TechAddress

Platform Reloaded: Facebook Launches Application Verification Program

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:32:33 +0000

If your Facebook application has vanished off the face of the earth (or at least from users’ news feeds) since the redesign, the social network has just launched a new program to help you get your swagger back. The Application Verification Program, announced earlier this year at the Facebook developer conference, is now live, allowing developers to submit their applications for review.

Applications meeting Facebook’s standards will be marked with a verification badge, and more importantly, “users will see more information from verified applications as we increase their allocations for communication channels such as requests and notifications, and increase visibility of their stories in News Feed.” Those are of course the same viral channels that helped many applications grow rapidly when the platform first launched, but also caused users to feel the platform was spammy as opportunistic developers bombarded them with requests.

So what does it take to get your application verified? Facebook has published 10 “Guiding Principles,” with the central themes being that apps should be “Meaningful,” “Trustworthy,” and “Well-Designed.” It also takes $375 – the application fee that Facebook is charging to developers seeking to get their apps verified. Facebook will begin granting apps the benefits of Verified status early next year.

Essentially, coupled with the current fbFund finalists, Facebook is resurrecting the platform, which has been largely hidden to passive users (folks who ignore the apps completely) since the social network rolled out its redesign. It’s all been very methodical – first, bury the applications under a special tab on user profiles, then, dole out funding to the best app developers, and finally, offer everyone else a way to get their apps back in the game. Ultimately, it might get Facebook where they want to be – a platform offering several hundred high quality apps, as opposed to tens of thousands of useless ones.

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Bizroof CRM Throws Cash Managers a Bone

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:30:56 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Delicious remains the most recognisable name in social bookmarking, but does it serve niche markets as ably as specialized tools could? Boca Raton, Florida-based Dwellicious thinks not, and has created a “Delicious for real estate” that it hopes will entice home buyers and real estate agents alike.

Better Than Delicious?

The basics are unchanged: add a bookmarklet to your browser and click it when you see a real estate listing you like, anywhere on the web. Except that unlike generic bookmarking sites, Dwellicious is optimized to work with the following: Century21, Coldwellbanker, Frontdoor.com, Har.com, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Redfin, Remax, Rentals.com, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate and Zillow. Unlike Delicious, Dwellicious knows where to grab the data from on these pages, and bookmarks all the relevant info with ease.

Here’s the smart bit: Dwellicious bookmarks are dynamic: updated whenever the price of a property changes, or new photos are added, or the property is taken off the market. Use cases might include sharing your favorite property picks with your spouse or real estate agent. And so yes, it’s “better than Delicious” within the real estate niche, but this benefit seems marginal.

Simple Business Model

Dwellicious is not only a simple idea, its planned business model takes little explanation either: the site plans to create Pro accounts for real estate agents, offering advanced tools to help their buyers.

Uncertain Future

It’s a simple, easily explained concept. And yet, the competitive advantage seems slim: unless you’re a real estate agent, generic social bookmarking may suffice…and if I did find a dream home at a bargain price, would I want to share that information or keep it to myself?

In truth, Dwellicious’ future likely lies with the real estate agents themselves: either as a tool to keep track of hundreds of properties at any moment, or as a service to their clients. Even so, the market gap here seems slim at best.

Dwellicious will launch on January 7th 2009 at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in New York City.

Further Resources

For more useful real estate tools on the web, see our following resource lists:

REAL ESTATE TOOLBOX: 65+ Real Estate Resources

20+ Tools to Survive the Real Estate Crisis

Source:Mashable!

The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it, hectic travels. This is the busiest time of the year when it comes to traveling, especially for families. Luckily, online and mobile tools help make the experience much more manageable.

From travel planning sites to navigation apps and services to help you keep track of your spending, here are over 20 resources to help you survive the holiday travel season.

Are you planning to travel? Which services have you found most helpful? Tell us more in the comments.

Planning Your Vacation

Disney - Has a useful site dedicated to families on the go. Believe it or not, they don’t just recommend that all families just go to Disneyland or Disney World! There are plenty of excellent suggestions for activities and sites to see.

