JyoNah

TokBox Shuts Another Door

On Tuesday, June 29th, TokBox sent an email to its members, informing them that come mid-July, the video messaging service they currently offer will be removed. Video Recording services that will continue to be offered are Video Invitations to a scheduled video chat (a premium feature) as well as leaving a recorded Video Message in the instance that another TokBox member doesn’t answer a video call. (a’la Voice Mail on your telephone)

TokBox, for those who are unfamiliar, is a flash based video communication web application, focused primarily on their video conferencing features – a service that competes with SkypeSkype, currently the popular downloadable desktop program for web based voice and video calls. Where the two branch apart is where TokBox offers up to around 20 people in a video conference, skype defaults to voice-only if the call has more than two participants. TokBox also offers a variety of media sharing sharing features, requires no download or instillation, then offers a variety of other features to their premium members.

This isn’t the first time that TokBox has elected to close down a service in the interest of their more lucrative ventures. In the past, TokBox was a rather more involved video community, complete with user profiles, video forums, video mail, as well as their video conferences.

When this was the case, I frequented the site because of the Public Posts, and found that others that frequented it for the same reasons were often around for us to all “hang out” in a video conference. Once the Public Posts were removed, my activity on the site dwindled. I only visited the site with any serious purpose any longer to use their video messaging services.

What the Changes Mean

What is noteworthy about TokBox’s announcment, is that they will continue to over the ability to leave a video message when someone does not answer a TokBox call. This begs the question, will you be able to call offline friends? Everybody with whom I exchange video messages has an account on TokBox, and I only sent the same message to multiple people on a very infrequent basis.

Of course, the likelihood is that these after-call video messages will not have quite as long recording times. I quite expect they will be seconds, at most a minute long. However, we will not know until the changes are made.

The Freebie

On Thursday, July 1st, TokBox VP of Marketing Mikey O’Brian moderated a Video Conference to discuss the changes. Present were a handful of TokBox users (many pleading for their favorite TokBox feature) Micky herself, and TokBox Lauren. Also among the conference participants was David Geller, the  Team Leader for Eyejot, a web service offering Video Mail which has thus far, competed with TokBox.

During the conference, David slyly threw an offer into the text field to provide eyejot’s $100/year Pro+ serivce FREE to to people migrating to eyejot from Tokbox. I quickly inquired how one might be able to collect on this offer – at which time he and Micky agreed to meet about the potential of this arrangement at a later date, while Micky made jokes about doing business in front of the community.

While We Wait

Now what we get to do is wait, with baited breath, to see what happens. In the meantime, a TokBox recording widget is embedded below, so record a video message while you still can. If you don’t know what to say, just tell me – are you going to miss TokBox video messages?

Did you use TokBox video messaging? What are you going to do once its gone? What do you think of TokBox’s decision to remove their service?

Or at least, thats what it sounds like when you read what is pictured bellow.

Add Anybody as a Friend?

I first encountered this window when reading through a FacebookFacebook message thread concerning a party we were trying to plan. (And boy has that been a pain.) I noticed that the party planner, who had initially sent out the message, included the E-Mail address of a friend who did not keep an account on Facebook. Right next to his address in the “To” field of the message was a link that said “(add as friend)”

The message seemed to indicate that I could set up a sort of proxy-profile for this friend of mine, even if he didn’t want me to. Asking for a full name, email address and birth date. The birth date I found a rather peculiar thing to ask for. I hardly know any of my friend’s exact date of birth – that’s something I usually rely on Facebook for. Though I suppose it may have to do with the legalities of facebook usage and age.

Facebook has been pretty flippant with people’s privacy lately. Concerns over their new Open Graph launch have been expressed in nearly every corner of the bloggosphere, to the point that some are deactivating their Facebook accounts. What are these people going to do if their friend’s just end up adding them back?

Rusty the Tape Dispeser

I experimented with the feature using my friend ‘Rusty” the Tape Dispenser as a test subject. (For those of you who have been concerned, no. The images above do not indicate a real person.) I sent a test message to both myself, and Rusty’s email address. I saw the message pictured above, and Rusty got the following email:

On my end of things, in the message, I saw the option to add the email address as a friend – just like before. (I had looked for the option to do this elsewhere on the website and couldn’t seem to find it.) I clicked on the link, and filled out Rusty’s information. (Rusty is a 20 y/o Italian tape dispenser) When I was done, I was informed that “Rusty Bensen” had been added to my friends list. That’s when Rusty got THIS email:

I set about searching for what impact adding Rusty to my friends list had on Facebook. A search for the name “Rusty Bensen” returned NO results. When I tried to send a message to Rusty by simply typing in his name, I got nothing. I even went to try and tag a photo of him, but got no result:

So in the end, it seemed like adding your friend to Facebook was just a fancy way to get people to send invitations, but with the way Facebook has been going, you never know.

