As Entourage fans most likely know, Season 5 of the hit HBO show debuts this evening. Last Thursday, I attended the first ever “in-flight” television premiere, a co-promotion between HBO and Virgin America, who was using the opportunity to launch the maiden voyage of its New York to Las Vegas route. While the event was choc-full-o free drink, party schwag, celebrity sightings, and an advanced look at the new season of my favorite TV show, it was also a chance to use some of the tools we talk about incessantly on Mashable for some real world social networking.

I actually got the ball rolling on the experience earlier in the week, when I posted an article from Variety and note about the event to Facebook. Of course, this automatically was sent to my mini-feed and in turn my friend’s news feeds, letting them know what I’d posted. While primarily I was simply looking to share the experience and maybe make a few friends from high school jealous, within a couple hours someone I knew from Mashable events had commented on the item, letting me know that they were also going to be in Vegas. Considering I was going on the trip solo, it was nice to know that I’d know at least one person once I got to town.

Moving on, once Thursday rolled around and things were getting started at a private hangar at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, my weapons of choice for keeping people updated on my whereabouts and activities were Twitter and the Facebook for Blackberry application, which allowed me to upload photos to my profile immediately after taking them. This proved especially useful later on, as my Blackberry decided to have memory issues that required me to continuously delete pictures to make room for new ones.

After a couple hours of partying and mingling in the hangar, the event got started when the cast of Entourage (minus Jeremy Piven aka Ari Gold) and Sir Richard Branson himself emerged from the plane for their photo opp. While this part of the story admittedly doesn’t have much of anything to do with social networking tools, it does provide an opportunity to inset some cool photos, which you can see after the jump

Getting back to the story, as you may know, one of the more interesting features of Virgin America’s entertainment system is its chat capabilities, which allow you to converse with other people on the flight. This was tightly integrated into the in-flight Entourage experience, as the crew asked everyone to login to the chat room and mention their most memorable moment from the previous four seasons of the show for a chance to win a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. Of course, the chat also provided an opportunity to get to know some of the other travelers and discuss the premiere after it was showed over the entertainment system.

Once on the ground, the party moved over to The Palms, where my camera phone captured some of the most spectacular views I’ve ever seen (if city sky lines are your thing), which were immediately uploaded to Facebook. From there, the real world social networking began, with the usual furious exchange of business cards leading to the mandatory social profile connecting the next day.

While putting in an honest day’s work on Friday from my hotel room, I set my sights on the evening’s activities. After running a few disappointing Google searches that were dominated heavily by annoying SEO-gauged content, I moved onto Yelp for reviews of places to go. What’s great about reading user reviews versus the generic ones provided by the many of the sites atop the search listings for terms like “Vegas nightlife” are that just about every review provides value of some sort, as one person’s negatives (“it was too crowded!”) are another’s positives.

After reading reviews of dozen’s of places, my indecisiveness was ultimately cured by some new Facebook friends who were heading over to Tao, a nightclub at the Venetian. From there, my Twitter timeline documents much of the night, including talk of a Michael Phelps sighting from the night before and even a celebrity encounter of my own – or so I thought. Of course, there comes a point in any good night out in Vegas where your Twittering *should* come to an end, and I certainly made sure to disconnect once that point was reached

As for the moral of the story, for me, not only was the trip a ridiculously good time, but also a reminder that some of these tools that many take for granted and others often question the value of really do have a purpose. When used properly, they can do an excellent job of making your travel experiences more fun and social – especially when going it alone. As for the season premiere, I think Entourage fans will definitely enjoy it, but I’ll leave the TV reviews for another day and a different blog (feel free to leave comments about the show though after watching the premiere!).

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If a post on Facebook’s developer blog is accurate, you have less than a week to make your call for no change. That’s right, no change. a group of members have coalesced behind a petition, massing together “Against the ‘New Facebook’” to send Zuckerberg and the rest of them out in Palo Alto a message: “We’re not saying get rid of the new layout, just that they should keep the old one and let us choose which layout we want like skins. Color options would be good too.”

As Compete’s trendspotters made known this past week, many Facebook users have switched over to the “new” Facebook, also called “beta,” only to revert back to the old way. Yet, the company is choosing to switch the network over by default in a matter of days, not months, as I myself envisioned it would. If you’re not fond of the idea of a site-wide shift, join the gentle opposition. Their goal at present is to reach 1 million registrants. As of 7:50 PM ET Saturday, they collectively number 424k-strong. The count has been 11 days in the making. Thousands enter the fold by the hour. All to invoke no change, but rather, a choice. Where do you fall? (Note: We made mention of a parallel movement yesterday, less than half the size, with nearly the same title. It happens.)

