Mosoto: Share Files and Chat on Facebook
Nick Gonzalez
18 comments »
Facebook released an API last year and new startup Mosoto is putting it to good use. Mosoto is a Flex 2.0 application that sits on top of your Facebook account via the API and allows you to share files, chat with friends, and discover new ones. The app has a desktop layout, where you control different mini applications for sharing files, chatting, discovering friends, and sharing music.
The chat client controls most of the action, listing which of your Facebook friends, friends of friends, and Facebook networks you’ve joined. By hovering over the names, Mosoto alerts you to the similarities between your profiles. If you find someone that looks interesting, you can befriend and poke them right through the chat window. Chatting is one on one, with groups of friends, or even all of your friends within a network.
From within the chat roster, you can share files with your friends using a free 1GB Box.net account. You can share and open files like pictures, songs, and videos using their in-browser file list and file viewers. The most interesting type of file sharing Mosoto does is with music. Mosoto lets you upload songs into your Box account and string them together in play lists your friends can play through and remix. The music player lists all the music and lists your friends have, and lets you mix songs from your friends accounts into your own play lists.
Mosoto is looking to release in the middle of March, but is still taking beta testers through their Facebook group. The project is self funded and was created by a of a team of five recent University of Arizona graduates: Girard Kelly, Seth Lesky, Louis Tran, Srinivasan Chandrasekharan, and Paul Chung.
See the video below for a great overview of the product, with the cheesiest background music ever.
Great tool.
Oh man. I’ll totally be all over this when it comes out. I love facebook. If this really works the way they demo, it’ll be so hardcore.
Great tool - but the video is just so shit its terrible. Its the cheesest of cheese I have ever seen or watched.
Change the video and you get my vote.
i’m not a fan of surplus tools
facebook should integrate whatever this is fully into their own platform.
i don’t see mainstream facebook using this
i turned off that youtube video of this program…the two guys’ ditzy, giddy voices are annoying
I remember facebook originally was planning on releasing their own file sharing tools. I guess this API was a much wiser decision after all.
I would still like to stick to traditonal ones.Its simple and fast ever
Ohhh Man this is going to be so sweet! I just showed this to a bunch of guys in my fraternity and everyone is so excited about using it!!
very cool, but isn’t it dangerous to introduce a tool designed specifically to share copyrighted music with your buddies? doesn’t that kind of put a crosshairs on the product?
what i mean by my previous post, is that their exit strategy appears to be getting acquired, and no one is going to acquire a product with such egregious infringement issues.
maybe they handle music differently .. it looks like they do not allow you to download music only stream it .. http://about.mosoto.com on http://about.mosoto.com .. 2nd point of What is Mosoto .. hmm interesting ….
haha that is what they said about youtube too! Anyway i can’t wait to startt using this!!!
Couple of observations:
1. In their video, they say something about the music they have “legally uploaded”. Then they show how to play and share a Michael Jackson clip. How dumb are these guys? I’m pretty sure Michael Jackson’s music hasn’t been released from copyright. Could this one demo video be enough to blow the protection of the safe harbor of the DMCA?
2. This is totally dependent on a network effect. In order to get use from the service, all of your friends need to be on the service. Maybe if large numbers of people rush to try it, and continually log in, then it will be useful. But if only a few % of Facebook is on the service, then I think it will fail. They could get around this by allowing Mosoto users to communicate with non-Mosoto users, in a way that encouraged the non-users to sign up (i.e. if you tried to chat with a non-Mosoto user, it would send them a PM, encouraging them to try it out).
is this a business? or something some guys came up with out of boredom? Considering a majority of college students use shared computers to check their facebook accounts (which prohibit downloads), does this prohibit useage of this product?
If thats the case, kiss this one goodbye.
Isn’t facebooks API filled with contingencies about cutting off for abuse or excessive use? If this takes off isn’t it going to be an excessive use case?
Perhaps because this appears to keep users within Facebook that they won’t face a cut-off - That is unless Facebook decided to just do this on their own after they run through all the kinks themselves.
This is cool, but vunerable. Go Flex go!
Great tool, hope it works as well as the demo. Tagged in Screencasts.ca.