Category Archives: Web 2.0

Watch Full-length Episodes of NBC and Fox Shows at Hulu

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

Heard of Hulu yet? Well, you may have heard that NBC has pulled their content from iTunes and YouTube. So their plan was to create their own YouTube with their content and ads and social features. NBC’s original plan was to get other networks to join up and put their content on this site. The only one that did was Fox. Hulu is the result of their efforts.

It recently launched in beta, and I signed up to receive beta access to the site. Yesterday, I received a login to the beta website. The press has given NBC a lot of crap about this idea, and I have to say they deserved it. However, my first impression of the site is that it is pretty freakin’ awesome. The implementation is great! I’m watching the most recent episode on Family Guy right now. The video quality is great. They do force you to watch ads though, although they are fairly short, but the site is otherwise free to use.

I tested it out at work, and I felt the need to say make sure you have a fast connection. I have a faster connection at home than at work, and at work it was very jumpy because it wasn’t downloading it fast enough.

I haven’t really tested out many of the social features, but I will continue to play around with the site. It looks like you can pop out the video and play it in its own window. There is also a sharing feature and a feature to make the video play fullscreen. It also looks like the videos are embeddable. I played around with adding it to this post, and it worked but it was breaking the layout of the page so I left it out. It looks like a good feature though.

Hulu has current hit shows like The Office, Prison Break, The Simpsons, Heroes, and many more. You’ll also find a large number of classic television series, including Arrested Development, Miami Vice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The A-Team. In addition, they are including movies in the beta with an initial selection of feature films that includes Conan the Barbarian, Sideways and The Blues Brothers. What they aren’t telling you is that content is only available for five weeks. I understand that applies to new shows, but I’m not sure how that applies to older shows and movies. My question is with this time limit how are they going to handle the content expiration dates while the writer’s strike is on and there are no new episodes. Seems like they should get rid of the expiration date and use it to their advantage by telling people they can go online and watch back episodes while the strike is going on.

So far I think Hulu is great. Although I’m not sure how much time I will spend watching episodes I have already seen on TV, again on the web. It may be more useful if my friends are using it. Once it gets out of beta, NBC and Fox need to promote the hell out of it to make this work. Hulu is a huge gamble for NBC. Time will tell whether or not it pays off for them, or whether they should have stuck with iTunes and YouTube.

Tumblr, Twitter and the Social Web

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

Tumblr is a new web service similar to Twitter. When you set up an account, you create a tumblog. Anything you post to it, then gets posted to your tumblog. It’s similar to other blogging services in that, your account can be hosted on their site, or you can purchase a domain name and point that at your tumblog.

What makes it different from Twitter is that you can post more than just text. You can post a photo, a quote, a link, chat excerpts, audio or video. It is different from a blog, in that there is no way to comment on posts. There are also no other bloglike features like categories or blogrolls.

So if you already have a blog, Twitter account or a Flickr account, why do you need another service to post your stuff to? Well, you don’t really. But what interested me in Tumblr is aggregation. You can import posts from other services into your Tumblr account. Services that can be imported include Del.icio.us, Digg, Twitter, WordPress, VOX, Blogger, LiveJournal, YouTube or any RSS feed. So rather than post the same info to different services, you can post to each service, import to Tumblr and display everything in one place. What this means is that you can track me on all these other services, or you can track me in one place on Tumblr.

I created an account to try it out. You can see my tumblog here. I am still trying it out, but my first impression is that the import feature doesn’t work like I hoped. It does import posts to Twitter. I added this blog’s RSS feed so it should import a link to each post. I also added my Flickr feed to it. It doesn’t import any old info, only new posts, but it takes a really long time. It took over 6 hours to import the Twitter posts.

So my advice is just to keep using your other services, unless you want to aggregate all your stuff like I am doing. You might want to try making this your primary blog if you aren’t using any other services, but be aware that it lacks important blogging features. I do hope they will continue to work on Tumblr and improve it. I think it has a lot of potential to be a really good service.

