While sites like YouTube and Hulu may have rights to limited content from Hollywood, Studio 3 Networks plans to take online video to a new level with epix, a service that will offer in excess of 15, 000 films and television shows across multiple platforms.

This “next-generation entertainment service” is expected to launch as a premium movie channel in the fourth quarter of 2009 but will be offered to online subscribers first, with an expected Web launch in May.

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“With epix, we are making an entirely new category of entertainment service for consumers that is unlike anything that currently exists,” said Mark Greenberg, President of Studio 3 Networks. “epix is the first brand to hold exclusive exhibition rights to movie content that can be delivered anywhere, anytime.” While this is fantastic news for Internet users, Greenberg told The Wall Street Journal that the Web streaming service is “not our primary business model.”

Studio 3 Networks, the joint venture formed by Viacom‘s Paramount Pictures unit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate plans to provide access to directors’ script notes, outtakes, auditions and other extras giving Web folk over and above what is currently available on other movie sites.

Offering up newly released movies such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at launch, epix will also have the rights to all 17 re-mastered James Bond movies as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Unfortunately subscription prices have yet to be announced but we look forward to watching it evolve.

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YouTube first introduced annotations last June, but starting today, Google’s well loved video sharing site is making it even simpler to add text comments into your own videos. Whereas before you had to go into a relatively complicated annotations editor to add your comments, you can now just click on a spot in the video during playback and the annotations editor will open automatically. Google has also made it significantly simpler to add links to other content on YouTube into your annotations.

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Now, when you watch your own videos on YouTube, a crosshair appears on the screen and you can start adding annotations by simply clicking anywhere on the video without having to go into the annotations editor.

The new linking options inside the comments now allow you to point to another video, channel page, playlist, group, or search query. You will not be able to link to content outside of YouTube, but. The YouTube team also highlights the possibility of linking to a video response page to gather feedback from your audience.

Is This a Excellent Thing?

The question, of course, is if this is really a excellent thing. Too often, users already overuse the annotations to advertise some of their other videos or to remind us that the video is also available in HD (a note that also pops up when you are already watching the video in HD, by the way). Even Google seems to be aware of this, as they provide a help page with instructions for how to turn these annotations off for embedded videos.

Omnisio

We can only assume that this is the first part of the integration of Omnisio‘s technology into the core YouTube service. Google bought Omnisio last July, though it is vital to note that the service did a lot more than just video annotations.

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As a concept, OpenID has shown a fantastic deal of potential. But that potential has often been hamstrung by the series of hurdles through which OpenID users have been required to jump in order to use their credentials. When Facebook Connect entered the distributed digital identity fray, those OpenID usability problems came into stark relief. Now, Google and Plaxo have responded with a new workflow for OpenID logins that simplifies the process and improves the usability – by adding OAuth and the Google Contacts API to the mix.

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You tend to hear more about OpenID, but OAuth has its own loyal following using the protocol for authentication. OAuth has been implemented by organizations like Flickr and Netflix – and has been promised to be in the works for Twitter. Combining OAuth with OpenID offers an improved user experience by letting each technology do what it does best. The benefits of this technique are demonstrated by registering for a new Plaxo account using your Google account.

How It Works

The “hybrid approach” – currently available in a limited beta – that Google and Plaxo have employed uses OpenID to sign in, then invokes OAuth for delegated authorization, and finally calls on the Google Contacts API to access information about contacts. And it does all of this transparently to the end user.

The first step in the Plaxo-Google scenario involves a new user being invited to Plaxo by a friend via Gmail. The invite understands the user is logged into the Google system and prompts the recipient with a “Sign up with my Google Account” button.

After clicking the button, the new user is directed to a Google Accounts page and questioned to confirm their identity. The user is also given the option of allowing Plaxo to remember him or her in the future.

Accepting the sign-in request allows Plaxo to have access to the user’s Google account credentials and the contacts associated with that account. The end result? The user now has a Plaxo account without all the rigamarole generally associated with a new account setup – and without a new username and password to track.

Why This Matters

While the concept of site-specific logins made sense in the early days of the Web, the thought of users being forced to develop a new identity, username, password, and profile on every site they visit – including adding all the same people as connections, over and over again – seems nearly laughable today. It’s certainly not scalable. Especially as password requirements become more and more stringent.

With the launch of Facebook Connect, the thought of a digital identity that could follow users from site to site went from bleeding-edge tech people to a much larger contingent of the general populous. And the ease-of-use demonstrated by Facebook Connect place some friendly pressure on the OpenID contingent to improve the way they were managing the login process.

Plaxo’s and Google’s demonstration is something that could improve usability for all OpenID logins, reducing the series of handoffs that tend to frustrate and confuse users. But as Eric Eldon of VentureBeat notes, there is still more to be done:

“Multi-site sign on, like what the companies are announcing today, will be more compelling when it can bring integration down to one or zero clicks, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.”

