Hulu.com has opened it’s doors into beta for some time now. And it has been stirring quite a commotion on twitter and the blogsphere, just because it’s a legal way to watch TV series episodes for free at anytime on your computer. Which is nothing new.
It has been done for years now by downloading tv torrents which as you may now is illegal. Most people avoid downloading illegal stuff from the internet and i really understand that.

In my humble opinion i fail to see why downloading a tv show that was broadcasted for free on tv should be illegal. But it is, and there’s nothing i can say or do to change that.

But i think it won’t be long now until tv’s start broadcasting their shows for free with ads on the internet. Hulu just comes to show that it will happen. It’s just a matter of time now.

For all those people outside of the US where you can’t watch hulu your only option still is to download the shows illegally. It makes now sense, but that’s the way it is.

It’s at times like this that I wonder what’s the effect of too much eggnog during the holidays.

The guys at Mozilla Foundation decided that it was time to stab a wooden stake at Microsoft Internet Explorer’s cold dark heart. They released a video on Youtube which apparently is part of a larger viral video campaign set to increase the usage of Firefox in Windows powered computers.
It directly targets Internet Explorer in several ways. Firefox adoption number have been constantly rising and this campaign comes as a surprise.

The video is done in a “We are the world” style with several internet memes singing a Firefox themed song.
You’ll find Chocolate Rain’s Tay Zonday and the Ninja from Ask a Ninja. Some other guys that i don’t recognize make singing appearances as well.

But the video doesn’t stop there, besides praising Firefox goodness it uses obviously fake statistics reporting that Internet Explorer users are more likely to suffer from high cholesterol or breast cancer.

I think this is a shot on the foot buy Mozilla. Microsoft will certainly file a suite against them, and will probably win. This will probably rally more support for Firefox, but in the end I can’t see anything positive coming to Mozilla Foundation from this open attack at IE.

Via Techcrunch

The music industry is collapsing. The consumers found a new way of getting the music they want, to listen to in which device they want. Itunes and others online services have changed that forever.

But there was no way to enjoy live music without getting out of your house and going to a concert.
Not anymore, now you can watch a live concert from your favorite band without leaving the comfort of your home.

And no, it’s not a live recorded CD or DVD. It’s a live broadcast which you pay to “attend” and get to watch your favorite performer playing live for you and hopefully to a few more costumers of the service.

DeepRockDrive promises just that. delivering live high quality video streams of selected bands perfoming in a stage set up just for that live broadcast. Actually the term that has been developed for such an event is a Socialcast.
And as you may have figured out the paying public gets to interact with the band in several ways.

According to TechCrunch’s post:

Here is how it works. The band plays in the soundstage (with or without a live audience). The shows are filmed with five Sony HD cameras, and each Web viewer can pick which camera angle he or she wants to watch. The audience can also vote on the order of the songs on the set list or make their own song requests. They can also send in messages during the show that the band sees on large screens surrounding the stage. Prior to shows (DeepRockDrive calls them socialcasts), bands try to drum up support with digital posters on their Websites and MySpace pages that fans can take and put on their own Web pages. On DeepRockDrive, fans can petition for concerts from their favorite bands, like this one for Flight of the Conchords. If the shows get enough votes, it makes it easier for the bands to decide to fly to Las Vegas to record the show.

I really don’t know what’s the big difference in watching a DVD recorded live or these kinds of socialcasts.
The big plus for this kind of stuff is the interaction between the audience and the performer.
On the other hand, the quality of such a service remains to be seen, but somehow i doubt that it will DVD quality.

Despite it’s possible shortcoming, it’s a step in the right direction. This service will debut during CES. So will surely hear more from this service very soon.

Like many millions out there i’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail app.
I open gmail several times a day. I’ve tried a couple of Firefox extensions to improve gmail but never kept them for long.

I’ve always tried being a more organized person. I’ve tried several apps, pda’s, PIM’s and even webapps. But i’ve always failed miserably in using them for long.

One of the webapps that i had tried was RTM (Remember the Milk). I think it’s safe to say that it’s the leader of the todo-lists webapps. It has many integration features but i never took the time to explore it properly.

