Photo sales site SpyMedia relaunched this morning with two major new features. The San Jose company has since late last year let photographers sell their news photos to media companies or other interested buyers. Today the site has added a slideshow widget and a bounty system to let buyers offer money for photos they would like to purchase.

Here’s a heart breaker; remember when we reported several weeks ago about the new MySpace security measure that disables outbound links from Flash widgets? SpyMedia is a great example of a company investing resources in a MySpace strategy that now, on launch, is no where near as viable as it was when the idea was hatched.

The SpyStream, or widgetized slideshow, is an interesting test case. Users who display the slideshow will be able to play their photos, their friends’ photos, their designated favorites or all photos tagged as aimed at a bounty of interest.

Company President Bryan Quinn told me that there are many widget features the company had planned that are now impossible or much more difficult since MySpace has leveraged Flash9 to block outgoing links. You can’t purchase SpyMedia photos with one click from a MySpace display anymore. The company had planned to offer revenue sharing for MySpace users who display SpyMedia images. Images can no longer be flagged as inappropriate with one click, making display of all items tagged with a bounty much less appealing. SpyMedia in MySpace is now largely a one-way phenomenon.

Quinn said he felt sorry for other companies whose entire model was based on clicking back from flash widgets but that SpyMedia would use water marks and other means of letting viewers know what URL to visit on the SpyMedia site.

SpyMedia’s whole model may not be shot, but it looks like the company’s new MySpace strategy is dead on arrival today. Every startup I talk to with a MySpace widget strategy (more than I can count) admits that the new MySpace code is a problem. Most underplay it, but the ability to click back to your site is what makes a widget play make business sense. There are certainly work arounds, like adding a text link below the Flash object – but as SpyMedia demonstrates there is still a major loss of functionality.

The widget will still work on other blogs, but as Quinn told me, MySpace is the gorilla and everybody wants to be where they gorilla is. Pete Cashmore of Mashable has been working with SpyMedia and he told me that though he considers the MySpace Flash issue to be a minor problem, he also encouraged the company to make a push into as many other social media sharing sites as possible.

In ways similar to SmugMug for stock photos or the forthcoming NewsAssingment.net for news text reporting, SpyMedia is a very cool idea. Another similar site is Scoopt, which takes a 50/50 split with photographers compared to the 35% that SpyMedia takes.

Will SpyMedia’s bounties for photos be a viable strategy for a small startup? How big an impact will it make that their primary tool for entering the giant market of MySpace has had the legs kicked out from under it? Only time will tell.

Two Time Warner sites are making serious moves into online video. CNN is expected to formally launch today a system for collecting user generated content, with video at the center of its strategy. The basics are already up at CNN Exchange. The system will be powered by Blip.tv – quite a deal to land for them. A CNet story this weekend said that war footage from Lebanon found on YouTube was a big part of the inspiration for Exchange, but you have to assume this has been in the works for some time. CNN Exchange will of course be about submission more than upload or sharing; I’ll be curious to see what percentage of submitted videos appear on the site. CNN will retain non-exclusive ownership of the submitted content and does not appear to plan compensation for content providers.

In related news the New York Times reported this morning that AOL, where many services will become free on Wednesday, will launch a video service this week. Commercial free downloads-to-own will start at $1.99 and various free offerings will join AOL’s video search for content across the web.

Since CNN and AOL are Time Warner companies one question seems to be whether any cross pollination in video strategy will go on.

Another question worth asking though is: does this mean certain death for the countless video sharing and downloading startups coming online? Probably not. Each will have its own unique feel, likely all with far less editorial control than these two big players.

In the end the dichotomy remains the same: try to get past the corporate editors and into big media in exchange for massive exposure or on the other hand try to create something compelling that will go viral across countless other channels.

CNN is likely to never allow unmediated upload of content on to its site because it’s such an uncomfortable position to be in from a branding perspective for companies born in the media-as-gatekeeper era. It’s hard to imagine CNN letting in enough video to offer site visitors the kind of endless clicking around that YouTube offers. Not to mention that talking dogs aren’t going to make it to CNN. YouTube minus talking dogs (and other copyrighted content) vs. sites like CNN plus user video would be a whole other equation.

I imagine that the glut of video services online is a much bigger barrier to effective entry than is the launch of services by these big players. These will probably always be two very different sorts of sites.

