Web-based list-creation service Blist has made a couple of changes recently, and the biggest one is "less a feature and more a philosophy." Because Blist is easier to demonstrate than it is to explain, you can now try Blist without an account. You can play with all the features, browser other people's Blists and even make your own -- you just can't save it.
At the same time, they've introduced social features, similar to the ones you're familiar with from places like Digg and Google Reader. You can add contacts and share Blists with others via your contact list. Previously, you could only share via email (that feature is still available.) We love to see intelligent uses of social features like Blist's. It looks like they've added something that people will actually use, without going overboard with elaborate profiles.
Google Reader users have long had the option of sharing items from their feeds. Just click the share button and anyone who knows the URL of your shared item feed can subscribe or view your shared items in a blog-like format. A few months ago, Google even started showing your shared items to your Gmail contacts automatically. But if you wanted to share items or web pages from sites that you didn't subscribe to, you were out of luck.
Now Google has launched several new tools that turn Google Reader into a bit more of a blogging/communication tool. There's a new browser bookmarklet that you can use to share any item on the web, whether the site has an RSS feed or not. Google has alsdo added a new Notes section to Google Reader that lets you enter text notes to share with your contacts. You can either enter a standalone note or click the "share with note" button on any article you're looking at in Google Reader to add your thoughts to a shared item.
You can also choose one of four graphic headers for your shared items page. There's the default Google Reader icon, ice cream, ninjas, or sea. No, we have no idea why these four, but we wouldn't be surprised to see Google add to the list of graphics later.
Like to share your photos on Flickr, your videos on YouTube, and your music on whatever the audio equivalent is, but tired of uploading files manually? iGliss is a media sharing site that lets you upload photos, videos, and music. You can load your media the old fashioned way by uploading and tagging your files one by one. Or you can use the handy little iGliss PC client that can monitor any folders on your PC for new media files and upload them to your account automatically.
One your files are online, other users can browse your iGliss folders, or you can use the sharing tools to embed your files on any web page. Users get up to 100MB of online storage space for free. There's no such thing as a premium account yet, but the iGliss FAQ says that the company could decide to start charging for additional storage in thefuture.
Online video site Hulu has allowed users to embed videos on other pages pretty much since day one. In fact, a cottage industry has popped up around embedded Hulu videos, although now that the site is out of private beta, there's not much use for sites like TV Paradise and OPENHulu to exist. But now Hulu is getting even more sharing-friendly with the addition of a series of social bookmarking tools.
When you click on a Hulu video, you should notice a new "Share" button on the left side of the video player. Click it and you should see links to MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Windows live, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon, and Google Bookmarks. Some of these buttons will let you submit a site for review, while others will let you embed a video. For example, the Digg button lets you submit the video to Digg for voting purposes, while the Facebook button lets you add a video to your profile that visitors can view on your Facebook page.
Hulu has also changed its RSS feeds so that you can now receive videos as enclosures, allowing you to watch them from within your RSS reader.
SimpleBucket is a promising new photo sharing site that has just emerged from a complete redesign and rebuild. The service is very promising, and offers a lot of nice features that might make it a big player in the days to come.
SimpleBucket's tagline reads "Real Simple Photo Hosting," and it shows. First off, SimpleBucket does not require registration. As in at all. Simply enter in any email address, select a photo (or number of photos) to upload, and away you go. HTML code for embedding your photo, a link to the photo page, and a link to the photo itself are all instantly generated.
Pownce, the social network that's all about sharing with your friends, just made sharing a whole lot easier. Now you can grab an RSS feed of all your incoming Pownce messages, for more convenient reading. This is cool, but RSS is par for the course on social networks these days. It would be bigger news if Pownce still didn't have it.
What is actually quite unique about Pownce is the variety of video and photo hosting sites it now supports. If you post a video link to Pownce -- under the link tab, not as a regular post -- it will now display inline on your Pownce page. This goes for the big players in online video, like Vimeo, Viddler, YouTube and the new Flickr Video, as well as a smattering of other sites. CollegeHumor video support seems sort of arbitrary, but hey, we guess some people watch it.
