Why not make some money on what you write in cyberspace? We at MessageDance know that the content and messages that our users share get a lot of attention from search engine queries.

You can now put your AdSense ads onto your MessageDance messages automatically. Just add your AdSense details into the Affiliates section from your DanceFloor. Any impressions/click-throughs are yours!

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

We completed a new feature that lets you send an email to MessageDance with a large attachment you want to share with people from your email. We’ll email you back a link you can then share with your friends. If you attach PDFs, Office files, music, or videos, we automatically provide a player on the webpage to view it.

Just email it to FWD @ messagedance.com. Use this to share those large powerpoints and PDFs to whoever you want. Remember, these posts will be public through MessageDance.com.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Sam

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

As usual, we’ve been very busy working on new features for our users. We’ve added tons of exciting stuff that we are announcing today. MessageDance at its soul is an email service — we like to call it a social email service. We grok very well with the issues affecting mainstream email services — spam, clutter, asynchronous attention issues, and a general pain to deal with attachments.

With this new release, we decided to address non-work related email attachments.

We call it FWDance. I remember how our sysadmins used to send emails emphasizing email best practices. One common wrist-slap was how to handle big attachments. Your colleague’s funny lol cat haz message was usually just one click (and one virus) away from bringing high-stakes product roll-out plans to a grinding halt!

FWDance is a simple service to offload all those non-work related email messages and attachments. Instead of forwarding big (and likely toxic) attachments, you are just sharing a website address. Your email administrator will come and hug you for doing this. Plus, bandwidth is not all that cheap either, so you are saving your company some money too. Let MessageDance worry about storing all your attachment files.

Earn Money for Your Content Sharing!

Speaking of money . . . how about a few extra dollars to compensate for your gas pump pain? Now with MessageDance, you can make some walking-around money too. We’re enabling users to embed their own ads on their MessageDance content pages. These show up on the sidebar on pages that show your shared content. Currently we only allow Google Adsense (160×600 ad units), but we will be expanding this to include other networks in the near future.

Best way to test drive this feature is to create account in MessageDance, go to Affiliate module and enter your AdSense publisher id. Once done, you’re ready to send any content including attachment emails to <username> @ messagedance.com.

Along with FWDance and Affiliates, we are also announcing FatBird. The Twitter phenomena is amazing. It’s hard to know why, but it can be amazingly addictive. At MessageDance, we love the Twitter community. 140 character constraint based tweets creates good, fun, snarky dialog (of course, you can send more than 140 chars with MessageDance, if you must!). Tweets can sometimes be profound and important as well. As the recent earthquake in China showed, Twitter can be put to good use with the Microblogging format perfect for breaking news.

Twitter fits in nicely with our vision to push all forms of expression in a completely decentralized fashion. We call it anywhere to anywhere publishing.Today we are announcing MessageDance FatBird, a smart way to browse and share tweets.

FatBird allows users to

-Browse tweets. FatBird does a smart url expansion creating a rich media browsing experience. Current release shows YouTube videos and Flickr pictures automatically. You can even listen to song if tweet has any url pointing to mp3 file as we render a player. Nice.

- Take bunch of tweets and send them directly to your blog. Yes they come with the url expansion and all the SEO juice.

- Share tweet digest with your friends. Like someone’s tweet and feel like sharing it? Now you can do that using MessageDance friend network. Tweet sharing notification will show up in all networks where you have MessageDance widgets installed. Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, WordPress and Blogger are just some of the destinations where your tweet digest can go now. Go ahead be a tweet curator!

Also you can do other Twitter-y stuff like REPLY, RETWEET and posting new TWEETS. We think you’ll like these new features.

As always, we would love your feedback. If you are not signed up, please head over to the FatBird home page and sign-up using using your Twitter credentials.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Stephen Baker and Heather Green has a great overview on the evolution of blogging. Read that to get a historical overview of bottom-up publishing revolution.

Blogging has influenced many power structures - be it mainstream media, entertainment industry or research based business. By enabling easy publishing and non-intrusive (RSS) reading model, it created classic non-consumption market out of moms, dads and every other average joe who has something interesting to say.

Blogging is in it’s phase 2. It’s purpose and benefits are all clear and mainstream media’s adoption suggests that its now mainstream as well.

Big question is where do we go from here?

Are we going to see innovation in the content (more multi-media and more mashup?), in distribution (more destinations?), in brand/reputation management (blog at the center of your digital identity?). There are more questions than we have answers. There are lot of theories and most of those theories are pushed by startups.