I’ve gone back and forth on Inform.com in the past (we also covered them here). They are a massively funded New York startup that launched an inferior news product late last year. Since then, they’ve made real efforts to shake things up. Their newest product, Inform Publisher Services, is aimed at big web publishers, and is designed to help them increase page views by adding relevant links to other, hopefully related, content in their archives.

The new service automatically creates links in existing articles, which link to a results page containing relevant content from the site as well as from the web, including blogs and audio/video content. It’s currently live on NewsOK.com, an Oklahoma newspaper site. To see it in action, see this article and click on one of the links within the text. I clicked on “State Department” in the second paragraph, which brought up this results page.

Frankly, I didn’t see a lot of relevant content.

Inform Publisher Services is entirely automated, and I’m sure they’ll tweak the algorithm over time to make it better. But with all the new links in the articles, it seems that readers will quickly tire of seeing a results page with barely-related content put in front of them.

Eric Schonfeld at Business 2.0 wrote a very long post on the new product tonight, suggesting that this will give pubishers the edge they need to compete with Digg and Google in the war for reader attention. I don’t see the logical connection that he sees, but the company has convinced six partners to launch with this soon: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, The New York Sun, NewsOK.com (Web site for The Oklahoman newspaper and News9, KWTV CBS Affiliate), The Huffington Post, The Deal LLC, and NameMedia. If Inform does a good job of creating more page views for these companies, they’ll keep this business and add more partners over time.

See our posts on Blogburst, another company offering services to media publishers. In the case of Blogburst, they are offering to syndicate vetted blog content to these sites at a much cheaper price than they pay for other content.

If you liked Battleship in Ajax, you’ll love this. Toronto, Canada based gpokr is a multiplayer no limit Texas Holdem game developed with Ajax technologies. The site, which was created by Ryan Dewsbury, also has real time chat among all players in a game. The site does not use real money, and Ryan says he has no plans to change that.

gpokr was written with Java, and uses the Google Web Toolkit for its client-side Ajax (the toolkit lessens the burden of building client-side javascript by interpreting server-side java into javascript)

Also check out Mark Roth’s Ajax hangman game, which was also created using the Google Web Toolkit. Both are discussed on the Web Toolkit blog, here.

kSolo, acquired by Fox Interactive back in May, faces some new competition in the online karaoke space. SingShot is releasing their own variation of online karaoke tomorrow. The new service is essentially a copy of kSolo heavily influenced by the successful YouTube user interface.

All the basic functionality of the kSolo product is there. Performers can select from a library of songs that are at least about two to three years old, listen to a demo, and record their own version while following along with the lyrics on the screen. The hope is to repeat the success of other social content sites like YouTube by allowing users to share their songs to be voted and commented on by the public. The human filtering will hopefully pick out the Kelly Clarksons in a forest of William Hungs.

The big differences in these two services lie in the details. First of all, kSolo spurned Flash, the now-ubiquitous platform for online video, requires a plugin and runs only on Internet Explorer. SingShot runs completely on Flash and works in all browsers, making it a breeze to set up and start running. Users just have change their Flash settings to allow the program access to their mic. While both programs allow performances to be shared, SingShot follows the simple YouTube model and allows a simple cut and paste link or embed, whereas kSolo has a clunky share feature that allows you to email a link or, after a little hunting, embed your entire playlist on a page.

Both services still haven’t gotten navigation right, though. I found it hard to stumble upon new songs or find ones where I only remembered part of the title or lyrics. Instead, I found myself filtering through broad categories (rock, pop, or 80s) and having to repeatedly hit “next page”. The simple addition of page numbers along the bottom would really help skim through the categories. However, unlike SingShot, kSolo’s search engine fails to recognize “the Beatles” as the same as “Beatles, the”. kSolo does have one up on SingShot when it comes to finding new music, though. They have a feature that allows you to find music that is similar the song you just recorded.

For Today’s launch, SingShot sends a shot across the bow at Fox Interactive Media by launching an aggressive pricing model. SingShot gives two weeks of free use to kSolo’s one week and charges $4.95/month for an annual subscription, $7.95/month for a quarterly subscription $9.95/month for a monthly subscription. kSolo charges $7.95/month for an annual subscription, $8.95/month for a quarterly subscription, and $9.95/month for a monthly subscription.

kSolo is well funded and starts with a larger userbase and song library, but the coming months will see who wins as these two slug it out.

