Robo.to is a micro-video platform which lets users’ record 4 second video clips expressing their moods, emotions, feelings, condition et.al. Think of it as an emoticon in video mode. But here’s the surprising catch; the free video emoticons don’t have sound. The short video clips go with text status updates. These video clips can be used in social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

Is it offbeat?

We have avatars…we have animated avatars and then we have these ‘live’ extensions of our own selves. A free video emoticon does a better job than the one-dimensional artificial avatars or even profile photos. And unlike them, videos aren’t static.

Let’s enter and switch on the mood.

1. Creating an account is simple and hassle free. An email confirmation completes the registration process.
2. Entering your account takes you to the Get Started page where you simply have to record your first free video emoticon. Allow the inline Flash player access to your webcam and with a press of the record button you are recording your first heart to heart thoughts.



3. The next step is about putting a few words about your state of being. Feeling happy…say so, in the little text box. Feeling crappy…why not say that too, after all your visual expression is probably giving you away. A little indicator lets you know what’s a good length for the message. In this case, a picture doesn’t say a thousand words. It’s the words that go with the picture.



4. To add the social media where you would like your video to update your friends, head southwards for the selection of the modules. As soon as you select one or more, the respective login box opens up, asking for your credentials. With the social links established, you can publish your video updates.



5. Just like any other social network, you can add your friends and follow their updates. Added friends go into your crowd which is like your network of friends. You can check into all status videos from the Statusphere section on top.



6. For those with their own blogs or websites, Robo.to provides a link and also embeddable code. This allows any reader to follow your status updates as soon as you make them.

   

Is that all?

If you don’t look carefully, you just might miss the link to the TV Mode on the upper right corner. It’s a gallery of those entire 4 second user created clips for public consumption.

The micro-videos are arranged around Topics, searchable by keywords or usernames. Viewers can rate the videos, reply to them and add them to their crowd. I clicked through quite a few and it’s fun watching some of the expressions condensed into 4 second dumb charades.

Will it catch on?

With a beta, it is early days. But one day who would have thought that a web app which forces you to write your thoughts in 140 words would ever become a rage. Twitter did and most of us are on it. Brief and skimpy seems to be in. For an app that calls itself a massively small product, that could be the USP. Mashable says the site has seen 350,000 site visitors and 1.5 million Robo.to views in all. That sounds like a calling card to potential success.

Try it and let us know. Maybe, in a 4 second clip?

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Before we start, let me lay out the things you will need:

• A text editor capable of editing HTML. I suggest TextWrangler.
• Signature Profiler
• Some basic knowledge of HTML.
• An online file-sharing service like DivShare or Box.net to store your avatar.
• To be running Mac OS X 10.4.x and higher.
• To be using Mail on Mac OS X.

This entire tutorial will transform your email signature from this:

to this:

If you’re still excited, then read on. But be warned, depending on your level of geekiness, this process may or may not be easy for you. [Disclaimer: this tutorial is actually an improved version of this one]

First step – Making a HTML signature

You have to understand that in order to insert HTML in your email signature and make it interactive, it’s actually two different procedures. The first is to change it into HTML, the second is by using Signature Profiler and adding the interactive stuff: iTunes status, random quote, Skype button.

Let’s focus on the HTML part first. You’ll need to open up TextWrangler and create your HTML signature. There are some limitations to adding HTML – for example, GMail does not recognize body or style tags and all CSS must be embedded. Head here to read more about CSS in email.

If you have no idea where to start, use this example HTML file as a base to mess around with. If you want, you could tweak it to fit your style. You should fill in your name and social sites where the fields indicate. Also, you’ll need to upload your avatar to Divshare or Box.net, get the direct image link and insert it in the image tags. The size of the image varies and depends a lot on the style of your signature and how many lines of text you will have. Like I said, you will need to play around and customize it yourself.

If you notice, there’s a specific line of text after the second break, {itunes.display.info} is used later to retrieve your iTunes status.

