Facebook Chat > IM ?

So Facebook Chat went live today (after a couple of weeks of private beta testing) allowing users to see which of their friends are online and chat in real time the same way one would on MSN Messenger, Skype or GoogleTalk.

ReadWriteWeb has a good summary of the features from the original Facebook blog announcement at the start of the month...

UPDATE - Ok, been playing for 10 minutes and the UI is REALLY good for a V1 release. Initial thoughts are it needs a floating notification widget / desktop client for when your browser is minimised but that's about it. This is going to have a considerable impact on the IM market and it will be interesting to see the competitor and press reaction over the coming weeks.

Twitter becomes front page news!

Everyone knows Downing Street has jumped on the web 2 bandwagon recently but few would have thought it would become front page news.

The Guardian (of course it was The Guardian) has reprinted Gordon Brown's Twitter feed on the cover this morning.

Many 'twitterers' are beginning to get annoyed by Twitter spam, commercial twitter accounts just advertising their clients products. Good to see Downing Street is using it probably and replying to tweets opposed to simply posting corporate 'messages'.

And ironically, how did I find out about it? From my friends on Twitter before I even picked up the paper!

Online TV on TV

So Channel Five has become the first broadcaster to buy the rights to an online TV show, explicitly Sofia's Diary, Bebo's successor to the popular KateModern show.

Bebo says it 'represents a milestone for television broadcasting' and Five wants to 'play a role pioneering the next stage of entertainment.'

Interestingly, Sofia's Diary, like KateModern before it, is not funded by ads but by in-video brand placement from companies including Microsoft, Orange, Proctor and Gamble and Disney.

Viewing figures are around the 5 million mark on bebo and Five will be hoping to capture back some of the audience it has lost to online media over the past two years and it will be interesting to see if other broadcasters follow suit....

Mantra in the news...

So, Mantra was mentioned in Marketing (sub needed) yesterday after supplying them with some facts on AVE. As it allows marketers to put a figure on PR activity clients see it as an effective measurement tool but many PRs will disagree. And rightly so, as it has many flaws:

1. It doesn't measure message
2. It doesn't measure the impact of the positioning
3. It doesn't measure the impact of the actual publication

But quantitative vs. qualitative will always be an ongoing battle...

Flickr adds Video

So Flickr yesterday announced (what has been rumoured for a while) Flickr Video. This allows Pro users to upload videos that will sit alongside their photo collections on the Flickr website.

Excellent, so I no longer have to keep my videos on a separate site like YouTube or (the far superior!) Vimeo?

Not quite yet. Flickr has (for now?) limited uploads to 90 seconds long and 150MB in size which means it is not going to become a replacement for YouTube just yet.

It is interesting to see is Yahoo! going after Google's share of the online video space and if it will, over time, integrate Flickr Video with its own Yahoo! Video site.

So what can users do with 90 seconds? Well one example emerging from the private beta phase is the 'fridget' - a snippet of video filmed from the inside of a fridge as someone (or something) peers inside.

Some examples!

The Next Web kicks off in Amsterdam

So The Next Web conference kicked off this morning in Amsterdam with Erick Schonfeld opening the event with his thoughts on the widgetization of the web, or as he called it, 'blowing up the web'.

You can follow all the action at the official blog.

And don't forget KRose will be broadcasting Diggnation live on Revision3 today at 5pm (BST) !!!