Online photo sharing site Flickr is branching out into video. Starting today, paying Flickr Pro members can upload and share video clips. We're not entirely convinced that Flickr's parent company Yahoo! plans to turn the site into a YouTube killer. Videos are limited to just 90 seconds and 150MB. While that should cover the videos you shoot on your digital camera, which are often limited to 90 seconds or less anyway, it's hard to imagine music videos, video blogs, or other YouTube-style content taking Flickr by storm with this limitation in place.
But the move makes some sense if you think about that 90 second limit on your digital camera. In the press release, Yahoo! claims 40 percent of survey respondents use their cameras to capture short videos, but 55 percent of them only share those videos with friends on their camera. Today's move lets Flickr users upload and share everything on their digital camera, including photos and videos.
Videos will show up in users' photostreams, and can be managed just like images, with tags, privacy settings, and other controls. At launch, video will be available in 8 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and traditional Chinese.
It's not clear if or when Flickr will role out the ability to upload videos to free account holders. But anyone can currently view videos uploaded by Pro members.
Does the world really need another photo sharing website? Maybe, if that site is Photie.com. Photie's design is strikingly simple. It's easy to navigate, signup is a snap, and there are plenty of interesting photos to check out on the front page. The main attraction here, though, is the ability to upload photos of any size.
Photie doesn't have all the pro features that sites like Flickr and Smugmug offer, but there are plenty of users out there who think of those as frills. A free service with a nice, clean design and no cap on file sizes looks pretty good if you don't want to deal with stuff like social networks, mobile uploads, and signup fees. This is just uploading and tagging, like nature intended it.
The site is still in beta, so we'll keep an eye on it and see how it evolves. Frankly, we're hoping it stays with the friendly "less-complicated-than-Flickr, much-classier-than-ImageShack model". Before you start with the "not another photo site!" comments, give it a look. We think some users will find it's just what they needed.
Warning: Because Photie displays recently-uploaded photos on the front page, you might not want to click through at work. There was nothing controversial up front when we took the screenshot above, but it's best to be careful. Thanks to readers Alex and Todd for catching this.
New York City hipsters have struck again, bringing quick and easy mixtape sharing to the 'net at Muxtape.com. The site was built by Justin Ouellette, and early mixes have been uploaded by Jakob Lodwick (of Vimeo) and Patrick Moberg (of nygirlofmydreams.com fame). Muxtape is easy as pie: upload songs in mp3 format, drag and drop to organize, send the link to your friends.
Muxtapes hold up to 12 songs in a nice minimal layout (LARGE TYPE! CLICK TO PLAY! CLICK AGAIN TO STOP!). You can't download songs directly from other people's Muxtapes, which keeps the focus on finding good new artists to support. Justin says RSS feeds and m4a support are already in the works, so Muxtape should just keep getting easier.
CloudFire, a soon-to-be-released offering from the maker of p2p sharing application BoxCloud, is looking to revolutionize the way you share media.
Before CloudFire, if you wanted to share a file with a friend or family member, or access that file on the go, you would have to upload the file to a media sharing site. CloudFire skips the laborious uploading process and allows you to share your media files directly from your desktop or media application (such as iTunes or iPhoto).
This kind of media sharing can be classified as peer-to-web, because the recipient of a file can view them anywhere a browser and internet connection is available, even on a mobile phone.
Details are scarce for now, because the service has yet to launch. The website has some screenshots and snippets of information; as for the prestige, we'll just have to wait.
Hopefully our invites are coming soon so we can provide a more in-depth look at CloudFire. Or do you think we just drop the name Download Squad and get all the invites, like some celebrity at an A-list nightclub?
If you're tired of online storage services that give you just a gigabyte or two of space for your files, you might want ot check out Wuala. It's a peer to peer storage solution, which means that you can store a near infinite amount of data online just by freeing up some space on your own hard drive to host other users' encrypted files. Wuala is currently in private alpha, but we've got 500 invites to give away. Read on to find out how to snag one.
