Photosynth Unveiled

Microsoft has finally released its much talked about Photosynth system. Described as "an entirely new visual medium", Photosynth allows you to input a collection of photos of a place, event or object, and after analysing each photo for similarities to the others, it will build a model of where the photos were taken, re-creating the environment and uses that as a canvas to display the photos.

It would seem that Microsoft see this as something more then just a fancy pseudo-3D creator. If all the company and development blogs are to be believed, this is going to be a whole new way to view all your photos. I'm not so sure, and doubt that this can be anything more then a fun piece of software, with limited continuous use. Having said that, it's a pretty cool way to slide show your holiday snaps.

Saturday Distraction

Sure the movie looks like it'll be total trash but the microsite isn't that bad, and the game is pretty addictive. Check out Death Race for an easy way to kill some time on another rainy weekend!

YouTube Top Spot

The crowning achievement of any viral marketing, advertising or internet based video campaign is it's total number of views. Obviously this isn't very different from tv or movies, but with the internet everything is very, very trackable. For some time now, the incredible “Evolution of Dance” video has held the top spot as the most watched video ever on YouTube. Produced by Judson Laipply, it is a 6 minute video in which Laipply performs a dance routine through cuts of 35 songs. Through a blend of dance, humor and physical effort, we are given something completely original and innovative.

Sitting in second place for a long time has been Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend video. It's not very original or innovative but it is quite provocative, and anything featuring a dressed down teenage girl is, unfortunately, going to do well on the internet. The videos initial viewing figures on YouTube quickly soared to 50 million+ views.

So what? I hear you ask. Well fans of Lavigne launched there own unofficial campaign to propel the singer to the top. Currently, it has 97,462,978 compared to Laipply’s 96,188,641. But how? AvrilBandAids.com created a way to “cheat” the YouTube system by refreshing the video every 15 seconds. Fans who opened her video would be able to “viewing” it over 5,000 times per day.

Unsurprisingly many major online publications picked up on this and started pointing the finger. What no one seemed to be aware of, was that YouTube caps views per IP to 200 per day. So the "cheat" couldn't have done it, not by itself. AvrilBandAids real goal wasn’t actually to cheat at all. Instead they allowed their "cheating" to slip into the public domain and the viral effect kicked in.

In other words, they used the reporting of the cheating to do the cheating for them. The publicity was enough to push it closer to 100,000,000 and passed the champ.

Interestingly, all postings of Lavigne's Girlfriend video on YouTube have now had their embedding code disabled.

Let's Mash it up!

I was talking to a friend yesterday about a post I wrote on Cybercom about Memes. I used the term Mash-up, which they had never heard before. I wondered what the best way to explain it was, and I did a little Googling.

The best definition of a Mash-up which I found was from Mitch Joel on Six Pixels of Separation, who defines a Mash-up as "Two individually awesome things that make up one even more amazingly awesome thing". I couldn't have put it better myself.

Facebook to Buy ConnectU

The BBC has reported that Facebook have set ConnectU as an acquisition target. More interesting perhaps, is the fact that ConnectU previously sued Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for stealing its code.

Basically, prior to becoming the face of Facebook, Zuckerberg worked as a programmer for the founders of ConnectU. Later, in 2004, he launched Facebook as an Ivy university-only network, which kickstarted the lawsuit by his former employers. The case was based on the accusation that Zuckerberg had stolen their code. At the time they asserted that Facebook should be shut down and all profits transfered to ConnectU. The suit was settled in 2008, but an appeal was later lodged by ConnectU under claims that Facebook had misrepresented it's real value.

Facebook lead ConnectU to believe its actual value was approx. $3-4 billion, when in reality it has a filed value of $15 billion. Based on the former figure, Facebook gave the ConnectU owners an undisclosed sum of money and stock. However, in return ConnectU's principal shareholders agreed to sell their ConnectU stock to Facebook.