When it comes to photo sharing, everyone has their absolute favorite system, and it’s next to impossible to convince them them that any o the other services have any merit at all.

Always improving and changing, Flickr has gotten to where nearly 2,000 photos are uploaded per minute to this sharing site. Extremely popular amongst the artist set, they seemingly still haven’t learned the finer details of how to protect their work, though that’s not to say private individuals haven’t learned how to protect their rights yet either.

Photobucket has a bit of a “lower class” sheen to it when it comes to the photo sharing sites, this is mainly a rub off from MySpace users making it their sharing service of choice early on. With partnerships like they now share with TiVo, their name should be gaining a bit more credibility.

Originally billed as a social network for the more mature crowd, Vois (pronounced “voice”) has also grown as a photo sharing presence.

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It’s totally like MTV to do something like this. For its “Choose or Lose” voting initiative that it ramps up every four years, MTV will be launching a “Street Team” comprised of 51 young, amateur journalists from each state and Washington D.C. to cover the 2008 election, emphasizing issues important to younger demographics.

Citizen journalism at its best? It’s the thing to do as of late, with traditional media heavyweights turning to others for furthered engagement, a boost in interest and traffic, and a good amount of less expensive, supplemental content. Members of the Street Team will begin appearing in January on a new mobile site as well as the existing MTV Mobile, ThinkMTV (a social network), and other websites as well. You’ll note that MTV is even taking advantage of its revamped efforts to reach the youth through its mobile initiatives as well.

The content will be a conglomerate of blog entries, videos, photos, podcasts, and animation. With a $700,000 grant from the John L. and James S. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge, the members have also been equipped with laptops, video cameras, mobile phones, and Adobe software, which is part of the company’s Adobe Youth Voices philanthropy program.

That’s a lot of stuff going on, but I think it will be an overall great decision for MTV. Already geared towards youth, especially for rallying political efforts, MTV will benefit a great deal from leveraging citizen journalism tactics. A program like this could be extended beyond coverage of the upcoming election year.

It’s a concept that Vimby is hoping to benefit from, with its recently launched network that gathers content from across the nation in order to find material for professionally produced content. And others like ESPN and CNN have begun their own efforts as well, turning to their audiences for the provision of content in exchange for a continued loyal audience and growing user base. See here for some interesting and ongoing discussions we’ve been having on the topic of citizen journalism.

[via webware]

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Sujjest (think “suggest” with the letters “j” instead of “g”) is a new search tool that’s getting its web legs by building an eBay search from its introductory technology. This all occurs in an Ajax for a “live” search affect. Very similar to GetItNext, Sujjest has a search filter for terms you’d like to exclude from your search. Unlike GetItNext, however, you’ll need to type in the terms to be excluded in your search. GetItNext actually provides a tag cloud of words you can add or remove from your search filter.

Sujjest will keep track of the terms you’ve excluded, and they can be easily incorporated back into your search with the click of a mouse. Hopefully this data will be collected to impose a more automated tool for users for future search features. There are a few different viewing options as well, where you can see results based on time ending or location. Different viewing formats are available as well. What’s missing from Sujjest is an account option where you can star and save items for later, or even save searches.

Perhaps this is not a primary objective for Sujjest at the time, but it should be something for the company to consider. There are a number of parasitic search tools out there that have taken advantage of eBay’s poorly organized search within its own site, so Sujjest faces some competition on this end. Furthermore, eBay has revealed its plans for a very much improved search function on its website, that will hopefully be easier for anyone seeking products for purchase, but will also take some user information into account, in hopes of matching up buyers and sellers more accordingly. These improvements from eBay could spell danger for a tool like Sujjest, which looks cool but lacks the integrated and involved capabilities of a useful tool for your average eBay user.

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The folks behind Bebo may be looking to put some cash in their pockets, one way or another. According to Venturebeat, the company has said that it has hired a bank to potentially raise another round of funding, while a source close to the matter has said that Bebo has in fact hired a bank so it can get sold. With the hiring of a bank, it’s highly suggestive that Bebo would be looking to raise a very large amount of funding, most likely from private equity firms and others that deal in late-stage investments.

But if Bebo’s looking for someone to buy, there are a few out there that may be looking for a shiny social network with a lot of growth potential and an existing large user base. Rumors already surfaced of Yahoo hoping to get Bebo under its control, and these rumors only got hotter when Yahoo partnered with Bebo for the company’s ad network. With Bebo’s fully embracing attitude of the open movement, the advertising and growth potential for Bebo is looking good.