Who Wins? Everyone

This isn’t a “winner takes all” pursuit or an “either/or” situation. We are participating in a Web environment where both Facebook Connect and OpenID can co-exist, because there are different applications that make both options viable and useful.

Personally, I’m not likely to use my Facebook account to access my bank and credit card accounts. But I am likely to use my Facebook credentials for social sites that would be enhanced by my existing Facebook connections. Similarly, my OpenID isn’t always the right answer.

Facebook has momentum and a fervent user base. OpenID has a who’s who of tech companies getting behind the concept as the preferred way to manage digital identities. Neither of these identity options are going away anytime soon.

What’s best about the current situation is the rivalry between the two camps: one proprietary and simple-to-use, one open and more complex. It will be fascinating to watch the two solutions push one another to become more and more simple for the end user. Because in that case, we all win.

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Radar is a small but rapidly growing photo sharing site with a strong focus on mobile sharing. Radar has already developed applications for the Blackberry and T-Mobile Sidekick, as well as numerous other phones. Today, Radar also released its iPhone application (iTunes link), which is one of the better photo sharing and social networking apps we have seen for Apple’s phone so far.

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Community and Mobile Sharing

Radar, at its core, is a photo sharing community that is not unlike Yahoo’s Flickr, though Radar puts a stronger focus on the community aspects of the service than on the pictures themselves, which makes sense, given that most of the content on the site was taken with camera phones.

Because of this, Radar’s web service and iPhone app emphasize communication between users. You can, of course, leave public comments on every picture, but you can also send private messages to other users.

Radar features a excellent set of privacy controls, which allow you to set your pictures to be private, or to make them visible to all of Radar’s users and the rest of the Internet. Radar also provides you with a widget that lets you show your images on your own website.

It Just Works

What makes Radar’s iPhone application special is that it provides you with an incredible amount of features (including some basic editing functions for your pictures), without overwhelming the interface. Every picture, for example, comes with statistics about how often it has been seen, liked, and commented on.

Using the application is a lot of fun because everything pretty much works the way you would expect it to. When you email pictures, for example, Radar’s app nicely integrates with your iPhone contacts. Double-click on a picture and you get the full-screen version.

As you would expect from a mobile photo sharing application, you can easily upload your pictures to Radar’s web service and see the latest updates from your friends.

One feature we do miss on Radar’s site, but, is RSS feeds. While Radar can send out a message to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can’t import a feed with your pictures to FriendFeed or other social media services. Radar, but, says that it is plotting to integrate its service with more platforms in the near future.

Verdict

We got a chance to test Radar’s iPhone app over the last few weeks and really loved the experience. The Radar community is still small, but also very lively and encouraging. Radar, of course, is entering a very crowded market, but they may just have found the right niche to thrive in.

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One of the longest-running requests for Google’s web mail service Gmail has been for offline functionality. Now, finally, Gmail users will be able to type up those emails inside an airplane. Google has just announced offline Gmail support via Gmail Labs – to start with for consumers and businesses using Google Apps, but regular Gmail consumers will get it over the next couple of days. The offline feature was built using Gears, Google’s offline web application API.

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In its email to us, Google archly noted that Internet connectivity has started to happen even in airplanes – for example American Airlines announced last year that they will offer in-flight wi-fi service. Even so, many people (including this author) have been clamoring for offline Gmail for years. Google’s web mail competitors have been much swifter in offering offline functionality. In October 2008 we reported that Zoho Mail had gotten offline support, ironically via Gears. Yahoo Mail gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop in July ’08.

It’s been frustrating for Gmail users, many of whom are early adopters, that Gmail has been so behind the times with this feature. Particularly when Google has Gears and has already used it to offline-enable Google Docs and Google Reader. So Google has been slow to use Gears in Gmail and Google Apps, but of course we’re pleased to see it being deployed now.

With its new offline access, Gmail will be able to be used inside the browser even without an Internet connection. Messages can be read, starred, labeled and archived and new mail can be composed, says Google. Messages ready to be sent will wait in the Outbox until the user is online again when the messages will be sent automatically. Google has warned though that "there might be some issues that aren’t completely ironed out" in the new feature.

The feature will be rolled out over the next couple of days, starting this afternoon for Google Apps users. You can enable offline Gmail by clicking ‘Settings’ in your Gmail, then click the ‘Labs’ tab and select ‘Enable’ next to ‘Offline Gmail’, and click ‘Save Changes.’ Then in the upper righthand corner of the account, next to the username, there will be a new ‘Offline’ link. Click this link to start the offline synchronization process (note that you will need to to download Gears if you haven’t already). For non-Google Apps users, you’ll have to wait a couple more days.

