional services like valet, car wash, mechanics and more.  You can read more about this site in our Startup Review.

BestParking.com - Allows you to compare parking rates of various garages in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.  Also offers a mobile version.

ParkingAnytime.com - Locate garages, lots, free parking and more for a given area.  Limited to Chicago, IL during their beta phase.

ParkingCarma.com - See real-time data of available parking spaces.  If you register, you can reserve parking spaces in advance.  Serves multiple US cities.

PrimoSpot.com - Gives you information on parking conditions in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and will show you the actual parking rules for a specific space.  The service plans to include more cities. You can read more about PrimoSpot here on Mashable.

Streetlinenetworks.com - Not operational yet, Streetline is putting monitors in 24,000 San Francisco metered parking spots so people will know where spots are available.  Read a summary of Streetline’s services here on Mashable.

Parking Spot Rentals

CraigsList.org - As with just about anything else you can sell or rent, CraigsList has numerous listings for parking spaces.

ParkAtMyHouse.com - Specializes in renting out parking spaces around sporting venues, airports or just about anywhere.  Available in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK and the USA.

ParkingHunter.com - Lists available spaces to rent in cities such as Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Vancouver and more.

ParkLet.co.uk - Offers listings of thousands of parking spaces available for rent all over the United Kingdom.

ParkingSpotter.com - Helps you locate parking spots for major events, airports or everyday use.

Parkingspots.com - Parking spot rental connections for those who own them, and those who need them, in the USA and Canada.  You can find a more detailed review of Parkingspots here.

ParkWhiz.com - Offers parking options around airports, sports arenas, daily & monthly parking and some more tools for those who need a place to park.

SpotScout.com - Parking garages list their inventory and then you can look them up on the Web or your mobile device.

YourParkingSpace.co.uk - A site to help connect people with spare parking spaces in the UK with those who are looking for them.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:ParkingHunter is Just a Google/Craigslist Map Mashup. Yawn.At Least ParkingSpots.com Has a Good Domain NamePlan Ahead with About Airport Parking (The Startup Review)Learn NYC’s Street Parking Landscape With PrimoSpotWeFi Finds Friends from Their WiFiInfield Parking to Launch NASCAR Social NetworkOrbitz Launches Incentives for Traveler Update Service

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: toksta

20-word Description:  toksta brings IM and chat (text, voice, video) to social networks and websites. 100% free, hosting included + worldwide revenue share.

CEO’s 100 word description: toksta brings real time communication to your social network or website by providing free (or white label), hosted IM and chat solutions featuring text, voice and video chat. Our goal is to prevent users from leaving your community to chat via external applications like Skype, MSN or ICQ. Add a cool new feature for your users within minutes and benefit from our worldwide revenue or ad view share. All solutions are design customizable with a facebook-like chat bar and deeply integrated with your community (friends list, ignores, profile pictures etc.).

Mashable’s Take: There are many ways to add communication tools to your site these days such as instant messaging with a Meebo widget or an audio/video message forum via UserPlane. toksta is offering a fully customizable real-time text, audio and video chat system for your website. You can add your own logo, change colors, fonts and the background image.  

The toksta IM runs directly in the Web browser and users can chat via their own profile no matter what other IM service or social networking site they are connected to at the time.  Best of all, no installations or additional logins are necessary which is a big plus for your website visitors.

What’s the catch? toksta can offer all this for free because it is financed by advertising, but the ads are not as huge or as pervasive as with other ad-supported services. As a matter of fact, the ads are only displayed during what they call waiting time as things load on the screen. toksta also offers a Revenue Sharing program that will allow site owners to share some of the earnings. They do offer a white label service that will allow you to remove all ads or even add your own advertisements. 

From all first impressions, toksta seems to be worth a look if you’re considering adding a live communications platform to your site and don’t mind intermittent advertisements. It’s easy to install and the price is right.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Metallica’s new album has leaked out a week or two early, unsurprisingly.  It isn’t surprsing because it’s Metallica, but that it happens to most every artist these days.  Some record store somewhere will sell a copy or two earlier than they should, one of those folks will share it with their friends, and lickety-split, it’s all over the Intertubes.

