If you're social life won't be complete until you're socially connected to David Hasselhoff, I have some good news for you. Now you can sign up to be one of the Hoff's 15,000 closest friends by joining his social network HoffSpace. Woo.
Free membership on the site gets you your own home page, and access to Hasselhoff's media collection of pictures and videos (though I'm guessing not this one.) You'll also be able to read Hasselhoff's blog, shop for personalized gifts, and chat with his adoring fans worldwide. There's even a page filled with ringtones and wallpapers for your mobile phone.
I know you're probably thinking this has to be the oddest social networking site ever created. Probably not.
TripSay is hard to explain. It combines travel information, social networking, maps and reviews of places. As someone who enjoys traveling, I think it has potential.
Basically, you log in to TripSay and build your world by entering places you have traveled. Each place you enter can get a rating from a smiley face to a butt (really!) and a short tip or comment for which you can, thankfully use more than 140 characters. You can join groups with similar travel interests like a particular place or type of travel.
Based on your rating of places you will get recommendations on the map that match what you have indicated you enjoy. Most of my recent vacation have been to beaches, so the majority of my recommendations were for beachy places. Tripsay uses a recommendation engine to generate your results.
If you want to look for something different, you can click on different icons on the main map to see mountains, shopping, cities, etc. that have been rated by other users.
TripSay calls itself an intelligent social network (that) delivers highly targeted travel information, recommendations and tips based on one's unique preferences and social network.
I think if TripSay gains a large user base and lots of information it could be really useful to find interesting restaurants and out of the way places that guidebooks don't cover. But, it will really depend on the amount of users the site attracts.
I've been hanging around Download Squad HQ enough to know that our readers love hearing about Twitter ad nauseam, and that none of those readers fear being RickRolled or ever click on links originating from profiles they wouldn't trust. But just in case you should happen upon this post from an outside source, and you aren't a regular DLS reader (gasp), there's something you need to know.
The BBC reported today that the first Twitter-specific attack has been discovered by the fine folks at Kaspersky. The fake profile uses the name "Pretty Rabbit" in Portuguese -- and it's frustrating me to all ends that I can't seem to find a reference or semi-accurate translation of what that user name might actually be -- and claims that clicking the tweeted link will take the viewer to YouTube for some adult video action.
But because there is so much wrong in this world, errant clickers don't get to see the adult video -- at least, not without paying the price. Instead, a fake version of Flash is downloaded, which has the hidden skill of harvesting all sorts of data and transforming your beloved Twittering machine into a zombie node, allowing bad men, women and rabbits to wreak criminal havoc all over the web.
Similar worms have been discovered on MySpace and Facebook, so please, choose your friends wisely.
The offending malicious applications only affect Windows-based systems. No word on whether the faux-Flash works with Linux or Mac, so while those users (who are over 18, of course) are safe from the malware, they will probably not get to see the exciting video Pretty Rabbit in Portuguese was referring to.
UPDATE: On behalf of everyone at DLS, I'd like to give a big thanks to Ed Mercer for the heads up that though the Portuguese username literally translates "Pretty Rabbit," the word "coelhinha" is often associated with Playboy Playmates/Bunnies. "Pretty Playmate" may be a more accurate translation in this case.
We haven't written much about Dopplr, a social network for travelers, since we talked about its launch last year. If you're a jetsetter, or even someone who travels a couple of times a year and has a lot of friends, we'd like to direct your attention to the new features in Dopplr's "Copenhagen" release, which has been out for less than a month. The key improvements include the ability to add trips by e-mail, Twitter and SMS, and the introduction of public profiles.
These new methods of adding trips are a followup to the iCal and Google Calendar support that Dopplr added earlier this year. Now you can either automatically update your Dopplr by updating your calendar, or you can send in your trips in almost any way you could wish for, short of mental telepathy. Public profiles mean you can show your trips to anybody, not just your Dopplr contacts, and choose how much information you want to share. At this point, we're basically looking for excuses to travel, just so we can use Dopplr.
Twitter is a vast network of individuals posting about all sorts of different things. Take for instance this very second, members are posting about cupcakes, the military, Ferrari, mobileme, the Olympics and much more. But these topics change so quickly you would be mad if you tried to keep up with them yourself. Thankfully, Twitscoop has automated this process so that you can continue to sit in front of your computer staring endlessly at other people conversation.
Twitscoop works by monitoring all the publicly available tweets out there and measures the frequency of the words used. The more mentions of a subject the more popular it must be.
Twitscoop then places them in alphabetical order in a Tag Cloud, the more popular the word the larger it is compared to the rest in the cloud. Mouse over the tag to find out who is talking about what, click on the tag and it will take you to a graph that will display the frequency of the topic along with the users. With all of this information available, you'll be one well informed Twitter!
In our time with using the site we only had one gripe with it, the lack to sort the cloud via the size of the tag. This is only a minor complaint really but something that should be added for those of us out there that like a little order in our lives.
Everybody that has a web-enabled phone and a thing for online interaction in lieu of actually having in addition to a social life knows that the biggest social networking sites are but a few keystrokes away at all times via mobile websites. Of course, even mobile-optimized web applications can be sluggish or glitchy sometimes, since they could potentially be affected by dozens of things like browser incompatibilities or updates. Luckily, smartphone users have an alternative: native application for their phones that talk directly with the service without a web browser getting in the way.
Facebook seems to be one of the more popular mobile websites, which makes it a relatively good candidate for a smartphone application written. Palm seems to agree with this, since the company released Facebook for Palm for their smartphones last month.