What about you?

If this feature worked like it initially sounded, would it be something you would use? Are you okay with Facebook’s recent changes in privacy?

The overwhelming fact is that this “Social Media Thing” isn’t going to go away, and even though its not the miracle some people think it is, not keeping your business present online is less and less of an option, and more and more of a necessity. This can leave a small business owner in a rather tight spot.

Cockamamy Consultants:

For just over a year now, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time guiding a friend of mine through maintaining branded accounts on a handful of social networks. She realized, like many business owners have, that she didn’t quite know what to make of the Social Media Boom, and how to take control of the tools that were provided to her, so she sought help.

Two or more months ago, her seek for advice got her twitter account deactivated. A friendly and frequent customer wanted to lend a helping hand, and directed her to a program he believed would help her broaden her audience on the micro-blogging platform she was just starting to get ahold of. The program, once given her TwitterTwitter credentials, searched for and followed other Twitter users on her behalf.

Such Auto-following activity is against Twitter’s Terms of Service, and when Twitter noticed that she’d followed almost 1,0o0 members in less than a day, they deactivated her account. ( A good rule of thumb when it comes to twitter, if it doesn’t seem like something you could do yourself – don’t do it.)

We got her account back, and I spent a good part of the next month spending an hour or two every so often going through and unfollowing people she didn’t need to be following. Her password was changed, and she now knows better than to do such a thing again.

At this time though, my friend anxiously pointed something out to me. When it came to Social Mediasocial media, she wasn’t completely certain what she should be doing, and she had to depend on the advice of others, but whose advice was she supposed to trust?

In Summary:

Social Media seems like such a simple task, that the industry is polluted with those who may have less of an idea what they are doing then they would have you believe, or even believe themselves. Its important to be sure that the person you’re taking advice from has a good idea what they’re talking about, and even more important if you’re considering them for hire.

What You Can Do:

The best way to learn is through experience, so hopefully your questioned professional has their own social presence. Ask for links to your professional’s own profiles, and give them a read through. Even if you’ve never had an account on the site you’re looking at, or you don’t understand some of the Jargon, you should be able to use these profiles to create a picture of what kind of person your professional is. Trust your instincts, but don’t make the self assessment your full assessment.

You’re bound to know a few people who have a little better grasp on the communities of the Web than you do, send those same links to a trusted few friends, and ask them what they think.

Do many of you run into people like the ones described here? What would you advise someone like my friend the Coffee Shop Owner to do?

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UPDATE: Grooveshark is now also available as an iPhone app on jailbroken iPhones. (Not available in the App StoreApp Store)

GroovesharkGrooveshark is the most exciting web-app I’ve come across in a long time. I discovered it a long time back at the suggestion of a friend, who compared it to PandoraPandora. Pandora – which has been around for five years – asks you to tell it songs and musical artists you like, and then plays music it thinks you might like as well by comparing the information you gave it to The Music Genome Project.

Thinking ‘Out of The (Pandora’s) Box’

Grooveshark is essentially a web-based audio-focused media player, with a library of music that is comprised of .mp3′s uploaded by Grooveshark’s userbase. In effect, grooveshark has almost every song you can think of, whether popular, obscure, new, or old. Each song is offered for sale by linking to the song on Amazon MP3 and/or iTunes.

In Grooveshark, you can upload your library of music, and then build upon it, collecting music from Grooveshark’s database. This library is kept for you in your User Account, and you can access if from any internet capable computer (as well as a desktop, and Android App)  You can collect the best songs in a separate area of the website by adding the songs to your Favoritesfavorites, and create playlists.

Artists

Radio

Very Important Person

As a Grooveshark VIP, a user has access to the desktop application, and the mobile application. The desktop application lets you use grooveshark without needing to keep your browser open, and the mobile application can be installed on Andriod and Blackberry phones (some exceptions) and brings all the features of Grooveshark to your palm. Grooveshark also recently released an iPhone application, but this application is only available to those with a jail-broken iPhone.

Whenever Grooveshark is working on a feature VIP users get to use it first. My favorite VIP feature is a button that lets you pick a genre of music to listen to, and Grooveshark Radio will play music that falls into that genre.

Grooveshark’s Themes also open up to a VIP user. Where as unpaid users have a selection of three or four themes, VIP users have free reign over the entire selection.

When Grooveshark is used as a free service, the right hand side of your screen is taken up by rotating banner ads. As a VIP member, these ads are no more.