Readers should also check out our coverage of Bix, a contest service that seems ideal for a mashup with these two song sites.

With all of the recent news about top Digg users being offered cash by Netscape to move over to their competing platform, I’m not surprised to see that someone has apparently placed their top 100 Digg profile up for sale on eBay.

The auction, which started a few hours ago, is for the Digg username GeekForLife. The user has submitted 748 Digg stories, 39 of which have made it to the Digg home page. There are no bidders as of 4 pm PST on Sunday.

There are two arguments for the account having value. First, of course, is the fact that Netscape is now paying top Digg users to switch over. Netscape is looking for actual users, not accounts, though, and so there’s little chance of this account being turned into a valuable income stream at Netscape. Second, high ranking Digg accounts count more than others when they Digg a story, making that story more likely to go to the home page. The account therefore has value, if Digg doesn’t simply turn it off.

This story has, of course, already been put on Digg.

A few years ago, online TV guides were just a paperless version of what was arriving in the mail or the middle of Sunday papers. Today, however, as we get closer to the world of TV over IP and video on demand in every home, the space is evolving, giving customers more than they can get in paper.

At the same time, advertisers are realizing that TV guides with demographically targeted content present a promising vehicle for delivering targeted ads. Market penetration for these sites is still relatively modest, but it is growing and, as the prospect of not just finding television programming, but also watching it online, becomes more likely, usage will grow exponentially.

Just as very few people bother to check the newspaper for movie times at their local theatre, preferring to go online instead, fewer and fewer people rely on the old print version of television listing times. There are just too many benefits to going online. We explain why below.

As of today, all sites with guides are free and it appears they will remain so, hoping their targeted content will attract more users and thereby enough advertisers or affiliate sales (think iTunes-like content downloads) to build sustainable businesses.

The best features on these sites are those that are moving beyond listings and doing a good job of matching viewer’s interests and habits with programming content. If it sounds akin to online dating sites, well… it is. Your potential matches, in this case, are TV programs.

The big win, however, is to link these listings directly to TV over IP content, something that will require industry-level psychological and legal evolution.

The companies listed here are the major providers of TV programming schedules online across local, cable, and satellite. MeeVee, Zap2It, and TitanTV also syndicate, making guides available across a number of sites. Individual cable or satellite providers and sites that provide listings in conjunction with hardware/software solutions, like SnapStream, will not be reviewed in this post.

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I love RSS, I love IM and I love the concept of Attention Data. Wrap it all up together and put a just-in-time bow on top and what do you get? The Touchstone Attention Management Engine. I love it.

A product of Australia’s Faraday Media, founded by Chris Saad and Ashley Angell, Touchstone is currently in private alpha with a few hundred invites going out per month. There’s a new batch available now, but note that it’s for Windows only.

The company is announcing today a first round of funding and though it’s declined to provide any details on that funding Saad tells me it will mean a major ramping up of development. To be honest I was skeptical until he and I chatted about just what Touchstone does. Even prior to hearing about the funding, I’d visited the site months ago and left with no idea what was going on. I’m real glad I figured it out, because Touchstone is the coolest thing I’ve seen in quite awhile.

Here’s what it is: It’s a desktop app that integrates several sources of incoming information, runs them all through a set of filters that you administer and then notifies you automatically when important events have occurred. That notification will come in a variety of ways, depending on how important the event is relative to your prioritized filters.

What does that mean? It means you can set Touchstone to pull in RSS and atom feeds, POP emails and Gmail, filter the incoming items for keywords you’ve set to varying priority levels with sliders and tell the system how you’d like to be notified of events of different levels of importance.

Saad tells me it’s a little more complicated than just keywords, the filters also incorporate each item’s declared importance, the popularity of the item on the net and the item’s age. Sounds smart, though the proof will be in the pudding of long term use.

If you chose to have it do so, the desktop app can also scan the contents of your computer and recommend keywords based on your past work. They call that Intuitive Attention Management. That data is all saved locally never sent away from your computer.

Notification of new events comes in three forms: system tray alerts (toast), a news-ticker style bar and a cursor trail that floats behind your cursor for a few seconds when something you’ve predetermined is really important occurs.

