Larry Kless' Weblog: Social Networks

Showing posts with label Social Networks. Show all posts

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Facebook Goes Live, Partners with Ustream on Live Video Social Streaming

In yet another integration of online video and social media platforms, the social networking giant Facebook has just announced that they are offering live streaming on Facebook pages through a partnership with Ustream, the leading live streaming platform. The new Facebook social widget called the Live Stream Box was first demonstrated during some recent Jonas Brothers concerts but was officially released this past week in both a free ad supported version or a premium white label version version powered by Ustream's Watershed available for $15,000 primarily geared toward artists and brands that can pay the "one-time development fee" and a subscription to Watershed's monthly $879 plan. See the Ustream on Facebook FAQs for more information.

With the merging of functionality between social network platforms Facebook is starting to look a lot like Twitter or Friendfeed incorporating real-time status updates and shared links, photos and videos. While real-time chat is a common feature in live streaming applications, it's though the size of the Facebook community that makes the Facebook/Ustream partnership significant. The 2009 US Presidential Inauguration was a seminal online event and important moment for Facebook Platform marking the beginning of a new era in social streaming. Working with CNN Facebook tested a new feature that let people share Facebook status updates and comments side by side with real-time streaming video on CNN's website garnering over a million status updates in two hours.

On the Facebook Developers blog Tom Whitnah explained, "We realized how powerful it was to see what your friends were saying, not just on Facebook, but right in context on CNN.com. Users posted over a million status updates during that two hour event. Since then, we have worked with several established websites and entrepreneurs to show real-time updates next to live broadcasts, including the NBA® All-Star Game and many of the sites covering the Oscars®, and we've seen many other sites integrate similar features themselves such as Nana10 in Israel which hosted live broadcasts and their own live conversations using Facebook Connect during the Israeli elections earlier this year."

The Jonas Brothers event also had huge numbers according to Ustream:

1.5 million unique posts were made via Facebook Live Feed
23K average posts per minute
More than 100K users joined the webcast after seeing their friend’s comment on Facebook
974K total unique viewers watched the one hour webcast
Ustream reported the Jonas Brothers webcast on Facebook surpassed the largest live video event they have hosted for any music artist
Over 40,000 tweets were sent out about the event during the one hour webcast

The widget lets users who visit your Facebook site or application share activity and comments in real-time. Powered by Ustream, it works best when you are running a real-time event, like live streaming video for concerts, speeches, or webcasts, live Web chats, webinars, mass-multiplayer games, TV show or any video broadcast. The Live Stream Box is scalable, and according to Whitnah, it can handle millions of simultaneous viewers updating in real-time. He also said it's easy to install and takes just a minute to set up.

You can include a Live Stream Box anywhere on the Web, or within your Facebook Page, or a Facebook application. See the full instructions on the Facebook Developers Live Stream Box wiki page that walks you through the set up and adding Live Stream Box to your site or IFrame application.

In case you hadn't noticed, we're in the era of live social streaming and while the price tag is steep for a white-label version on the Live Stream Box it's clearly targeted at artists and brands like the Jonas Brothers who as Nicholas Carlson notes, "putting three dudes on a couch in front of a laptop doesn't cost a lot. Neither Facebook nor Ustream, which provided the video tech, sold any ads against the show, but there is good reason to expect they'll slap a pre-roll on the next Jonas chat."

CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Information provided by CrunchBase

CrunchBase Information

Ustream

Information provided by CrunchBase

Updated links and text: 6/28/09

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Robin Good's Best Video Conferencing Tools Mini-Guide

Robin Good has published a new mini-guide of the best videoconferencing tools, Best Video Conferencing Tools: Free, Low-Cost, One-To-One And Multi-Party Solutions - Mini-Guide - Robin Good's Latest News.

The videoconferencing apps mainly come in two flavors, browser-based and client-based. Most all run on Flash and require at least Flash Player 7 and others like Skype, iChat and ooVoo are stand-alone applications.

Most of them have similar functions with supporting a two-way video call, text chat, contact lists, scaling of windows and modest echo cancellation. Robin noted that many videoconferencing tools, "often integrate some complementary features, such as the ability to make VoIP phone calls, do screen-sharing, record sessions, transfer files, or whiteboarding." While many of those features are he added that premium services offer "pro features like better video quality, more participants, or advanced control and customization."

