A little bit like a slide presentation app and a little bit like Whrrl, Storybird brings ease of use and a captivating interface to the sharing of words and pictures online.
Using artwork from talented illustrators, Storybird allows users to create and display narratives of their own choosing. The site and its library of stories are currently particularly suitable for younger Internet and iPhone users. Best of all is the “story maker” section of the site, which allows users to drag and drop images, edit text, and create customizable stories to share with friends and family.
Collaboration is as simple as inviting others via email to edit a story. Users take turns finishing a story in a fashion reminiscent of storytelling games played by children with insufficient access to televisions.
Users can also create reading lists of stories for sharing and later perusal. Stories are rated for particular age groups, as well. Both of these features signal this site’s usefulness in the classroom… Read on at readwriteweb.com
Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into FacebookFacebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well. It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story. A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change. What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. FlockFlock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and TwitterTwitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for FirefoxFirefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well… Read on at techcrunch.com
A new Y Combinator funded startup called GraffitiGeo has just launched with a fresh spin on user-generated reviews. The mobile application is somewhat like a mashup of review site YelpYelp, mobile social network FoursquareFoursquare, and social news site DiggDigg. The Digg-like element of the application is the easiest piece to use: like that restaurant? Vote it up. You can also leave more detailed comments to go along with your vote, if you so choose. To encourage people to participate in the “game” aspect to the app, GraffitiGeo also introduces a point system whose concept is borrowed from mobile app Foursquare…but is a bit more confusing. What’s more interesting than the mobile application launching now is the second GraffitiGeo app which is right around the corner. The next app will be an augmented reality application for the iPhone which takes the above elements and layers them over your iPhone’s viewfinder… Read on at readwriteweb.com
Joshua Schachter is best known as the creator of DeliciousDelicious. But a few years after he sold it to Yahoo in 2005, he left the company and joined GoogleGoogle. Since then, he’s been known to speak his mind about Delicious’ overall direction (which he doesn’t seem to like), and it’s pretty clear that he still has the desire to create. And that’s exactly what he did tonight, quietly launching a new service he’s developed called a tiny thread. The idea is simple, take tweets and thread them together to form conversations, adding context. This works by using the a tiny thread site to both start new conversation threads, and add your comments to old ones. After authenticating via OAuth, your comment is then sent back to TwitterTwitter, with a link back to the a tiny thread conversation page… Read on at TechCrunch.com
Nambu Networks, the company behind tr.im, pic.im, and the Nambu social application for Mac OS and iPhone has announced that tr.im will no longer be shortening URL’s for the public. According to a blog post, the reason behind the decision is TwitterTwitter’s decision to use bit.ly for their URL shortening, as well as the cost for servers and development while there are many other solutions for URL shortening.
Nambu Networks will now focus its attention on Nambu for Mac OS and iPhone.
tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate… Read on at TechCrunch.com
When most of us have ideas, they get locked way in the portion of our brain where we house the “if only I had the time or the money to do this” spot. When serial entrepreneurs like Dmitry Shapiro (CEO of Veoh, iList/Spymaster advisor) have an idea, they just build it. And that’s the story behind the super new AddATweet. Shapiro says that he was tired of visiting sites like CNN and not being able to leave a comment without logging in, so he built a way to get around that using the browser and his TwitterTwitter identity. The idea took shape as AddATweet, giving us all an instantaneous way to leave a comment wherever we’d like… Read on at Mashable.com
I love simple apps. The fact that GeoChirpGeoChirp, the latest in the now quite long line of Twitter/Google Maps mashups, doesn’t even require me to register, is a plus in my book. And the fact that it does one thing – help you search tweets for keywords in a certain geographic area – and does it well, is an even bigger plus. It works like this: on top of the page you have a Google Map; enter any location, and choose a radius below, from 1 to 50 miles. Then, adjust the number of tweets you want to see – from 5 to 25, and type in a keyword. The result is a very useful app, if you know what you’re looking for… Read on at Mashable.com
Tweet your way to riches? That’s probably not in most people’s future, but a number of companies in the fast-growing Twitterverse are focused on helping users and companies leverage the popular microblogging service for financial or marketing success. For starters, there’s TweetROI, a service that pays influential Twitterers for spreading the good word about marketers’ products and services. In keeping with the social media theme, the last bit of the company’s name actually stands for “Return on Influence,” not “Investment”… Raed on at internetnews.com
Think about it: GmailGmail and by extension Google Apps are core products for GoogleGoogle, which is in essence a search engine company. XoopitXoopit enhances the search functionality of their web-based e-mail service. You’d think it’s a no-brainer for Google to go after the startup if they knew its management and investors were open to a sale. And if the selling price was really only $20 million, it’s not the money that would make Google think twice… Read on at TechCrunch.com
Yahoo, which has said it wants to add social features to Yahoo Mail, is in late-stage talks to buy social e-mail startup XoopitXoopit for roughly $20 million, according to a WSJ report, which cites unnamed people familiar with the situation (Kara Swisher says the company has been planning to announce the deal Thursday). Xoopit raised $5 million in a first round from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital last year. The startup’s FirefoxFirefox plug-in, which works with GmailGmail, lets users sort and search through files, photos and videos they have sent or received – and then easily share them on social networking sites or blogs. The company also has a similar photo browsing application for Yahoo Mail… Read on at paidcontent.org
A little bit like a slide presentation app and a little bit like Whrrl, Storybird brings ease of use and a captivating interface to the sharing of words and pictures online.
Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about 
A new Y Combinator funded startup called 
Joshua Schachter is best known as the creator of 