Our existing engagement with blogging tools and blog based media has comfortably plateaued to a good-enough set of functionalities. Why rock the boat when things are working?
I believe our basic needs and increasing fragmentation in media will call for changes in the importance we attach to blog features. Individual needs circle around more money, more fame/brand, more distribution of your identity (SEO juice). ME brand will circle back to your blog. Right now it’s scattered around online destinations which are built for community environments.

Just to test this theory I did a very high level search on three leading search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live) with the keyword “blog”. Just the fact that Google (which is by far the most dominant search engine) places higher importance to personal blog shows how important this type of destination is.

You can compare all three search engine results via PDF files. I saved it so that I can track how this first page result will change in near future.

To be continued..

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Well that subject line was a question I received recently.  Now our early beta users users know this feature very well but I thought not everybody is aware of it's full impact.

Recently we rolled out an interesting feature where users can set up their multiple email accounts. This multiple email account is like having multiple passports. You can travel to the wonderful world of blogging and twittering from any email clients.

Now it won't be a big deal if it was just multiple email account configuration, possibilities this feature enables is where it gets really interesting.

Let's look at recent events and understand how these funny sounding technology tools (blogging and twittering!) are really saving lives and making an impact on our ability to express ourselves.

Mercury News recently reported about how Berkeley student survived his arrest in Egypt by making a timely help plea on Twitter. In this case having an option of channeling your distress signal was key to his survival.

We are all familiar with government authorities blocking access to expression tools. Recently we saw how Chinese government is blocking access to Blogger blogs in order to suppress dissenting voices.

Even going beyond state sponsored suppression, we have seen some companies going overboard with their security policy implementations. Now I am definitely not advocating throwing corporate security practices out of the window. All we are doing is connecting more dots which generate more options for expressing yourself. Having multiple ways to reach out to your point of expression is a great option to have.

Going beyond these news items, we have clear productivity objectives as well. 

We are uniquely capable of coming up with different ideas based on our surrounding context. Take some of these examples - You are sitting in Starbucks, imagination strikes you and you want to blog using your iPhone. You are sitting in office cubicle and you have strong urge to send tweet, use your Outlook client to send tweets. You are at the airport in some far away country and only tool available is an internet kiosk which only allows Hotmail (you would be surprised once you step out of Silicon Valley!), use Hotmail to blog your field reports. To me this very idea of detaching tool dependency from the urge to express is a big help.

Here is how you can start blogging and twittering (from office mail - @officemail.com!, home mail  - @pacbell.net anybody!, airport kiosk, Starbucks, iPhone, Blackberry etc etc) virtually anywhere.

Just put in your multiple email addresses (the ones you will send from) in DanceFloor > Manage Email. MessageDance validates that you are a valid sender and routes your content to where you want it to go.

You can just address your messages to "<you> @ messagedance.com" and have it go to multiple social destinations including Twitter, Facebook, Xanga, MySpace and more!  Write a blog post and send it to "blog @ messagedance.com". Send you photos to your private photos section in Facebook by sending them to "photo @ messagedance.com".

If you don't have MessageDance account, please signup for MessageDance beta program and we will approve your request for full access.

http://www.messagedance.com/user/signup

If you are already on Facebook or Twitter, then you can avoid beta signup path and signup directly using following links:

http://apps.facebook.com/messagedance
http://www.messagedance.com/twittermail

Now finding your cellphone email address is not as trivial as you might imagine. I will be publishing list of popular email signatures related to leading telecom service providers. In the meantime please check these links -

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/splash/blackberry.jsp
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/3249
http://cellphoneforums.net/verizon/t172216-what-my-text-email-address.html

Friday bonus for all you iPhone fans

You can get one for your blog/social network from here

It’s been another furious few weeks for us working on new features. This release is in many ways centered around blogging.

Blogs are extremely popular and powerful. The majority of social network users have one. Conversations keep us informed and engaged but we all know how painful it is to keep it updated. Continuing with our larger theme of allowing users to express their ideas from any social networking site, we enabled blog posting capability from a diverse set of popular social networking destinations.

Now, MessageDance social messaging platform users can send blog posts from Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, YouTube, Google Reader, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Outlook. We are working on many more clients and social network destinations but for now I am sure these will keep our users busy.

