Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

If your Twitter home page is filled with messages from friends linking out to other web sites where you can watch a video, read and article, or listen to a song, Blip might be for you. While Twitter is 100% text based, people tend to use the micro-blogging service to share links to multimedia files. Blip, on the other hand, is a micro-blogging service with an integrated music search engine and audio player.

Here’s how it works. Once you create an account, you can type the name of a band or song into the “What are you listening to?” box. The question’s a bit disingenuous because Blip doesn’t really care what you’re currently listening to. Instead, it will pull up a bunch of songs matching your query. Thanks to Seeqpod integration, you can actually listen to songs without leaving the web page.

Once you’ve picked a song, you can enter a short message to go along with your music. When your Blip “listeners” (contacts, followers, whatever you want to call them) login to their home pages they’ll see a list of updates from their friends, along with the songs their listening to. Click on any message and the song will begin playing.

You can also link Blip to other social networking services including Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, LiveJournal, and Tumblr. We tested this out with Twitter, and while Blip did end a message to our Twitter contacts letting them know what we were listening too, it left out the text portion of our Blip.

[via TechCrunch]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Browser Tips, Social Software

Hot on the heels of the del.icio.us beta plugin for Firefox 3 beta, Yahoo! has released a beta plugin for Internet Explorer. While Firefox is pretty popular these days, we’re pretty sure there are still more people using the IE6 or IE7 browser that came with their computer than a beta version of the open source Firefox browser. Which is to state, seriously, Yahoo! is just now getting around to this?

The Internet Explorer plugin packs most of the features of the Firefox version. That means you can search and browse bookmarks from your sidebar, view current activity, or tag pages with a button in your browser toolbar. The plugin works with IE6, IE7, and IE8 and runs on Windows XP and Vista.

This plugin is being released as a pubic beta, which means some features may change before the final release.

[via CNet]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Share This

Share This

Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Social Software, Beta

Flock, the social web browser built from Firefox code keeps getting more social. Flock 1.2 beta adds Digg, Pownce, and AOL Mail integration. Once you login to Digg for the first time from the Flock browser, you’ll have the option of opening up a Digg sidebar which shows you all of your Digg contacts and their current activity. You can also click a button in the sidebar to submit any page you’re currently visiting to Digg.

Micro-blogging service Pownce has also been added to the sidebar. If you have a Pownce account you can keep up with your contacts without opening a separate web page. Previous versions of Flock already supported Twitter.

Finally, the latest beta adds support for AOL Mail notifications. This isn’t so much a social feature as an essential feature if you happen to use AOL as your primary web mail account. Flock already supported Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. We’re not sure why AOL wasn’t already in there, or why Windows Live Hotmail still isn’t supported.

Like Firefox, Flock is cross-platform. There are versions of Flock 1.2 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

[via CyberNet]

Read

Share This

Share This