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Tatango, the ad-supported group SMS service previously known as networkText, spent the last few months in a private beta following a functional and visual overhaul and a round of funding by Bellingham Angel Organization. Now everyone is free to get in on the group texting good times; they’ve opened the doors to the public.

The service is dead simple to use, as it should be. I made the jump from accountless bum to en masse messaging mogul in all of about 2 minutes.

Source:TechCrunch

On the heels of a major upgrade earlier this week that added facial recognition features to its Picasa photo management service, Google added a new Explore page today that shows off the most popular public photos uploaded by members. In addition to the featured photos, shown in a 3 X 4 grid, the Explore page also shows the most recent photos uploaded in a slide-show widget. Below, it offers a list of the most popular tags. For instance, here are pictures tagged “New York.”

The Picasa Explore page also has a Where In The World? game that is mashup opf geotagged photos and Google Maps. It shows you a photo and you have to guess where it was taken. If you guess wrong, it tells you how far off you are in kilometers. This is fun for outdoor photos, but when people upload geotagged photos of a generic apartment of a plate of food, it can become tricky.

Despite statistics indicating that many users who migrate over to the new Facebook design are reverting back to the old, all signs point to the imminent launch of redesign. Yesterday, the company wrote on its developer blog that “over 30 million people have checked out the new profile, and many are using it as their profile full time. We’re nearing the time where we’ll switch over remaining users by default. We expect most of this to take place over the next week.”

Meanwhile, today users of the old Facebook are seeing the following message, indicating the switch over is near:

Previously, the only indication of the new Facebook (outside of the endless blog posts of course) to users still on the old version was the bar at the top giving them an opportunity to try it out. So far, about 35% of users haven’t been to the new Facebook at all, according to the Compete stats released earlier this week.

Clearly, Facebook is now doing everything they can to make sure all users know that change is afoot, in hopes of avoiding another user revolt like that they saw with the launch of News Feed and Beacon. Will it work? The group “people against the new Facebook” has more than 70,000 members, and our comments in posts about the redesign have been decidedly mixed.

Redesigns have caused chaos with the masses since the days of AOL 2.0, so you can almost guarantee plenty of angst when Facebook flips the switch. But at least the company has done a much better job of communicating its changes this time around. We’ll be watching closely when the new design goes live next week.

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Researchers at Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece - a hotbed of Facebook research - have created a small Facebook application that causes a DDOS on a certain website. The application masquerades as a “picture of the day” app and shows an image from National Geographic. When someone clicks on it, however, it makes a request to a victim’s website, pulling down about 248 gigabytes of fake data a day and essentially shutting down the server.

Joost – one of last year’s hottest startups and so far one of this year’s biggest flops – is pulling a 180 in strategy. According to Om Malik, the video service will kill off its desktop client and replace it with a Web version that will utilize a “small plugin that would embed itself in the browser and allow you to grab files using the P2P technologies”

Although the required download was long one of the biggest criticisms against Joost, the company now faces another big challenge: content. While Joost has scored a number of deals with the likes of CBS and Major League Baseball, one look at the Joost homepage tells you the current state of the company’s catalog.

With all due respect to He-Man & Shera, there is no way Joost on the desktop or the webtop can compete with the likes of Hulu, which has thousands of recent episodes of hit shows like The Office, The Daily Show, and House, just to name a few. Considering Hulu is backed by News Corp and NBC Universal, it’s doubtful Joost will be able to do much to improve its catalog either, since Hulu’s huge competitive advantage is its access to content. Making things even worse, Joost’s own investor and partner CBS has many shows available on its website that are nowhere to be found on Joost.

While shifting to a Web-based product is a much needed move, it seems like too little, too late, unless the company also makes a radical shift in content strategy. At the moment, Joost – which has raised $45 million - has essentially become like a lower tier cable channel, which simply doesn’t work online because of the infinite number of alternatives.

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Source:Mashable!

Dipity has released some major new features, taking online timelines to another level with the launch of Dipity 2.0. The site has added a great deal of social networking  integration with services such as Digg, Twitter, Daylife, Flickr and many others. It has also added the ability to track not only what your friends are doing (ala Friendfeed), but also the topics that they are interested in. Dipity then presents all of this data in a more visually pleasing manner that’s impressive and easy to digest.