Imagine seeing a cursor trail whenever an especially important email just came into your inbox, an important new task is assigned to you in Basecamp or your topic of interest is being debated on the front page of Digg. Cursor trail…what’s up?

It’s just feeds and email for now, but the company is holding a contest for developers to create new input and output adapters for the system, Saad says 50 developers have signed up so far. Here’s a number of ideas to inspire future functionality.

Business model? When it goes public you’ll be able to use this awesome service for free with some particularly contextual ads around it or pay to get an ad-free version.

This is the kind of tool that I can imagine becoming core to my workflow once there’s a Mac version. If this little dream called Touchstone comes true, it’s going between NetNewsWire and Adium on my desktop. It’s a tool for smart, personalized and persistent awareness of the information ecosystem.

Updated: See also Attensa, which I totally meant to include here at first and I just forgot. Sorry Attensa folks!

Grouper, a video sharing site we’ve covered a number of times before, has launched a very cool new feature that could disrupt the crowded world of online video sharing. Viewers can now add their own video comments to Grouper videos and the comments can be watched inside the same embedded player. In just a few weeks the embedded players themselves will be able to record the video comments – right now you have to click through to the Grouper site to record.

Here’s a Wordpress blog post with an example of the new feature, though not all videos autoplay like this one. Account registration is required to leave a video comment, but it’s a remarkably painless registration. Comments appear without approval but can be removed individually by the publisher of the original video.

Text comments are possible in Grouper, but as they say – text comments in response to videos are usually boring.

Grouper used to operate exclusively through a Windows desktop client, but the company told me that since it enabled web based sharing in October its user numbers have grown from 1 million to 8 million. The company was originally funded by its founders (who sold Spinner.com several years ago), a number of angel investors and a $1.5 million investment from Deutche Telecom’s T-Online, the 3rd largest broadband ISP in the world.

The company’s business model is primarily based on corporate partnerships. MTV, for example, has videos featured on Grouper. In another interesting partnership, the company recently announced that Grouper would be folded into the software for Logitech digital cameras. That’s a pretty big deal.

The good news just doesn’t quit for this company. They also told me that they’ve hired Chris Amen-Kroeger, former Director, Streaming Network Operations for AOL and VP of service delivery at Salesforce. Amen-Kroger starts work at Grouper on Monday.

A very compelling feature set, great user experience, big partners and an experienced team. Grouper is a company to watch and a service you might enjoy using.

New San Francisco ecommerce startup zeeDive, which we mentioned a couple of weeks ago and still has the most basic of landing pages up to the public, has entered a limited private beta.

Like another recent startup called Limbo Auctions, zeeDive has an interesting twist on the standard online buying experience. zeeDive sets a top price for an item and drops it steadily until time runs out or someone buys it. Buyers can step in at any time and make a purchase, or set a price. If the item falls to that price, that buyer gets it.

It’s an interesting model that will appeal to bargain hunters. However, the current inventory on the site is very limited (even though they cover a ton of categories, including Beauty & Health, Clothing Accessories, Electronics, Jewelry, Travel, etc.). There just isn’t much that they have for sale, yet. A bigger concern is the pricing, which doesn’t seem to be so low that people will flock to the site. Nevertheless, these are issues that can be worked out during the beta process.

The design of the site and use of Ajax to show pricing changes and to set the buy price is very well done. They’ve also included merchant feedback, watch-lists and other useful features. Our overall impression is that they’ve created a buttoned-up ecommerce site, but there needs to be much more inventory and significantly lower prices. Note that the company has already warned us about the limited inventory during beta. Also, the company is proactively engaging with testers to improve the service (they sent a nice survey asking for feedback – mine is given here. )

There’s lots of instant messaging news today. Google isn’t letting the fact that it has less than 1% market share and only 44,000 people used its Google Talk client last month get it down. Tonight they’ve released three significant new features to the product – file transfers, voicemail and music status. Information on all of these features is here.

File Transfers

Files and folders can be sent to Google Talk friends by clicking the “send file” button. There are no limits on file sizes or type, and the recipient will see a preview of the image within the chat session. Both users must be using the actual Google Talk client, however, for this feature to work. See left image below.