Rich blog post using Gmail, iPhone, YouTube, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Outlook. You can send blog posts to WordPress and Blogger based websites using your favorite email service. We added powerful photo attachment (actually, any file type — use your blog as a file-sharing website!), tagging and rich html support to make the blogging experience as powerful as existing blog clients. Added bonus: Make blog post using email and we take care of updating your Twitter status. Tinyurl link points to your blog and will bring new visitors.

Blog post and tweet posting from Facebook. Good thing about having email-based architecture is that we can leverage existing tools. For Facebook users, big freedom lies in making use of their Facebook inbox for sending blog posts and even sending YouTube videos to Twitter.

Reblog your favorite blog posts from Google Reader. Re-blogging is fast emerging as the lazy and efficient way to park blog posts on your blog site. It lets us normalize attention tax by re-posting quality blog posts. One of our colleague calls it delicious-meets-wordpress.

Share product recommendation with Twitter friends using Amazon. We all shop on Amazon website but our conversations happen on blogs and Twitter. Users would like to engage their friends in product selection process. We enabled Amazon users to send blog posts directly from Amazon website.

At MessageDance, our day-to-day obsession is to go beyond social network boundaries and create new solutions for powerful sharing. By allowing extremely simple ways of sharing blog posts and tweets, we are offering users freedom and convenience. I hope users will like these new features. As always, please keep sharing your suggestions and feedback.

Here are few screen shots showing typical user interaction. We believe users will happily use tools they are familiar with.

Happy Dancing.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail

How long we stick to a specific terminology to define what’s existing and what’s emergent is a challenge. Take the case of Social Networks. This term is as specific as your neighborhood and as vague as your religious affiliations. Actionable definition of social network is better understood in a larger context. Website can be a social network if it support key social activities, blog can be a social network if it uses enough social communication tools.

Fortunately there are smart people who do much better job of explaining these evolving definitions. Charlene Li wrote an excellent blog post on this topic. She did in-depth analysis of social network components. Her point is that social networks are going to be like ether. They will be everywhere. They will be everywhere as they are based on four key components which are pretty generic in nature.

She wrote:

There are four components of what I’m calling this idea of “ubiquitous social networks”: 1) Profiles; 2) Relationships; 3) Activities; and 4) Business models. These aren’t new — I wrote about the first three in my original report on social networks back in May 2004. But in the context of ubiquitous social networks, they will develop into the following: 1) Universal identities; 2) A single social graph; 3) Social context for activities; and 4) Social influence defining marketing value.

Different market players will focus at different component level. At MessageDance our focus has been to enrich third component of social networking equation. Which is creating compelling social context for activities. Sharing messages, photos, videos and files are all social activities.

On the other hand, it’s challenging to articulate the directional property of social networks. How much of these activities are happening BETWEEN social networks, activities targeted TOWARDS social networks and activities starting FROM social networks. In more technical language, are we going to be WRITING from social networks or READING from social networks? If it’s all in the air then probably this distinction doesn’t matter.

Users would prefer READ and WRITE capability from ALL destinations. Capability to express should be in the air as well. It’s not there completely. SHARE THIS and PUBLISH THIS options are not present everywhere. Lack of these features inhibit users desire to express themselves.

Later in the same post, Charlene elaborates on social context for activities:

3) Social context for activities. The brilliance of Facebook Platform is that it greatly expanded what people could do on social networks. The problem is that what people do is still pretty limited. Take a look at the top applications on Facebook – they can be roughly grouped into 1) managing/comparing/interacting with friends in a general context; 2) self-expression (FunWall, Bumper Sticker); 3) games; and 4) media preferences (iLike, Flikster). These are all fun and interesting, but they only begin to scratch the surface of what I do every day.

The biggest hole and opportunity, IMHO, is shopping. I research and buy things online every day, and with rare exception, these activities take place outside of Facebook. Facebook Beacon brings some of the information into News Feed, while a few shopping-oriented applications like StyleFeeder have potential. But by and large, social networks don’t figure into my shopping experiences.

But it could, and in a very significant want. Take for example, a book review that Dave McClure wrote on the book “The Mystery Of Capital” within the Books iRead application on Facebook. I happened to run into the review last year, but it wasn’t in context. Instead, I want to see reviews from my friends when I’m in the book buying process – on sites like Amazon.com and BN.com. It would mean a lot more for you to look at the Groundswell page on Amazon, and because you’re sign-in with your email address, be able to see any review a friend has written about the book – even if it’s on their personal blogs. That’s the epitome of social networks being like air, when it’s integrated into everything that you do.

