You may have noticed that I experiemented with some of my Picture of The Week pictures on the photo-sharing site Zooomr. In general I enjoyed the concept, and quickly thought that I would be able to settle into the social photo-community of Zooomr.

There is no official “I forgot my password” page, and although I was 80% sure of the password when I first registered it would not work. After several emails to the staff they finally reset my password, though even with the new password I could not log in. Since I had not uploaded any pictures yet, I thought I would just re-register. I did, and everything was working fine, as long as I accessed my Zooomr page from the machine I registered on. The second hick-up was uploading. Some of my bigger pictures did not upload correclty, and since the upload had not completed I could not access the picture to delete, even though the pictures showed up as thumbnails on my user-page.

The final straw for me was yet to follow. When I tried to log on from another computer, even though I was now 100% sure of my password I was yet again faced with incorrect login credentials. Re-emailing the staff, and still a couple months later I have not received a reply. Before posting today I see that I am not the only one experiencing these problems, see here. Just today I researched the login topic again and finally was able to login again. Apparently even though login asks for an email address it wants your username. Who could have guessed?
I continue to wish Zooomr the best, and hope to give them a second chance in a couple months. Now I need a little break.

The popular TV-show crime series CSI:NY from CBS will include an investigation in Second Life in its next awaited episode, that viewers can also participate in, TechCrunch reports. I find this is a very exciting new step in the social media world, as it truly does add interactivity into a prime time TV-series.

As Hollywood, or the showbiz if you want, steps into the virtual realm of Second Life it will definitely give the virtual, other, second life of yours a very exciting and exotic opportunity to sharing in solving the mystery of this intriguing and entertaining action crime series. A two-way intergration of normally very single tracked popular tv-series will definitely cause a great deal of us previous sceptically towards Second Life and the virtual world to perhaps give it a new chance. And perhaps the actual investigation can teach you a couple things as well?

This tied in nicely with some topics from as seminar I was at today, discussing new social media trends, with several new media personalities in Norway. Amongst them Øyvind Solstad one of the guys behind NRKbeta.no talked about Second Life.

Anyway I will personally have to perhaps give Second Life a new chance, because I must admit it I think CBS has made a genius move.

Information Architects have made a Subway map for: Web Trends of 2007. The most successful companies and websites, including a number of my favorite Web 2.0 solutions, are plotted, categorized with color-coding and rated by size and popularity with stars.
Personally I like the way that have portrayed the data, in a clear and familiar symbolic design.

For the interactive version of the map click here.

In addition the company has attempted to add Web generation numbers. Ie. Web 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and even Web 2.5. According to the company Web 2.5 can describe the route that Facebook is taking. (Then I am guessing that would entail Facebook’s Applications feature.)

(Via TechCrunch)

Choosing color (colour) schemes and palettes can be a challenge. Now a site called ColourLovers offers a Social Networking solution for different color combinations.

This above specific page is part of their blog and the post is titled: Color Inspiration from the Masters of Painting. It offers some color-combos from several famous historic paintings.

Previously I wrote about ColorJack for Comparing Complimentary Colors

(Via Drawn)

Social bookmarking solutions like the already established del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon continue to expand in new directions. One of the latest additions is the page-tracking solution Cluztr. Cluztr registers each webpage you visit, you can share pages you have browsed with friends, aswell as see who’s on the same page as you and then chat or leave a message on the website.

TechCrunch’s article, where I discovered Cluztr, is titled: Social Bookmarking Meets Big Brother: Cluztr and I think that title sums it up pretty well. Although it is a good concept, I would rather have what little privacy is left which I have surfing on public computers and insecure wifi networks.

With Web 2.0 Running out of Time, which help keep you organized and updated on several different social-networking services from the same site at once are in demand. Such as ProfileLinker (ProfileLinker Simplifying Social Networking) first caught my attention, there is a new player called Loopster (As of this morning Loopster is Refusing Connections(?)).

However according to TechCrunch’s review, ProfileLinker aims to be more of a central nerve of your social networking, while Loopster aims more at generating feeds of your friends updates on the various networks.

This new web 2.0 service, MyCyberTwin has caused some laughs and then made people think. I have even read of MyCyberTwin references to a so-called web 3.0. Basically MyCyberTwin is a bot, that can converse on various social-networking sites in your place. It has enough AI, Artificial Intelligence, to actually convey a semi-meaningful conversation.

I believe that we are definitely going to see a lot more of this sort of AI-features, as there is simply not enough time for the web 2.0 generation, bloggers and webmasters to keep up with everything. (See: First Follow-up Web 2.0 running out of time?) Also what are the ethical implications, is the “owner” held responsible etc.?

Check TechCrunch’s out write-up for some interesting example dialogues and comments.

Facebook Developers just released an iPhoto plug-in, that allows you to export pictures from iPhoto to Facebook with opportunities like adding captions or tagging your friends. (If you want, read how I gave into the Facebook Peer Pressure.) Otherwise if you are into the whole people/face tagging and mass-uploading albums to Facebook this plugin is more likely for you than me.

Read more about the the iPhoto Facebook Exporter and get the plugin here: Facebook Exporter for iPhoto.

Personally I prefer Adobe’s Bridge, included in their Creative Suite package. (Especially since I am not ready to upload and tag all my virtual friends, that I don’t have picture of on Facebook.)

(Via Mac1.no)

Imagini takes advantage of the well known phrase: A picture paints a thousand words. Their objective is to create a new language of communications though images. They have some nice interface and a good “social-networking” conecpt. It will be interesting to see if they rise above the commercial aspect of their gift-finders.

I tried out their “Imagini Friends” section, which providesan expression that you match with a picture that fits your impression.

The pictures were all pretty good, as well as the results from the personality profile tester, or VisualDNA, actually turned out similar to what I believe to be my personality. Above a screenshot of the picture-book that told me my supposed mood, habits, etc.

I am stepping a little off-track from my regular tech, video, web 2.0 and social-networking news. I have not had much time to find that many interesting stories, and so I will take opportunity to profile/point out two bands on mySpace.

The reasons for profiling these two bands is that I like their music, in addition I have met them in person in Stavanger.

Above is screenshot of Jeremy’s page.

Above is a screenshot of Guro’s page.

Guro’s page was launched now in March, and I stumbled upon the news over at the ramblings of onar vikingstad.