Voicemail

Voicemails can now be left for friends who do not answer calls through Google Talk. Unlike File Transfers above, this feature does not require that the friend use the Google Talk client. In that case, they’ll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file. Voicemails can be up to 10 minutes long, and messages can be left for people online without calling them directly by clicking the down arrrow from any profile card or chat window. Voicemail will also automatically kick in after 4 rings. See middle image below.

Music Status

If you are listening to music while logged in to Google Talk, you can show your contacts what you are listening to by selecting “show current music track” from your status drop down menu. This is only for “supported music players” but they do not say what players are supported. See far right image below.

Note that the Google Chat client is, ridiculously, available only for Windows machines.

Yahoo Messenger Version 8 for Windows, which can be downloaded here, launched out of beta today. Our previous writeup of the beta launch is here.

The key new feature of Messenger 8 is that it is open to third party developers to create widgets that work within the client. Yahoo is reporting that 180 plugins have been created in the last month since the platform was opened.

The five most popular plugins are:

• Pando: Easy, fast and reliable way to share large files – even folders – with friends, up to 1 GB at a time.
  31,757 downloads since June 20, 2006
• YEmote: Access ALL the secret and hidden Emoticons quick and easy. Click animated smiley to be insert automatically into your text.
  29,201 downloads since July 11, 2006
• Yahoo! Greetings eCard: Browse from a selection of eCards to send to your friend while chatting.
  13,358 downloads since June 20, 2006
• iTunes: iTunes remote for Yahoo! Messenger. Note: you need to have iTunes installed in order to use this plug-in.
  13,125 downloads since July 18, 2006
• Eazibo: The best way to interactively and instantly make flowcharts or diagrams, share photos and make annotations with your friend online connecting. It’s called “Instant Graphics.”
  11,900 downloads since July 18, 2006

Yahoo Messenger is the second largest IM network after MSN, and even though Yahoo and MSN have announced interoperability (and continue to expand the beta group testing it), there’s still clearly a level of competitiveness between the two teams. Yahoo sent me the chart below comparing the two services.

San Francisco-based Sphere’s only been around for three months, but it’s already locked down two important deals. Both deals leverage its “Sphere It” technology, which performs a semantic analysis on the text within the page being searched and returns blog results that it finds relevant to the article.

In May we wrote about Sphere’s deal with Time.com. Next week, Sphere will announce a deal with the New York Times subsidiary About.com to embed the core Sphere It technology within About.com articles.

Unlike the Time.com deal, About.com will only use the technology to sort through it’s own content. The results can be seen under the main text of articles, under the heading “Related Articles.” See here for an example.

The two companies have been in an extended year long paid test of the technology (using it long before the core Sphere search engine launched). According to Sphere CEO Tony Conrad, the test performed so far above expectations that About.com has agreed to a long term deal to license the technology.

Competitor Technorati has its own deals with major partnerships like the Wall Street Journal Online, Washington Post and Newsweek. Those deals, however, point to blogs posting on a specific article, whereas Sphere It focuses on the content itself, finding similar articles regardless of whether or not they’ve linked to the original source. See this post for a longer description of the difference between what the two companies offer (frankly, both are useful, although Sphere It is better for newer content that has few links in).

US House Resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), was passed by a 410 to 15 vote tonight. If the Resolution becomes law social networking sites and chat rooms must be blocked by schools and libraries or those institutions will lose their federal internet subsidies. According to the resolution’s top line summary it will “amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.”

Adults will be able to ask for the library’s permission to use such sites. The Resolution will now go to the US Senate for a vote before being offered to the President for signature into law.

The rhetoric from advocates was all about MySpace. For example, Texas Republican Ted Poe says, “social networking sites such as MySpace and chat rooms have allowed sexual predators to sneak into homes and solicit kids.”

An incredibly vague law, DOPA will require schools and libraries to block access to a potentially huge range of sites on the internet. The goal is to protect children from adult predators. Sites that must be blocked include those that allow people to post profiles, include personal information and allow “communication among users.”

410-15 was a shocking vote. I write about it here because it has the potential to impact a huge portion of our readership and the companies we profile on this site. Though the viability of enforcing such a law is open to question, web services offering collaboration in education are looking seriously endangered. Secondary collaborative consequences of commercial web sites used in schools aren’t looking good either. Or perhaps it’s just symbolic of the divide in the US between on one hand those of us who are excited about the incredible potential of web services to enable personal creativity and on-demand global communication and on the other hand those who believe that the internet is just a series of tubes.