See his blog post for full descriptions and comparison tables of each product.

He used the following criteria to evaluate these tools:

1) Platform: Type of tool (software / web-based).
2) Video channels: Number of parties that can participate to a video conference at the same time (refers only to multi-party tools).

3) Public conference: Ability to make a video conference fully public.

4) Embeddable widget: Flash widget embeddable on web sites or social media sites.

5) Session recording: Feature to record your conference session for later review or publishing.

6) Text chat: Ability to text-chat other participants.

7) Other features: File transfer, screen-sharing, live annotation, whiteboarding, etc.

8) Pro starting price: Price and additional features of the first advanced pricing level.

Best Free and Low-Cost One-To-One Video Conferencing Tools

Best Free and Low-Cost Multi-Party Video Conferencing Tools

Honorable mention
http://www.dimdim.com/

This list was originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on April 6th, 2009 as "Best Video Conferencing Tools: Free, Low-Cost, One-To-One And Multi-Party Solutions - Mini-Guide".

Saturday, February 21, 2009

The Picture Production Company Creates Online Viral Marketing for the Watchmen Movie with The New Frontiersman.net

TheNewFrontiersman.net is part of the online viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Watchmen movie inspired by the right-wing extremist publication read by the main character Rorschach in the original graphic novel. It was launched in early January and I previously wrote about how the web site extends the narrative of the film through transmedia storytelling into highly populated social media sites like Twitter, Friendfeed, YouTube, Flickr and Digg. Documents, photos and videos are all aggregated on the web site uncover evidence in both the public and secret history of the Watchmen.

A number of the blogs had suggested that the Warner Brothers team behind The Dark Knight was driving the campaign, but the web site is being spearheaded by Dan Light, head of interactive at The Picture Production Company, for Paramount which is distributing the film internationally, outside the U.S. But that hasn't stopped it from getting plenty of attention from U.S. blogs and sites. Anthony Ha of Venturebeat spoke to Light who said, “I can’t think of another campaign that makes such economic use of these tools in such a cleanly integrated way.” Ha had noted that Facebook was omitted from the list of sites, which nowadays, seems like it would be the epicenter of any viral marketing campaign. However Light noted that, "Our implementation of Twitter and Friendfeed is very lean. We've kept it simple, and used the right tools for the right jobs."

The interest has been overwhelming with fans, both old and new, commenting on and engaging with the content. The PPC blog noted that the first video, an excerpt from a 1970 newsreel looking back on 10 years of Dr. Manhattan had been viewed 125,000 times within the first 24 hours and currently has 447,992 views. Flickr views and Twitter followers are growing as well and they were also excited to be featured on Epic FU. PPC Interactive had been pitching ideas for the movie five years ago were also thrilled that most of their original ideas are seeing the light of day.

Here are two more new videos from their promotional campaign.

Who Watches the Watchmen? - A Veidt Music Network (VMN) Special - 1983. Uploaded from BetaSP archive. Integrity in journalism... subscribe today! www.thenewfrontiersman.net

The Keene Act & YOU (1977) Government PSA on behalf of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Integrity in journalism... subscribe today!

So who watches the Watchmen? Something tells me a lot of people will be doing that in about 12 days. Stay tuned for more on the story behind Warner Bros Sponsorship of For Your Imagination's Watchmen Axis of Comedy Network and also for upcoming details on a special promotion of my own for readers of this blog.

Related:

Saturday, February 14, 2009

UNUSUALS A Business Utility for a Worldwide Commercial Film industry, Connecting Its People and Their Reels

UNUSUALS is a social network startup designed specifically with the commercial film professional in mind. It's designed as a business utility for a worldwide commercial film industry, connecting its people and their reels. With UNUSUALS you can create your own profile and make updates, anytime, safely store, share, and access your show reel in DVD quality, all in one private and professional place online. As a member your films will be available for your business partners to download and access the UNUSUALS' search engine which is built to cater exclusively to the commercial film industry to help you find jobs, hire crews, connect with other like minded production professionals.

You might ask, why another professional social network? I'm already on LinkedIn and Plaxo and don't spend much time there as it is? Do I really need to join another network?

As a former video freelancer myself I have many friends who are still freelancing on commercial and corporate productions who would greatly benefit from this sort of network, especially in these grueling economic times.