When you first sign up for Wuala, you'll be able to upload up to 1GB. Once you've demonstrated that you've got a high speed internet connection and that your computer is on for more than 4 hours a day, Wuala will let you allocate free space on your hard drive for hosting other users files. If you make 10GB available, you'll be able to upload 10GB of your own files. Sharing 50GB will net you 50GB of online storage. And so on.
The program interface is familiar and easy to use. It looks a lot like Windows Explorer, with a system of folders and file icons. You can easily create or delete folders just by right-clicking to bring up a context menu. And you can either upload files by opening an "Add Files" window or just by dragging and dropping them from your desktop.
WeGame.com is a social video sharing site that focuses on gamers and the games they play. The idea behind WeGame is that users can upload their own videos or use the WeGame client to capture game videos and throw them up for everyone's consumption. Unlike similar sites built around games such as GameVideos, WeGame is differentiating itself by putting all its emphasis behind user-submitted content.
By supplying a client for capturing game video that supports a decent number of games, WeGame makes it very easy to upload new content - even for people who might otherwise never post videos at all. And, with the right audience there to watch your latest replays, exploits, or you latest machinima creation, the incentive to post is high. Unfortunately, the client is currently only available for XP and Vista.
Of course, comments, embedding, and voting are all part of the site. So, if you've been digging around the net for game videos without getting the kind of social interaction you've been looking for, WeGame is for you.
YouSendIt, MailBigFile, and Driveway are great if you need to share a file that's too large to fit in an email attachment. But what if you want to share a bunch of files with a group of people? Sure, you could just keep sending out emails with that link, but wouldn't it be nice if you could set up a temporary web page where people could download files or view pictures, watch videos, or listen to audio online?
Drop.io does just that. You don't need to register or even enter an email address to create a Drop.io page. Just enter a name for your page (7 character or longer), and start uploading files. Generally, Drop.io seems to prefer videos, images, audio, and documents. We tried uploading an executable file and it promptly disappeared.
The site includes a Flash player that will let you access media online or you can click a download link to save files. The user who creates a Drop.io page can choose whether other users can edit the page or just view it. You can also select how long files will be available for, from 1 day to 1 year.
Looking for a sample invoice, lease, will, W-2 or pretty much anything else that can be saved as a document? Online document sharing company DocStoc has emerged from private beta. We got our first look at DocStoc last month, and the service is easy to use, and most importantly, useful.
There are over 12,000 documents online so far, and they cover everything from business plans to software tutorials. You can easily read documents online, download them, or embed them on a web page.
Like other user generated content sites, you need an account to upload content. But anyone can browse, read, download, and share documents that other users have uploaded.
If you'd asked us a few months ago whether we thought there was room for two Youtube-for-documents style sites, we probably would have laughed. But then Scribd came along and showed that people really are interested in perusing interesting documents online and embedding them in blogs and other websites. And then Docstoc decided to tease us with a similar site geared more toward professionals.
While you can find pretty much any sort of document at Scribd, Docstoc has a focus on documents that can help with work. For example, users have uploaded forms for calendars, budgets, leases, invoices, and tax preparation.
We first got a sneak peek at Docstoc a few months back. But now that we've had a chance to peruse the site ourselves, we have to say, it's incredibly useful for anyone who needs a ready made form or two. Need to send an invoice for work you've performed, but don't have a template handy? Docstoc users have already uploaded dozens.
There's also a social aspect to the site. Users can create profiles and leave comments on documents uploaded by others. You can browse through the most popular documents overall or within various subcategories.
Docstoc is still in private beta, but we've got a few invitations to give away to the first 5 people who respond to this post. The invites are time sensitive so you'll have to respond and sign up today.
Update: Congratulations to our 5 quickest commentors! We're all out of invitations. But stay tuned, we'll be giving away invitations to a few more cool services in the coming days.
Web-based list-creation service Blist has made a couple of changes recently, and the biggest one is "less a feature and more a philosophy." Because Blist is easier to demonstrate than it is to explain, you can now try Blist without an account. You can play with all the features, browser other people's Blists and even make your own -- you just can't save it.
