When Mashable first covered SlideRocket, it was in private testing. Finally in open beta, SlideRocket is proving to be a beautiful and easy to use tool for creating full featured presentations.

SlideRocket offers you the ability to create presentations online using its full featured Web application. You can add charts, graphs, images, animations, special effects, lighting effects and more to the slides. You can also play around with the text, and it offers a downloadable desktop application for viewing the slides offline. SlideRocket also works with a variety of platforms.

When the private testing phase started I’d gotten an invite, but declined. At the time I was too busy to really play around with it and give good testing feedback. Boy do I wish I’d started playing with it way back then! They have had a few glitches today since opening their doors to the public, but overall it has gone off without a hitch. I’d say this application beats the pants off PowerPoint and is really going to give KeyNote a run for its money as well.

The main issue I’ve had today is a number of freezes while trying to use the service.  I’m going to assume this is being caused by the number of people trying out this new shiny object. I have a number of presentations to create in the coming weeks, and I plan to try using SlideRocket for them, so I’ll know soon enough if the freezes are a strictly opening day issue.

If you haven’t checked out SlideRocket yet, you should. It gives you a fully featured place to create presentations online, right down to importing of Google Docs spreadsheets and including special effects in your slides. I’m quite impressed with how easy it is to use and how elegant the presentation is. You have to love a beta that launches that is both useful and has a great user interface. SlideRocket seems to have accomplished both goals, giving us an application that matters in a pretty package.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SlideRocket is a Slick Slideshow Creator for PresentationsAlpha: When Beta Is Not Good EnoughForget PowerPoint: 13 Online Presentation AppsStitcher Prepares To Go Public With Its BetaWeb 2.0 Invites for August 22nd, 2007Google’s Urchin Software Released As Public BetaFlock Public Beta Now Live

Source:Mashable!

In a rare blog post, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg addresses those that have been critical of the social network’s new design, which has now been rolled out to nearly all of the site’s 100 million members.

As we noted earlier this week, more than 7 million users have joined various groups protesting the changes, with many calling for Facebook to at least offer an option to go back to the old design. Zuckerberg writes:

“As people share more, sometimes we need to change the site to accommodate how much information people are posting …

… We realize that change can be difficult though. Many people disliked News Feed at first because it changed their home page and how they shared information. Now it’s one of the most important parts of Facebook. We think the new design can have the same effect …

… It’s tempting to say that we should just support both designs, but this isn’t as simple as it sounds. Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work for our small team, and it would mean that going forward we would have to build everything twice. If we did that then neither version would get our full attention …

… Even if you’re joining a group to express things you don’t like about the new design, you’re giving us important feedback and you’re sharing your voice, which is what Facebook is all about.”

The uproar over the new design isn’t surprising, even though Facebook did do a thorough job of preparing users for the changes. As Zuckerberg notes in his post, there was a huge uproar when the Facebook News Feed launched, not to mention the entire Beacon fiasco.

Interestingly, of the 6 blog posts that Zuckerberg has made in the history of Facebook, 4 of them have been in reaction to user unrest. Perhaps the CEO – who just made his debut on the Forbes Richest American list at #321 – should take a bit more time to post about the things that the site is doing right as opposed to reserving his appearances for the times when all hell is breaking lose.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Live: F8 Keynote with Mark ZuckerbergThe Daily Poll: Who’s to Blame for the SXSW Keynote Fiasco?Zuckerberg to Keynote SXSW ConferenceFacebook Founder Faces Court TodayFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Treads Lightly In 60 Minutes InterviewMark Zuckerberg Sells Stock, Makes Some Nice Pocket ChangeZuckerberg Refutes Facebook IPO Rumors

Seeing as how Web services today are becoming more and more multi-faceted and multi-functional, particularly in the social networking and social media space, it really is open to debate what is and what is not part of a specific segment of the market. Where blogging starts and where networking ends, for instance, is a gray area that has grown ever larger with time. Mobile utilities in particular have evolved to contain powerful assets that accomplish several tasks at once. Perhaps nothing better exemplifies this fact than the items which can now be found within Apple’s App Store, where the supply of downloads for the iPhone (and its slightly-less-phenomenal sibling, the iPod touch) expand with each passing week. So we focus today on that very storefront, to determine which applications now available can help to best enable mobile blogging in all its myriad forms and purposes, wherever cellular, Wi-Fi, and/or GPS signals might be found.Good ol’ run-of-the-mill blogging: TypePad and WordPressIf we burrow down to the core of the blogging world, there are several platforms which sport robust frameworks, and many of them are free to use. WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Live Spaces, are just a few that sport mass userships and audiences. But only two currently reside as native, officially-released applications within the iPhone/iPod touch paradigm. They are, as we noted recently, TypePad and Wordpress.