Need clarification? Have a Question? Log in with FacebookFacebook or Twitter and comment below. Tell me what YOU think of Grooveshark, or if you use something else, something better?

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Something I Liked

About a week ago I started receiving some rather curious device updates from twitter. That day I had been suffering from my springtime allergies and couldn’t understand why-it was the middle of January! Miserable, I complained to TwitterTwitter. Later on, my phone buzzed and I was presented with a text that was the following tweet from my friend Jaculynn

I had been tested for allergies twice in my life, but I’m actually not certain if either time mold or fungus was tested for. I snapped my phone shut, returning it to my pocket, and gave this possibility due consideration. Even though I was pretty sure of both that I wasn’t allergic to Mold or Fungus, and that had discovered the culprit already. (The weather had been uncharacteristically warm recently, and the trees had been tricked into blooming.)

A moment latter a thought me double checking that text, suspecting I had mis-read what it said. While it seemed like the kind of thing Jaculynn would say – I hadn’t elected to get device updates from her. Sure enough, it was Jaculyn that the tweet had come from. Now THIS is when I got excited.

Something Just Right

I had always wanted to get device updates for @Mentions. Since the early days of my Twitter use, I wondered why in the world such an option wasn’t available. Once a friend of mine (we’ll call him Kenan) tweeted something that both myself and another of his friends (we’ll call him Jordon) responded to.

The difference between myself and Jordon is that Kenan had elected to get device updates for Jordon a long time ago, whereas I had only met Kenan (as well as Jordon) recently, and so Kenan didn’t get device updates for my tweets. Kenan and Jordon then continued to converse – while I watched – and my reply was ignored, because Kenan didn’t know about it.

This is of course only one example, similar situations have many time occurred in different context. It wasn’t only for the sake of not leaving people out that wanted an option to get an SMS for every @Mention that was tweeted. I also had the personal desire to be able to answer every tweet more or less the moment it came my way. When people had something to say to or about me it was important to me, and I wanted to make sure they knew that by getting a timely reply.

Once, I worked up an alternative, but it didn’t work out so well.  I created an account at Notify.Me and had it send me SMS notifications for every new item on the  RSS feed I created using Twitter Search of tweets containing “@JyoNah.” The problem with that was that an essential bit of information was missing from those notifications; they didn’t include the name or twitter handle of the tweeter. Effectively, it didn’t work, and I was left hoping that Twitter would answer my prayers.

Something Gone Wrong

Just a few short days – if not a few short hours (I didn’t exactly keep track of it) after the device update from Jaculynn, my new favorite thing about SMS updates was no longer happening. Tweet after Tweet, people where including “@JyoNah” – but my phone didn’t buzz. I was disappointed – but not devastated, and after a short bit I moved on with my life.

It was a few days later that I encountered this update on status.twitter.com

It turned out that my favorite new feature wasn’t in fact, a bug. All I could think of – beside my amazed amusement - was to question WHY they had not implemented this as a feature yet. How has someone at Twitter not seen the benefit?

Shouldn’t they? Wouldn’t you find such a feature useful?

If you think @Mention device updates are a good idea;

use the hash-tag#BringBackTheBug or Copy the following and tweet it:

I think @twitter should #BringBackTheBug. Give us @Mention SMS updates. http://bit.ly/8RUuUA

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Written and Published by JyoNah (Jonah Price)

FacebookFacebook can be an INCREDIBLY useful social utility, but for all its potential it can be hard to figure out. Fortunately, there are little things you can do to help make the chaos a lot easier to manage.

Don’t Want to Go

The Facebook Events application is great. Its a nice, easy way to let all your friends know about an event you’d like them to come to, and if you’re feeling like the whole world might as well attend, all your friends have to do is invite all of THEIR friends and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, when you want to share an event, its easier to invite everybody than to sort through your friends-list and only invite the people you think would be interested. This means that quite often, we get invitations to events we don’t even care about. Sally’s party that you can’t make it to is one thing, but “Inform those in your life who are dumb to never reproduce” day is another matter entirely.

Don’t Want to Know

Clearly, “Yes” and “Maybe” aren’t the way to get rid of this, but clicking “No” isn’t going to completely make it go away either. You’ve been invited, and this event is now on your Facebook calendar, and every event on your Facebook calendar will show up on your Home-Page in the “Events” section starting three days before the event occurs to the moment it ends.

To prevent this, take a look a the blue text beneath the “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe” buttons. The little blue hyper-link there reading “Remove from my Events” will remove every scrap of that event from your Facebook experience.