Kaboose - Also provides a tremendous amount of ideas for family travel and vacationing. There’s a plethora of useful family friendly tips and suggestions such as the best family-friendly cars.

The Travel Channel - Has a special section just for family travel and vacations. There are many videos covering travel suggestions as well as message forums dedicated to families on the go.

Tripology - Like an online travel agent that works with the information you provide on the type of trip or vacation you want to take. They take the information and provide relevant suggestions for your upcoming journey.

TripoRama - A travel planning service specializing in group trips. Similar to other sites, this service can make suggestions and share useful information for any type of trip you want to experience with your loved ones.

For information on finding cheap flights, check out “30+ Tools for Finding Cheap Travel Accomodations.”

Navigating Your Way

Source:Mashable!

Like many entries in the world of SaaS, Bizroof, a company offering a steadily growing CRM package, practices the art of incremental improvement, a concept popularized by Google, et al., which takes a semi-experimentalist approach to product development.

This past July, for example, Bizroof had its official launch, and only a month later implemented support for Yahoo’s location-based service Fire Eagle. This week the company is introducing users to new cash-flow analysis and sales automation tools; a whopper of a bonus for managers seeking that all-in-one fantasy.

And users will be content to know that the money management options provided are similarly well-design as the previously standard set of software. Ease of use is the order of the day. If your cost analysis job isn’t so rigorous as to require some serious machinery, these extensions will likely suffice for the day-to-day.

Layout is straightforward and segmented into view options for reports new and old as well as edit fields for money brought in and money sent out. Really, if you have just a semblance of understanding about accounting, you’ll learn it in seconds; a few minutes at most. (Account owners can also change currency settings from US dollars to euros to pounds to yen.)

For Bizroof to deploy these things to the company’s stated membership of 3,800, regardless of their use of free or paid accounts, is quite a treat, too. Just know that a Basic plan will limit you to 20 cash flow reports per month, whereas the $120/year Pro level will grant you access to 5,000.

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Zynga Launches the Ultimate Time Waster: Live Poker for the iPhone

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:32:17 +0000

Source:Mashable!

There are a number of microblogging engines in existence today that work the build-your-own angle of the market. The corporate and closed Yammer and the open source Laconi.ca are two such enablers.

Well, today one more joins the fold. Its name is Twingr. It comes by way of Miami and the Startups.com network and its aim is to give anyone the ability to create free custom Twitter-like forums without having to do much legwork.

Easy to Use

Suffice it to say that the promise of an easy-to-use system is realized at Twingr quite strongly:

- It sports a simple layout that anyone familiar with the 140-character messaging architecture will recognize and immediately warm up to.

- Its community-building component allows you to tap into your Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo accounts to send invites to contacts you know. You have the option to manually send messages to email addresses without having to log into one of the above mentioned services if you prefer to avoid that method.

- The settings menu provides users with switches to fine tune member-to-member messaging access. By default, the main options are as open as possible, except for follower request approvals.

Insofar as microblogging goes, there is little or nothing about Twingr that won’t appeal to registrants. Save for select circumstances for users of WordPress and 37signals webware, who have things like Prologue and Newsroom to interact with relatively small groups of people, a community on Twingr to complement your website or fanclub or whathaveyou can be the very style of forum you’re looking for. Startups.com Marketing VP Pepe Amorin says that the plan for the new venture is really to “let the flower blossom.”

And it’s free…

Again, there’s no cost of admission, at least not yet. It’s in public alpha mode for the time being. Yet even at launch stage it looks like it’s off to a good start. If I am to compare it to alternatives in the field, it has more in common with Yammer than Laconi.ca. But the fact that that it is free of cost regardless of engagement will have the attention of microblog fans who wish to limit the public thread to personal invitees only.

A few final words to cap our review: Pardon the electropop in the demo video below. Yes, it’s just as informative to watch when muted.

Source:Mashable!

