Website Hype

Have you got Hulu beta yet? A joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp, Hulu is a new online video on demand service that will also be offering video sharing. The potential of Hulu has been recognised by Tech Crunch, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat, who awarded it the Crunchie award for Best Video Startup at the 2007 Crunchies.

As well as movies, Hulu offers full-length episodes of NBC and FOX television programs, including shows from the Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, and Oxygen channels.

Hulu is currently in limited beta testing, during which fifteen to thirty second advertisements are presented where the normal three minute ad break would be.

In a manner similar to an old Martini ad, Hulu claim that their content is available “anywhere, anytime”, (actually, with Martini it was “anytime, any place, anywhere”), but the content on Hulu is currently only available to users in the United States, so not exactly the anywhere, anytime that Hulu over ambitiously claim.

However Hulu does claim that it is working on making its content accessible worldwide. Let’s hope so. What may be holding this back is the process of clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific region, which will take forever and a day.

If you want to sign up to beta test this new site, you can put in your email address on their home page, and they will add you to the private beta waiting list, and send you an invitation with username and password when they are ready for you. This doesn’t happen instantaneously – I signed up and still haven’t heard anything.

Are you mad about the movies? If so, then you will be pleased to hear that there is now a social networking site especially for you. With the tagline “Stop watching bad movies”, Flixster is the social networking site for movie buffs, and within just one year has grown into one of the largest movie sites on the web, with over fifteen million registered users, and has outstripped other movie sites such as Fandango.

Like most social networking sites, users can create their own profiles and invite friends, but here they can also rate movies and actors, and write their own movie reviews for other users to read. The site also offers information about movies, and generates overall movie rankings on the basis of the 500 million movie ratings that have been provided by the users.

Users can chat to one another, look up movie showtimes, catch up with the latest movie news and gossip, view images of their favorite actors, and also see clips from popular movies and TV shows.

Just one worrying thing though, if you Google “Flixter” in conjunction with McAfee site advisor, the site is listed with a red cross next to the listing, and you are advised to use caution. Why? Well, it seems that Flixter has been cited as sending out too many “spammy emails”.

As for overall cosmetics, I have to admit that the home page is a bit busy, ad-filled and unappealing – your eye doesn’t quite know where to look.

So, my overall impression is: good idea, but could do with a bit more careful website design in terms of eye-appeal. Still, the proof of the pudding is Flixter’s success.

Cute, pink, flowery, refreshing and girly, Glogster is a new site that lets users create web pages, which they call “posters”, using Flash elements. Glogster exhort you to “Poster yourself” – now how can you resist that? You can upload photos, songs, text and various other items. Supposedly, you can even embed your poster on another website, but at 960 pixels wide, your poster will be way too big for most blogs or the likes of Facebook et al.

You can build a friend network to which you add other “Glogsters”, making it very much like some of the current social networking sites. You can rate other people’s Glogs too.

When you sign up for an account with Glogster you quickly arrive at a large Flash rectangle where you can drag and drop images, videos, and sounds. You can either use either preloaded images and snazzy decorations from the site itself, or upload your own. Then as an added embellishment you can play about with drop-shadows, fonts, and the like. You can add links too of course.

Some pundits are already saying that the site is a little like Geocities was, before the explosion of social networking sites and blogs. For people who are already using Facebook and MySpace, it is difficult to see what Glogster really has to offer, and the site faces competitors such as Scrapblog that launched about a year ago - although, admittedly, Scrapblog does not have such a pretty homepage.

There was a time when the idea of creating your own website for free was revolutionary, but now it is just old hat. Most ISP’s offer free websites nowadays. A serious part of the critique is that Glogster are not really offering anything new.

At the moment Glogster is attempting to pull in the punters by giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters.

Glogster is one way of using Flash without giving yourself a heart attack, and the very pink and chic homepage may well pull in the teenage girls who love scrapbooking. It will be interesting to see if this poster site takes off. If its design is anything to go by, it could do.

For those who are interested in both travel and the web, and the way in which various websites can enhance the travel experience, the new website Hi Everywhere! will be of interest. Hi Everywhere! offers to match travelers to people who already live in the area that they are visiting, who are willing to show visitors around, and encourages both guide and visitor to write travel journals of the experience.

The site is based in the US, but many of the people using it so far appear to be based outside North America, and in fact the majority appear to be in Asia.

There are only around 100 members at the moment, which is still not enough to give the site “critical mass”. Social networking sites, forums, and other sites that are relying on user-generated content always face a starting problem – people will only be attracted to the site if it has content, and content will only be created by people coming to the site and joining up.

The presence of this new site has already brought forth howls from pundits who are worried about the safety aspects, yet as long as you meet the other person in a public place, stay in public places, and exercise the usual caution that you would with strangers, there doesn’t seem to be anything to get unduly concerned about. Just use your common sense.

It seems that Hi Everywhere! is a reasonably good idea, you always see more of a place and get an inside perspective when shown round by, and talking to, people who are local to the area. This way you can avoid the tourist traps, and see those hidden away places that tourists tend to miss.

It will be interesting to see if Hi Everywhere! grows in membership, and if it leads to some good sightseeing.

There’s nothing like the internet for getting people together, and there’s nothing like football for bringing people together either. Combine the two, and you’ve got MyFootballClub.co.uk, which was launched earlier this year, with the main intention of getting enough football fans signed up, at a cost of £35 each, to buy an English football club. (By the way, for those of you across the Pond, I’m talking about soccer). Thus far, around 50,000 members have paid up, (thirty five quid is about $72), and this has created a fund of about 1.3 million pounds. The site has happily announced that a deal has been agreed with Ebbsfleet United, a minor English football club, for US$1.45 million. The membership will own the club, vote on team selection, decide which players to buy and sell and, hopefully, guide the club up the leagues.

This great new venture has been set up by none other than former football journalist Will Brooks, and it is probably the first time in football history that fans have had the opportunity to buy and take control of a professional football club – both on and off the pitch. Every MyFootballClub member is going to have an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club, with decisions being made via an online private forum and voting system.

The new site highlights the fact that the internet opens up the possibility of organisations being democratically run by large numbers of members in a way that would not have been possible previously, allowing daily contact between people living miles apart, indeed scattered all over the globe. Online forums allow everyone to have their say, and website software allows large numbers of people to vote easily on crucial issues, and for those votes to be quickly counted.

So it will be interesting to see how well this idea works, and the outcome of this particular venture could point the way to future online enterprises dealing not just with football, but a myriad of possibilities in terms of co-operative company ownership, and online democratic decision making.