8hands
Similar MOGs' Top Songs This Week
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It was one of the coolest competition we had!
having to listen to soundscapes and micro sounds from a talented musicians from around the world was pure fun and interesting.
we would like to thank everyone who sent us their interpretation and sounds for our upcoming application.
we now have to finalize, hear them all again and decide what sound is gonna hit the charts! and of course will win the Theremin. we really hope you'll all gona like it!
The final results will be published here and in our MySpace page in the next few days.
here is a cool song we received from a cool guy named Eric Eisher
It's not a big secret that MySpace has become a huge spam swamp. I'm getting more advertisement comments and messages on my page than a popular blog gets Google AdSense. The underground feel that used to wrap MySpace in the past is total history now, and we're ready to leave our “parents' house" and move into a new place of our own.
In a proper web 2.0 spirit, why look for someone else’s community while we can build one of our own?
Ning is an online platform for creating social websites and social networks. The websites Ning offers are built with standard PHP and the platform itself is built with Java.
Ning offers almost every feature you need in order to build your own website, with unique tools for community services. It’s like taking blogs and platforms such as WordPress into a new level, while making every website into a community with friends, comments, messages and so on.
Among the features Ning offers you can find a full customization allowing you to add your own logo, branding and visual design. Email invitations, messages and notifications that are sent from your new social network share its look & feel. Ning also offers a variety of themes for your network and the ability to add custom CSS designs of your own.
Setting up your network is easy to follow and simple to use: within 5-10 min YOU ARE MySpace! Next step is to invite your friends and that’s about it.
This amazing platform was created by Marc Andreessen (of Netscape fame) and Gina Bianchini, and launched its service in October 2005. Ning already holds over 30,000 different social networks!
It is much cleaner, friendly and impressive than MySpace and I can’t see why it can't become the "next big thing" everyone seems to be looking for. Ning combines videos, blogs and photos in the easiest way and provides all the tools you need in order to express yourself – as a business website, an art related website or any other topic you can imagine.
One thing that is missing is a music player for bands and artists to upload songs. Although almost every band has a video in store now a days, in order to give the best alternative to MySpace I would expect Ning to provide a tool for musicians to upload not only videos but also music files.
And if you were wondering about Ning’s business model, here's Gina Bianchini's explanation on how it works:
“Every free social network created on Ning gets a quota of 5GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. This is typically more than adequate, however for an additional $9.95 per month, you can get another 5GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth.On free social networks, we reserve the right to run ads. If you want to buy that right from us and run your own ads - or have no ads at all - it’s an additional $19.95 per month.
There are a few additional premium services, such as masking your domain name which is $4.95 per month, and we plan on supporting the service with a combination of targeted advertising and premium services.”
If you need tips on how to create a good online community you can find it here.
Make sure to visit the 8hands Ning community at http://eighthands.ning.com/
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Myspace is pretty trashy. A lot of people at my school have Facebook instead. I like Mog, because you get the music talk you don't get on other sites.
I was about to write a nice opening for my next "User spotlight" column which will focus on the Twitter community. I knew exactly how I'm gonna write about the simple, naive and not too sophisticated interface for this cool and beloved community, that mainly just want to know what its friends or other people are doing.
My perception has started to change just from the beginning, when I found a cool Twitteret user that I wanted to interview, and was amazed by the fact that I've got no option, what so ever, to contact her. No option for a comment or message sending. Also, the "about" section is very very limited and you can hardly learn anything about the people you meet in the site. Not exactly a good start for making new friends in a community, so I thought...
Luckily enough, Lynn Wallenstein (a co-founder of Powered By Geek company) had a link for her website, where I've managed to find an email address to contact her.
While reading Lynn's answers, I finally understood that for many users (though not all of them), Twitter functions more like a cool gadget for your Google Talk and less as an inner online social community "I like the Twitter web interface, but I primarily use it through gtalk/jabber as I want the updates pushed to me" says Wallenstein.
When I asked Wallenstein to name 3 things that make Twitter a good community she said "I don't think Twitter is a community. A community implies that ALL the people on Twitter are all always talking to each other. Twitter has many little communities that overlap. I happen to be involved in the more geek/web designer circle in that those are my friends, we seem to all be talking to each other. I am sure there are many similar circles for other areas/regions. Twitter is a tool that facilitates a community..."
When looking at the wikipedia definition you see that Twitter is "an Internet service that allows users to post one-line summaries of their current state, and to view the current state of other users. It fulfills a niche somewhere between blogs and customisable status texts or display names in instant messaging applications." So why not build a community in the web? I mean, wasn't that was the whole "web 2.0" idea?
"I wouldn't use Twitter 1/1000 of the time I do if I had to check a web page. The IM integration is defintly my favorite Twitter feature" And what about other communities, are you a member in any of the other social networks? "I am a member of like every social network in the world, but Twitter, if you want to call it a social network, is the one I most frequent. I am always on Twitter... 24/7. With it pushing to my IM client I just work and read the messages as they come in. For me it is like working in an office with a bunch of people and someone yells out "hey check out X""
So I understand that your real friends (in life) are part of the Twitter community as well. "Yes, many of my real life friends are on twitter as well as many people I am going to meet at meetups and conferences are as well." If you could, what would you change about Twitter? "Better API Plus I would love to see new features like XFN integration as well as some sort of friend recommendation (8 of your friends have this person as a friend, you should add them, etc) as it is sometimes hard to track what conversations are going on if you are missing people. I also think an improved direct message, such as @screenname would go directly to them" Best line you ever read on Twitter? "redjac: Just saw a guy on the street beat a rat to death."
Your favorite Twitter user?
Changes depending on the conversation, but I think thus far my most "interesting" twitter friend is Christian Heilmann, partially because he posts so much, partially because his posts are usually in my field of interest and mostly because he is funny.
Now, I got to ask - Is it really that interesting to know what other people are doing at any given time? Definitely. It not only provides me a method of venting about whatever I am doing, but I pick up interesting bits of information from my friends. I have found a lot of cool things from twitter recommendations. And last one - What would you do if you had 8 hands? "One for the remote, three of typing, one to hold my coffee, one to thumb wrestle and two backup emergency hands incase of paper cuts." To summarize my Twitter little research I would say that users, especially the ones who use a lot of profiles in many of the social networks out there, won't spend much time in a community when you need to get and update your web page every time. I guess when it comes to profusion, communities must find a way to facilitate us, the users, and make it easier to keep us updated all the time with our online communities friends.
- originaly posted at - http://www.8hands.com/blog/
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whoooOOO! gO ERIC!!