Youtube joins Shoutitout after Shoutitout announces video milestone

Youtube has just joined Shoutitout under the nickname @youtube, this coming just hours after Shoutitout had announced that over 5 years of playing time in video had been Shouted.

For those who don’t know Shoutitout only allows you to Shout videos that are posted on other sites, they only allow 3 other sites Youtube, Vimeo and Metacafe.

Shoutitout has also partnered with Vimeo to allow you to upload videos to Vimeo without leaving Shoutitout. They tried to do the same thing with Youtube and Metacafe but the sites couldn’t come to a agreement so they went ahead with just Vimeo.

Well, today Shoutitout announced this milestone of 5 years of video playing time, it was also rumored that Vimeo was catching up in playing time and amount of videos posted, so Youtube decided to take matters into their own hands by creating a Shoutitout account.

Shoutitout has several popular Youtubers on it so Vimeo could perhaps pull them in somehow but Youtube wanted none of that so they made a Shoutitout account, say our sources.

The account hasn’t gotten much attention yet but has only Shouted once and has picked up a badge, plus it is friends with 2 of Shoutitout’s top 5 users already so that is a solid start.

As for Shoutitout stats we have a little more than what they announced. First of all around 3 years of the video are from Youtube, around 1 and say, 9 months is from Vimeo and around 3 months is from Metacafe. There are around 11,000 Youtube videos posted on Shoutitout, around 9,000 Vimeo videos and around 1,ooo Metacafe. Vimeo used to be around 10,000 behind Youtube but has really cut into that since the partnership.

We are also starting to wonder, maybe Youtube will start talking with Shoutitout about the terms of that partnership again to stop Vimeo from getting any more ground on them threw Shoutitout. Anyway this is a pretty high profile signup for Shoutitout.

Twitter’s Wall like feature comes out to all

Twitter is rolling out allot of new stuff this week, and they are continuing to do so. Today Twitter’s wall like mentioning  feature, that we reported was coming awhile ago, is coming to all.

Right now it looks like the users with a smaller number of followers are getting the feature first, then it is spreading to the more popular users in a pretty quick roll out.

This is a feature to encourage conversation on the network and really it should have been there a long time ago because it’s simple enough but extremely useful.

Yes, this is allot like Facebook’s wall posting feature but unlike Facebook it will not appear on the users Twitter profile page, it will just go to the feed like every other tweet does and all mentions do now.

Twitter is probably testing allot more features in the name of engagement as you read this since Twitter’s new approach seems to be to get users more engaged.

Heello averages 4 Pings a second on first day

New startup Heello has started a little faster than other startups of similar design and features. The site had an average of 4 Pings a second on its first day, granted this isn’t near what Twitter gets and really Shoutitout gets more than this to, but it is a solid start and is a much better start than either of those two sites got.

The site is closing in on 200,000 Pings and after one day of being on the web that is pretty nice of a number. For those wondering, the site is hosted by Amazon but on a special server, not in the regular cloud like allot of other hot startups. This fixes the issue of it going down with the rest of the internet when the Amazon Cloud goes down like it did recently.

As far as we can tell Hello has more than 25,000 members to date and it probably has around 30 or 40 thousand. We don’t know how many photos have been posted but are trying to find a source who may have information on the matter. It is always hard to find out this kind of information on startups so it could be awhile before we have that kind of thing about Heello.

One thing is for sure, it has given itself a nice little start, lets see where it goes from here.

Weather Channel to include tweets in forecasts

The Weather Channel, who is now partnered with Twitter, is launching The Weather Channel Social, a new, web, mobile and on air social site that will compare tweets from a local area to the forecasted weather.

On the website the page will show local listings and tweets matched for relevance on the weather in that area, in other words you get to here what the Weather Channel says the weather is like in the area, and what the people there say it’s like.

The mobile application will show the listed areas and show a live feed of tweets in the area about weather as well.

The Weather Channel will also use th

e tweets on air before, during and after the Weather Forecast (only during live broadcasts) they will also discuss live weather trends on Twitter.

To add to all of this the Weather Channel has also created 220 local Twitter feeds for cities with over 100,000 in population.

Twitter has been known to get up to 2 million weather related Twe

ets per day if the weather is active and can get around 300 to 500 a minute as well.

The new Weather Channel social is sponsored by Citi. Twitter and the Weather Channel will share revenue for the project according to our sources.

What it looks like:

Google+ adds games, away goes our Google+ coverage

Google+ has just added a games feature that includes Angry Birds, Bejeweled, and Zynga Poker. Cityville and Farmville to come at a later date. The fact that Zynga is on board is interesting since Zynga sued, and won a lawsuit against a Google owned social network Orkut earlier this month.

You may recall the Google made some gaming investments and some people knew Google+ games was coming. Well we aren’t going to be covering Google+ as much anymore because of it. In till now Google+ was considered by us as an advanced microblog, besides the circle feature which as you may notice we never covered. Since they have added games they head towards the subject of social network like Facebook and Myspace so we will only be covering stuff like upgrades to +1 and stats on how many posts there are. Stuff like that, not everything on Google+.

Here is what Google has to say about Google+ games:

Today we’re adding games to Google+. With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life.

And here is how it works with Google+:

When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting—click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you’ve received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear. So you can comfortably share your latest high score—your circles will only see the updates when they’re interested in playing games too.

Most importantly Google says this:

If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.