And as it was among the first to announce its own developers platform, it has since signed on to implement Open Social while enabling a licensed version of Facebook’s platform in the meantime. That makes Bebo the first large network to offer a platform for developers that’s compatible with existing Facebook apps, and once you add in Open Social support, Bebo will be one open son of a gun, hopefully attractive to every type of application developer out there. Does that make Bebo more attractive to a potential buyer?

If Bebo is hoping to bank on the open movement, now would be a pretty good time, as the promise and momentum of it all hasn’t begun to falter. While Bebo’s estimated value of $1 billion + is still a few billion shy of Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of companies out there that would like to have their own powerful social network. Bebo continues to grow in the U.S. and as social networks like MySpace get more involved with traditional media (in a sense), an SNS like Bebo is also highly attractive to a large media company.

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Rumor has it that Google may get the best Christmas present evar. Bloomberg is reporting that contacts close to the Google-DoubleClick acquisition are reporting that the $3.1 billion purchase will be cleared by U.S. antitrust enforcers, possibly by the end of the week. After a very long battle that got several major players involved, sparked an all out ad-network acquisition flurry, and has been looking more and more dismal by the month, Google may very well come out on top.

Shortly after announcing its plans to acquire DoubleClick, Microsoft headed up a campaign to stop the acquisition all together, stating that Google would in fact become a monopoly in the online ad industry should the two companies combine their search and display ads. AT&T opposed the acquisition as well, for similar reasons. What Google was left with was a long journey that put them up against antitrust organizations around the world. The European Union has been less supportive of the acquisition, and Google must still receive an official approval from them. The EU has confirmed that it will rule on the transaction by April 2, after an extension was granted.

Google has made every effort to make the acquisition look attractive in the eyes of antitrust enforcers and privacy advocates, working on global efforts to create standards in regards to privacy rules in how collected data is utilized, as well as proposing a “crumbled cookie” effect should the antitrust enforcers allow the acquisition to go through. More recently, Google has faced even more flack, from delays in relation to political angst, malware and purported conflicts of interest.

With Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo having snatched up their own advertising companies with seemingly no problems, the battle was in fact on its way to becoming far more interesting than we could have ever imagined, given the potential of the other larger companies to take advantage of Google’s dire situation. However, today’s announced rumor could really change everything. Get ready, world.

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MashMeet NYC 2 was a complete success! Thank you to everybody who came and another round of thanks to our sponsors who helped supply the much desired “drink tickets”. Thanks also to New York Web 2.0 Meetup for joining up with us.

We crammed more than 200 hyper-connected ubergeeks into the Pourhouse - sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk to you all personally. In any case, feel free to keep up with all things Mashable on Twitter! (twitter.com/adamhirsch, twitter.com/adamostrow, twitter.com/kristen_nicole, twitter.com/rizzn, twitter.com/mashable)

As for our filmed interviews, we are cleaning them up right now and will do a post with them as soon as they are all ready. Thanks to Stephanie Frasco of Ask Frasco and For Your Imagination Studios for helping with the video!

For all the pictures we’ve collected and to submit your own please see our MyMashable MashMeet NYC Group.

Happy Holidays!

A Final thank you to our sponsors!

Utterz lets you mobile post to your blog or social network page instantly, any time in voice, video, pictures and text right from your cell phone. Setting up an Utterz connection to your page takes less than a minute, and you’re ready to post anytime, anywhere. Utterz works with all cell phones – no special data plans, or software needed. Post from events, parties, while traveling, or anytime you are away from your computer. Set up your Utterz connection and post from the NYC MashMeet while you’re there! We’ll see you there!

Organic Incentive provides flex tools currently has a hosted solution (and later ad-supported) so users with absolutely no programming experience can create viral widgets. All you do is enter the URL of your flash widget, and drag and drop a “share” button on to it, customize it, and customize the popup with all the share options that appears when your users click “share.”

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Pligg, which makes software that allows anyone to setup their own Digg-like site, will soon be launching a new service that will let users without any development skills setup their own social news community.

The service, dubbed “Fraxi,” will essentially be like Ning for Digg clones. It will feature web-based tools for creating Pligg-powered sites, so you can setup a social news site for cats, dogs, celebrity gossip, or whatever else tickles your fancy. You’ll also get your own Fraxi sub-domain: yourname.fraxi.com. The service will be free, and the company plans to announce more details soon.

This seems like a great way for Pligg to drive up usage and potentially revenue through targeted advertising on the niche sites that users launch. Pligg put itself up for sale back in August and we haven’t heard anything since, so it looks like the company has decided to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new model with more potential.

