Bill York's MessageStream

New MessageDance features -

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:12:47 GMT

Hello my friends! Check out why you haven't seen much of me lately . . .

Digital Media Sharing - on the Cream and Clear

March 5th, 2008 by Geoff · No Comments

Roundup: YouTube to Twitter, Photo-Blogging, Share Email Attachments & more.

We've been insanely busy at MessageDance the last few weeks adding features requested by our beta users. The enormous value we believe MessageDance will bring to the social media is starting to take shape. MessageDance is revolutionizing messaging by enabling a single publishing of content to be transformed and distributed to disparate end-points. Huh? OK, enough of the marketecture buzzwords. Share whatever you want — videos, photos, music, rich content, text — to where ever you want in your network — all from one message. We'll take it from there, transform it, and render nicely for its final destination.

Portable YouTube Playlist: all the way to Twitter: If you're into YouTube and want to share videos to your friends in Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, its ridiculously simple to do with MessageDance. Music-video-philes can even create and update a playlist and display it in their MessageDance widget. When you've found a video on YouTube, you just need to click on "Share" and put in your or your friend's MessageDance email address (or send to all of them using "friends @ messagedance.com"). It will go to all of the places you and your friends have MessageDance — this includes Twitter. I sent this video from YouTube.com and it went to my blog, Facebook profile, and Twitter. Clicking on the link shows the video rendered in MessageDance.com where my friends can make comments about it.

Photo-Blogging: I got an iPhone for my birthday and it really hit me as to how easy it is to share anything with all of my social channels. I can take a picture of something I see at the park and send it to my network of friends from my iPhone. You can even make a game of it. The next evolution of this is to have the easy-ability to reply or comment by photo. It's in the works.

Share Attachments: We believe in the future of email. It is easy to use and is an efficient way to transport messages and data. It's just being abused. MessageDance doesn't clutter your or your friends email inbox. We just use email as the vehicle to deliver digital media and share it in ways no other service does. One thing our beta users constantly ask for is the ability to share actual file attachments. Now you can. Send photos, images, music, videos, PDFs, Word, Excel, whatever you want as attachments and they can be shared with your friends.

And since the first release, you can embed and copy & paste in rich content into a rich email client (like Gmail!) and it will render in MessageDance.

The next few weeks you'll see some more stuff that will make your social sharing even easier. To reward you for reading this far, here is an unreleased feature that you can try (we're working on something sweet to make it better). If you're a MessageDancer and added us to Facebook, you can email photos to "photos @ messagedance.com" and we'll automatically drop it into your My Photos section of Facebook Photos. With Facebook, only cellphone users can upload photos using email, but with MessageDance you can use any of your email clients to send photos. Freeeeeeeedom!

Principles of economics, translated

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:26:35 GMT

Happy Chinese New Year

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:07:43 GMT

Welcome to year of the rat. Wikipedia says - "Being the first sign of the Chinese zodiacs, rats are leaders, pioneers and conquerors. They are charming, passionate, charismatic, practical and hardworking. Rat people are endowed with great leadership skills and are the most highly organized, meticulous, and systematic of the twelve signs. Intelligent and cunning at the same time, rats are highly ambitious and strong-willed people who are keen and unapologetic promoters of their own agendas, which often include money and power. They are energetic and versatile and can usually find their way around obstacles, and adapt to various environments easily. A rat's natural charm and sharp demeanor make it an appealing friend for almost anyone, but rats are usually highly exclusive and selective when choosing friends and so often have only a few very close friends whom they trust."

A long post

Bill York (wmyork) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:41:34 GMT

http://gawker.com/5002269/the-cruise-indoctrination-video-scientology-tried-to-suppress

You have to watch this video. It shows Tom Cruise, with all the wide-eyed fervor that he brings to the promotion of a movie, making the argument for Scientology, the bizarre 20th-century religion. Making the argument is an understatement. The Hollywood actor, star of movies such as Mission Impossible, is a complete fanatic. "When you're a Scientologist, and you drive by an accident, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you're the only one who can really help... We are the way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures." There's much much more. Let me put it this way: if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.

RDF cometh. This time in the form of Air

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:48:46 GMT

Reality distortion field is a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Inc. in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs' charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Mac project. Later the term has also been used to refer to perceptions of keynote (or Stevenote) observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products.

[Source: Wikipedia]

Infrastructure in India

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:21:24 GMT

Have you ever been talking to a CSR who is in India and have the line drop? The picture below begins to explain the challenge . . .

Pew Internet on Teens and Social Media

Brij Singh (brijsingh) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:36:11 GMT

Pew Internet research report on Teens and social media is out. Some interesting results -

Girls continue to lead the charge as the teen blogosphere grows; 28% of
online teens have created a blog, up from 19% in 2004.

The number of teen bloggers nearly doubled from 2004 to 2006. About 19% of online
teens blogged at the end of 2004, and 28% of online teens were bloggers at the end of
2006. Overall, girls dominate the teen blogosphere; 35% of all online teen girls blog,
compared with 20% of online teen boys. This gender gap for blogging has grown larger
over time. Virtually all of the growth in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006 is due to
the increased activity of girls. Older teen girls are still far more likely to blog when
compared with older boys (38% vs. 18%), but younger girl bloggers have grown at such
a fast clip that they are now outpacing even the older boys (32% of girls ages 12-14 blog
vs. 18% of boys ages 15-17).

The growth in blogs tracks with the growth in teens' use of social
networking sites, but they do not completely overlap.

Some 55% of online teens have profiles on a social network site (SNS) such as Facebook
or MySpace and those who have such profiles are much more likely to be bloggers than
those who do not have social network profiles. Two in five (42%) teens who use social
networking sites also say they blog. And, in keeping with the conversational nature of
social media, social networking teens are also interacting with others' blogs. Seven in ten
(70%) social networking teens report reading the blogs of others, and three in four social
networking teens (76%) have posted comments to a friend's blog on a social networking
site.

Online boys are avid users of video-sharing websites such as YouTube,
and boys are more likely than girls to upload.

Fully 57% of online teens say that they watch videos on video sharing sites such as
YouTube. Older online teens, especially older online boys (15-17), are more likely to
report watching videos on video sharing sites when compared with younger teens.
Online teen boys are also twice as likely as online teen girls to post video files (19% vs.
10%). Not even older girls � a highly-wired and active segment of the teen population �
can compete with boys in this instance; 21% of older boys post videos, while just 10% of
older girls do so.

Complete report in PDF.

I'm just getting warmed up

Bill York (wmyork) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:16:21 GMT

Let's see what MessageDance is all about.

Welcome to MessageDance!

Ask Sam (AskSam) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:58:57 GMT

Looks like you are ready to go! Check out this quick video.

Below are a couple of more videos about other cool things you can do with MessageDance. You can also check out our Help Section for the nitty gritty.

Blog from Email, YouTube, Facebook, Google Reader and more!

Sharing Videos to Twitter

Sharing Photos with iPhone to Twitter, Facebook, and more