Many new points of view

There are four vastly different ways that you can view all of this information. There’s the default patent-pending Timeline view which displays the data in chronological order. There’s the flipbook which creates a dynamic photo album type of viewing experience. The List view is a traditional top to bottom list view and the Map view creates a Google Maps type of display of the information. So you can look at the same information from several different angles depending on your preference. No matter which one you choose, you’ll never look at these topics the same way again. Best of all, everything can be viewed in place without requiring you to leave the site. For example, you can view Flickr photos and YouTube videos right inside the timeline.

Seeing is believing

Here are some examples of what you can do with Dipity:

- Howard Stern uses Dipity on his website

- So does Billy Joel for his biography

- Here’s a mashup of Dipity with YouTube that they call TimeTube

- This is called Archaeologist, which is a mashup of Dipity and Digg

- Ticker is a mashup of Dipity and Flickr

When will Dipity 2.0 be ready for Prime Time?

The official word is that Dipity 2.0 will be made available to the public in late September or early October. However, because you’re special and a devoted Mashable reader, you can join Dipity 2.0 right now by taking advantage of one of the 500 invites they’ve set aside for us. Simply go to the Dipity preview site, enter the invite code ‘MashableReader’ and click register once you are prompted with a login screen.

Conclusion

Dipity can be somewhat confusing at first glance, but think of it like FriendFeed on a timeline. You can view your friends’ activities on social networks on a timeline structure instead of the regular top to bottom method. You can also create the same type of timeline views for any topic that interests you or to display all of your social networking activity such as blog posts, Flickr photos, Twitter posts and much more.

After using Dipity 2.0 for a while it all starts to make sense. Viewing data in a more graphical way makes a great deal of sense, especially in this age of information overload where we’re all getting drenched trying to drink from the firehose of social networking. Dipity 2.0 certainly provides a unique, entertaining and useful way to look at things online via what could be called a social timeline.

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Social.IM, a standalone Facebook chat application that bypasses certain restrictions of Facebook, has been acquired by iSkoot, a company that was so far into providing carrier-friendly mobile VoIP solutions. With this move, they plan to move into mobile Web applications arena, and Social.IM is definitely not a bad start, although it has lost some of its luster since Facebook launched its own in-browser chat.

iSkoot’s CEO Mark Jacobstein goes marketingese on the deal: ”Social.IM has served as an instant Web communications desktop platform and we see a clear consumer integration with iSkoot’s upcoming suite of Web to mobile push services. Acquiring Social.IM is a key step in our path to introduce later this year a groundbreaking new communications platform that will revolutionize the mobile landscape.”

The story is interesting because Social.IM seemed to be in a bad situation: it focused on one platform only, providing Facebook users a way to chat, and then Facebook launched its own chat (which has several flaws, one of which is the fact that it’s so damn unreliable), which usually means you can close shop and wave goodbye. However, iSkoot seems to have recognized Social.IM’s potential and will integrate it into its own set of services. Although the terms of the deal aren’t disclosed, it doesn’t sound like too bad of a deal for Social.IM.

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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.

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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.

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If you’re in search for two things of major importance each day, they undoubtedly are 1) food, and 2) a roof. Which is why a search engine by the name of Circos, which we spotlighted briefly back in January and has just been re-launched, is so compelling. The items on which it pays focus are twofold: restaurants and hotels. That’s all. For now, at least.

What’s most interesting is the way Circos is organized. It can be used as something of an arbitrary, emotion-based search utility. It provides a menu of checkboxes for users to specify as a personality match. Once a choice is made, a click of the ‘Go’ button near the center of the page takes you to a list of results. The accuracy of the engine when used in that manner is of course dependent on one’s location, which Circos determines automatically, so if you’re scouring Small Town, America, what follows might be considered lacking. Or, if you have trouble taking the keywords for what they’re worth, you can customize a search via the box at the top of the page. Enter a city name, type of food, type of hotel (“luxury,” “cheap,” etc.), and proceed to the next page.

For each result you can see short quotes from reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and Yahoo Travel, plus an option on view what people speak of when they discuss a particular place. Click through to a specific page and you’ll see a graphical view of what people have said. And if you chose to observe tags in “word view,” and you specify one label or another, the corresponding reviews will emerge in kind.

Granted, such options are a bit more playful than some users might like. But the overall objective is achieved, I think. It’s a less clinical option for discovering places to eat and/or stay than services which deliver massive amounts of information to sift through, chock-full of figures, dollar-for-dollar comparisons and so forth. If you want to take a public opinion-influenced approach to your search for restaurants and hotels, Circos is something to consider.

It isn’t just visual appeal that Circos provides. It’s really quite useful. Other engines will do more. Some, much more. But it’s a pleasing alternative.

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