I’m not the best person to analyze this though. Here’s who I recommend:

• Declan McCullagh at ZDNet has posted a very thorough background article on DOPA.
• Andy Carvin writes Learning Now, a blog about education and technology for PBS, and has set up a page called DOPAWatch to aggregate blog posts on the topic.
• danah boyd is probably the web’s leading expert in analyzing the politics of MySpace and youth social networking.
• Will Richardson’s Weblogg-Ed is a great source for all things Learning 2.0
• Vicki A. Davis is a Christian school teacher in Georgia who uses blogs, wikis, podcasting and more in her classrooms. Vicki has written a number of powerful posts on DOPA and I would expect she’ll have something to say in the morning.

If youth are the most likely adopters of new social software then I think it would be in the interests of all who are interested in social software to watch the US government’s attempts to keep children from it.

Skype announced today the release of some very cool toolbars including one that interacts with Microsoft Office. When you’ve got it installed, you can click on any phone number inside a Word, Excel or Powerpoint file and Skype Out will call that number! It recognizes fax numbers too, and won’t call those. Very cool.

Beta versions of toolbars for Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird were released in beta last week. Those do the same thing with numbers in emails and make it easy to follow up emails with Skype IM. Two weeks ago the company released public versions of Firefox and IE toolbars that will call numbers on web pages and add country codes based on the page host’s ISP.

The company says it estimates that 30% of Skype users use it for business and these toolbars are targetting that audience.

Of course these are all for Windows only! The closest thing to love for Mac users is this Tuesday’s version 1.5 of Skype for Mac.

None the less, innovation continues – even post acquisition. Speaking of that acquisition, see also, even if just for laughes: Skype Founders Use eBay Cash To Atone For Their Kazaa Sins

Google announced today at OSCON, the O’Reilly open source conference, that it has launched an open source project hosting site that will rival SourceForge.net. The service has been given the unglamorous name Google Code Project Hosting.

Early comments around the web highlight the need for a competitor to SourceForge.net, which is believed to experience too much down time and emphasize enterprise users at the expense of others. SourceForge.net runs on the propriety SourceForge software and is owned by Fremont California’s VA Software.

Projects hosted by Google are organized by tag and includes an ajax feedback and issue tracking. They system is built on Subversion and Google’s Big Table file system. Projects can be up to 100mb in size. The reliability of Google’s uptime seems to be a primary selling point.

The interface is pared down and doesn’t include much of the information that you find when you look at a project on SourceForge. There’s an ajax issue tracking feature for user feedback. So far the whole thing looks far less user-friendly than SourceForge but if it’s targeting a technical audience exclusively that might be of less consequence.

Projects already available on the site include things like Webomedia, an ajax based framework that will help create online streaming of media, Simple File Manager, an easy to use web based alternative to FTP, and RepoMan, an encrypted Python P2P chat service. Humorously, the sample tag “stable” currently brings up no results.

Update: Several people have pointed to Jeff Lindsay’s DevjaVu as an alternative. It’s in private beta right now, but it’s a startup and we love startups.

Those of us in the US can finally get our very own minihompies in the newly launched US version of the South Korean social network CyWorld. Minihompies are now called MiniHomes in the US version and they are these strange little spaces for user avatars (MiniMe) and cartoon charms that people apparently spend real money on. Most of the charms appear to cost 5 acorns – the CyWorld currency (around 50 cents?) though purchasing more acorns with cash will not be enabled on the US site until next month. So spend your acorns carefully when souping up your hompie.

The new US site is experiencing some technical problems on its first day, account creation is a little messy but you can go in and look around the site.

According to a report by Katie Fehrenbacher, CyWorld parent company SK Communications has set up a 30 person office in San Francisco, spent around $10 million to the US version and pledges to spend whatever it takes to be succesful in the new market. Still to come are a mobile play and music sales through CyWorld. The company already has localized versions in Japan, China and Taiwan. Localization for most of the rest of the world is in the works.

Up to 90% of South Koreans under the age of 20 are reported to be registered on CyWorld, a market share even MySpace must be envious of. Whether CyWorld can translate its success in one country elsewhere is a great test case concerning the challenges of localization in the social networking space.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the vast majority of US users will prefer the wide open space and clumsy code of MySpace to the minihompies, acorns and silly cartoon avatars of CyWorld. I suppose the employment screening perils of MySpace could be averted if you were able to say “that wasn’t me – that was my MiniMe!” Whatever.