In this case, that’s almost exactly what happened, according to Blabbermouth

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich has commented on the premature release of the band’s new album, ”Death Magnetic”, via a French record store. A shop in Paris reportedly sold a number of copies of the CD this morning well ahead of its official September 12 worldwide release date — with illegal ”Death Magnetic” MP3 files making their way online by this afternoon.

During a guest appearance earlier today on ”The Woody Show” on the San Francisco, California radio station Live 105 (KITS 105.3 FM), Ulrichstated about the French leak,

“Listen, we’re ten days from release. I mean, from here, we’re golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me. Ten days out and it hasn’t quote-unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody’s happy. It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days, so it’s fine. We’re happy.”

This is the happy face that Metallica seems to be putting on this particular leak, and I’m not buying it for even a minute. Consistently since their role in the demise of Napster, they’ve maintained an adversarial role with their fans that continues to this day.  

If you remember, they were handed accolades in the blogosphere several months ago when they agreed to release their album free of DRM in digital format. Sean P. Aune wrote a post on his personal blog that at the time I thought was a little harsh, essentially saying the band was still clueless, and was nowhere close to “getting it.”

Their cluelessness a few days later was futher confirmed when they had their management issue takedown requests to all who reviewed the album based on invited advanced listenings.

I think our president once said something like “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” With eloquence like that, you have to wonder, but I think even he would be a bit wary of Metallica’s true feelings on this.  

I’m guessing they aren’t going to get involved in another ridiculous lawsuit or criminal pursuit against the pirates of the world, but mark my words: if Metallica’s album sales aren’t simply spectacular, look for an irritated and enraged Lars Ulrich coming soon to a press conference near you to blame all the pirates of the world for preventing Metallica fans from keeping his private jet fueled up.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:RCMP Says: Piracy OK (for Personal Use)Metallica Has Smoked Themselves RetardedDon’t Download Illegally in France AnymoreDRM-free MP3s from Warner Music Now Available on AmazonStudy Confirms: Piracy Is Better Than The Real ThingHey, I Know A Way To Get Windows XP After June 30NBC Exec Heats Up Battle Against Piracy

Source:Mashable!

It didn’t take long for Second Life, a leader in 3D Virtual Worlds, to respond to There.com’s announcement of new features.The most compelling new feature There.com revealed was its innovative ThereIM which would allow its members to chat in 3D and 2D worlds at the same time. Not to be out-done by their competition, Second Life has announced their own instant messenger called SLim™ (Second Life Instant Messenger) that will work in the 2D and 3D worlds.

A whole New Virtual World

The thin client SLim™ will be a voice and text instant messaging client that will enable Second Life Residents to conduct voice or text conversations with members of their Second Life Friends list in and out of the virtual world. While the Second Life viewer will still serve as the primary communication engine, SLim is capable of running on any computer and offers users a voice-enabled instant messaging client that extends the value of the Second Life platform beyond the virtual world.

Breaking down the Barriers

Allowing communication between the virtual world and the regular online world is a major hurdle that has hampered wider acceptance of that platform. Taking down this barrier will be a boon not only for entertainment purposes but also for commercial and corporate endeavors. Enabling interaction between these two separate worlds will surely take 3D virtual worlds to the next level.

Additional features of the SLim client:

- Provides residents with access to their Second Life Friends list with real-time “presence” status updates

- Enables users to seamlessly migrate a text conversation into a voice call

- Allows SLim users to leave voice mails for offline friends

Availability

Linden Lab and Vivox will be demonstrating the benefits of SLim at this week’s Virtual Worlds Conference in Los Angeles, California. The official release date has not been made public.

Conclusion

The future of 3D virtual worlds looks brighter than ever thanks to the two announcements made by There.com and Second Life. We can all expect more innovation to come from this platform as it becomes more integrated with the rest of our online experiences.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Armani in Second LifeSecond Life Gets Identity VerificationThe Future Of Linden Lab Following Executive ShuffleSecond Life Teams Up With IBM for Virtual World InteroperabilitySecurity Experts Expose Costly Vulnerability in Second LifeNew App Merges Facebook and Second LifeDoes Second Life Need a Reuters Office?

For those of us who are active Google Talk (GTalk) users, sometimes chatting is not enough. Luckily, there are tools to make your GTalk experience more interesting like VOIP, translations, and more. Here are 10 third party tools and special features that will help you get the most out of the service.

Which ones are your favorite? Know any more? Tell us in your comments.