Note the subtle note there -”even if it’s on their personal blogs“. There is growing expectation by users to express from any website. What we lack is the compelling context. These contexts have to be less destination-aware and more user-centric.

Once we have that scenario, are we going to call that anywhere-to-anywhere social interaction a SOCIAL NETWORK? Or something else? Any suggestions?

iPhone culture is here and it promises to change many things. Photography is one area where iPhone changes the game. Capturing, viewing and sharing experience is amazingly easy. I have been using iPhone for capturing my photowalking experience.

If you are new to the term “photowalking” then here is how Wikipedia defines it:

Photowalking is the act of walking with a camera for the main purpose of taking pictures of things you may find interesting.

Idea of photowalking extends to all cameraphones but iPhone makes this experience a total joy. Like iPhone keyboard, this experience grows on you and eventually you can capture, compose and share in less than a minute. Check some of these example photowalking pictures:

This is how you can do. First two are one time steps and will take 10minutes of your time.

• Sign-up with MessageDance (Leave comment if you have interest in photowalking, we will make sure you get preference in beta invitation)
• Once registered you can use email handle like “tweet @ messagedance.com” to send your photo messages to Twitter.

Now you can use following steps to create your photowalking experience using iPhone:

• Make sure iPhone is configured to send email. This email should be same as the one you used for MessageDance registration. (Multiple email support is coming soon but for now please use same email address)
• Capture picture using iPhone camera
• Switch to view mode
• Touch “Share” icon and you will see “Email Photo” button pop-up, click on that and iPhone mail compose will show up
• Enter subject and message body details. To field can be “tweet @ messagedance.com” or it can be your MessageDance handle like “asksam @ messagedance.com”. Once done, hit send. That’s it.

On Twitter, your photowalk picture will look like this. Notice nice little indicator:

Photowalking is very addictive so you have been warned :). Go ahead give it a shot. I am sure you will stop texting and start using pictures for communicating many of your daily experiences.

(PS: This post is inspired by “less than 3 minutes” post by Orli)

Roundup: YouTube to Twitter, Photo-Blogging, Share Email Attachments & more.

We’ve been insanely busy at MessageDance the last few weeks adding features requested by our beta users. The enormous value we believe MessageDance will bring to the social media is starting to take shape. MessageDance is revolutionizing messaging by enabling a single publishing of content to be transformed and distributed to disparate end-points. Huh? OK, enough of the marketecture buzzwords. Share whatever you want — videos, photos, music, rich content, text — to where ever you want in your network — all from one message. We’ll take it from there, transform it, and render nicely for its final destination.

Portable YouTube Playlist: all the way to Twitter: If you’re into YouTube and want to share videos to your friends in Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, its ridiculously simple to do with MessageDance. Music-video-philes can even create and update a playlist and display it in their MessageDance widget. When you’ve found a video on YouTube, you just need to click on “Share” and put in your or your friend’s MessageDance email address (or send to all of them using “friends @ messagedance.com”). It will go to all of the places you and your friends have MessageDance — this includes Twitter. I sent this video from YouTube.com and it went to my blog, Facebook profile, and Twitter. Clicking on the link shows the video rendered in MessageDance.com where my friends can make comments about it.

Photo-Blogging: I got an iPhone for my birthday and it really hit me as to how easy it is to share anything with all of my social channels. I can take a picture of something I see at the park and send it to my network of friends from my iPhone. You can even make a game of it. The next evolution of this is to have the easy-ability to reply or comment by photo. It’s in the works.

Share Attachments: We believe in the future of email. It is easy to use and is an efficient way to transport messages and data. It’s just being abused. MessageDance doesn’t clutter your or your friends email inbox. We just use email as the vehicle to deliver digital media and share it in ways no other service does. One thing our beta users constantly ask for is the ability to share actual file attachments. Now you can. Send photos, images, music, videos, PDFs, Word, Excel, whatever you want as attachments and they can be shared with your friends.

And since the first release, you can embed and copy & paste in rich content into a rich email client (like Gmail!) and it will render in MessageDance.

The next few weeks you’ll see some more stuff that will make your social sharing even easier. To reward you for reading this far, here is an unreleased feature that you can try (we’re working on something sweet to make it better). If you’re a MessageDancer and added us to Facebook, you can email photos to “photos @ messagedance.com” and we’ll automatically drop it into your My Photos section of Facebook Photos. With Facebook, only cellphone users can upload photos using email, but with MessageDance you can use any of your email clients to send photos. Freeeeeeeedom!