If MySpace and Facebook are struggling to define themselves as places that include young adults with money, how hard is that going to be for CyWorld? Perhaps in other parts of the world very young children make frequent micro-payment online purchases online (see Finland’s Habbo Hotel – $30m in twenty cent transactions), but I don’t think that’s common practice in the US. Perhaps they are targetting the demographic of adults who love HelloKitty, perhaps I’m wrong and will be surprised.

One notable limitation of the system is that US users are not able to make friends with users in other countries and data can’t be ported from one country’s CyWorld to another. But I guess it’s all about the acorns, anyway.

The Yahoo! Korea team has launched a service called Webzari for visualizing the weight of inbound links to any web page and saving the visualization query history in Yahoo!’s social bookmarking service. The interface is in Korean, and it’s not entirely clear how well it works yet, but the basic feature set is discernible and it’s an intriguing thought for the future. The Yahoo! Search team seeks feedback on the project on its blog.

Half useful and half fun, Webzari joins a list of recent visualization initiatives from big vendors. Visualization’s not just for the little guys anymore. We covered the new Digg Labs visualization tools before launch last week.

The idea here is that Yahoo! Site Explorer will give you a list of sites linking to a URL, but that Webzari makes it easy to see quickly how big in links or pages each of those sites are and where they are based geographically. It could work like a Technorati link search displaying “authority” and geographic information in flash. Pretty nice.

I asked Dana Smith, a concept developer at “visual thinking company” XPLANE about Webzari and she told me that it’s a good example of visualization helping users “see the forest and the trees” more quickly than text alone. The service could be improved, she said, if the nodes included site logos or some other unique image because “it’s the uniqueness of each entity that makes visualization really powerful.” I don’t think a lot of visualization projects focus on that.

I use Technorati to search for links all the time and I usually want to know about the number of inbound links to each of the sites in my search results. Webzari’s visual representation of search results is quite useful and I would love to see the feature included in English language Yahoo!

Zillow, which just raised another boatload of cash, has announced a couple of new features recently. One, the Zillow API, will be embraced by legions of real estate agents desperate to get traffic to their websites. The other, a Zillow mobile feature, will let you get a Zestimate, which is Zillow’s estimate of a home’s value, by email/SMS.

The Zillow API is still being developed, although they’ve given some details on the Zillow blog. Yahoo is already using the API, as well as this test site from a company that build sites for agents.

The mobile feature allows you to obtain the value of a house by email/sms. To use it, text or email a home address to z@labs.zillow.com. I agree with SocketSite – Zillow Mobile you no longer have to wait until you get home from a dinner party to figure out how much your host’s house is worth. Another use, of course, is to check home values in a neighborhood when you visit an open house.

37Signals, the poster child of consumer facing software as a service, is making another move that’s sure to please their customers and demonstrate again the advantages of hosted services over desktop-bound software. The popular personal productivity tool Backpack is now offering an online calendar with all paid Backpack plans. The the calendar page was just linked to the Upgrade page and blogger Rex Hamock, the author of the recent MyBusiness article about 37Signals founder Jason Fried, wrote tonight that the calendar feature is on its way.

The Backpack calendar looks a lot like Google Calendar (our review) and includes iCal synching and natural language input but SMS alerts as well.

Just days ago 37Signals officially embraced outside developers CellTell and their service that sends phone messages to your Backpack account.

When we wrote a few weeks ago about ActiveCollab, a free and open source competitor to 37Signals’ flagship enterprise offering Basecamp, debate was fierce over hosted software as a service vs. software downloads to be placed on your own server. Many people contended that the nominal cost of paying a hosted service for maintenance was more than worth it. [Note: Even ActiveCollab announced yesterday a one-click hosting option with DreamHost.]

Now the addition of one new major feature and one cool supported feature to a 37Signals product is a tangible example of the other primary advantage of software as a service – your system got upgraded and you didn’t even know it was happening. Even the next version of Internet Explorer will be delivered by automatic update, it was announced today.

Whether or not you’re a cynic about user generated content, tagging or ajax – it’s becoming increasingly clear that the web service centric part of the Web 2.0 equation is a keeper.