The first, and probably most in depth section is the Friend’s Manager. This area allows you to talk with friends in the form of “Gabs”. You can assign Gabs to your friends and enable whether or not you wish to allow them to invite others to the Gab. It’s more or less of a simple flash messaging system. There’s also a “Email Alerts” option which will automatically inform you by email if: you get a new friend request, someone accepts your friend invitation, you’re included in a Gab, or if someone replies to an existing Gab. You get your usual User Profile to edit; name, birthday, picture, hobbies, location, etc. Additionally, they have added a section called “Exchange” which categorizes all types of hobbies and interests: Auto, Finance, Books, Games, Jobs and many others. In these categories, you can create mini threads so that you can share all your favorites interests with your friends. A five star rating system has been implemented so that you and your friends can vote on what things are cool, and what things are not. You can sort them by name, date, friend or rating, as well as add “Opinions”, which are just comments on your Exchange items. If you want to, they’ve also added a print feature for the User Opinions. It reminded me of Delicious Library, a simple application for Mac users to categorize their interests in their own libraries.

SnapPages also includes a Photo Manager application allowing you to organize your screen shots and miscellaneous pictures. To start, you can create an “Album” to import your photos and other pictures. Each album can be set to public, private, secure, or friend-only. Secure requires for you to input a password to access it, the others have permission according to their name. You can add tags to the photos to help organize them for later use. While in your albums area, you can enlarge your photos by using the slider found in the upper right corner. They have included a mild photo editing section in the Photo Manager where you can rotate, crop, and/or adjust brightness. They have a few others setting to revise the lighting and other effects, but there isn’t many option currently right now. If you’re looking for some more in-depth online flash photo editing, head over to Picnik. You able to share your photo galleries with friends by selecting the particular album that you want to share and adding recipients along with an optional message. Lastly, there’s the download feature that simply let’s you download any of the photos you have in any of your albums.

The last section of SnapPages is the Calendar Manager. Each calendar that you create acts identical to the Photo Manager’s Albums in regards to their property settings: private, public, secure, and friends-only. You can color coordinate new calendars when you create them as well as changing their format from the normal month calendar, to a weekly or daily calendar format. You can add events to your calendars which will require you to specify a time, a place, and any further details you need for the events. They also give you the option to input a URL to an online map if you find it necessary for the event. You also can define whether your event is a repeating affair. If so, you can input the time span it repeats: day, week, month, or year. You can also add notifications to each event, which sends you a reminder prior to the actual event. They also give you the ability to add tasks to your calendars and set exact due dates for each project. Like I mentioned, they have the Share option just like the Photo Manager if you desire to collaborate or share certain calendars with friends. They’ve included a nice RSS feature which allows you to subscribe to your friend’s calendars and see their past and upcoming events. Overall, the Calendar Manager is a nice simple way of helping to keep yourself on track for things you need to get done. It’s not nearly as in-depth as something like Google’s Calendar, however for the average person, it’ll suffice just fine.

To be honest, I liked SnapPages. Though it didn’t bring anything incredibly new to the table, it laid out all the old stuff neatly and thoroughly. Since it was created in Flash, the animation helped give it a nice touch of fluency. Give it a try, it was fun to play around in it. They plan on continuously adding new features to SnapPages, so we can only hope for the best.

At start, the collection of products and websites that you are saving in your organizer will be saved locally on your hardrive, but if you create an adaptiveblue account, your collection will be stored online so you may easily access it from anywhere. Adaptiveblue takes advantage of Amazon’s S3 storage service allowing you to save your data online giving you possibilities with Blueoganizer including RSS feeds for your collection and website badges. That’s not all though. Blueorganizer is also a tool that allows you to easily buy, compare, and search about any product that you save in your organizer.

To get started, head over to Adaptiveblue and download the extension. Once installing and restarting your browser, you will see two new buttons in your Firefox navigation toolbar that look like what you see to the right. The left button allows you to bookmark, or “bluemark” as Blueorganizer calls it, and the right button lets you open up your collection. Let’s begin with opening your collection.

When you open your collection for the first time, you will notice that Blueorganizer has gone ahead and added some preset bluemarks for you to look through. This is to give you an idea of what you can bookmark and how searching and sorting is handled. You will see that bluemarked books, movies, electronics, music, and even toys will contain images along with extra options to claim if you own the item, buy, search, and compare.

