I just got the message that facebook.com now has opened it’s doors for German students. Will this be a showstopper for the German Studiverzeichnis (which I reported on earlier)?
It might look like it, but not so fast my friends! First of all, Studiverzeichnis has an all German interface, and although many students these days are comfortable using English speaking websites, this still is a factor to reach the masses. And reaching masses they do at Studiverzeichnis - they just recently announced (de) that, technically, now every tenth student of Germany, Austria and Switzerland uses Studiverzeichnis (although they can’t be sure that only students are using the system, as there is no need to provide a school-email-address at signup).
Still, Studiverzeichnis has a dramatic lack of uniqueness - in other words: They still only copy Facebook, and they lack behind. Now they have to either speed the hell up, get their own face and their own unique features, or just sit and wait and hope that there will be enough people staying because they either already invested in setting up their account and do not want to do it again at facebook.com or just because they feel more comfortable with a German interface.
[tags]Studiverzeichnis, Facebook[/tags]
I got sucked in by the “we will reveil something really great at that day and time” last week by the ComBOTS announcement. Obviously. In the end, it looks like they want to be unifying some communications like they already kind of tried with freemail.de, but adding the Jamba element - means you can buy stuff like emotions - little three-second animations that replace emoticons with more colors, sound and bling. BUY EMOTIONS? COME ON!
And what is it with all those pseudo-buttons… “invitation only” - this website now looks like the makers have taken the current web2.0 design direction and just pushed too hard to be cool. And that FriendlyWare licensing? Use it as long as you want, only if you like it and use it regularly, you need to subscribe? Does that mean that if I do use it regularly, but not really like it, it is still free?
It looks like the stock market did not like what they saw either:
We won’t find out until later this year when they open it to the public - unless you belong to the small group of “Privileged Users” that have access to the software now. How stupid are they to tell everybody else implicitly that they are not privileged? Would it now have been more intelligent to just say “sorry, closed beta”? The Germans again.
All in all - I am disappointed of the way they go, but they are going for the masses, and the masses seem to like that stuff. Plus, they got > 1/2 billion EUR to make it work. That is some substantial push-power. It’ll be interesting to see how the masses really like it and use it once they open the doors for real.
[tags]ComBOTS, beta, Freemail, Jamba, IM, screenshot, German[/tags]
This piece of software has been on my “WANTED” list for more than half a year. The podcasting software Übercaster had its blog out as early as November of last year, and they teased with some amazing preview videos, but only now did they announce a definite date for the start of a public beta phase: July 24th. So far I have done all my podcasting with a wild mix of Audacity, Garageband and AudioHijackPro. They are all doing their job, no doubt about that. But when you want to do some more radio-style podcasting with playing soundclips and music on the spot, it gets rather difficult to set up (right now I’d need a second computer just for playback). On the PC there is Adam Curry’s baby Castblaster (which itself seems to be in forever-beta phase). It has an ugly GUI but it does exactly what I want (it will even integrate with Podshow+)… except for the fact that it is on the wrong platform. Übercaster is promising to do this, and more, with a really Mac-like GUI, and all in one - away with the multiple-application-after-another-approach that sucks so much, no more fiddling, just straight forward processes.
I will download Übercaster the day it comes out and then tell you about it. Stay tuned!
[tags]Übercaster, Ubercaster, Castblaster, Podshow, Adam Curry, beta, podcasting, recording, Audacity, Garageband, AudioHijack Pro[/tags]
This has not caught a lot of international interest so far - what a bloody shame. ComBOTS is the new company from the people who did web.de, one of the biggest German internet success stories, that was sold to united internet. Citing their website:
Everyday life in the digital world burdens us with thousands of unused photos on our hard drives, SPAM, trojans and viruses. The mix of e-mail, SMS, MMS, Instant Messaging, Voice over IP, web cams, video chat, attachments, online photos, web drives, mobile e-mail, push e-mail and spam protection is far too complex and a long way from being really fun.
We are about to change this!
Sounds promising, isn’t it! 50Hz just attended the press conference that precedes the public announcement at 3pm (GMT+1) today. He says (and I am freely translating here):
It is not hardware. It will be a huge mass of infrastructure. It looks cool when you dig manga comics. It makes communication easier, but only if you get all your contacts to use that system.
Well, that indeed sounds interesting. There’s one thing for sure: These guys have both truckloads of money at their hand and a massive knowledge base. I am really looking forward to see what they make of it.
[tags]ComBOTS, 50Hz, web.de, united internet[/tags]
When Adam Curry promised the launch of the long expected Podshow+, meaning the relaunch of his company’s website Podshow with a completely new feature set, for July 4th (Independence Day in the US), he was definitely not expecting his mother’s death just a day before - and hey, good things need their time.
The reason I write this is because what Scoble complains about - the use of flash on podshow.com - is in fact a side effect of the relaunch, AND what I think the best “coming soon” message ever written. What they are doing is showing little flash movies while they are getting the website straigt - with Adam looking if the website is up yet:
… waving at the people out there:
(both pictures taken from the website http://music.podshow.com/PDNswitch/)
… but there are clips from his staff in there, too - they seem to rotate.
I think this is a great thing to do. It is entertaining, it shows the user that they are currently working on it and that they don’t take themselves too serious. Love it!
For all who can’t wait to see what it will look like, go here.
[tags]Podshow, Podshow+, Adam Curry, Flash, Scoble, relaunch[/tags]