To see how your signature will look like, save it (to the desktop or anywhere else convenient) and drag it into Safari. Once you’re happy with the results, click on the File menu and Save as ‘webarchive’ onto your desktop. Name it “HTML sig”. We’ll return to it later.

Step two – Show your currently playing song

Now that you have your HTML signature all set, you’re ready to add the interactive stuff like iTunes status and Skype buttons.

Download and install the Signature Profiler plugin for Mail and restart Mail. It should now be added into your Mail preferences.

Here’s what SigPro can do:

• Add iTunes currently playing song, artist and album
• Add a Tail signature
• Add a random text qoute
• Add your Skype Status and buttons to call you
• Lots more advanced stuff like calling scripts

If you’re planning to show your iTunes status, then you’ll need to create signatures for them. Personally, I’ve only created two new ones: one to show the song iTunes in playing, and another when it is paused, stopped or not running. To do this, you’ll need to go to the Signature tab in Mail preferences. Create a new signature and call it “iTunes playing”. Right click in the signature field and you’ll notice that SigPro has added their Replacements into the menu.

Add the items {itunes.playing.song}, {itunes.playing.artist} and {itunes.playing.album} into the signature field from the right-click menu. Now all you need to do is to customize it. Here’s what I would write: I’m listening to {itunes.display.song} by {itunes.display.artist} from their album {itunes.display.album}.

Keep in mind that these are just text, so you can adjust the font attributes. You’ll need to select the curly brackets as well when changing the size and colour of the fonts, if not you’ll lose the formatting.

Now, make another signature for iTunes’ paused state. It doesn’t need to have any fields in it, just a short message will suffice.

After you’ve done that, go to SigPro’s tab in Mail preferences and hit the ‘iTunes & Quotes’ tab. For each iTunes state, select the appropriate signature. Now test it out! Play iTunes and see if the signature changes (it will change right there in Mail preferences).

Step three – Swapping your text signature for the interactive one

If you already have a plain text-only signature set in Mail, good. If not, set one up and associate it with an account (by dragging the signature from the middle column into the appropriate email account in the left column). Quit Mail.

After you’ve done that, go to ~/Library/Mail/Signatures/ and you will find all of your signatures in webarchive format. Assuming that you only have one email account set up in Mail, you will have three signatures: your regular signature, “iTunes Playing” and “iTunes Paused” signatures. To find out which is the one you want to change, double-click them to open in Safari until you find them.

Once you’ve located it, copy its file name. It should look something like this “F61C8250-DE9F-4B33-A17D-2F5FF6E3B5B9″ (without the webarchive extension). Rename the “HTML sig” file on your desktop with this file name. Drag the new signature file from the desktop into the ‘Signatures’ folder and replace the older signature file.

Open Mail and your signature is now HTML and interactive.

A few things to remember: The avatar doesn’t load in Mail’s preference but it will load when composing a new mail. Also, any changes made in the HTML signature will be hard to repair. For instance, if you accidentally delete the avatar logo from the signature, you will have to start from scratch again. Keep a copy of the ‘webarchive’ files so that you can restore your signature in case of a disaster.

You can also add other stuff (like the Skype button) into your signature by right-clicking and selecting fields from the SigPro Replacement menu. If you want more control over its formatting, then I suggest that you add the fields by editing the HTML signature in TextWrangler.

If you’re into this kind of thing but don’t use Mac, then I would recommend that you check out Saikat’s article on creating multiple singature in Gmail. Retaggr is also an easy way to add a funky signature to your emails, David mentioned it earlier in his post about how to create online business cards.

Please ask if you have any questions about this tutorial or if you somehow screwed up and need help. What are the other methods you use to interactify/interactize your email signature? Let us know in the comments.

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But then let’s face it, Twitter’s not the only micro-blogging platform out there, and it’s definitely not the only program that lets you have status updates. That’s why having a Twitter-only client doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. I was using Twitux before, but since then I joined a fully open-source micro-blogging platform called Identi.ca. Probably by virtue of being open-source software, it has a large Linux-user population, so I had to join. And Twitux doesn’t work with it. Enter Gwibber.