Ning, which employs a similar model to allow users to setup their own social networks, has been growing quickly, with more than 100,000 communities created. While Pligg might not have $40 million in VC money, a super easy way to launch a social news site should go over well given the popularity of the space and continual stream of new entrants.

PS - Thanks Pinny Cohen for the tip.

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Nearly two years after the MPAA sued TorrentSpy and a handful of other BitTorrent sites, a federal judge has ruled in favor of the MPAA. It seems that a large portion of the judgment passed down by Judge Florence-Marie Cooper was a result of TorrentSpy’s perceived attempts to cover its tracks (i.e. destroy evidence). With a default judgment against Justin Bunnell and the rest of the defendants involved in the Columbia Pictures et al. v. Justin Bunnel et al. case, it looks worse than ever for TorrentSpy.

We’ve covered the case periodically since it was brought to court, and it was pretty clear that TorrentSpy did everything in its power to assert its legal rights, even going so far as to counter-sue the MPAA in May, 2006. What was uncovered in court, however, gives TorrentSpy a pretty dismal image. It looks as though TorrentSpy put a lot of effort into burying its tracks in an attempt to rid all incriminating evidence.

Several demands from the court throughout the case demanded information from TorrentSpy, including IP addresses of its users, in order to determine if the site’s service was being used for legal purposes or for pirating copyrighted content. TorrentSpy in fact responded to such court orders by taking matters into its own hands, and even blocking U.S. users from accessing its site so as not to get any individual users involved based on their personal identifying information.

As the court found TorrentSpy guilty of trying to destroy evidence as well as lying under oath, there’s been more fuel added to the fire for the crackdown on torrents. The increasing pressure has even spilled into other realms of Internet activity, with the Etology ad network pulling campaigns from torrent sites and even more media conglomerates jumping on the bandwagon to bring down torrents all together. See more details at ars technica.

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There’s no doubt that teens reign supreme when it comes to social media usage on the web, on their mobile phones, and everything in between. A study by PEW indicates that content creation by teenagers in continuing to grow, with 64% of online teenagers between the ages of 12 to 17 engage in at least one type of content creation. That’s less than a 10% increase from 2004, but at least we know these teens aren’t going anywhere. There’s also been a significant increase in content creation from other age groups, but that’s an entirely new discussion that has little to do with the PEW study at hand.

PEW in fact found that girls (30%) like to blog more than boys (20%). Man, what’s that say about the current state of tech blogging? Things change when you become an old fogie, I suppose. PEW also found that girls (54%) like to share more images than boys (40%). So do teenage boys get dominance for anything concerning regarding online social media? Sure. Videos.

Nearly 20% of teen boys like to share their videos online, in comparison to 10% of girls. When I see this stat I can’t help but think of those idiots that video tape themselves skateboarding into mailboxes and emulating the cast of Jackass in every other way imaginable. It’s for this very thought process that I’m forced to attribute the online video dominance to the most amusing video content being that of boys doing stupid things, whereas girls would much rather just take pictures of each other.

So what can we do with this data? PEW offers up one additional trend, indicating that 47% of all teens place their content in public areas where others can see it, and 89% of those teens receive comments on their content. So the user engagement is there, the online social media discussions are there, and there’s a clear line drawn in the sand when it comes to teen blogging, photo-sharing and video-sharing.

Those looking to shape their social networks for a teen crowd can take the data for what they’re worth. Other companies like 3Guppies can get a glimpse of how the teen demographic interacts with each other, and hopefully turn it into a viable business model. Those power teen users are the consumers of tomorrow. How will you keep their attention as they morph into Facebook and LinkedIn users?

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In an effort to catch up to Google, Yahoo has rolled out a couple of new features for its mapping tool. You can now drag’n'drop directions at any point in order to reroute directions according to your new guidelines. While Google has had this tool for a few months now, Yahoo has added a couple of differentiating features in order to win you over.

The most notable new feature is a small window that will pop up with a set comparison parameters so you can see the difference in mileage and time based on the changes you’ve made. This is a handy feature, but is it enough to match Google’s real-time capabilities for rerouted directions, which display as you drag the marker around? I suppose it’s merely a matter of preference, and your needs. Google’s rerouting options will probably save you a bit of time, as you get the comparison data as you make changes, as opposed to receiving them once the changes have been made.

Pretty soon we’ll have the socialization of Yahoo maps too, if the trend continues to follow Google’s mapping lead. Perhaps we’ll see comments and recommendations on various routes according to rerouting needs. Wouldn’t that be overwhelmingly fun?

[via downloadsquad]

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