Facebook for Palm sports a relatively intuitive user interface, with its five-tabbed home screen; it seems matches the new phone interface included with the Treo 680 phones. The five tabs let you navigate to the Photos, Status Updates, Contacts/Friends, and Mail pages along with your Home page news feed quickly. Of course, the feature that sets Facebook for Palm apart from the regular mobile version of Facebook is the ability to quickly and easily upload pictures and videos to your Facebook profile. You can also easily search through your Facebook contacts and dial or text message someone who might not be in your phone's contact list already.
Facebook for Palm is supported on the Centro, Treo 755p, and Treo 680. However, rumor has it it'll work on your 700p as well, if you select the 755p version for download.
Planning a vacation always starts with one thing... where to go. You could always ask a friend or a family member for their suggestions but then you would be only limited to where they've been. Tripwolf hopes to change that with there social travel website.
There are different ways you can use the site, if you already have an idea of where you would like to go enter it in the search box and Tripwolf will display the location along with places of interest, photos, videos and reviews by members of the site.
But the strongest feature of the site are the Trip Gurus. The trip gurus are self-proclaimed experts in their chosen areas of travel. Simply ask them a question and most will respond back with helpful suggestions.
So if you're thinking of planing a trip you might want to see what Tripwolf has to offer.
With all the social networking sites out there it's hard to keep track of who's on what site and what are they doing. Whoisi is attempting to bring everything together so that keeping track of your friends doesn't feel like a second job.
Just enter their user name and have it added to the whoisi database. From there add them to your "follow" list and every time you visit the site it will display their latest activities. Keep in mind that once added, anyone can follow them from the whoisi site.
An interesting feature of whoisi is the ability for anyone to edit information about any user. You can add additional sites that this person is a member of or delete the site. Currently whoisi supports information from Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, LinkdIn and rss feeds.
Once you get over that whole privacy thing of anyone can add you to the site, the convenience of being able to follow all your friends on a simple website is quite appealing.
TwitterCounter has one simple purpose in life, to give you a counter to display the number of people that follow you, from Twitter, on your website.
Just enter your user name and TwitterCounter will display the number of people following you over a seven day period. To display the updating counter on your website simply copy the available code and paste it to your site for all to see.
If you're really into your Twitter stats, enter your email address to receive daily updates. Because we all know you're only a few followers short of that elusive number one spot!
Timelines are a great way to provide an overview of events. But what's even better is a timeline that generates content automatically based on information you probably already have.
Dipity takes automated timeline creation to a new level. If you have (and quite frankly who doesn't) a Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, YouTube, Twitter or any of the other supported social networking site just enter in your user name, URL or an RSS feed and dipity will do the rest.
You can view your timeline in years, months, weeks or even one day. Dipity also let's you rate your events so that those with higher ratings are displayed more prominently than others with lower ratings.
You're free to embed your timeline on your own site or list them on dipity's searchable directory.
If you ever wanted to see your online life sprawled out in front of you, dipity is one way to go about it.
Goodreads is a social networking site dedicated to book lovers everywhere. Here you can post up books you've read or are planning to read on your virtual book shelves and get book suggestions based on what others have reviewed.
Like any good social networking site, your experience here is only as good as the number of friends in your network. If you don't currently have any friends (on the site that is) try searching for a book that you like and see whose reviewed the book and what else they've reviewed. If you find their taste similar to yours, ask them to add you as their friend.
In additional to book recommendations, Goodreads also offers links to purchase books from sites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble and offers discussion areas where you can interact with other members.
So if you're looking to expand your reading library, you might want to give Goodreads a try.
Sites like Flickr and Photobucket already have services that let you build slide shows, MagToo takes it a step further by also letting you create great panoramic shots to share with others.
Creating a panoramic image does require some thought before you start uploading. In order to get a quality panoramic image, MagToo recommends that your photos overlap by at least 20-50% and that you try to keep the camera level as possible. Once you've uploaded the photos, it's just a matter of clicking the "Stitch Photos" button and letting MagToo do the rest.
The main issue we had with the service is that Internet Explorer is required for the creation of the image. Hopefully in the future, the developers will add content creation support for other major browsers as well.
It's no secret that Twitter goes down on occasion. But what are you gonna do if you just neeeeedto tweet?
The great minds at betaworks pondered that question as well and developed twitabit. A simple website that stores your messages and forwards them once Twitter is back up and running. Simply enter your username, password and message and you're off.
If you love Twitter so much that you haven't jumpedship, twitabit may be that life preserver you were waiting for.
Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the concepts are pretty much the same. You follow someone with interests that intrigues you, see what their doing, what their saying and sometimes you do what they say. Now what if they told you where to spend your money, would you? Covestor thinks so.
Covestor takes the social networking formula and applies it to the stock market in a 2 part system. The first requires members with some sort of investment background (we'll call them experts) to build portfolios. The second has average users reviewing these members and if they like what they see, they follow them.
If these experts buy or sell a certain stocks, users get to see that and choose if they would like to buy or sell along side their experts. Covestor is currently working on a fully automated system as well. You'll just be able to put down a bunch of cash and the system will invest your money as your experts invest. Of course as an expert you get a percentage of the action, since people are following your advise.
So is this the next step in social networking? We already take advice on what to wear, where to go and what to eat. Why not take it a step further with having strangers tell you what to do with your money?
We mentioned Microsoft TownSquare today, the new offering from Microsoft for internal social networking and document sharing, and we have a screenshot for you to check out.
From what we can see it looks like you get a steady stream of activity based on employee which is really, really cool and helpful, along with an RSS feed to track the activity. From a project management standpoint, this is a huge.
We'll keep an eye out for more info and keep you up to date. Is this something you would want to use at work, or would it creep you out?