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Like this tip? Click on the “Share” button at the top to post it to Facebook and tell your friends, or click on the “ReTweet” button to send a link to your followers on Twitter.

Recently, GoogleGoogle made some changes to its search by changing a few of the factors that determine the order of the results of a search. (Prior to this change, I actually used to be the top result when searching “Jonah Price” now however its some Lawyer with a relatively empty ‘profile‘ on his law firm’s website.) Fresh from this big – though probably un-noticed by Joe Schmoe – change, Google is going to do it again, and this time Joe is going to know.

Google is going to modify its interface! They’ve mixed things up on the Home Page, and added a sidebar to the search results. Using the method published by Gizmodo and then republished by MashableMashable I was able to test out these changes.

WARNING: Changing back to the old interface requires certain technological skill.  If you don’t feel comfortable with the idea of manually creating and deleting cookies, I’d advize you avoid experimenting with it. (Mashable’s guide includes instructions for undoing the changes, Gizmodo’s does not.)

The Home Page: In Yo-FACE!

The change of Google’s home page was what most shocked me; everything I’d read about the new interface talked about the results page I’d heard nothing of any modifications to Google’s starting location. With my cookies modified to alter Google to show me the new interface, I was presented with the following:

The search box is thicker from top to bottom, and shorter from left to right. The Google Logo is flatter, and has lost its drop shadow. And the buttons, which Google had recently begun to de-emphasize are now much LARGER, bold, and blue.

Google’s home page has rarely gone through such dramatic changes. Most any modification has always been as subtle as the over-all design it self, what happened that Google decided  to get louder?

Search Results: The Sidebar

Enter your Query into the search box and press enter; in the new Google interface your search results come up along the right side of this side-bar. Selecting “More” expands the side-bar to include options such as Blogs, Newsnews, Videovideo, Maps, Shopping, etc. Selecting any of these options modifies the search results to only include the content indicated by your selection.

Each category is accompanied by filters that show up at the bottom of the side-bar. “Everything” provides a filter that will omit results out of a certain time frame. “Videos” has filters for video length, film quality, closed captions, as well as time frame.

Nothing in the sidebar is new functionality, but it is perhaps, a little bit more useable. The likelihood of a casual Googler coming across these search tools is much larger in the format of this sidebar than in the old interface, where the options where a little less obvious, and took more clicks to get to.

Beta Blues

The new Google interface is right now only a test verision – that Google hasn’t even officially released – and as such, things aren’t streamlined. The “Images” and “Maps” categories on the sidebar currently direct you to the corresponding page in the old interface, but simply returning to the home page will get you back to the new interface.

Other Differences

There are a few minor differences at this point between results in the new interface and the old one, most of which are features from the old interface not carrying over into the new one. For instance, the video search results page has always included an embedded player on the right side of the page, used to play the discovered videos without leaving Google. The new interface no longer has the embedded player, but instead has Sponsored Links. The news results had a collapsed categories selection in top left of the typical results page. The new interface gives no categories selection. Of course, just because they aren’t there now doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t plan to implement them before its release. All we can do is wait and see.

What do you think? Is the new sidebar going to make your Googling a little easier? Is the new feel of the Home Page an improvement? Have you tested the new Google yourself? Leave a comment below.

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Wednesday, it was reported on MashableMashable that HuluHulu – the web service that popularized television on the internet – was Flirting with Music Video

Norah Jones it seems, can now be found – among Saturday Night Live, Glee, Dollhouse, and Desperate Housewives – on Hulu.

As an avid supporter of Hulu, I was happy and excited to see such a great service expanding like this. Though I wasn’t exactly a big fan of Norah Jones – I wasn’t exactly sure who she was – I eagerly clicked play on the video embedded underneath Mashable’s story.

I found myself immediately disgruntled at being presented with – instead of the music video I was expecting, – a thirty-second advert. Blinking in surprise I realized that I should have expected this. Hulu was all about Ads. After years of illegal and ad-free content on the web, Hulu was the one that started bringing the content to the web legitimately, paying for it all with ads.

Yet there was something unsettling about having my, two-minute long video prefaced by something I didn’t want to watch as long as a fourth of what I DID want to watch. The simple act of including a commercial was completely altering the experience of a Music Video.

After watching a few videos I found that the experience wasn’t always exactly the same. Sometimes the ads were 30 seconds, at other times 11 seconds, and even sometimes 4 seconds. The shorter times – the 4 seconds especially – were much more bearable. Still, I think the consumer of music video is much more used to the instant gratification of the play button.

What do you think? Will Hulu be successful with Music Video? Do you think the ads will prove to be a problem?

This video is powerful, and I’d rather let it speak for itself.