Extended Talk

Extended Talk is a free addon for GTalk that brings in enhanced features such as making your chat windows transparent, changing font colors, message and typing areas, creating text filters, using smileys, and custom images. It also provides shortcuts to insert dates, time, IP address, email, etc. in your messages. Overall, the addon is non obstructive and fits quite well with the GTalk interface, while providing a few handy extra features.

Google Talk Shell

Google Talk Shell is another GTalk addon with some extra features that you might like. Firstly, it allows you to add several avatars and make them rotate in short intervals in your GTalk application. You can auto-hide the GTalk main window so that you have a large work area, or you can configure GTalk to always be on top of the desktop. You can also run several GTalk user names simultaneously using this addon. There is even an anti-boss hotkey to hide the GTalk window quickly.

Translation bots

Translation bots are described by Google as pieces of software that act as chat contacts and provide some fun or useful functionality. Whenever you need to translate any word or sentence from one language to another, you can send that as a message to one of the appropriate Google Chat translation bots. The bot then acts as a translator and replies to the translated version of your message. Of course you need to add the translation bot as your GTalk contact beforehand.

Currently there are 50 bots available in two language pairs. The names of the bots have been made of two letter abbreviations of languages, the English to French translation bot is ‘en2fr.’ To add the bots as contacts, you simple need to add the email of the specific bot in this format: name_of_the_bot@bot.talk.google.com. For example, for English to French bot, it’s ‘en2fr@bot.talk.google.com.’

Transliteration bots

Transliteration bots are somewhat similar to translation bots, but here they convert English sentences to scripts of various Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. You can add the bots using their names ‘en2hi’.translit, ‘en2kn.translit,’ ‘en2ml.translit,’ ‘en2ta.translit,’ and ‘en2te.translit,’ ending with ‘@bot.talk.google.com’.

Chatback Badge

Chatback badge is a nice little tool from Google that you can use to chat with non-Google users. The badge can be put on your blog, website, or anywhere you can embed an html code, and it will display your online status along with a ‘Chat with me’ message in a nice chat bubble. You can create the chatback badge in different styles as well.

GTalk Sidebar

GTalk Sidebar is a convenient way of chatting with your GTalk contacts using the Firefox sidebar. Every chat window opens in a new tab in the sidebar itself. You can make the GTalk application pop out in a new window if you wish. Although GTalk Sidebar doesn’t provide any additional feature, it can be another nice alternative, just in case you don’t want to open a Gmail window on your browser and don’t have the desktop client installed. An alternative to this addon is to save the GTalk Gadget as your Firefox bookmark and set the bookmark to load in the sidebar.

GTalk Profile

GTalk Profile is an online service that you can use to find other GTalk users from across the globe. You can simply click anywhere on the world map provided at the GTalk Profile site to look for users in that area. You can also look for users using its search box.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is not an exclusive GTalk application. What it does is update your status on as many as 21 of your social sites including Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Wordpress, Tumbler, Pownce, Blogger, Plurk, Xanga, Friendfeed, etc., and even Mashable, simultaneously. All you need to do is add Ping.fm as a contact in your GTalk application and send it to your status update as a chat message. You also need to create your account at Ping.fm and add your social profiles so that it can do the posting for you.

GTalk to VOIP

GTalk to VOIP offers a number of free and paid VOIP services that you can use with your IM tools including GTalk, Yahoo Messenger, and Live Messenger. These include incoming calls to your IM tools from any mobile, landline phones, or Web services; outgoing calls to SIP phones, Internet radio, video conferencing, offline messaging, IM interoperability, SMS service, etc. Payment can be completed through Paypal.

Inezha

Inezha allows you to use your Gtalk application as a feed reader. Simply send the RSS feed url to the Inezha bot on your GTalk and ask to be notified on all future updates. You can also access you online account at the Inezha site and add the feeds you want to subscribe to. There are also Firefox and Internet Explorer bookmarklets and widgets that you can add to your blog. Inezha also provides a social networking feature where you can add your friends and subscribe to their updates.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Unofficial Gtalk Application for Facebook LaunchesShare Google Reader Feeds in GTalkImo is Another Multi-IM Chat ToolGoogle and Salesforce Poised for DealIs Facebook Chat Coming This Week? Yep.Video: Facebook IM PreviewGmail Rolls Out More New Features: IM Imports