Microsoft not a one trick pony

Hulu - TV coming to a PC near you

Hulu.com. Is this just another YouTube clone? At first glance maybe but, if you dig a little deeper not so much. True, they have just started a beta but, from the looks it may be what iTunes really wanted to do with video. Instead of short clips, hulu will offer full length videos of popular shows from the major networks including: The Office, Prison Break, Heroes, My Name is Earl, King of the Hill, Saturday Night Live, etc, etc.. This could be huge! They have the backing of serveral big internet names like AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo.

The video player looks cool, a little iTune-ish with simple thumbs and descriptions. They intend to spend a lot of time developing a good experience. It also looks like it may just be for windows only to start. We'll have to see.

The beta has just started and their is limited content available but, hopefully in a few months they will have everything lined up and ready to take on the big boys.

Stay tuned..

Online Photo Resizing? mypictr

I suppose there is a need for this sort of thing but, I'm not sure how widely it's used. mypictr allows you to upload a photo and crop it. Then you download it to your computer and your done. They don't host the image so you can't link to it as your avatar or profile pic. So you'll then need to upload it again to the site you want it to appear. Here's the blurb from their site on why you should use them:

Imagine following situation, you are about to create a new profile at a new social network and the size of profile picture is limited to a custom width and height. You would probably search for a software which will allow you to adjust your picture to the right size. With mypictr you don't need to search for the software, all you need to do is to upload your large picture, pick a right size (or custom size) and download a smaller profile picture.

I suppose you can make that argument but, it's hard to not find "software" freely available, often coming with the OS, that won't crop an image. Even Microsoft Paint has easy enough tools to crop. So is this just a site to do something "because we can" or does it serve a real purpose?

thoughts....

Online photo editors, why?

FotoFlexor is another online photo editor similiar to picnik who I've written about before, and pixer, pixenate, Phixr, snipshot, etc, etc...

FotoFlexor is easy enough to use, you upload or bring your photos in from many online photo sharing sites. You can do color correction, red eye removal, color effects, spatial effects, actually most of the basic things you can do in PhotoShop. FotoFlexor even has limited layer support. Overall it's a pretty good site and I think I may even like it better than picnik.

So the first question is "why are there so many online photo editors?" First off they all written using Flash. And what does flash give us? Great image tools! Most of the image enhancements are just U/I to what Flash provides. Easy enough. Flash also makes it fairly easy to perform image processing so you can take the alogithms that have been around for years and whoola we're Photoshop, sort of. So it fairly straightfoward "nothing is easy" to build one of these sites. So point number 1: We can build it maybe someone will come.

The second question is "who is going to use these sites?" If you compare the sites side by side with Photoshop you'll notice that processing time is much slower on the websites, especially with large camera files. So if your going to do a large number of image edits the web isn't the way to go. If you already have to offload the files from your camera to your computer before you upload them to the web why not just use a photo editing app on your computer. Even if you don't want to shell out the $$ for Photoshop there are many inexpensive or free photo editors out there like GimpShop, Paint.Net or Pixelmator. Just use them.

So if it's not traditional digital camera users who would find it advantageous to use these sites who is it? How about all those crazy kids with their camera phones. They don't typically connect to a computer to share they photos they just use picture mail or the like. They basically are e-mailing their photos to myspace pages, facebook or mycrappywebpage.com. Those camera phone photos in nightclubs with low light are notoriously horrible. So that's the market. Not Soccer Mom's with little Timmy's photos. It's punk kids with crappy photos of some girl they are going to tell all there buddies is their secret myspace friend. And they REALLY need to touch up that photo.

So maybe all these companies are writing these online photo editors in the hopes of getting bought by a Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, aka the GYM business plan.

Hum, maybe I should write one of these....

AntStorm - Google Search of the People

Everybody knows and generally loves Google. We've all said it; Have a question? Google it. Want to find out about someone? Google them. Blah blah blah... Yes Google is a great search tool for very specific look ups like "adobe photoshop". But, try something like "best free photoshop tutorials" and I'm presented with pages and pages of tutorial sites that aren't free or are sites that reference tutorials of other sites. Sure "best" is a little subjective but, some of the tutorials I'm not sure could even pass as average. So after you spend a while digging through links and lists of links you finally come up with the 4 or 5 sites that have some really good information. Whew! thanks Google but, that was a lot of work on my part to find what I wanted.

What is there was a way to save your search results so that others could take advantage of your work? That's where AntStorm comes in. Want to know the best places in Austin to mountainbike? or study Japanese? Better yet create your own results pages (aka trials).

So that's all well and good by why would anyone take the time to save their search results. We're all in a hurry! The site is setup so you can receive a percentage of ad revenue from people viewing your search results. Seems fair, you did the work.

It looks like the site is just getting started so I'll check back in a while to see how it's going. I LOVE the concept if they can make it work. Better get those ants moving.

Fav.or.it a blog mashup

This looks like a cool concept. Fav.or.it appears to be the latest site in the digg and del.ico.us genre.

It's still in beta but, from reading the press they are building a blog mashup that will enable you to view content you are interested in matching various criteria. They are also building blog posting so you can write your own blog or comment on other blogs without going to the hosting site. There will be community aspects to the site but, they don't appear to be described yet. Perhaps you can share your mashup or comment on blogs. They are intially focusing on tracking 10,000 feeds of various popularity. I've submitted a few of my blogs for submission so I'll let you know how it goes when it launches.

Could it be a digg killer?

Cool Cartoons

This is a cool little site. Check out ToomDoo.com. If you ever wanted to create a comic strip this is the place for you. You can use one of their ready made characters or upload your photo. Then add word balloons, backgrounds, graffti, or other graphics to complete your strip. If you don't have an idea for your own comic strip then check out the most popular strips or books. Some are pretty amazing, others not so much but, there is probably something for everyone.