Entries tagged with social - Channel 10

New From Live Labs: Political Streams

sarahintampa — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:56:00 GMT

The Live Labs team has just released a new project, Political Streams, and just in time as the U.S. Presidential election draws near. The site mines social media from across the internet, including blogs, newsgroups, and web sites, in order to track what stories are popular and if that popularity is increasing or decreasing.

When you click into an article on Political Streams, you’ll see a snippet of text from the article’s start and a link to the source if you’re interested in reading the complete story. Beneath this text are charts and graphs that show the attention the people and places mentioned in that particular story have seen over time. On the right, you’ll also see links to related information like other articles on news sites and blogs as well as links to people and places. Those people and places are generated by leveraging the API from the online open database project, Freebase.

The Political Streams site was built on the Social Streams platform, a platform that mines the social web for data. BLEWS, an earlier project by Microsoft Research, was also built on this platform.

Xobni Makes Your Inbox a Social Network

sarahintampa — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:54:00 GMT

Last week, the startup Xobni launched their public beta, so now everyone can get their hands on the Outlook plugin that turns your inbox into a social network. Xobni (that's "inbox" backwards!), taps into the hidden social network you spend time with every day: your inbox. The plugin runs in a sidebar where it analyzes and extracts info about you and your relationships.

During their private beta, they tweaked several things, fixed bugs, and even decided to streamline the plugin a bit by removing the "organize" tab, instead choosing to focus on their core product's offerings - super-fast search and relationship management. Using Xobni, you have access to features like threaded conversations, analytics, user profiles, a "related people" feature, shared attachments, and other automatically extracted info - like phone numbers for your contacts. To get in on the Xobni public beta, just visit the Xobni homepage and sign up.

PhotoZoom Facebook App

sarahintampa — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:31:00 GMT

PhotoZoom, the web site that leverages the new Deep Zoom technology which makes your photos "zoomable" now has a Facebook app all of its own. The PhotoZoom application lets you create Facebook photo albums that use this Deep Zoom technology. You can choose to convert your existing albums to PhotoZoom albums or just create new ones. After you add the app, you'll be taken to the PhotoZoom site to get started. Very cool! (via LiveSide)

You Witness News launches from Yahoo

Jesse — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:22:00 GMT

Per yesterday's NY Times article, Yahoo launched their citizen journalism site You Witness News this morning. After signing in with your Yahoo! ID, you can upload just about any movie file that weighs less than 100 megs. After providing some brief description, tagging, and date information, the video will go live. You can also connect a Flickr account to the site and upload still images through Flickr. The media that gets contributed to this new site will be available to the editors of both Yahoo News and Reuters for use in appropriate articles.

Yelp provides local reviews by and for the people

Jesse — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 19:26:00 GMT

Sometimes it takes relocating half a thousand miles away to get perspective on how useful some web tools are. Joining team 10 can mean having to give up that beloved home field advantage and all of the local haunts we’re so used to, well…haunting. Where are the best burritos? What’s the best place to hustle play pool? Which barbers actually do what you want?

The kids at Yelp have spent the past two years building a website is giving the power of review back to the people. Instead of being fed highly-edited opinions from a narrow selection of professional critics, Yelp’s data is made by anyone who feels compelled to contribute. There are a number of upsides to this approach. First, because someone has either got to love or hate something in order to be compelled to write about it, there aren’t many middle-of-the-road reviews that don’t help us come to a decision. Second, the site enables readers and reviewers to communicate directly, which creates a social network derived from more than a list of our favorite CDs.

So go forth and Yelp about something already!