But wait, there’s more. Google is also working on an offline Google Calendar. There is no date for this release, but it too will be launched with Google Apps first.

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The social Web has given users fantastic power: the ability to make and share content with people around the world – easily and quickly. The problem of course, is that power is often not compatible with effective and clear thinking. The thought that germinated in an instant can be immortalized in perpetuity on the Web.

With the extraordinary growth of the Internet and the interlinking of information that the social Web has brought with it, it’s time to examine the footprints we leave on the Web as we go into the future that promises to “throttle the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ from turning into the ‘madness of the mobs,’” as described so eloquently by Jason Calacanis.

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Search Engines Are No Longer Enough

With Internet usage growing at a remarkable pace it comes as no surprise that comScore recently rated Google as the most well loved Internet property in the world, attracting over 777.9 million visitors as of December 2008. Not surprising either is the growth of social and news sites. According to Compete some of the top social sites attracted visitors in the millions during December 2008:

• FaceBook: 59 million visitors
• MySpace: 59 million visitors
• Digg: 33 million visitors
• Twitter: 4.4 million visitors

This growth can be contributed in part to the media as they realize the benefits of instant access to an enormous well of information that the Web provides. As media folk are becoming increasingly tech savvy, they’re realizing results from search engines are often lacking. In an effort to gain as much insight into specific topics they are now turning to social sites for research.

Interconnected on the Web

While it’s exciting to live in an ever connected and always on world, the flip side that we have to accept is that we also live in a world where information is becoming increasingly interlinked. Today it is relatively simple to follow footprints on the Web if we want to track both people and brands.

For instance, take a look at my public profile on Twitter and you’ll notice I can also be found on other sites: BlogWell, ReadWriteWeb and The Drill Down. Visit BlogWell and you’ll notice I can be found at WebMama and TechTalkRadio. Visit The Drill Down and you’ll see my contact information for Digg. While I occasionally use different user names on sites, I publicly declare my affiliations and unless you know me really well, or have reason to follow me across the Web, you may not realize the relationships I have or where I can be found online by visiting any one site.

While the information about me on the Web is not terribly exciting, I do leave a small bit of information on every site I visit. And therein lies the rub. Say something in passing on a social site and it may come back to haunt you.

There is No Delete Button on the Web

It is becoming increasingly hard to remove content from the web. The Internet Archive and its Way Back Machine gives you a historical snapshot of a site within seconds. Google gives you cached pages showing pages that may have been deleted for any number of reasons. Photo sharing sites that store images online combined with services like Twitpic that let you quickly upload pictures to social sites – all of these fantastic social Web resources also leave your historical Web footprints open to dissection in the future.

And although the information you place out on the Web may seem insignificant today, you have to question the question of whether it will be insignificant tomorrow, or in five years when you need to apply for college or seek new employment. Additionally, you have to question yourself whether you’re just leaving more junk for the next generation to clean up.

New York Times’ Policy on Social Networking

Poynter Online recently published the New York Times’ policy regarding social networking sites, as provided by The Times’ assistant managing editor Craig Whitney. In the memo, Whitney, who is responsible for overseeing journalistic standards, points out that social sites “can be remarkably useful reporting tools,” but is quick to warn reporters to take care when using them. “Anything you post online can and might be publicly disseminated, and can be twisted to be used against you by those who wish you or The Times ill.”

For a long time, The New York Times Company has had a policy on ethics in journalism and this go to document a social media policy can only be seen as a step in the right direction. But, there are some that see this as one of the reasons “mainstream media is doomed to irrelevance.”

For the record, it is possible to remain passionate and right to your beliefs while participating on the social Web. What social sites should not allow – nor excuse – is a belief held by many that common courtesy and simple manners should be bypassed simply because you’re not there in the flesh.

Whether you agree or disagree with Whitney’s take on the social Web, it’s vital to recognize this huge step that The Times has taken. It has finally worked out that information on the Web is intricately intertwined. The article is well worth a read.

Getting Caught on the Web with Your Pants Down

There have been many instances where people and corporations have been caught out by content they upload to the Web. Whether the content is an image, a 140 character Tweet, or a blog post, we hope the following examples will give you time to reflect on the content you are uploading today.

Meltdown on Twitter

Last week, the Applicant blog talked about a hypothetical human resource bot in an attempt to persuade its readers of the importance of being aware of what they post to the Web. It was predominantly written to encourage readers to consider the ramifications of outbursts on the Web as applied to career and employment.

The very next day Twitter user Astrospace suffered an online meltdown which was captured as an image and posted on Applicant, giving their hypothetical post a fantastic huge shove into reality. “If I were an employer this certainly wouldn’t be my ideal applicant, and at this point their brand is without a positive brand image,” the Applicant post says.