On the top right of every bluemark is a wrench. This wrench is what Blueorganizer calls a context action tool which enables you to instantly find, shop, compare things on the web. This is a very handy feature. Picture this: There is a book that you have been wanting to buy, but you aren’t sure about purchasing it yet. So you bluemark it and use the search and tag options to search about the book and the author with Google, Technorati, or even Odeo for podcasts. You then look for related books that you may like as well and use the tags search tool. After reading more on the book and related, you decide to buy it. You go back to the wrench and click on the compare option to find the best deal on the web for the book and order it.

Let’s now take a look at the search and sorting functionality of Blueorganizer which you see on the top of the organizer. The searching is very basic where you can select the type of bluemark or collection (bookmarks, books, electronics, movies, music, toys, and video games – soon to be more), filter by tags, or search by text with results appearing as you type. The search is pretty standard but what I found to be more interesting was the sorting options, or what I like to call, “Smart Sort.” Depending on the collection type you select from the list, the sort button (on the right of the collection drop down box) will have different options to sort by. For example, selecting the book collection allows you to sort your bluemarks by author, history, popularity, rating, title, and even the year of the book. Or another example, selecting the Video Games collection will allow you to sort by manufacturer, platform type, popularity, and more. The sorting options are flexible to the collection and that really helps you narrow down on items. Although one sorting option that I did not see was sort by date added to the collection, which I would love to see because like normal website bookmarks, I like to view what I most recently bookmarked.

I think we’ve got the basics of using the organizer covered. Now lets look at actually saving bluemarks to your organizer. To bluemark websites and products, simply click the browser bluemark button for Blueorganizer which will then bring up a popup to enter details for the bluemark. But before I continue onto actually saving the bluemark, I want to point out one small but helpful feature with the bluemark button and the Blueorganizer engine. The neat thing with the bluemark button is that when you come across a page that Blueorganizer detects and can successfully grab specific information from (using Microformats – Supported Sites), like a book title and image or music album, it will add a dark blue dot in the middle of the button to notify you. Otherwise, bluemarking a site when the button doesn’t have the dark blue dot will just act as a normal website bookmark.

When the popup appears when adding a bluemark, you will see that if Blueorganizer was able to parse the website and it detected it being a collection type (books, movies, electronics, etc.), the title, image, and tags will automatically be filled in for you. Blueorganizer makes it to the point where the only thing you have to do is… nothing but click “Ok.” The only thing that won’t be filled in for you is the rating and buttons stating that you own the product or not. Any data, including images, that Blueorganizer can recognize out of its supported sites will automatically be added to your bluemark so you don’t have to worry about it.

Last feature I want to talk about is registering an account for your Blueorganizer (completely optional). There are three benefits that I see when you signup. First, creating an account will automatically store all of your bluemarks online securely (using Amazon S3 Storage) in turn letting you automatically synchronize your collections between multiple computers by simply logging in to your account. Secondly, you can publish RSS feeds for your collections so friends and family can easily track what products you are thinking of getting or what products you recommend. Lastly, when publishing your collections, Blueorganizer allows you to add widgets, or Bluebadges, to your website so anyone can see the latest bluemarks you have saved – great for product specific websites. All these features with screenshots can be found in the features overview at Blueorganizer.

Overall, Blueorganizer, is probably one of the best Firefox extensions I have used because of how feature rich it is, although it’s not for everyone. It’s target is more toward users who like to organize books, music, and other things rather then the average web surfer, even though it does support normal bookmarks. My opinion would be to simply give it a try and see how you like it. As for problems, I only ran into one while using the extension and that was when bluemarking a normal website that has a very long address (ie: MapQuest or some blog posts), Blueorganizer would go ahead and add “%20″ (which means a space) in the address at certain points of the URL, in turn making the link broken. Other than that, no problems really. Another issue to Blueorganizer is that it is a Firefox only extension which leads me to agree with Mashable’s idea of having a public website that users can showcase and share their collections, like Kaboodle. But overall, Blueorganizer is a great extension that certainly helps with organizing products and websites online that anyone into keeping collecting should try.

For more, read Sid Yadav’s review of Blueorganizer.

Searching an artist returns the artists full biography and discography, powered by All Music Guide, as well as a list of similar artists. Furthermore, users can narrow down into artists albums and listen to sample music, learn about the album, and even learn about individual songs from an artist. Users can also bookmark artists to their profile, create a radio station for recommendations, and purchase their music with the iTunes and Amazon buttons on the left of artist biographies.

