ePay It Forward?
You’ve no doubt watched or at least heard of the movie Pay It Forward, with Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and the incomparable Haley Joel Osment, who sees dead people. The title of the movie is a phrase that means, essentially, that you can make the world a better place by making the lives of a few people better. They don’t pay you back but when they’re able, they pay it forward by doing the same for a few other people.
Well website eKudoz wants to do something similar using messages. Send a nice message, congrats, kudos, to two people who will hopefully do the same to two more. This is a great social experiment and seems to have a grounding in the concept of Six Degrees of Separation. A story related to Six Degrees involves an experiment where people had to send out two letters addressed to someone they didn’t know by sending them to someone they did, who would in turn repeat the process.
More Streaming Video Sites: Pyro TV, UStream TV
The latest entries in the streaming video website wars are Pyro TV and UStream TV.
Pyro’s interface is clean, with video playing on the top half of your browser screen and tabbed listings on the bottom half. But I don’t see anything all that different about Pyro.TV compared to any other video sharing site, other than an abundance of content from specific TV channels such as Cartoon Network. Am I missing something?
UStream has nothing visually outstanding. They do push the social aspect by highlighting members, offering a link to their profiles and allowing several types of communication: message, 1-on-1 text chat and 1-on-1 video chat.
Now, given that you can search for various types of people (single, swinger, married, etc.) who are looking for various types of meetups (dating casual and serious, networking, etc.), you’d figure they’ve for some reason combined a dating site with a video sharing site. Speed dating, anyone? There’s a section for it.
Not saying that it can’t work, just that I don’t judge my potential partners only by what video content they watch. Just strikes me as odd.
Originally posted on April 9, 2007 @ 9:00 pm
I have tried both UStream and Pyro. Ustream had way too many options that did not even pertain to video channels. What I wanted was a website where I could get video game channels and tech channels, not just videos (a la YouTube). This is a clean website, no downloading or pop-up pages. Pyro is very well maintained, also. My channels are updated constantly.
I have been using Pyro tv mainly as a way to get daily news feeds. They have just come out with a channel player feature that allows you to take the channels you subscribe to and keep them together in a multi channel player. This player can be embedded into other web pages. I currently have embedded mine into my Netvibes homepage and each morning when I boot up, I can watch the news. Pretty catchy!