Recently RTM dev team lauched a firefox extension that integrates RTM into Gmail.
I didn’t jump on the early adopters bandwagon on this one. But after reading Gina Trapani’s review of the extension in Lifehacker i’ve downloaded and installed the extension.

I love the thing.. every time i open my gmail there it is, a beatiful list of all my tasks for the following days.
The only complaint is that it can’t be moved around, like an igoogle module. But hey, it’s free, it works and it keeps me organized.

You can download the extension here.

Now that’s a nice name for a website. Subvert and Profit shows the ugly face of the internet underground.

There are many online communities dedicated to exchange services for money, and there’s nothing wrong about that.
But it’s quite usual to find “job opportunities” to vote for certain items on digg.com or stumbleupon.com. There are also link exchanges, del.icio.us tagging and several other ways to bring traffic to websites.

Some are sleazier than others and most explore the inequities of social news algorithms. The idea is quite simple. Get a group of 100 people to vote for your story on digg and you’re on the front page, getting the much wanted traffic to your website.

Apparently Subvert and Profit is expanding to youtube, according to this Techcrunch post:

While they have not yet revealed how they plan on subverting and profiting from YouTube, we can take some guesses based on Dan Ackerman’s infamous guest post on the subject. Dan’s viral suggestions included email lists, comments, views, blog embeds, and ratings. I imagine S&P’s strategy will center around paying their users to boost each of these.

However, getting big on YouTube is significantly harder than Digg or StumbleUpon. Front page featured videos are chosen by YouTube itself and pushing a video up the ranks in terms of views requires tens of thousands, not hundreds of user actions. I can only imagine their plans include outright view fraud to make the video “go viral”.

Maybe Youtube is quite difficult to monetize, but I’d bet that quite soon we’ll start seeing twitter spam, if not from these guys from some other folks.

After reading in Techcrunch about Duels.com i took a few hours of my time to give this game a go.Couple of things struck me right away, it’s simplicity and beatifully designed website.
After creating a character I started dueling my way up the levels, gaining experience, gold and tokens.

After several hours i was satisfied with myself after beating down into a pulp dozens of opponents.

A couple of days later I was still doing it, but no quite with the same thrill. All because i discovered, that players progress by fighting other players in a virtual arena. You can challenge or skirmish with another player three times a day.

And that’s all you get to do. Select player, skirmish him three times, challenge him, and hope that he accepts your challenge.

There are items that can be used to change the outcome of the challenges. But after 16 levels of this, the novelty wears off, and it all starts feeling like a chore.

I’ll probably wont be playing Duels again. I get paid to perform boring repetitive tasks for a living.
It’s a nice idea that with the right diversity of gameplay could have a major impact in the web browser games market

I must confess I had very low expectations when I read this blog post shared by Robert Scoble about a new web app called Photophlow.

According to their website “photophlow is an easy and fun way to talk about and share flickr photos in real time.
Think of it as the ultimate flickr communicator: invite your friends, search photos together, chat and comment all at once.” which immediately got me thinking about some meebo + flickr mashup.

After signing up to the beta, I got my invitation fairly quickly. The site is brilliantly designed in a simple and intuitive way.

It’s indeed a chat app, but it’s interwined with flickr in many ways. Letting the user share not only his pictures with others, but search for topics being discussed to illustrate a point or simply add something new to talk about.

Flickr Group moderators will go ape with Photophlow. By casually grouping together in real time a bunch of people that share the same common artistic and photo interests.

Several features of Photophlow reveal great attention to detail. Chat users are used to demonstrate actions by using commands like /clap /smiles. These commands are not only readily available but can be linked to any photo on flickr. So if you want your smile to show a picture of a grinning dog or a sad clown, it’s just up to you.

While I was testing out Photophlow I got to talk a bit to Neil Berkman one of the developers behind this project. He took the time to give me the full guided tour and answer some questions. Thanks Neil.

I’m not internet guru, or startup analyst but Photophlow will hit Flickr like a storm.