Gwibber is a status-update client for a lot of services. I’m just using it for Twitter and Identi.ca, but it also works for Digg, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, and Flickr. It’s actively developed, and the developer (Ryan Paul of ArsTechnica) seems to be listening to user input, so that’s definitely a plus.

Right now, though, I just really like its flexibility. It uses WebKit for rendering, so it can get pretty fancy. Take a look at the screenshot below. I configured it to use dark blue for Identi.ca updates and light blue for Twitter updates, so they match each site’s theme. You can pick whatever color you want for each, but I thought it was easier to remember this way.

You can also see that where someone replied to me the message is outlined in red. That’s pretty useful. New messages are outlined in light blue to highlight them.

Perhaps my favourite feature is the duplicate detection. See that plus sign on my message? Here’s what happens when you click it:

It detected that I tweeted and dented the same thing and displayed the status update only once. This happens when I post from within Gwibber or when one of my friends that uses both does so. It just helps tidy up the interface a bit, I think. And then of course there’s the requisite “Reply” button in the bottom right corner of whichever notice has focus.

If you’d like to try it out:

• Fedora: in 8 & 9’s testing repositories
• OpenSuSE: It’s in 1-click
• Ubuntu: Directions on wiki to add repositories

Please note, though, that Gwibber is still in Alpha. I haven’t noticed any issues with it, but being alpha software does mean there are big changes happening fairly often. I think duplicate detection was added last week. I’m with everyone that’s requesting a “Replies” tab. Ryan says he’ll make it a priority.

Windows and Mac users? You’re out of luck. This application is only supported for Linux, but if you get it to compile and run on other Unix-based OSes, let me know.

[rating=4]

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Subsume currently only supports updates from Facebook and MySpace friends. It integrates nicely with Address Book, showing the picture attached for the contact but is optional and you can have Subsume work independently from Address Book. Besides that, every time a computer joins or leaves your network, Subsume will let you know; and can even automatically send out status updates for you on Adium and iChat when you watch something in VLC, Joost, Miro or DVD Player (so your friends know to leave you alone!)

More specifically, Subsume will provide you with alerts regarding:

• New Notifications from Facebook
• New Wall Posts
• Status Updates from Facebook and MySpace
• Connected/disconnected computer son your local network (Bonjour)

Subsume is more or less for the people who enjoy checking out what their friends are up to. This is the kind of program which you turn on and leave it on in the background, if you know what I mean. Since it works with Growl, Subsume pretty much feels like it is part of the system, not a separate application and doesn’t really bother me or decrease my productivity. My only gripe is that I can’t get the Subsume Dock icon to hide when I run the application. It also sets itself to start on login, so that saves a bit of trouble.

Subsume hasn’t been updated since November last year but still it is quite functional and does the job. Maybe if there were more Subsume users, that would encourage its creator to focus more attention and time into the project.

Subsume is compatible with Tiger and Leopard and again, it’s free.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

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In order to keep up with the social media phenomenon, there are numerous aggregation sites & applications popping up on a regular basis. It seems like most people are now using FriendFeed to stay updated with things but what about the other social aggregators out there that are less publicized? Do you use any of them?

I’ve joined my fair share of social aggregators but these are the 5 that stand out to me as far as being the most useful & beneficial. If there’s a different one that you prefer, please feel free to tell us about it in the comments.

Socialthing!

Socialthing is the social aggregator with the least features & only supports 13 sites (so far) but it seems to be growing more in popularity. It’s very personal in that you can only see your own lifestream & it doesn’t support friends, followers or subscribers; you can only see your friends from other sites (in your lifestream). From your lifestream you can reply (to microblog posts) & favorite items & it is sorted by person & site, in chronological order.

Whenever there are new updates for you to view, a message will show at the top letting you know that new updates are available. You can then choose to see them when you’re ready.

