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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Blip is like Twitter for music, or rather Twitter plus music

Blip

If your Twitter home page is filled with messages from friends linking out to other web sites where you can watch a video, read and article, or listen to a song, Blip might be for you. While Twitter is 100% text based, people tend to use the micro-blogging service to share links to multimedia files. Blip, on the other hand, is a micro-blogging service with an integrated music search engine and audio player.

Here's how it works. Once you create an account, you can type the name of a band or song into the "What are you listening to?" box. The question's a bit disingenuous because Blip doesn't really care what you're currently listening to. Instead, it will pull up a bunch of songs matching your query. Thanks to Seeqpod integration, you can actually listen to songs without leaving the web page.

Once you've picked a song, you can enter a short message to go along with your music. When your Blip "listeners" (contacts, followers, whatever you want to call them) login to their home pages they'll see a list of updates from their friends, along with the songs their listening to. Click on any message and the song will start playing.

You can also link Blip to other social networking services including Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, LiveJournal, and Tumblr. We tested this out with Twitter, and while Blip did end a message to our Twitter contacts letting them know what we were listening too, it left out the text portion of our Blip.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Social Software

Jaiku - feature-packed online presence service


If Twitter and all its buzz in the web community can be considered its own growing world of sorts, then Leo Laporte - one of the service's foremost users according to Twitterholic - just sent ripples through its oceans by announcing his decision to move to Jaiku, a similar service that seems to have longer legs and quite a few more features. Since this was the first we've heard about Jaiku, we couldn't resist swinging by to sign up for an account to see what this micro-blogging, über-status message service has to offer.

In a nutshell: a lot. For starters, Jaiku acts as more of an 'online presence,' allowing you to do things like import RSS feeds from any of your other web properties (including photo feeds from the likes of Flickr) in addition to its fundamental feature of allowing you to post 140-character, SMS-friendly updates of what you're thinking or doing. Jaiku also has refreshing bits of genius sprinkled everywhere, such as the ability to group update notifications via email instead of sending single notices every time any contact posts something. On the downside, however, Jaiku doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a 3rd party following. It has no API (yet), so we're having a hard time finding Jaiku equivalents for TriQQr and the Iconfactory's spectacular Twitterrific client, let alone all the widgets, plugins and mashups which Twitter has quickly grown a reputation for.

Still, Jaiku offers plent of micro-blogging goodness, so give it a spin if Twitter simply isn't offering enough meat to sink your free time into.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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