WordPress arrived with its own utility after TypePad had introduced itself to users. Both have received good reviews so far. And why not, really. Both aptly manage the basic tasks of posting and editing blogs, and each enables the user to upload photos from a library or take new images via the iPhone’s onboard camera.

I have already offered my own impressions about both applications, and happen to favor TypePad’s application a bit more than the WordPress release because TypePad provides support for English and French, but both essentially get the same job done similarly well. Neither path will lead you astray. Quite honestly, as I said before, one’s choice of application will naturally fall to whichever platform one prefers as it appears on the desktop, and whether one has invested much time in either setting.Micro-bloggingThere are even more choices in the microblogging realm, and if photos are one’s main source of intrigue, the list is even more voluminous. So let’s dig in. To start, there are the Twitter-specific applications: Twitterific, available for free and ad-supported [iTunes]; or as a paid-for premium version [iTunes]; Twittelator [iTunes]; and Twinkle [iTunes].

My experiences, coupled with feedback from others tells me Twitterific is the most pleasant, as it has the benefit of housing a browser within. If you’re one to click on URLs posted by friends, this is definitely a convenient feature. And in my trials, it has proven quite reliable. It is most useful due to the fact that it makes any transfer out of Twitterific and into Safari Mobile unnecessary. Once you’ve taken a look at whatever webpage you were directed to, you can close the browser and immediately carry on with reading incoming feeds. No need to repetitively enter and exit applications.Twinkle is aesthetically pleasing, no doubt, and it adds a location dimension to facilitate conversation among users within a given area. But the application has been known to crash regularly. According to Tapulous, Inc, the creator of Twinkle, an update should arrive this Friday, July 25, to fix bugs and “other minor problems.”Miscellaneous and (even more) multi-functionalHere’s where it all comes down to personal tastes and desires. Some applications will connect you to numerous services for easy, synchronized posting. Others will help you satisfy only your tendencies as a photo blogger. Some will help you connect with friends, micro-blog a bit, and even post duplicate hellos and how-are-yous to Twitter. That’s because… well… it all comes back to Twitter, doesn’t it? Without further adieu, here are some items for your consideration listed in no particularly prearranged order.LifeCast [iTunes]: Manage your day’s events in organized fashion. Want to keep what you do for work and for play exclusive? No problem. LifeCast is about keeping things tidy. Also, non-English speakers will enjoy its slightly multi-lingual reach. French, German, Italian, and Spanish are all supported. Also, if you’d like to post text to Blogger, you may. The same goes for Tumblr (photos, too). Geo-tagging comes with.

Bluepulse [iTunes]: We gave this a brief review some days ago. And while it wasn’t my personal cup of tea, it’s something that others have shown an affinity for. If you’d like something Twitter-esque (with a Twitter connection, to boot), albeit in a way that allows you to message multiple people of your choosing — rather than, say, everyone on your friends and followers list(s) — this one’s a treat. The layout may take some getting used to, though. It appears designed to make existing Bluepulse users comfortable when making “the switch.”

ShoZu [iTunes]: If this one were to be described in a single word (not yet recognized by the grammar police), it would no doubt be “awesomeness.” You need only look at the list of supported sites and services to get a grasp on what this ShoZu is all about. It is the Swiss Army knife of online social interaction (so far as photo uploads and status updates and things are concerned, anyway).

Pownce [iTunes]: Despite what the heads at Pownce say, this one’s original intent was most definitely to give Twitter a little slap-slap. Which seemed like it might’ve been possible, until it didn’t. For what it’s worth, it’s still a nifty service. If you want it on your iPhone, the download is available.

Kyte [iTunes]: Mobile photo blogging is super cool, for sure. But mobile slideshow blogging is exponentially more kick-ass. Kyte makes that happen. For this one you might need to take a few minutes to craft something nice, but it’s worth it.

Clowdy Photo Blogger [iTunes]: The name says it all. It also lets you see photos taken “nearby” to where you stand. A number of downloads currently available in the App Store do this as well, but Clowdy works the photo realm exclusively. It’s free, and it’s all of 0.1MB large.

Graffitio [iTunes]: This operates with the same location-based concept as Clowdy, but it’s text-based. The best way to explain it is to offer an example. Say you’re at a restaurant. You can check Graffitio to see if a Facebook-like “wall” has been created for the place. If so, you can post a public message to it. If a wall doesn’t exist, create one. If enough people participate in the experiment and visit various locations regularly, it starts to become a rather interesting series of whiteboards.

