Myspace

Hands-on with Flektor's content creator

Flektor is a new Flash-based content mashup tool. Users can pull in photos from several hosting services like flickr, MySpace, and Photobucket to make slick-looking, embeddable media slide shows for blogs, Web sites or social networks. It's a lot like Mixercast, and other media mashup services like RockYou and SplashCast.

Flektor's interface is drag-and-drop, and has a very short learning curve. To add media to your show, just drag imported media files down to a timeline at the bottom of the screen, where they can be rearranged or removed at any time. There are also "Flidgets" which can be inserted into your show to add live chat, a live broadcast from your Webcam, or cliched film effects like color bars or static. What's really neat is the ability to edit any picture with some easy-to-use sliders that let you do simple, on-the-fly alterations to your photographs--something you'd find on a Web-based photo editing tool like Picnik.

To add a little flair to your show, there are nearly 100 transitions, effects, and filters that can be put on top of or in between your media. You can also edit each effect and change its appearance. Out of the many transitions I've seen on some of these Flash editors (Photobucket's Remix in particular), Flektor has some really snappy and good-looking effects.

The main hindrance in using Flektor is how long it takes to communicate with the third-party services. Flickr in particular takes quite a while to sync up photos from various albums. On the upside, the MySpace integration is very simple; just give it a username and it will pull up photos members have uploaded in addition to any images that have been embedded in user comments. It's also easy to embed your Flektor player on a number of services, with a handy export page that provides special embedding codes for a dozen services (including Google's Orkut).

I've embedded a sample "Flek" I put together using some photo and video clips. For screenshots of the editing interface, keep reading.

[via Mashable]

MySpace partners with reality show

MySpace is teaming with reality-TV magnet, Mark Burnett, to find the next John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan.

MySpace and Burnett, the creator of such prime-time hits as Survivor and The Apprentice, are expected to announce Wednesday they are planning to launch a political reality show called Independent.

Burnett is producing the show and is attempting to sell it to one of the networks. Fox, owned by MySpace's parent company News Corp, is a potential partner said Jeff Berman, general manager for video at MySpace.

"Most people are tired of politics as usual," Berman said. "When you … Read more

News roundup: MySpace, Yahoo, Amazon

MySpace and Photobucket make amends. The block on videos from Photobucket for MySpace users was lifted yesterday. According to a post on the Photobucket blog, "open lines of communication and procedures with MySpace" were made to make sure it doesn't happen again. The blockage affected nearly a quarter of Photobucket's 40 million registered users. Related: MySpace launched a version of its site today for Latino Americans.

Yahoo, Gracenote launch lyrics service. Yahoo Music users will now be able to pick up the lyrics to their songs after a deal was made with digital media company Gracenote. … Read more

Hands-on with MySpace News: Far from a Digg killer

The much-anticipated Digg-like news service from MySpace launched early this morning. The front page combines popular stories from the service's 24 categories and a user-democratized voting system for promotion and demotion. Stories are pulled from various sources by using technology from Newroo, an aggregation service MySpace acquired last year.

The voting system isn't based on simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, as on Digg, Netscape, and Reddit. Instead, MySpace News uses a five-star rating system, with "loved it" and "hated it" on opposite ends of the spectrum.

MySpace News also features a local events section for 12 major cities. We tried out the San Francisco page, and there were a number of events listed, but no dates or locations for them, just small text summaries.

Any time you click on a story, MySpace will redirect you to the site where the story resides, and add a small navigation pane to bring you back to MySpace (like Netscape did when it launched its community news site). The navigation pane has a rating tool, a listing of three related stories, and a link to the story's URL to send to friends. Interestingly enough, MySpace will take over the site's URL and give it a news.myspace.com designation, so if you send that link to friends, the MySpace News branding will come with it. Very sneaky.

Tuite a few things are missing from MySpace News. The first is integration with MySpace proper. There's no way to show which stories you've been rating (or reading) on your MySpace profile. Likewise, you can't see what your friends have been up to, something that is critical for a social network. There's also no way to submit stories. According to the FAQ, this will be added later down the road. For now, stories are fed to the service from blogs or Web sites and put into a pool to be picked up by users. Finally, there's no way to discuss stories that are on the service.

In other words, almost all the features that make Digg worth coming back to are missing from MySpace News. While the service will likely flourish because of its built-in user base of MySpace millions, it hasn't been built from the start to let its users take the reins beyond just clicking buttons. It's a very thin social news experience.

For more screenshots, keep reading.

MySpace in the news

A test version of MySpace News is expected to launch Thursday and will debut with some of the same features offered by the top news-aggregation sites.

Click here to read more.

MySpace challenge news aggregation sites

Social-networking site MySpace is venturing into the increasingly crowded news aggregation business. The swelling ranks already include Digg, Yahoo News and Slashdot.

A test version of MySpace News is expected to launch on Thursday and will debut with some of the same features offered by the top aggregation sites.

The way it works is that users decide which stories are most relevant and determine which ones appear on the front of the homepage. MySpace first organizes the news reports into 25 main categories, including sports, politics and technology.

Users then act as editors by rating the stories. The top rated … Read more

Piczo goes multilingual

Piczo, which is a San Francisco-based social networking site for teens that touts extensive, parent-friendly safety features, has started to reach beyond the U.S. and U.K. The company announced an initiative to expand into other countries by introducing international versions of the site, and today, Piczo announced the first phase of this expansion: into Germany, France, and Spain. There are already sizeable chunks of Piczo's 25-million-member base from those three countries, according to an official release (including 1.2 million in Germany), but now they'll be able to opt into using the service in their home … Read more

Rumor: Third-party widgets on Facebook?

Eliot van Buskirk on Wired's Listening Post blog is reporting that a source has informed him of what could be a pretty darn interesting development in the world of social networking. Buskirk writes that social networking site Facebook plans to allow its members to embed third-party widgets on their profiles, "allowing users to embed outside audio, video, and other content onto their profile pages for the first time."

Currently, there are features to "share" media on Facebook, but no way to embed third-party content or to customize the design of members' profiles. As Buskirk wrote … Read more

YouTube one-ups MySpace, launches political 'Spotlight' service

YouTube has announced a new series on content for political candidates, called Spotlight. Candidates will be able to ask the YouTube community a question and monitor comments and video responses sent in from users. They'll then get a chance to respond to the group discussion later in the week. The goal is to provide an open forum for users to know candidates a little better, and for people to ask questions directly--an option that's historically been out of reach (outside members of the press or those involved in campaign events). The project is also taking advantage of a … Read more

MySpace blocks Photobucket embeds--what's next?

This morning, MySpace quietly blocked Photobucket content from user profiles, a move that cuts out a reported 25 to 30 percent of Photobucket's 17 million monthly users from sharing content on the popular social network. Photo slide shows and video embeds are completely blocked, including those edited using the remix tool we covered in March.

The move came under the guise of Photobucket users posting ad content in their embeds, a move that's expressly forbidden in MySpace's user agreement. Previous MySpace blocks include Stickam, Revver and Imeem.

The big question is what major service MySpace will decide … Read more