You can also use Socialthing! to post status updates to Facebook, Pownce & Twitter (for now).

Profilactic

Profilactic “is a social media aggregator/lifestreaming service that pulls together just about everything you and your friends create online” & supports a whopping 186 sites! One of the best things about Profilactic is that if there is a site that they don’t support, you can just add it in yourself.

On June 1, 2008 Profilactic created a partnership with Ping.fm, giving members the ability to post updates to 21 different sites at one time.

With Profilactic, not only do you get a lifestream but you also get a profile, you can add clippings, you can add friends & you can view your friends’ lifestreams.

Strands

Strands has quite a few unique features that makes it stand out from the rest of the social aggregators. It allows you to filter content by group (everyone, people who follow me, just me, mutual contacts), category (blogs & notes, images, music, bookmarks & more), date (today, last 7 days, last 30 days) & rating (liked, disliked, saved). These filters can be applied for the entire Strands community or for any individual member.

Two other unique features that can be seen for the entire community or just an individual member are the trendwatch & hot posts. Trendwatch shows the top sources & top categories for a person’s content & hot posts shows which user posts have the most activity (comments & ratings).

What really makes Strands stand out is their tracker, “a desktop application that tracks your listening behavior in your favorite media players and pops desktop notifications about your contacts’ activity even when you are not on Strands.”

Swurl

Swurl is a social aggregator that’s set up in a blog type format. Your home page shows all of your content in chronological order & without any type of site filtering. Your friends page lists all of your friends according to site (Digg, Twitter, Flickr, etc) along with your friends’ feed. The particular format of the home page & friends’ feed actually resembles FriendFeed & includes many of the same features.

Swurl also aims to stand out from the rest by providing you with a timeline of your content. The timeline is set up much like a calender, differentiating your content according to the type it is (status, link, blog, music & image). As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the timeline shows an actual album cover (if recognized) of the song you listened to & it also shows any image that you’ve uploaded.

Iminta

Iminta answers the question, “what are you inta?” & currently supports 34 sites. Iminta has a lot of the same features of the other social aggregators I’ve listed. Their best feature though, is the ability to filter content by as many sites as you want. You can filter content for just 1 site, 3 sites, 10 sites, it doesn’t matter & you can choose which sites you want the content filtered by. You can also filter the content by type (images, microblogs, songs, etc) & you can filter out your favorites only.

Iminta gives you 3 tabs to work with – recent comments, what your friends are inta & what you’re inta. You can manually add an inta as well. Plus, Iminta makes it easy to share your friends’ content by letting you email it or blog it.

Also, you can organize your friends into groups. Groups allow you to “quickly filter your views and RSS feeds for groups of friends & control which friends can see which things you are into.”

So now it’s over to you. Do you use any of these services? Or do you use any others? Let us know in the comments what you think of these or any other similar social aggregation services.

(By) Charnita is a social media addict & internet junkie. She blogs about web apps, internet tools, social networking, web 2.0 & internet marketing on her Social Web Tools blog.

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I say “more or less” because there are a few start up flaws. When you first install it, it doesn’t import all of your Facebook contacts right away. In fact when I installed the plug-in for the first time, NOTHING HAPPENED!! It was only a hour later that the Facebook contacts slowly began to appear in my contact list and even then it was only a few at a time. I have about 25 people in my Facebook friends list and only 12 are appearing right now in my Pidgin contact list several days later. Why the others are not showing up, I don’t know.

Maybe they (the contacts) have disabled Facebook Chat on their end – Facebook users do have the ability to opt out of the chat feature – or maybe they have to log into Facebook Chat for the first time before the plugin detects them? I don’t know. Either way, not everyone is there on Pidgin yet. But the people that ARE there can talk to me fine and I can talk to them. So the plugin works perfectly in that regard. So I feel I can recommend it to you and say it’s a plugin worth using and a plugin worth watching for the future. It’s clearly still a work in progress so I am confident that any existing bugs will soon be cleared up.

One of the Facebook plugin features that I really like is the ability to update your Facebook profile from inside Pidgin. When you go to the account management section of Pidgin, you will see a “Set Facebook Status” option and when you enter a status, this will automatically send that status to your account on the Facebook site.

The pros of using the plugin are obvious – all of your contacts are in the one place on Pidgin. There’s one less reason to log into Facebook and this in turn saves you time and makes you more productive. Pidgin also logs your conversations as text files which is useful if you want records of your conversations kept.

The cons of the service? Hmmmm…..you don’t get poked by using Pidgin? I guess if you like that sort of thing, using this plugin would be a bit of a bummer for you.

The developer, Eion Robb, has also made a Skype plugin for Pidgin, which I have also tried out and used for quite some time. I highly recommend it as well if you want to move all your Skype contacts onto Pidgin as well.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, professional freelance writer and the editor of Make Use Of. He drinks countless cups of tea a day, checks out countless websites a day – and does not like to be poked up the you-know-where on Facebook. Check out his personal blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

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Networks like Facebook and of course Twitter started it, and now everyone seems to be adding them in. MySpace now has numerous Facebook-like features including the current status message, newsfeeds and applications.

It’s all a form of micro-blogging and services like Twitter have been growing immensely over the last few years. If you’re a big user then you may get tired of keeping all your profiles updated at any one time.

Here are a number of fairly simple tools that you can use to quickly update the status message on a whole number of services at once. You might also want to check out Mark’s review of Ping.FM which also does the same job.

Posty

Posty is one of the new applications built on Adobe’s AIR platform and supports the four main micro-blogging services; Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr and Pownce. It doesn’t need much explaining, just save all of your login data and start using! The convenient thing about having a desktop client is that you don’t need an additional account to access Posty itself, just the services.

Hellotxt

To be honest though, it’s unlikely you will be using those four services together seeing as they are all pretty similar. Hellotxt is a better alternative as it has support for Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku and Bebo. Hellotxt is a website that functions in the same way as Posty. After registering you can enter your details and update your status’ whenever you feel the need.

Sociogami

“Instantly update your status across all networks at once!” Sociogami is a great looking application that supports MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. It only supports these three at the moment but I’m sure more will come with time. We’re seeing a lot of these kinds of applications lately and Sociogami is looking to become one of the better social media managers.

Mingll

I was slightly suspicious when I found Mingll as free toolbars are pretty much synonymous with ’spyware’ and although users are a little more savvy these days it can still be a problem. I must admit I’m pretty against filling up my browser screen real estate more then I have to, but for what it does Mingll is actually very good. If you’re like me and prefer minimalistic approach then check out Aibek’s article on how to keep your browser functional and save as much as space as possible.

More then just a simple status updater Mingll is in fact a fully featured social media manager. It’s simple and easy to use and currently offers support for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIN, Digg and promises that YouTube, Flickr, Bebo, Orkut, LiveJournal, Yelp and Flixter are coming soon.

The best thing Mingll does is keep you logged into all your services and essentially combines features of each services into one. So all IM and mail is together, contacts are accessible from one place, friends, notifications etc

What do you use to update your social network status messages?

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning.

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The service currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Tumblr (with MySpace and Bebo coming soon). By entering your current status into Ping.fm, the site will then send your status to your account on these social networks within 60 seconds (for me, it was done no later than 30 seconds). No longer do you have to visit each site individually and enter your status again and again. Now it can all be done remotely from one central location. A big time saver.

Upon creating your Ping.fm account, you are asked to log into your accounts on these social networks and authorize Ping.fm to update your status on your behalf. The fact that you have to provide your password may worry some people but Ping.fm has provided a privacy policy and you should read that and make your own mind up before proceeding. I was inclined to trust Ping.fm with my details. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Make me lose even more at Scrabulous?