Speaking of Facebook, the Web’s largest social network (arguably) has its own application [iTunes], as many have already learned, and in some respects, it’s about blogging, too. If you’re one to routinely update your status, and your friends do too, what’s to say you all aren’t blogging? And with the recent update to the application, introduced late last week, you can post to your own wall as well as those of friends. Upload photos seamlessly too.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Jaiku on Your iPhoneTypePad Announces Native iPhone 3G ApplicationWorld’s Simplest iPhone AppiRovr Launches Mini Social Network for the iPhoneTypePad Blogging from your iPhoneMultiply Launches iPhone EditioniPhone to Launch in Germany on T-Mobile

Source:Mashable!

When major companies emerge in the technology industry, there’s no indication of what may come of them. Will they go the way of Google and become an online powerhouse? Or will they go the way of countless other online properties that get sold off to the highest bidder? Either way, it doesn’t matter: in the end, somebody makes it big.

But when it comes to Facebook, not everything is so clear-cut. The company is huge, sure, but it’s also huge in a sector that’s dictated by fickle users that would gladly move to the next bigger, better, cooler thing at the drop of a hat. That said, it’s also a huge company that should enjoy around $350 million in revenue this year and has a (foolhardy) valuation of about $15 billion, according to Microsoft’s estimates.

On top of that, Facebook is also the world’s most popular social network even though MySpace still leads the US market, and as more users jump on-board each day, it’s becoming an increasingly valuable property.

But now, it’s time for Zuckerberg and the rest of his cronies to forego his faulty hope of an IPO and sell Facebook to the highest bidder.

Simply put, Facebook is at the top of its game. It’s enjoying exponential growth, its user-base is growing rapidly, and as it adds more advertising and investment deals to its offering, it’s quickly becoming a valuable online property. And as it becomes an even more valuable property, it becomes an even more attractive target for major companies like Google and Microsoft to acquire for billions of dollars.

And while some believe that the growth can last forever and selling now would mean that it gets out of the business too early, I think that mentality is what could see Facebook sell for $500 million instead of $10 billion.

Facebook is a generational platform. Just like AIM was the most popular social tool of the nineties in the US and MySpace was huge a few years ago, Facebook is the new king in the social space. Right now, it’s cool for high school and college kids to log on to Facebook, send messages to each other, and play the myriad games that make it such a compelling platform.

But as those kids grow up and enter adult life, they will find other tools – much like the AIM and MySpace crowds did – and leave Facebook in its wake.

Do we even think about LiveJournal anymore? I didn’t think so.

At this point, there isn’t a more attractive target online than Facebook. And with a new generation of kids growing up on messaging, Facebook chats, and friend news feeds, it should enjoy considerable success as it grows with that generation.

But it’s also difficult to argue that it can ever make more than it would right now. Facebook is the topic of conversation everywhere on the Web and its growth has been truly astounding. It won’t last forever though, and once something new comes along that is seemingly “cooler,” a mass exodus of MySpace proportions will occur and instead of billions, Zuckerberg might walk away with millions.

There’s no shame in waking up and realizing that you’ve built a wildly successful company and it’s time to sell before you may want. Sure, there’s always the possibility that Facebook will be worth ten times as much three years from now, but when you’re playing with a fickle crowd that gets upset with every wrong move, it’s better to err on the side of caution than to see one wrong move totally cripple your service.

In the online space, which is dominated by a select few companies, major firms like Microsoft are trying desperately to establish itself as a force on the Web. And although it may have waited too long to do it, it’s ready to move right now and its desperation for tons of traffic is palpable.

And it’s that formula: fickle users, huge (and valuable) growth, and desperate juggernauts, that makes this the prime time to sell Facebook off and move on. Rest assured, it’s the right decision.

Mashable Prediction Center: Will Facebook be acquired or file for an IPO in 2008?

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:FlyerExchange for Facebook App AdsZuckerberg Refutes Facebook IPO RumorsFacebook Sold 10% of Shares?Time Magazine’s Simple Facebook AppcomScore: Facebook Traffic Flattening; MySpace Hits Record9 Facebook Applications To Make You MoneyTicketLeap Offers Facebook Application for Events

Here at San Francisco Design Center, the F8 ‘08 event is being held all day. The keynote with Mark Zuckerberg is the expected highlight of today’s event, a year after the launch of the Facebook Platform. Most are expecting Zuckerberg to announce initial partners with Facebook Connect, which would come a day after MySpace had its announcement of Data Availability.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:The Daily Poll: Who’s to Blame for the SXSW Keynote Fiasco?Zuckerberg to Keynote SXSW ConferenceZuckerberg Saves SXSW with Open Q&AWhen an Interview with Zuckerberg turns into a RevoltMark Zuckerberg Sells Stock, Makes Some Nice Pocket ChangeDinner Keynote at Web 2.0 Summit: Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfeMark Zuckerberg Spotted in Seattle

Logic by numbers would have it that Facebook’s Chinese impersonators would irk the Zuckerberg gang more than any other similar copycat attempt made elsewhere on Earth. In fact, let’s assume they do. China’s Internet market will likely do little else but grow fast for the foreseeable future, so Facebook would have an incentive to combat the spoofs anyway it could. At the moment, however, the plan seems to be to deliver “the real thing” amid the fakes, and work to supplant the rest through sheer authenticity. (Does the adage that says “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery” still hold any credence today?)