HD Video isn’t just coming to every television screen, it’s making its way online as well. From well known video sites like YouTube to unknown upstarts like Vuze, many online video services are embracing the new standard.

Here’s a list of 20 great sources where you can find High Definition videos. Making the switch is easy; the only thing that’s blurred is the line between online and offline entertainment.

Tell us more about where you find HD videos in the comments.

Online HD Video Streaming

Apple - The Mac daddy site sports an excellent HD Video section with plenty of movie trailers, music videos and more. For the best experience, you’ll need to install/upgrade your QuickTime player.

Microsoft - Not to be outdone yet again by Apple, the boys from Redmond have added support for HD Video to their Windows Media player. Their WMV HD showcase has plenty of IMAX clips in HD as well as some movie trailers.

SmoothHD - This is a joint effort from Microsoft and Akamai for delivering HD content over HTTP with the help of SilverLight as part of the Open Video Player initiative.

Hulu - The hot video service has an extensive HD gallery of movies to behold. There are full-length feature films you can experience in HD for free. For example, here’s a trailer for Quantum of Solice.

Vimeo - Now supports HD in 1280×780 and lets you upload videos and convert them to HD.

Adobe - Has jumped into the HD Video arena as well by adding HD support to their Flash player technology. Here’s their HD Gallery.

Vuze - Provides a downloadable player that lets you view stunning HD Video content. The site is reminiscent of Hulu and YouTube with its search capabilities.

DailyMotion - The French video service supports the HD format.

YouTube - Well, there isn’t any special area for YouTube HD Video content because it only plays high quality video if it’s available and if you have a fast Internet connection. If you want to force YouTube to always play the high quality video whenever it’s available, change your option under account setting to do so:

MotionBox - Allows you to upload your home movies and convert them to HD Video. Go here for more information on the service.

NASA - If you’re into HD space exploration then this is the place to go. Many blasts from the past.

NY Times - The popular newspaper has recently launched an HD Video Portal based on Brightcove’s player.

Broadcast TV Channels in HD

CBS - Maintains a wide selection of HD Videos you can watch in their entirety, such as CSI: NY, The Amazing Race and many more.

ABC - Follows suit with their rival by streaming many of their shows online in HD. Requires you to install a small movie plugin for your browser.

NBC - NBC also streams their shows online in HD. Keep in mind that not all of their video content is in HD format. Look for the HD symbol next to the show name to verify. Also, you can download many shows in HD from their NBC Direct service for free.

HD TV Resources

Boxee.TV - Software that lets you connect video sites to your HDTV so you can enjoy HD video on your big screen. For example, you can stream hulu.com to your AppleTV.

vudu - Set-top Box that allows you to watch a slew of HD and HDX video instantly from an online selection.

AppleTV - Apple also provides a set-top box that lets you play HD movies, TV Shows and more.

XBox 360 - Microsoft has a set-top box that plays HD Video content such as movies and TV shows. You can find plenty of HD content at their xBox Live Marketplace.

Tivo HD - The new line of Tivo boxes support HD and Internet access, which means you can stream HD video from online services such as YouTube and NetFlix. You can also share your HD converted home movies with friends and family members.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, Bim

Source:Mashable!

Luckily, I don’t play poker. It’s one in the long list of addictions I’ve been lucky not to get infected with over the years. But if I did, I’d be all over Zynga’s new game for the iPhone: Live Poker.

Zynga creates games for Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. They usually don’t waste time reinventing the wheel; they go with good old ever-popular games like Texas Hold’Em, BlackJack, Scramble and Sudoku. They also have a number of action/fantasy titles such as Special Forces, Mafia Wars, Vampires and so forth. All of these translate into 4.5 billion page views, which makes Zynga the largest social gaming network around.

Their latest offering, Live Poker, allows iPhone users to play poker with their friends from social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5. It’s the first iPhone game that leverages Facebook’s Connect platform; for the end user, it means that not only can you waste your entire workday playing poker, you can also do so on your iPhone on the way home. Goodbye, free will; hello addiction.

You can get the application in the iTunes App store; the basic version is free, while an advanced version, with a larger chip package and access to tournaments, will cost you $9.99.

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Yahoo Reinvents the Web Portal

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:39:01 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security (S3) project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington, DC.

Thoughts of a future President Obama have gotten many people in the tech community abuzz with glee. Indeed, this is a great opportunity for new ideas and creativity to impact the federal government, and society in general. As someone who works in the government every day, I’d like to see the readers of Mashable put their money where their mouths are, as it were.

Many people have commented to me personally, and in general, that the term “Web 2.0” and anything else with “2.0” after it is tired. When I was very new to the social software world, I was sitting next to Peter Shankman at a workshop when he exclaimed, “If I hear someone mention the term Web 2.0 one more time, I’m going to [redacted]!” I was half-laughing, and half-terrified, since I had only just recently heard the term!

Using “2.0” to denote applying new social technology to a noun has become practically ubiquitous. So maybe its use is tired. But often people don’t have any better ideas. Articles like this and this prove that while empty criticism is easy to dish out, suggesting good alternatives is hard work.

Searching for alternatives

My gut told me that better ideas were out there. As a preliminary test, I recently queried my Twitter followers for ideas about what to rename Government 2.0, and got one great response from Jody Reale. She suggested “Quantum Government,” which I like, because in physics a quantum is the smallest unit that light can be broken into. If we consider government the light and individual employees the quanta, we might think of social media empowering each individual quantum to achieve more than they could before, and truly make the whole more than the sum of its parts.

Help a bureaucrat out

Let’s get back to Peter Shankman, who created a wonderful crowdsourcing service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which connects reporters’ story ideas with sources’ knowledge. Well, I hope that the people who read this column can “help a bureaucrat out” – what do you think Government 2.0 should be renamed? Please post your comments publicly here on Mashable, and discuss them with me and amongst yourselves. Be creative, be vicious, and most importantly, have fun.

To make things interesting, I’m going to personally give away prizes. First prize will be an excellent blue CIA coffee thermos and other emblazoned gear (pens, etc.). Runner-up will be an awesome-looking classic white coffee mug from the historic and prestigious National War College in Washington, DC. Finally, I will give out a prize for the “most creative” name that isn’t chosen in the top-two (I have to be creative with that prize, so I haven’t thought of it yet – suggestions?).

So, do you have something for me? Can you beat Jody’s “Quantum Government” idea, currently the number one? And most importantly, will the readers of Mashable prove that government crowdsourcing can really work? I challenge you.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, klikk

Source:Mashable!

Want to know what the future for big web portals will look like? Yahoo’s developer team might just have an answer. Using YUI 2.x and YUI 3-based framework, they’re working on a new front page that will enable extensive customization for users; developers, on the other hand, will be able to create third party applications for the page.

Developers should go over to the YUI blog for the nitty gritty details. From the user’s standpoint, this means that Yahoo’s new homepage will be very customizable, with a dashboard area (on the left side of the screenshot) where you’ll be able to check Yahoo and non-Yahoo applications and services. On the other hand, Yahoo will “learn” from your browsing habits and bring you content tailored to your needs. Finally, you’ll feel more connected, as you’ll be able to see what your friends are up to, be it on one of Yahoo’s services or the web in general.

Does all this sound a bit like Facebook? It’s definitely a step in that direction; a web portal should be the center of your internet experience, and social networking is becoming a crucial part of it. It seems that Yahoo has decided it’s finally time to leave the old “portal” concept behind and move into uncharted territory. We’ll see how this pans out for them; I’ve heard people say hundreds of times that the average user doesn’t want customization, and that a simple, static web portal is still the way to go if you’re catering to a massive audience. However, things change fast on the internet; it’s sometimes better to be one step ahead than one step behind.

Yahoo has already started testing the new homepage, starting with the US, UK, France and India: if you’re connecting from one of those countries, you might be one of the lucky users chosen for “bucket” testing. If you’re not, there’s no way to get in, so you’ll just have to wait like the rest of us.

