Make3D takes a two-dimensional image and creates a three-dimensional fly around model that includes depth and a range views. Photos can be uploaded directly or pulled into the site from Flickr.

The service is based on an algorithm created by Stanford students Andrew Ng, Ashutosh Saxena and Min Sun that won the best paper award at the 3D recognition and reconstruction workshop at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Rio de Janeiro in October 2007.

A January Stanford News Service piece explains it some more:

…the algorithm breaks the image up into tiny planes called “superpixels,” which are within the image and have very uniform color, brightness and other attributes. By looking at a superpixel in concert with its neighbors, analyzing changes such as gradations of texture, the algorithm makes a judgment about how far it is from the viewer and what its orientation in space is. Unlike some previous algorithms, the Stanford one can account for planes at any angle, not just horizontal or vertical. This allows it to create models for scenes that have planes at many orientations, such as the curved branches of trees or the slopes of mountains.

The service is in the same space as Microsoft Photosynth, but unlike Microsoft’s more extensive product that meshes many images together to create 3D models, Make3D is a one image only service. If you like, Make3D is Photosynth for the common man, quick, simple, and although the results don’t come close to Photosynth, they are still very impressive. A full gallery of Make3D renders can be found here.

Freewebs is taking a step back from its personal website network and expanding into a social media portfolio company under the name Webs.com. The domain will serve as a hub for its new web properties, including recently launched social publishing site Pagii and Freewebs. The site will also include a new property, the “Social Gaming Network” (SGN).

SGN is a game developer that builds applications for social networks. Currently, they’re making games just for Facebook, although Open Social integration seems a no-brainer. Their games include Warbook, Super Snake, Street Race, and Blocky, as well as their recently purchased Fight Club (for an undisclosed sum). You can add each of the games to your profile like any other app, which turns out to be a bit of a pain. I’ve started glossing over the Facebook permissions checklist. Each of the games is a decent way to waste away your work day on Facebook, but Blocky took up the most of my time.

The new network makes a lot of sense. In essence, Webs is doing what other casual gaming services like Kongregate and King.com are already doing off the site, but using an existing social network instead of building one. The games leverage the network in varying degrees. Warbook is a feudal RPG that lets you make allies or fight your friends kingdoms. Snake is understandably more solitary. But all the games encourage users to play more games by earning points for virtual goods, or bragging rights by pw0ning their friends on the leaderboard.

Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore. I asked comScore to do a ranking of social sites in the U.S. and then I reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is:

Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).

In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).

Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include Wordpress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.).

Freewebs has launched a new “social publishing” site called Pagii, aimed at crafting highly stylized personal web pages. It’s termed social publishing because the service isn’t only for crafting user profiles, but also crafting layouts for any other content such as scrapbooks.

Pages are designed with a very flexible AJAX page editor that lets users drag, drop, and resize objects and place them anywhere on the page. It’s the kind of system any heavy MySpace user would love. The system doesn’t adhere to a grid layout and allows objects to be layered one on top of another with varying opacities. A lot of the style objects and effects are vector based (SVG), making it possible to rotate and resize them without sacrificing quality. It allows for adding nice effects like reflections and animations to page elements as well.

Objects supported by the editor include shapes, photos, text, html, and Pagii widgets. Pagii widgets allow you to add basic social networking modules such as friends, comments, and personal bio to your page. They can be reskinned to match the rest of the page design. Supporting html code in the widgets means you can also add your favorite embeddable widgets from other services too.

Pagii’s editor creates some of the most flexible layouts I’ve seen, but that kind of flexibility may seem chaotic to some. Other editors like Webjam, Weebly, Synthasite, and Jimdo have taken a more structured approach, following the grid layouts that have become the norm for websites.

RealEditor is a MySpace profile editor that was created by Jay Elaraj and Dave Maestri, two Freewebs developers, in their leisure time.

It caught the eye of MySpace President Tom Anderson, who wrote to the founders in March. He complimented RealEditor and asked them if they’d be willing to come work for and/or sell the software to MySpace.

The co-founders declined. But they had a bit of a surprise recently when MySpace released it’s new editor, incorporating many of the features from RealEditor and some of the look and feel. They created a video here which shows some of the similarities.

At the end of the video, they say:

I can keep going, but I think I’ve proven my point that MySpace’s ‘new and innovative profile editor’ was just completely ripped off RealEditor.com, and MySpace is taking all the credit — and making some nice cash, I bet.

I have no problem with borrowing ideas, a lot of real innovation comes from that, but blatantly ripping off someone’s product and taking all the credit is just super lame, disrespectful, and pretty pathetic.

Also Kind of funny.

- Jay & Dave
www.realeditor.com

If it were me, I would have sold the editor to MySpace when they offered to buy it. There isn’t a close enough case for this to be worth litigation, and the traffic bump from calling MySpace out on this will be short lived.

Update: RealEditor has requested a clarification based on some of the comments coming in below. They say “They offered to pay us for the development time we already put into it at an “agreed upon” rate, and an hourly wage/jobs. Which didn’t appeal to us since we’re in a better position at freewebs. MySpace claims they offered a cash buyout upfront (in the tech crunch comment), so I assume that’s what they’re referring to. Specific numbers were never discussed, it never got as far as a “formal” offer.”

Fotowoosh, a new service from Maryland-based startup Freewebs, will turn any image (preferably an outdoor image) into a 3D model. They went live on Friday. Examples of what the service can do are above (along with the original 2D images. A video is here which shows more examples.

The 3D image is constructed in Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format, meaning you currently need a VRML reader to see it (future browsers will likely build this functionality in). In a week or so, the company say, users will be able to upload a picture and have a 3D animated image returned to them in a Flash widget that can be embedded on any website.

When you upload an image to Fotowoosh, their software tears it apart and distinguishes the sky, ground and vertical elements within the photo, then cuts and folds it into a 3D model:

Our system automatically constructs simple “pop-up” 3D models, like those one would find in a children’s book, out of a single outdoor image. The system labels each region of an outdoor image as ground, vertical, or sky. Line segments fitted to the ground-vertical boundary in the image and an estime of the horizon’s position provide the necessary information to determine where to “cut” and “fold” in the image. The model is then popped up, and the image is texture mapped onto the model.

This is the creation of Derek Hoiem, a PhD candidate in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, who’s now working with the company. Additional information on the intellectual property behind Fotowoosh is here and here (these links auto-download a pdf and a powerpoint document).

Microsoft is working on something related to this in their Live Labs group called Photosynth (more information here). The product will construct a 3D model based on lots of photos of the same thing or general area from different angles.

Freewebs raised $11 million in venture capital in August 2006 from Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle. The company’s main product is a website building tool that draws 18 million or so visitors per month. Shervin Pishevar, the company’s president, say that Fotowoosh will be a standalone service, and they’ll also integrate it with offerings from partners as well as the Freewebs service itself.