Agriya

Volume is back in the limelight again, the latest version of its premium audio sharing script Volume that is aimed at serving the music enthusiast community the way Rayzz video-sharing script props up the video-sharing community.

The comparison with Rayzz is especially appropriate, it turns out. Earlier versions of Volume were built with the  Joomla engine. As cost-effective and efficient as this was, the evident trend seen today on media sharing websites toward ever-rising bandwidth demands and intense traffic pressures points to a need for a new approach that will help Volume’s new customers stay ahead of the curve. Today’s Volume is built on the highly successful Rayzz framework.

With a new foundation come new features to help webmasters create and manage a better website experience. A Volume-designed website is easy to set up for even a novice website creator, especially so with Agriya’s dedicated support staff. But ease of use in this case comes with great customizable features too. The entire website is easily rearranged to individual needs, and compatibility with the Smarty templating system makes things very user-friendly. Today’s Volume automates the file uploading and job to a large extent. Multiple audio files are easily uploaded at the touch of a button with a batch file uploading feature. Associated audio metadata are automatically picked up in the process as well.

Sending newsletters, announcements and other forms of communication to the members of your music sharing website becomes easier too. An Artist Management section also allows the webmaster to keep tabs on the best-performing acts on the website.

Music sharing today is often just a setting for young people to conduct more meaningful social interaction in. The Volume script natively includes social networking features; website members are able to make playlists and comment on other people’s choices, and communicate by method of internal messaging and mailing. A popular music website is hopefully going to attract advertising interest from sponsors too. Volume’s new advertising management features help the webmaster remain open to the possibility of advertising revenue.

Agriya’s vice president of marketing, Sheerin Banu, sees the latest release of Volume filling an important need in the market. “In certain age groups, shared music exploration happens to be a more important way to bond than other forms of interaction”, says Ms. Banu. The more easily deployed a music sharing site is, as it will be with Volume, the more swiftly will audiences be able to react to shifting trends in music, she feels.

Find out more information about Volume.

Discover the online Volume Demo

Buy Volume now for an introductory offer of just $147!

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Google has a new search product out; and it is here just in time for the holiday shopping season this year. The problem that the product has set out to solve is the lack of an effective search technology that is customized to retail and business. Google certainly offers a generalized search function to any website that cares for it and pays to have a Google-powered search-box on its website. But this new product, and it’s called “Google commerce search,” is specifically built to help with retail.

What does it mean though to call something “customized search”? To begin with, Google Commerce Search will allow customers to search by parameters that are specific to a retail context. The ranking of the search results that arrive this way will be done to best suit customers looking to locate a product just as they would at a store, with a salesman’s help. Spelling alternatives will be considered with better sensitivity and business owners can do things like place product promotions at the top of the rankings, no matter what.

They call this, Product-specific Search; Yahoo Music has rolled out such a product too to help visitors to its music site, in searching for and exploring music; the new Yahoo Music website is special in the way it interprets the searches visitors perform. Perhaps this is the next step up from Mozilla’s advance a few years ago giving people browser tabs to use in place of separate browser windows – to help people keep their Internet exploring focused and manageable. In Yahoo Music search, when you search for a musician, say Robbie Williams, the original search stays, and a pane on the left shows choices of his most popular videos and songs.

Retailers who pick Google Commerce Search can call in on other business-oriented Google products like Google Product Search and Google Analytics too to help collect statistics how their visitors like to search while on their visits. How much would it cost for a company to order Google Commerce Search integration in their websites? The word on the street is that Google charges about $50,000 for a yearly subscription to its services. For that kind of price, most small retailers should feel locked out; but Google would perhaps do well to take another look at its familiar and stark search results presentation style. Retailers are all about visual appeal; Google’s no-nonsense approach in a sparse format could work for faster search; but what would it do for the retailers who cannot do without visual appeal?

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For success in the world of social networking, exactly how aggressive do the marketing strategies employed have to be? Get this, the hub that seemingly captures the most news on every kind of medium, Twitter, gets less than 2% of all social network traffic today from US residents, according to statistics published on Experia. Twitter does grow with remarkable tenacity, posting a ten-fold growth this year; but where does that take it – to a grand total of less than 2%. So what does the scoreboard look like among the social network giants? Surely no one could have beaten Facebook and Twitter?

As it turns out, Facebook is unbeaten in what is almost 60% of the market. We have all been regaled with news reports of the death knell of MySpace for about a year now – how they departed from their roots in music in attempting to become a major social networking hub, and were snubbed by users for turning their backs on their musical origins. MySpace actually is not doing badly at all; it finishes second with about a third of the market, though it’s user base has shrunk considerably. The surprise bronze medalist in the race is the relatively low-profile Tagged.

“Why Tagged?” one may ask. What have they done? How could they have beaten Twitter? Twitter gets such glowing press and the best that Tagged got to do all year was to get negative press for an e-mail scam earlier this year and their hard sell tactics in getting memberships up. Perhaps all the hard-edged tactics have worked. Not only is this company getting sign-ups, it is also retaining those members with great page view statistics, time spent statistics, and financial profitability.

Twitter finishes last in the top four. Has there been a data error totaling up the numbers? How does all the great press Twitter receives about addictive tweeting not get it better rankings? It is possible, in fact that Twitter is merely a master at working the press.

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Mozilla has issued a couple of major updates in quick succession; the first one, an incremental update, came in the last week of October, and it was called version 3.5.4. This one was only a bug fix update, aimed at smoothing the user experience, and not a feature update. Some of those bug fixes would only be of interest to anyone who was technically inclined; bugs that deal with arcane things like download filename spoofing, memory safety flaws in media libraries, cross-origin data theft with document.getSelection(), and heap buffer overflow, have been addressed. And there are a few serious security problems sorted out as well, like the ability of outside agents to run arbitrary code and install viruses on your computer, or the hanging pointer vulnerability issue.

But perhaps of real interest to mainstream users is the most recent update, still in Beta, the update release 3.6. This is quite a major update with lots of interesting new features for the power user. With Google’s Chrome snapping at Firefox’s heels, it is clear that Firefox is trying to address some of Chrome’s main competitive advantages: its overall speed, especially at startup. Version 3.6 does away with a few other recognized problems, such as JavaScript performance. For new users, Firefox introduces built-in support for the browsers seem system, Personas, the ability to view fullscreen movies with no add-ons, a scanning feature that will look through all the plug-ins installed on Firefox and check for updates for them to automatically, support for CSS, HTML 5 and other under the hood features. To bloggers, the new drag-and-drop feature can be particularly useful too. Firefox’s main advantage today is its vast installed base against Google’s Chrome’s. That browser may have a tiny installed base today but is expected to grow soon, especially with the release of Google’s Chrome operating system for netbooks. Competition always works in the consumer’s favour.

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There are nearly two billion Internet users around the world today, many of them native in languages that do not use the Latin script. The use of language font packs to bring Chinese, Arabic or Devanagari in to written webpage content has long been standardized. But there has been one area of the Internet user experience that has never been open to equality in the languages: the one of the naming of domain URLs. The autonomous body that regulates and sets standards for the Internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) is now ready to roll out registration for Internet domain names written in scripts like Chinese, Russian and Arabic, by 2010. Internet addresses used to be assigned under a protocol known as the Domain Name System, or DNS; the DNS system still applies today, but it works in conjunction with the new Internationalized Domain Names IDN system that allows native use of foreign languages. How does all of this work?

The DNS system has always only been capable of accepting ASCII or all Latin characters. When you type in a regular Internet address into a browser, the DNS system translates the user-friendly name into a string of numbers that identify the network address the name appeals to. The new IDN system does not replace the DNS system; it merely works with it, by using algorithms like ToASCII and ToUnicode to translate non-ASCII text to ASCII standards. All browsers today have been updated to accept IDNs.

Starting November 16, 2009, countries and language communities can begin to apply for language-specific top-level domain names or country code extensions like.uk or .us. This move while it has been in the making for nearly ten years now, coincides with the way the US government has started to ease its control over the Internet body Icann, paving the way for true autonomy.

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Twitter today is a great ear to the ground for most businesses and corporations. People love to vent on Twitter what they think about this or that company’s service or values; those companies have always seen this as a great window into their mistakes. Well, Twitter is a company with consumers too – and Twitter just happens to tune into Twitter like everyone else, to hear what the grapevine has to say about their potential to improve.

Consumer opinion seems to have trended Twitter towards the creation of two new features for users now: one called Retweet and another called Lists. The thing about these ideas is, not only did Twitter not come up with it on its own, it is not even building them on its own: fanatic Twitter enthusiasts are doing it all for the company. While this is a fresh approach, it isn’t really unheard of. Bug Labs does something similar with its hardware products, giving informed consumers to design and build their own.

Where Twitter stands out is in turning this kind of innovation from an occasional departure to a regular feature of its plan. For instance, the popular way in Twitter of providing a link to the name of anyone who may appear in your post, is to put a “@” symbol in front of their name; this popular way came of a user idea. Twitter accepts features that users think up and popularizes them even when the management doesn’t entirely like it. The wildly popular hash tag used today was a user brainwave that was wildly unpopular with the management at first.

The new feature anticipated now, called Lists, is meant to let people make lists of updates posted by their favorite celebrities or anyone. It is meant to help people make some sense of their voluminous Twitter interests. The other feature of the week, Retweet, has been in unofficial use for a while. Users a time ago formed a casual shorthand term called RT when they wanted to repost someone else’s tweet. Twitter is introducing a way that will perform the same function without increasing text volume by repetition. Now this should be something to Twitter about.

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The problem of being haunted by a tune must be a really bothersome one for people, judging by the number of applications there are out there that will help ease your mind in the matter. Midomi is one of the star performers in this area; this search engine is so powerful that it can pick up on the tune you have in mind if you will just sing it over into your computer. All you need is a modicum of singing skill and nothing stops you from placing that bothersome tune. Midomi happens to be a self-refining algorithm too. When enough people sing in for a particular song, the algorithm learns better and better.

Midomi and the competing product Shazam, both work on the iPhone and other smartphones too. Perhaps the best part of Midomi is the way it can tie in with the Twitter and Facebook experience. There is a Facebook app that Midomi has that can help you share all your musical discoveries in this way with your friends on the network. Once you have that song nailed, the program will also let you go over to your favorite YouTube clone site to watch a video or take you to an online music store to buy it.

In collaboration with LyricsFly and IMDB, a new service called ScreenTunes helps you search for movie soundtracks too. The Midomi concept can certainly help push a popular segment in social networking, one that is devoted to obscure music in a shared experience of discovering it. Perhaps the best part of these applications is hearing how they were created by enterprising young people, some barely out of school.

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Facebook has made an astounding announcement this week: in a statement, the company says that it isn’t of primary importance to them that Facebook members actually log in into the website at all once they have signed up for their service; the announcement stated that it was all the same to the company that its members should visit the site for their updates or find the updates at any startup Facebook service at all. What is more, Facebook promises to release a set of developer tools for startup companies to look into Facebook with, to provide you with your Facebook updates and notifications outside of Facebook.

But why would Facebook do this – give away access to the core of its business to other commercial players? For one thing, Facebook believes that it is being overwhelmed by demand for its service; there are so many different kinds of gadgets out there to view content on that to expect one company to provide for all of them seems impractical. Actually, as counterintuitive as this sounds, it’s been done before – by none other than Twitter. That service has allowed third-party programs right from the start, that bring to people the ability to look at Twitter updates from outside of the website.

So how goes the third-party application situation so far? Consider SocialScope, a startup that aims to bring Facebook to your Blackberry. It lets you tap into multiple social networking sites, and is better even than Facebook’s app for that smartphone. Seesmic is another noteworthy service; when you install their software on your desktop, it allows you to use Facebook right from your desktop without going to that website. Seesmic just hopes to return Facebook the favor by basically making the Facebook idea more successful, giving their users convenience.

Facebook and Twitter are not really profitable enterprises yet, even with all their massive popularity. When people find out that they don’t need to actually go to those websites to check their information, won’t the websites lose whatever little chance they have at making a profitable venture of it? Only time will tell how this unconventional idea pans out.

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The thing about the Internet is that in sitting in your home, putting your thoughts and personal information out, you are tricked into believing you have privacy; and in a password-protected Internet life how easy it is to take for granted how vulnerable we become without it.

Everyone has elderly relatives who need to be in on all that happens in the lives of the children in the family – birthday parties, school events; often, to help the technically uninitiated elderly relative, people just post their children’s pictures and videos on a place like Facebook without password protection or even on a YouTube clone website. They figure that their video is lost in the crowd of millions of others; what predator is really going to find it?

People only wake up to how easy it is for people to find it, when things get out of hand; people anywhere on earth roam the Internet, put together freely available media files and use them for anything – for a school project, for plastering all over the walls of a city a thousand miles away to advertise a baby show, or merely to share among friends. It can be very easy to let one mistake get out of hand.

Even where personal views on the subject tend to the liberal, there is always the serious consideration of how other people might react to your media-posting activities. Birthday party pictures, school event videos and the like, usually include images of other people’s children too. People take a dim view of having decisions about their children taken without their consent. If the parent of a friend of your child’s finds a picture of his child at your child’s birthday at a recognizable restaurant or park, they can right away worry about how a sick predator out there can find their child if they wish to. There’s also the matter of setting a good example for your child in online safety; if you go about posting personal pictures at random on the Internet, how will you ever tell your child to exercise caution himself?

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Lu.ly ….. now that’s a funny random sound; but it is also a really great idea that all Facebook and Twitter devotees need to know about. Lu.ly basically, is a toolbar for all the major browsers that allows you to watch a crawl of all the relevant tweets and Facebook notifications out there, in real time, right there on your Lu.ly browser toolbar. There might be some people who might not find this useful, but to watch a crawl of all your chosen tweets like it was a news channel or something has to be fun.

Twitter add-ons for Firefox are nothing new; but this one takes the idea a step along, and makes it possible on all major browsers, and lets you watch your Facebook and Twitter updates in the same place. The design of the toolbar is tasteful and restrained, you can even hit pause if you want to concentrate on something else.

What does feel like to use Lu.ly then? New status messages constantly crawl into view; you can travel back and forth with the messages of the tweeter of your choice, right from within the toolbar too. There is a search bar on the toolbar in addition, that allows you to search within Twitter. The functionality offered by Lu.ly is right at par with the ones offered in competing Firefox extensions, like TwitterNotifier or Tweetbar; the implementation and the cross-platform compatibility is what sets Lu.ly apart. Of course, Lu.ly is now one more competitor for your already crowded toolbar space. Perhaps things could go the Ludicrous way; the Ludicrous Firefox add-on allows you to work in Twitter from your Firefox browser window using no other interface for its purposes other than Firefox’s own search box. Mac users should be able to use Lu.ly presently: a version is in the works.

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