Once you have authorized Ping.fm to act on your behalf, there are three ways they can update your status:

1. By web interface: you can enter your status message on the Ping.fm website and hit the enter button. Easy.



2. By email: Ping.fm provides you with an unique email address which you can use to email your status messages into the site:



3. By instant message: I really like this one. You can put Ping.fm bots on your IM contact list and then send your status to Ping.fm as instant messages. Supported networks at the moment is only AIM but a Google Talk bot is apparently imminent and support for more networks are apparently in the works:

But the feature I really like are the “triggers” – these are if you only want to post to certain networks and not to others :

@fb message – Post directly to Facebook
@jk message – Post directly to Jaiku
@pn message – Post directly to Pownce
@tr message – Post directly to Tumblr
@tt message – Post directly to Twitter

So if you wanted to only post to Facebook that you were watching a movie (for example) then your status message to Ping.FM would be @fb watching a movie. That way, it would only go to Facebook and not to say Twitter or Pownce.

To find out more, I had a short interview with the creator of Ping.FM, Sean :

Mark : What gave you the idea to start this service? What made you confident you could compete with an already existing service such as HelloTXT? What makes Ping.FM stand out from the crowd?

Sean : Ryan, (a colleague-of-mine-now-partner-in-crime) and I tossed the idea around the office for a day or so. We decided it would be pretty useful what with all of the micro-blogging sites starting to become so popular, so we put the gears in motion. Ryan moved to San Francisco shortly after and I started the concepts for the development.

At the time we started all of this, we had no idea that HelloTXT existed! It wasn’t until we were mentioned in a Mashable blog post that one of the guys came out and said hello.

I’m confident that our points of engagement; i.e. chat bots, widgets, apps and all of the other various platforms we’ve deployed on, not to mention the ones slated for launch will keep our services very useful.

Mark : How reliable would you say Ping.FM is? Has there been any down-time? Be honest now!

Sean : The only down-time we’ve come across was an issue with the AIM bot. It decided to go off line for several hours last weekend, but has yet to become a repeat offender. The site is very lightweight which makes it incredibly stable with high traffic. All message handling is done off the site, even if the site is down for any reason, all of the other
platforms will remain live as if nothing is wrong. It’s an intense system.

Mark : What definate new services are you planning to roll out in the near future? Do you have any other vague Ping.FM plans in your head that you’d like to share with the Make Use Of readers?

Sean : Current plans include an iPhone web app as well as a WAP based app for the phones that don’t support rich web content, an AIR platform, Windows platform, Mac dashboard widget and a few other platforms I’d like to keep a secret for the time being. We’re trying to push weekly roll-outs that include new features, but we’re developing them so fast we have to pace ourselves.

But, you can expect the GTalk bot and some other super secret platforms to go live within the next week for sure.

Mark : Are you planning to offer a cellphone text messaging capability like Twitter?

Sean : Yes, we are currently looking into premium SMS capabilities that will allow users to send messages to custom SMS short-codes.

Ping FM is in closed beta at the moment but Sean was nice enough to offer Make Use Of readers beta invites to try out the service. We have 100 invites to give away. Just go to Ping.FM and enter the beta code makeuseof. Then come back and let us know in the comments what you think of the service. If you’re a Mac user you might also want to check out Moodblast.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

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MoodBlast was recently updated to version 3.0.7. This app just does it all for you. With a mouse-click, it will update all of your statuses on Skype, iChat, Adium, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, Jaiku and Facebook. Talk about being efficient!

When using the application for the first time, you’ll need to enter its Preferences menu to input the usernames and passwords for the social networks you want MoodBlast to update. Facebook however, requires authorization, so you’ll need to first log in, then grant MoodBlast permission. After that, it’s pretty smooth sailing.

And instead of always typing your status, you may also grab the song you’re listening to on iTunes by typing !itune and MoodBlast will set your status accordingly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t refresh itself after a song change, so you’ll have to actively type !itune and hit blast again.

MoodBlast is charityware and it’s available for download at Circle Six Design’s website. And oh, it’s Mac only. There is also a web-based alternative, check out HelloTXT.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

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