While Astrospace may have had excellent reason for his rant (as most of us do), his outburst has now been captured and will possibly remain online for a very long time.

You Never Know Where Your Dulcet Tones will Turn Up

Last year when David Berkowitz boarded a train in New York he heard an argument between a woman and a man. While his first instinct was to get off the train, he made the choice to continue on.

This turned out to be fortunate for those with a sense of humor as he chose to record the argument and it now resides somewhere out there on the Web.

In this instance it may be more hard, if not impossible to track the folks involved in the argument across the Web, but it still shows the importance of putting your best foot forward when in public – whether online or off.

Do You Know Who’s Following You Online?

Peter Shankman recently learned a seemingly off-the-cuff Tweet by James Andrews, an executive of Ketchum New York.

“Right confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say “I would die if I had to live here!”

Sounds innocuous enough right? Not so. Andrews was in Memphis and on the way to meet his client FedEx. Turns out a Fed-Ex employee was terribly offended and responded with an e-mail that was copied to a variety of people including the folks in charge at Ketchum and the execs from Fed-Ex.

According to Shankman, the letter starts like this:

“Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most vital entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.”

Read the entire e-mail here.

Clearly, what you do on social media leaves traces and cannot be easily removed from the Web. Information can honestly easily be tracked back to you and what you say and do will be public for a long time. Whether you believe in monitoring yourself online or not, don’t forget the point of the social Web: to get to know other like minded people, share resources, have fun, and leave the place a small nicer than you found it.

Although we were plotting to include a resource list of tools and services to help you monitor your online presence today, we’ve chose to leave it for next weekend given the length of this post.

As always, your opinion is very much appreciated and we look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Image Credit: Vu Bui

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So apparently we’ve walked through the Foyer of Financial Fiasco and plunked ourselves down right in the centre of the Living Room of Economic Doom (settling into the Sofa of Slowdown, with our feet on a comfy bear market rug).

What’s it like at your end? Are a lot of your budgets and projects that seemed like slam-dunks a few months ago suddenly coming under scrutiny? Or are you finding there’s still room to experiment and innovate, even – or, with some particularly visionary organizations, especially – in a recession?

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More Noise to Signal.

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ShareThis reports that it is now.

How do website readers prefer to share tales they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most well loved method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are fascinating – but there are also some huge caveats to keep in mind.

The Numbers

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how well loved sharing by email is. It’s clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one but, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The huge surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely well loved ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively small time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites that have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers via Amit Agarwal’s blog, which is always a fantastic place to learn new things about the web.

Why This is Vital

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It’s an vital detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most well loved can help make this choice. Here at RWW we don’t use ShareThis, we use another service called AddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data. GigaOm, for example, doesn’t offer sharing by Facebook at all – something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, but, include the following:

• Your site’s audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that there aren’t a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb tales on MySpace – but maybe we’re incorrect!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren’t for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget. Tasty users, for example, don’t necessarily reckon of what they are doing as sharing (it’s often bookmarking for personal use) and that service has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very well loved ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.

From a company called Blue Whale Systems Ltd., makers of a free mobile push application called BlueWhaleMail, there now comes a new push application: Facebook. Via the BlueWhaleMail app, you can be told of your friends’ status updates, wall posts, and news items. You also have the ability to send pokes, make wall posts, and email messages. The notifications you receive are showed on your phone as soon as they as show up on Facebook…and there’s no need for you to have to browse to the Facebook web site to either view them or respond.

What’s BlueWhaleMail?

Out of the 2.7 billion people with mobile phones, those not carrying a smartphone still represent the majority of handset owners. But these people deserve an simple way to access their email and social network notifications, too, even if they can’t afford or don’t want to pay for a sophisticated smartphone.

Says Michael Maguire, founder and CTO, who previously worked in the BlackBerry Applications team at Research In Motion, "My team and I reckon there are some fantastic dedicated mobile email devices out there – but we’re biased, because half of us helped build one of them. Unfortunately the rest of the world’s 1.1 billion email users have phones with unusable, hard to configure in-built email that few people can be bothered to set-up. With BlueWhaleMail, we’ve gone back to the drawing board so that people can keep the phone they like and still stay in touch on the go."

At the moment, the BlueWhaleMail app is only available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson phones, but that list will grow in time as BlueWhaleMail branches out to serve the needs of those who carry “ordinary” mobile phones.

Where To Download

BlueWhaleMail can be downloaded from http://apps.facebook.com/bluewhalemail/ or by browsing to m.bluewhale.net on your mobile phone. The application is ad-supported and features a small banner ad at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer.

To learn more about BlueWhaleMail, check out this video, where founder Michael Maguire discusses the application:

BlueWhaleMail Interview with Michael Maguire – video powered by Metacafe