Google Launches OpenSocial

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

Imagine having access to all your social networking data on other social networking sites. Facebook started doing this earlier this year by allowing developers access to publish social networking applications on their platform.

One of the complaints people have about Facebook, however, is that there is no way to get information from your profile and applications out of Facebook. Google is seeking to change that with the launch of a new set of APIs call OpenSocial. Today Google sent out a press release on Friday that is rocking the web 2.0 world.

It is titled “Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web.” OpenSocial is a set of APIs for building social applications for websites that want to add social features. Depending on how this is implemented, this could really impact social networking in a good way.

Soon you will have access to your information across multiple websites. This will also help developers, in that they can just write one application instead of an application for every platform. Here is a list of partners that Google has already announced are supporting OpenSocial.

Several developers, including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. I am hoping that other services that I use a lot like Flickr, Twitter and WordPress join in soon.

So far, Facebook has not announced any support for OpenSocial. In my opinion, Facebook would be making a big mistake not to. They need to announce this and quickly, or they will risk losing their credibility with developers and users.

Twitter Tools = Awesome!

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

Okay, I really like WordPress, and I really like Twitter. Which means, I love Twitter Tools! I decided the other day it would be awesome if someone created a wordpress plugin that showed my latest tweets on my blog. Twitter Tools is exactly what I was looking for. It not only shows your latest tweets on your site, but it can also create a tweet whenever you update your blog, letting people know that you just updated your blog!

Other options include Twittering from the WordPress admin or the front end and creating a blog post every time you update Twitter. The cool thing is you can set it up anyway you want. I really gotta give credit to Alex King. The man creates some awesome WordPress plugins.

Update – 10/28/07: It looks like the Twitter updates in the sidebar are showing the blog post links. Something is wrong because Twitter tools is not supposed to be showing those. I will turn off the auto Twitter updating for the time being in the interest of not cross posting. I will contact Alex to see if there is a solution for this.

Reflection Maker

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

From the makers of Stripe Generator and Tabs Generator, comes a similar, easy to use, web based automator called Reflection Maker. I want to like this tool, but unfortunately it lacks a few things that prevent me from using it in a production environment.

I found that the way it calculates the size of the reflection confusing. It does so using percentages, rather than length. It took me a few tries to figure that out, then I had to calculate the percentage I wanted to use. I would like more precise control over the size of the reflection than that. You also have no control over the transparency of the reflection, which is a problem for me. The last problem is that the image is too pixelated once it is generated. They should at least let you control the optimization as well.

Based on those criteria, it doesn’t stack up to their other tool Stripe Generator. It is too bare bones in its current state. Stripe Generator, by contrast, gives you a lot more options. If they improve the tool by adding these features, I would highly recommend it and probably use it myself. Right now, I am still stuck doing it by hand.

Update: Here is a good tutorial for creating the reflection effect in Photoshop.

Stripe Generator

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

This tool is right up your web 2.0 alley. It’s called Stripe Generator, and everything about says Web 2.0, from it’s design and functionality to it’s purpose.

It’s basically a web application to generate striped patterns to use in your web design. In case you didn’t know, striped backgrounds are the latest thing in web 2.0 design. It’s also basically a widget, which is another component of the web 2.0 world.

What’s cool about it is that it takes something that is not that hard to do and makes it that much easier. It also makes it really easy for the novice to do. The implementation is very smart in that it only does one thing but does it well. The interface is a particularly important part in this aspect. Notice the use of Ajax here!

The marketing is really well done also in that it is obvious who their core audience is and they have aimed it squarely at them. They have also made it easy to link back to them by including a banner. They even provide a mailing list I guess to stay up to date on their current projects. What they need to do is to figure out how to make this a widget that other people can add directly on their site.

Well, the inventors have really done a great job here. Hopefully, they will expand this concept into other areas. Well done!