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Jiggle and Blow Your iPhone to Make Mother Earth Smile

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:37:48 +0000

Source:Mashable!

SocialMedian was barely a thought for people back in February, but it has gained a solid following in the 9 months

of its existence. Many people would ask why this startup has gained any traction. It is yet another social news site with voting and commenting. Did we really need another? Given the amount of traffic that socialmedian is getting, it is obvious that they are onto something.

With this in mind, I figured it was time to chat with SocialMedian Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg and find out if things were actually as good as they sounded.

A look Back

During the summer, there was rapid growth as SocialMedian added Google Reader and other service integration, as well as replize. These features were added because of user feedback. Goldberg has stated several times, “Our model at SocialMedian has been: small, fast, and listen to users.” You have probably noticed that you do not see any advertising or many press releases plastered all over the major news sites. Essentially, SocialMedian has been built through its user base. The only “press coverage” you tend to see are reviews from various blogs, including here on Mashable.

Almost a month ago, SocialMedian integrated with Facebook and users saw a large amount of traffic coming from the popular social network. Also, in the weeks leading up to the election, socialmedian announced partnerships with the Washington Post and The Guardian. Their election widget was gaining adoption, and Goldberg stated that the few days following the widget release had seen a 300% increase in traffic. Why? It is probably due to the partnerships created through the Election Talk widget.

A chat with SocialMedian

Rob: How big of a traffic boost did the Facebook integration give you?

Jason: We got a nice initial boost when we launched our Facebook integration as our existing members were suddenly easily able to find and follow their Facebook friends and to invite new friends to check out SocialMedian. Since then, Facebook has been a steady boost for us as our users have amplified their SocialMedian activities to their Facebook friends and new users have also taken to our Facebook features. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of overall impact to our growth and engagement, I’d say Facebook integration has been about a 7, but has the potential to be a 10 with some new developments we have planned to even better leverage the Facebook platform.

One thing the Facebook integration launch did though was it really went a long way towards starting to mainstream SocialMedian. I used to measure our growth entirely on new registrations. It taught me that awareness comes first then adoption. The Facebook integration made a whole bunch of new people suddenly aware of SocialMedian via their Facebook friends. After seeing SocialMedian postings on their friends’ Facebook pages for the 5th, 10th, 50th time, you start to see adoption. The second thing it did was really up the engagement level on SocialMedian. Suddenly it was really easy to follow people via Facebook. That hit our currently active users with a slew of new follow messages, which ignited them.

Rob: Obviously, the Washington Post and Guardian partnerships are a big deal. Do you see SocialMedian making several partnerships like this?

Jason: YES! It took us two weeks to put together the micro-site election.socialmedian.com for the Washington Post and then 1 phone call to get The Guardian excited about taking the widget. Now we know how to do it fast and know better to get ahead on working with more partners to include them. We also built this in a way in which we can replicate it again and again and again with only 2 days to get a micro-site up and running for any topical SocialMedian news network.

We’ll do our second one next week for the Monaco Media Forum event in Monaco November 12th, where the Prince of Monaco brings together 300 leaders in the transformation of media. It’s a closed event but SocialMedian will enable people to follow every blog post, video, picture, and tweet from home. You heard that here first. The page for that will be http://mmf.socialmedian.com.

Rob: Do you see any scalability problems with the micro-site idea? Meaning how often can you do these without affecting how much staff you must maintain?

Jason: No. It basically builds right on top of our “news network” concept in which anyone can create a news network to gather and discuss news about a particular topic. For these microsites like election.socialmedian.com or mmf.socialmedian.com, all we really do now is apply a template created for the election site which adds some additional views like “rising fast” in addition to “popular” and “recent” and which enables anyone to grab and embed a widget for the news network. We can do hundreds of these without any negative resource impact.

Rob: At the beginning of November Quantcast showed SocialMedian at just over 160K page views, what is the real traffic? I saw the email regarding the 300% increase over 3 days. Does that give you over 475K pageviews?

Jason: Conservative estimates had socialmedian at 500K pageviews (rolling 30 days). October ended consistently above 20K per day. Overall, there were 225K pageviews in September, 280K in October, and 120K the first week of November with traffic rapidly increasing as we got closer to the election. Quantcast has significantly more conservative numbers.

Rob: So how do you measure user engagement?

Jason: Clips/day is our best measure of engagement. Clips aggregate all user activities: clipping, sharing, like/dislike, and 1st comment a user makes on a story. In the past 60 days we’ve gone from averaging 1500 clips/day to more than 3500. We have seen the same sort of increase in comments as well. We attribute our replize feature, where users reply to other users vs. just leaving comments, as the key to the rapid rise in comment levels. One thing worth noting is that Mixx has probably 4-5x our traffic, but we are far higher than them on clips/story vs. their votes, and comments/story. In other words, we have more quality traffic we think and more engaged users.

Rob: Have you seen a traffic boost due to the election partnerships?

Jason: We see that our user growth has been more about the tech community suddenly all talking about SocialMedian at once vs. being all about the election. Over the past 4 days we’ve added more new registered users than in the previous 4 weeks. We’ve seen our 3 biggest traffic days yesterday (on a Sunday!) and the two prior days. It happened because users started talking publicly about how they seem to be getting value from SocialMedian. Nothing beats positive word of mouth. And we’ve worked really hard to cultivate that, while spending $0 on outbound marketing.

It’s all about satisfying users and getting them engaged in the service. Then, when they recommend the service to their friends or readers, it helps that newbies see a party going on when they get to SocialMedian (a vibrant community) that they can join in on vs. have to create. Notably, our strongest area is still tech news and we still have a very tech-oriented early user base, but at the same time our users have created more than 2000 news networks on all sorts of topics.

Rob: Will end of election season hurt traffic significantly, or are you seeing increased engagement from the new users?

Jason: So far we are holding up very nicely as new people introduced to SocialMedian because of the election and from Twit.tv seem to largely be staying around. This past Sunday was our biggest Sunday in history and Monday was better than the Monday before the election…so far so good. I think it’s fair to say that the election helped draw people in but the discussion continues around the news of the day.

Rob: What is the biggest complaint from users and how are you addressing it?

Jason: The biggest feature request we have is for us to add topical news search. We have none right now. That’s coming in just a couple of weeks. We’re also working on better filters and cleaning up the UI, which have been big user requests/complaints.

Rob: What do you see as the biggest reason for success?

Jason: The biggest reason for success is simple. We listen to users. We have done very little to focus on growth and marketing and instead focused almost entirely on helping one users at a time find value and get more engaged with the service. Our theory is that one happy user will bring 10 over time. That’s our focus.

Looking forward

Obviously, things look to be going very well for Jason and SocialMedian. It is still too early to determine whether the traffic will decrease now that the election is over, but the micro-sites give SocialMedian the ability to have focused coverage on any major event or conference. SocialMedian is maturing nicely, and I would definitely keep an eye on their future.

Source:Mashable!

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Based on the developments of the past year, the future of music may very well be free. The record labels are suddenly willing to work with Web companies on free and legal music distribution, leading to the high profile launch of MySpace Music, as well as the continued growth of startups like Imeem, iLike, and Amie Street. CBS-owned Last.fm also got on the free music bandwagon, offering up full tracks with limited free streaming.

However, those are far from the only sites that made noise in the online music scene in the past year. We recently compiled a list of more than 30 different free and legal sites where you can get free music, each of which has its own unique twists for discovering the best artists and songs. Nominate your favorite using the widget below.

Make Your Nomination

Mashable Open Web Awards

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Feel free to elaborate on your nomination in the comments, or try to gain more support for your favorite service by copying the widget to your blog (click the “Grab This” link in the widget above)!

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The Open Web Awards is made possible by our sponsors. By supporting the Open Web Awards, these companies reward and encourage innovative web technologies. We can’t thank them enough for sharing our passion: building great web companies.

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“PartnerUp brings small business and social networking together to create a community where entrepreneurs find the people, resources and information to grow their businesses.”

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“iStockphoto is the world’s leading image market and a revenue-sharing social network. Browse 3.5 million images and videos starting at $1 or become a contributor.”

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Prize Sponsor

“Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products, most of which are produced within 24 hours.”

Source:Mashable!

The folks who introduced GoPlanit to the world are launching a Sim City-like set of iPhone applications, one free and one for pay ($2.99) by the name of Pet Earth [iTunes URL] and Pet Earth Lite [iTunes] to quench the activist, treehugging, superheroic self nascent in the global gamer conscience.

Perhaps Sim City isn’t grandiose enough an analogy. It’s more like “Sim World,” if there was such a thing. And instead of micro-managing one town center or another, your job as mobile steward of the Earth is to counteract disasters wherever they may occur. And oh is it a thoroughly humorous endeavor. This is funny, funny stuff, folks.

Learning Curve

You won’t know it immediately on startup. It might take you some time to really learn it end to end. But delve into an emergency response effort and you’ll quickly see why we think it might elicit a chuckle or two from users as time progresses. Some words of warning: play this game around friends and strangers at your own discretion.

Basically put, the game is constructed in a beat-the-clock fashion. If you take your sweet time addressing concerns, the warning count will increase.

My experience with Pet Earth started easily enough. A volcanic disruption was happening in Italy. The task put forth was to shake the phone, engaging the on-board accelerometer with consistency until things calmed down. I then tapped okay to go back to the main screen, and proceeded to the next job. Something to do with a flood, apparently. To reverse the waters, I had to maneuver water drops into a bucket by tilting the device. I did just as I was asked, and, again, went back to the home page.

…Blow, Blow, Blow Your Phone…

Then I saw notice of a hurricane. The fix prescribed: you blow. And blow and blow some more, right into the mic of the device until Pet Earth says job well done once more. Fun stuff indeed!

No, really, it is an enjoyable thing to play with, just as long as you and environmentally friendly people such as yourself continue to buy the premium game for $2.99 or help pull in ad revenue via the Pet Earth Lite edition. Through both avenues, the company plans to donate to the Arbor Day Foundation as well as the Trees for the Future collective.

So go ahead. Shake, tilt and blow your phone (keep the clean tag, peoples!) to a cleaner and happier home planet. You’ll have a blast.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

MGM’s Full Length Movies Coming to YouTube

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:30:20 +0000

Source:Mashable!

So much for the idea that YouTube and Hulu aren’t direct competitors. The New York Times reports that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios will start posting full length movies from its catalog on the popular video sharing service. The partnership will be announced today, and viewers will immediately be able to watch shows such as “American Gladiators,” full-length movies like “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven,” as well as clips from popular movies like “Legally Blonde.” MGM’s movies and shows will be free to watch with the only hassle being some ads which will run alongside the videos.

While these movies and shows are hardly the latest blockbusters, it’s an important step forward for YouTube, which obviously wants to shrug the reputation of the place to find short, odd, and poorly filmed user generated videos (although there’s nothing wrong with that), and start offering full length features.

Unfortunately, they still have a long way to go, as even MGM is not ready to move their entire catalog to YouTube. “We will have some long-form videos up on YouTube, but I don’t think that’s the platform to have 30 or 40 movies up at once. I feel much more comfortable doing that on a site like Hulu,” says MGM’s co-president Jim Packer. In other words, this is merely an experiment to see how YouTube’s audience will respond to being able to see full length movies; if YouTube passes this test with flying colors, then maybe, maybe the big studios will start offering more material.

It’s a race against time. YouTube can’t afford to wait until Hulu gets too big; it needs to leverage the fact that it’s the biggest video sharing site around without completely giving in to the (often ludicrous) demands of big Hollywood studios. Winning or at least settling that Viacom lawsuit would definitely help, but whether YouTube will manage to achieve this delicate balance before it’s too late remains to be seen.

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