This is a great move for Pandora. I’m a big fan of music recommendation services, such as Pandora and Last.fm, and until the recent launch of Backstage, Pandora didn’t have any real information to provide its listeners about the artists. Last.fm however has done this for quite some time, but in a more social manor where listeners can improve biographies, tag artists, and even view overall statistics of the artists activity on the service. I don’t know if Pandora is headed in this direction or not, but whatever the case, it is great to finally have a built-in resource to learn about the artists that are being recommended.

(Via Mashable)

Google now displays videos from the Video Store on the top of Google Video followed by popular and random videos. You can find videos from many sources, such as CBS shows, NBA, and Sony BMG including videos for popular shows: CSI, Survivor, NCIS, Amazing Race and Classics Including I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, and Twilight Zone. Google has also managed to get NBA to put their current season games on the web for the first time. There are also many more providers and source of paid content that Google will be using which are stated in Google’s press release, “Google to Launch Video Marketplace.” So lets get down to business. How much are you going to be paying for these videos? The CBS Shows seem to be selling at $1.99 per video, which really is quite small of a price. I have seen prices ranging anywhere from $0.99 cents to $10.00 dollars. You will also see that some videos don’t have a buy button, but rather a Day Pass button. Purchasing a video under Day Pass will allow you to download the video and have access to it for only 24 hours and can only be viewed while being online, which is reasonable.

Searching for videos is simple and there are some advanced methods you can use. The most basic one is limiting your search to titles. Simple put, “Title: ” in front of any title of any video and search. Google also provides some filtering options (above screenshot) for filtering videos for sale, for free, or by the length of the video.

And what about purchasing the videos? Purchasing is done directly through Google Video Store and you are not directed to any external sites. You do need a Google Account to purchase videos and if you do, you will just need to enter your payment information for the first time of making a purchase. Google even has a new Purchased Videos page so you can track the videos you have purchased.

Update: You can view some more Video Providers from the Official Google Blog.

If you are familiar with PureVolume, you will notice the new beautiful design consisting of simple gradients, dark colors, sIFR, and excellent implementation of Flash and Ajax throughout the site. But the main reason why I love PureVolume is because I can find music of any genre, signed or unsigned, listen to the artist through their Flash streaming music player (PurePlayer) and download the artists music for free if the artist has songs available for download. The service is free for listeners and bands, but if the bands want to step up their plan to PurePlus for a small amount, they are given more features, more space for storing music, and also given the opportunity to become a featured artist giving the band a large audience of new listeners that can hopefully boost their musical career.

Artists are given their own profile page that they can maintain their music, lyrics, photos, listings of upcoming shows, and even a blog. The main feature though that everyone loves though of course is the media player. Bands can upload mp3′s, group them by albums, and allow listeners to stream the music through the PurePlayer (screenshot above). If listeners like what they hear, hopefully they will add the band to their favorites, become a fan, buy the artists music, and maybe even spread word about the artist. I have PureVolume open all the time on my computer (it’s true, and I know my brother does too) and have certain bands that I listen to every day. You can open up the PurePlayer in a popup, which makes it a whole lot easier to browse around and still listen to the music. There are a few things though that I would love to see in the media player, although it may be asking for too much. Having the ability to add multiple artists to a playlist and have them play through the PurePlayer. At the time you can only listen to one band at a time, which I am happy with, but would absolutely love the ability to have a type of queue of artists to play.

I mentioned the use of Ajax throughout the service. You will see this nicely implemented when adding a band to your favorites, adding comments, or when viewing content. Content is layed out in tabs and to make the experience a lot quicker for the user, Ajax is used to grab the content of a tab when clicking it instead of refreshing the page. This is a great feature because you can now view other sections, like photos and the blog, while still listening to the music using the embedded PurePlayer. The old version of PureVolume did not have this so I was extremely happy to see the company take advantage of Ajax technology with their service.