Google says to check out their new Google+ “Platform blog” here.

Google also says the games roll out will be gradual and it starts today for some users.

Preview of Google+ games:

The fake account problem on Heello

Heello has gotten an interesting response as a knock off of Twitter, but it has also been filled with fake accounts. Most sites get a few Justin Biebers or Lady Gagas but Heello is getting fakes like crazy.

The site is working on a way to pull the fakes out of the userbase but for now the site will be filled with fake accounts. These accounts include: @cnet, @googleplus, @yahoo, @twitter, @youtube, @shoutitout, @ev, @wikileaks, @martzuckerberg and many others.

The site has also gotten its full collection of Justin Biebers the most notable being @justinbieb who is also a fake.

For now if a “company” joins Heello don’t trust anything posted on the account in till the company confirms that the account is theirs. All the accounts we listed above have confirmed with us that they made no account on Heello.

Some stats for Heello really quickly. The site has a little more than 16,500 Pings and around 5,000 users. We can’t get the exact stat for the users that is just the amount of listeners the official @Heello account has, that account isn’t a fake by the way.

Proof the listed accounts are fake just by the Pings they have posted:

Twitter launches Show Me More

Since it launched back in 2006, Twitter has been basically the same thing on everything. Strait timelines with just words and a username. Today that changes.

First of all the tab @Mentions on Twitter is being replaced with the tabs @USERNAME and Activity. These two new stems are designed to show what is going on around these tweets or whatever appears in these timelines.

The @USERNAME tab (obviously replaced with your username) will show your replies, but it will also show things like when someone follows you, when someone Retweets you or favorites your Shout. It’s an very similar concept to Shoutitout’s notifications if you are familiar with them.

The Activity stream shows the same things, but for other people. For example if someone who I am following retweets something it will show up there.

This could change Twitter is a large way. While Favoriting tweets has been around since the site launched, it is rarely used on any site (which is why Shoutitout switched to the like button.)

But Twitter has decided to take this path and hope to increase the amount this feature is used along with other features so that your connections can see what you are interested in.

Twitter will roll out these changes to a very small group of users today, then slowly rolling out to everyone else over the next few weeks if everything goes according to plan.

For now this will only be on twitter.com. Twitter is drawing up ways to put this on mobile devices but notes it could be very different if it ever comes.

This is what the feature looks like:

 

Twitpic founder launches Twitter competitor

Twitpic founder Noah Everette has launched a new site called Heello, it is almost exactly like Twitter.

The site was announced awhile back and has been in privet testing for a while now but really the only noticeable difference between it and Twitter is that it has a public streaming feed that you can’t pause, but don’t have to click messages to see more “Pings.”

Aside from that the site basically just changes the words of everything and allows you to use it, just like Twitter.

The site is also currently mostly fake accounts making fun of the site, like Mark Zuckerbergs page that has a description saying “I made Facebook, bitch!” so don’t but to much weight into what you hear on Heello.

It is also very possible this might just be an attack on Twitter for some revenge since Twitter launched a competitor (that it recently just deployed to the whole web, which may have something to do with the all of a sudden launch.) Twitter also blindsided Twitpic about the feature when they told yFrog and other sites that offered similar photo sharing to Twitter features. This could just be an F-you Twitter site.

Everette did “Ping” that features he has planned for the site will make it stand out from others, we will see.

What a profile on the site looks like:

Shoutitout grows almost 20% in one day

Shoutitout had a pretty good day yesterday. More than pretty good, more like an amazing day.

The site grew almost 20% in just one 24 hour period soaring up nearly 100 members which is something that hasn’t happened on the site, ever.

Shoutitout expects to have several more days, not this size, but pretty big in the next few days as well which should grow them past 700 members before the school year gets started (which is what they are aiming for.)

Shoutitout announced this via a Shout by @admin saying this exactly:

You could say we had a good day yesterday

The Shout is yet to get any comments or likes, most likely because it is currently 1am on the east cost which is where allot of Shoutitout’s userbase is, but it will slowly gather attention for sure.

The site seems pretty excited about the sudden extreme growth, but really it isn’t to sudden since the site has had several large days recently and also several amazing days with the amount of Shouts then the site really should be expecting this.

This is also why the site recently moved to the Amazon cloud, in fact they might be the site using the cloud the best since it didn’t crash along with Instagram, Foursquare and others last night.

Twitter rolls out photo sharing to everyone, now it gets interesting

Twitter has just announced it has rolled out its new built in photo sharing service to everyone on the site. This makes things allot more interesting.

The site has allowed some of its users access to the new feature but not a large amount in till today when everyone got the message that they now have access to the photo sharing service which should reboot a highly anticipated feature which was already starting to become unused.

The reason this makes things interesting is because what will it do to Twitpic, Mobypicture, yFrog, etc. Also can Twitter catch up with Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Shoutitout etc…?

Right now Twitter gets about 1 photo for ever 10,000 Facebook photos, 2,000 Flickr photos, 5 Instgram photos, and 3 Shoutitout photos but this will grow that number largely and cut into that stat by allot.

Or the other thing, no one will use it and will keep supporting Twitpic in till Twitter just blows it off and it stays out there but is almost never used, which has happened often with other sites, but isn’t a usual around Twitter.

We will keep you updated in different posts if any other popular photo sharing service respond to this.

What a photo looks like after it is tweeted:

Video explaining Twitter photos: