Quick news: Slacker, Streakr, Kaneva, Twittermap
I have fought the urge to start making this sort of posts for a long time, because the purpose of FranticIndustries is to offer opinions and reviews, not just quick links to new stuff. However, the amount of new services can sometimes be overwhelming. Plus, an in-depth review is sometimes impossible; for example, Slacker simply doesn’t work well for me, but I still feel I should report that the service exists. So, you can expect to see more quick news on new web startups like this one on FranticIndustries, while those that I find especially interesting will still get a full review.
Slacker - a very ambitious music service that plans to tackle the likes of iTunes with its offline music software, all multimedia player manufacturers with its upcoming hardware multimedia player, and services like Last.FM and Pandora (and dozens of internet radios) with its online software (which is the only thing that works at the moment). My first impressions are quite gloomy: I can’t get it to actually play music. The GUI is quite nice, though. Try it out, maybe it’ll work better for you.
Streakr - search engine for social networks. Works with MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Facebook. I’ve tried it out for a couple of MySpace profiles I know, and it worked quite well - it didn’t even have problems with “exotic” Croatian characters. Unfortunately, it already has quite a competition in UpScoop, Wink, Bigulo, ProfileLinker, and even Eurekster Swicki and I’m afraid there’s only room for one in this space.
Kaneva - MySpace meets SecondLife meets YouTube meets Flickr. Sounds like spending way too much time to figure if it’s good or not; if anyone has any idea, please let me know.
Twittermap - Mashup site connecting Google Maps with Twitter data. Not only you can find out what’s everyone doing at any given moment; you now know exactly where they’re doing it. A person called midmusic is awaiting pizza at this very moment! Which is very exciting! (I’ve tried, God, I’ve really tried).