MessageDance: One more Twitter clone

It all started with Twitter, an easy cool new way for social networking and micro blogging. After a while it became the most famous thing , in case you don’t know, and I really really doubt that you do not know, Twitter simply allows users to send updates on themselves, those are called “Tweets” they are text based posts (140 Character long) submitted to Twitter and displayed on the user’s profile pages. What made Twitter so famous in my opinion is the ability to send those text based posts using either the web, Instant Messengers, PDA, Mobile SMS or 3rd party applications such as Twitterrific.

Since then, more and more Twitter clones came out, claiming they can do a better job, some of those clones are Pownce, Jaiku, Cromple, Tumblr. And the latest of them all is MessageDance which is still in private beta. The main difference between MessageDance and Twitter is that on MessageDance you are not limited to a number of characters per post and you can actually add images and videos. Actually Tumblr allows users to post long posts and include images and videos too.

But its not all good news, MessageDance requires you to install a widget on your blog or website to make your friends know what you are posting and to see what they are posting?! What I cant get is why it is a MUST to install the widget. Installing widgets should always be an option not a requirement.

The way I see it, Twitter is still the best, because none of those clones have the portability Twitter has, they simply depend on posting directly on the web, while on Twitter as said earlier users can post using either the web, Instant Messengers, PDA, Mobile SMS or 3rd party applications.

Comments January 30th, 2008

MoveOn fights Facebook for lack of privacy

This is not totaly new news, Facebook Beacon has collected many critics since it started, it is basicly a new Facebook adverising model. Simply if you buy anything anywhere online this info will be shared on your profile news board.

So now MoveOn the online campaign group is taking action, they created a Facebook group called “Facebook, stop invading my privacy“, the group has 9,724 members until writing this post. And MoveOn also started an online petition.

Here what they had to say :

“When you buy a book or movie online, or make a political contribution, do you want that information automatically shared with the world on Facebook?” the group asked.

“Most people would call that a huge invasion of privacy. But recently, Facebook began doing just that. People across the country saw private purchases they made on other sites displayed on their Facebook News Feeds.”

CNN made a story about this conflict…

Comments November 22nd, 2007

PICURLS: See what photo’s the world is seeing… !!

As you know there is a number of social news/bookmarking websites such as Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. People share articles, websites, photos, videos and so on. Digg already announced that they will be having a special section only for images but it still didnt happen.

Here comes PICURLS, basically this website pulls all the top photos of the day from Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Simpy, Furl, Boing Boing and Wired. You can also subscribe to the RSS feeds for the pictures from each website or from all of the websites.

But PICURLS still have space for improvement, the 2 main drawbacks that i can see is that there is no community, none of the images has any comments, at least for the past few days, all what i can see is the number “0″ beside each image. The second thing is that when you click on the link it sends you to the source not the page of the website such as Digg and Reddit, i am not if this being done out of fear that maybe Digg or Reddit wont allow this to happen.

Anyway, in general this is a very nice website, and one day it could become something if it kept on developing.

Comments November 6th, 2007

Microsoft buys a piece of Facebook, an expensive piece…

Well there were signs all over the net that there is a huge bidding war between Microsoft and Google and it seems Miscrosoft just wanted it more than anybody. The speculation was that who ever wins the bidding in the end will buy around 10% of Facebook, but the war ended with Microsoft paying $240 Million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. Which makes Facebook overall value goes up to 15 freakin BILLION Dollars, $15 Billion, wow, although this year they have made only around $150 Million in revenue.

So what is the deal exactly, well Facebook gets allllot of cash, employ some new employees, expand to other countries and so on, for Microsoft, it will be selling ads that show up on Facebook outside the U.S and share the revenue with Facebook, btw Microsoft already sell ads for Facebook in the U.S.

Who should we congratulate? who is the real winner here ? only time will tell.

Comments October 26th, 2007