Here's UNUSUAL's pitch: One of the biggest challenges for the film professional is getting his or her reel noticed ; whether you're a director, actor, make-up artist, or grip. Until now, film professionals had to fraction their attention into various places online, with none of them singularly doing the job: Your IMDd profile lists the credits of associate productions and films, a couple things uploaded to YouTube, some other things brought together into a portfolio/book/clips website, some other things uploaded into Flickr or another site.

Even if people would regularly scan all these sites , none of these current solutions do a very good job of protecting copyright, privacy, and so forth. In addition, these previous array of solutions don't allow is the sort of high-quality, longer-form works that best show the quality of your work. Finally, UNUSUALS has come along offering what the others don't - a worldwide community of commercial film professionals and their complete, high quality reels on display.

I conducted an email interview with UNUSUALS Managing Director Nayer Paknia to get more detail about his networking site which follows below.

Larry Kless: Where the idea came from and how did you get started?
Nayer Paknia: The UNUSUALS team is made of directors, executive producers and producers with more then 10 years experience within the international commercial film world. We saw all the needs, problems with other existing sites, complications in the daily business & we wondered why no one puts all these services, which are very badly needed into one single site. At some point we thought: Let's just do it ourselves. We know what's missing. No one knows our users better than we do. Yes it is a big idea with lots of research, discussions, focus groups around the world. It took us 2 years to finish the concept only and offer something new. Something innovative to push the industry one huge step further.

LK: What's your main value proposition(s)?
NP: UNUSUALS is a business utility for a worldwide commercial film industry, connecting its people & their reels.

LK: Who is behind the scenes running the site? Who's sponsoring it?
NP: A big group of commercial filmmakers. 3 of us work full time for UNUSUALS now. And of course our programmers. So far our own private money. But we're interested to involve potential investors, just because we have many more ideas on how to expand the site but our budget is pretty limited now ;-)

LK: How are you marketing the site?
NP: So far we've used our own personal contacts. UNUSUALS launched in the beginning of 2009 and we already have 1200 members signed up. Most of them our own contacts. We're planning different marketing strategies. If the 1200 members are happy with the site, which they are so far, we're sure they'll help us to spread the idea, since this small industry is pretty well connected worldwide.

We'll use different blogs and other networks to reach the individual filmmakers around the world. We'll represent UNUSUALS in Cannes commercial film festival this year and cooperate with other companies through links & advertisement. Since we've already put lots of money into this site we cannot really focus our marketing into advertisement, which would be expensive. Besides we don't think that advertisement would really help us but rather word of mouth marketing.

LK: How are you monetizing it?
NP: We offer 3 different kind of memberships. Basic membership is and will always be free of charge. With a basic membership you can already do a lot. Present work, get connected, get discovered .. Standard and Advanced memberships cost a bit, because they include special services such as personal archive, UNUSUALS monster search etc.

LK: What's the short and long term goals?
NP: Short term goal: To get as many professional and good filmmakers, production houses, post production houses, sound studios etc. involved in commercial films into the database as possible. Within the next year UNUSUALS will be a place to find anyone in the commercial film industry. Not only their names and empty profiles, but also their films, spots, music clips etc.

Long term goal: We'll definitely expand our services for the advertising agencies. Because they're the ones who are offering jobs for companies and the companies offer jobs to crew members. So we've put together some good ideas for serving the advertising agencies.

LK: What other social networks are you engaged in?

NP: None. Because we're not really a social network. We're a business network.
If I want to communicate with my friends I use Facebook. But if I want to communicate with my business partners and get new contacts for my professional live, I use UNUSUALS. Our plan is to offer a separate place for networking with business partners. We don't like how these two different worlds get mixed up in Facebook. My business partners can see what my close friends say about me and tag my pic. on the wall. Facebook is great but we need to go one step further. But Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter will definitely help us to reach out to the filmmakers worldwide & inform them about the UNUSUALS news.

UNUSUALS is offering a 6 week free membership with access to all of the services on the site upon registration. Register with UNUSUALS now, free of charge, to get started.

For more information see the social media news release which explains everything: http://www.unusuals.net/smnr/

Visit UNUSUALS at http://www.unusuals.net

Update 2/15/09: Corrected some translation from German to English