Meanwhile, Facebook is evidently taking a harder tack in more Western reaches of the world. According to Kevin Allison of the Financial Times, Germany-based studiVZ, which claims a membership ten million strong, spread throughout the region encompassing Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, has been served a lawsuit by Facebook. The charge: copyright infringement.

A peek at the frontmost layers of studiVZ shows that Facebook is standing on quite solid ground. What’s more, success for Facebook may not be a simple skewering of its target. With legal persistence, it could net a good amount of cash as well. Early in 2007 it was reported that a German publisher by the name of Holtzbrinck GmbH had paid north of $100 million for the acquisition of studiVZ. That was only about a month and a half after studiVZ’s founder, Ehssan Dariani, took some head for personal blunders that made their way into mainstream press outlets like Der Spiegel.

StudiVZ currently comprises a trio of “platforms.” In addition to studiVZ there are schülerVZ and meinVZ, which collectively purport to be growing at a rate of 100,000 memberships per week. The company says that its schülerVZ brand is its most popular, with 6.4 billion page views per month, circa March 2008.

If we’re to compare financial largess among the Facebook look-a-likes of the globe, studiVZ isn’t the most substantial player. Xiaonei, a network purchased in 2006 by Oak Pacific Interactive for an unmentioned sum of money, managed to pull $430 million [VentureBeat] earlier this year from Softbank. Juxtapose that figure against an investment by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing of $100m in Facebook itself between November 2007 and March 2008, and studiVZ certainly isn’t the most pressing concern from Facebook’s vantage at present. Is this lawsuit filed by Facebook then a preparatory measure? Something to start with, to be followed by a hit against a bigger fish?

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:StudiVZ Acquired For $112MGoogle Loses Domain Name Battle in GermanyFacebook Now Offering German Language SupportCopycats: Top 10 International Facebook ClonesDoktus, German Scribd Clone: Samwer Brothers At It Again?Exposed: The 7 Most Blatant Web 2.0 Rip OffsGerman YouTube Clone Acquired by TV Station

Record label EMI will lay off 2,000 and shift its focus toward digital music, private equity investor and company topper Guy Hands told the Financial Times. Hands said the music industry operates on fallacies with origins in “the phenomenon of the 1990s and the CD” and as a result, companies like EMI are hemorrhaging cash. EMI, for instance, spends $50 million a year destroying unsold CDs. Guess whose model Hands said the industry should follow to turn itself around?

Hands said to look to Radiohead, a band which spurned EMI when it allowed fans to download a low-fidelity copy of a new record and pay whatever price they chose. (Photo by wwhyte1968)

Source:Valleywag

newVideoPlayer(”Zuckerburg_Awkward_60_minutes.flv”, 475, 376,”");“You seem to be replacing Larry and Sergey as the people out here who everyone is talking about,” 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl told Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his interview last night. In response, Zuckerberg sniffs. Then there’s a beat. He blinks. Then Zuckerberg asks: “Is that a question?” He looks off camera and chuckles. Here’s to another 100 years of puff pieces turned sour by petulance.

Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag’s top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it’s meta.

The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired’s “The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007” makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple’s genius ads.
• 9.The New York Times’ “Buzzwords 2007” can has number 9.
  
  
• 8. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we’re so handy with their charts.
  
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp’s 2008 Tech Predictions.
  

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick ‘em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  function streampadPop(l,n){window.open(”http://flash.streampad.com/playerL.swf?autostart=yes&list=”+l+”&songNumber=”+n, “Streampad”,”toolbar=no,width=200,height=300,resizable=yes”);}
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there’s real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.
  

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria
  Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

• 3.We’re not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica’spredictions for 2008. “The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon,” Chris Lee writes. We’ll just show you this neat video.
  newVideoPlayer(”Ars_LHC.flv”, 475, 376);
  

• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don’t they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired’s editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.
  

  There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

• 1. How’s this for meta? We’re going to declare Valleywag’s own “The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists” the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)