So, what about the social networking that I mentioned? The whole social aspect is new to PureVolume but I think they definitely hit it off very well. When viewing an artist, you will see on the bottom right a container with the tabs, Fans, Friends, and Comments. Fans are listeners that have added the band to their favorites and Friends are other artists that are friends with the band you are looking at. This lets me see other people that like the music I like and see what other music they like. With the help of PureVolume allowing listeners to become fans, it makes the service even stronger when it comes to music discovery. Lets get a little more on the social side now, reaching to a point that compares with top social networking sites. Listeners can signup, add friends and favorite bands to their profile, maintain blogs and photo galleries, and comment on other friends profiles. Get friends, hear what kind of music others listen to, and meet people with similar musical interest.

Overall, I am loving the new version of PureVolume. I didn’t think their service could get much better, but clearly I was wrong. It is now a strong music and social community with over thousands of artist and music. Just a warning though that the new version of the site has recently been released and they are still battling server issues every once in a while. If you experience slow download times, small errors, or the server hanging, just give it some time and check back a little later. They are usually very quick with getting things sorted out. Otther than that, I am very happy with the service. As said before, I think it would be really cool to be able to set a queue or artists for the PurePlayer. Also, something that I would like to see is a feature that used to exist on the older PureVolume, the random artist button. On the old PureVolume, you were able to select a genre and then keep viewing random artists under that genre, but you can’t do that anymore on the new version and even though it’s such a small feature, it helps pass time looking for new music. A feature that I really like is in the Listeners area (need to signup), that if you enter your zip code, it will find shows in your area from the artists on PureVolume. It’s neat seeing all these artists showing up next to where I live and I am actually thinking of seeing one of them this month. If anyone wants to keep up with PureVolume’s news and developments, be sure to check out their Backstage Blog. That’s about it. Music and social networking in one. Excellent work, Unborn Media.

View PureVolume – We’re Listening To You.

The first page that you will come across when viewing more results for an artist is the music search results. This is just the normal music search page but with the results for the artist you originally searched for. It will list possible matches for artists, songs, and albums all with pictures so you can easily narrow down your search. One thing that you will notice is that Google will be profiting from this as well (of course) because they provide links to purchase this music for services such as iTunes Music Store, Real Rhapsody, and eMusic (funny, I didn’t see any for Yahoo! Music Engine). I find it really helpful that they provide a link to the iTunes Music Store because now when I find a result, I can easily sample the music too with iTunes and if I wanted to buy it, I can easily do so.

Google came up with the artist I was looking for, Yellowcard, so I clicked on the artist result for Yellowcard. You should then see something similar to the above. You will see on the left that you can select views for all tracks or artist summary (in the screenshot, I have all tracks selected). You will then see more ways on the left to refine your searching with showing normal Google results (Artist Websites), Google News on the artist, a link to image results, and also results from user groups. One the right you will see all the artists albums listed by popularity. You can also sort by release date (my preferred). It provides links to purchase the albums and also lets you view the ablum songs by click on an album name, which will then also allow you to purchase each song individually. But what I found to be more interesting were the reviews. The reviews page simply pulls up articles that have reviews and ratings for the album you selected. I like being able to view the reviews to give me an idea of what other thinks about the artist and to help, you can filter the reviews by positive, neutral, or negative ratings.

Overall, I love the simplicity that Google Music Search provides. Many other search engines that incorporate some type of music search usually direct you to totally different websites for artist resuts. But I feel that Google did the right decision by keeping you at all times on the normal Google Search interface. I can easily leave and get back to what I was doing at any time. Yahoo! has artist results as well and the results Yahoo! provides are great, but what I do not like about it is that when viewing more results for an artist, it will direct you to their Yahoo! Music site. This makes me feel that I am no longer at Yahoo! but at some music website, when I would actually prefer to see results on the search page itself as Google has done. With Google, I feel like I haven’t left anything behind because I am still at Google search and the interface still looks the same (a comfort issue). Is it just me? Also, when you make the initial search using Yahoo!, the seperate links for artist results are harder to see because they get mixed up with the normal search results, while Google shows an image making it easier to point out. Lastly, I also prefer Googles quiet simply because I can buy music from other services while with Yahoo! you can only purchase for their music engine. But enough about what I like more. What do you think? Google may be a little late in the game, but as usual, their simplicity won me over.

View Google Music Search.

Update: Search Engine Watch has more on relating Google Music Search to other search engines.

Above is the main page that you will find recent information about member activity. You will see a column for “Newest File Unders,” which are pretty much another way of saying, tags. You can see the latest playlists that have been created along with an XML file to subscribe to. Also, you can see a section for the latest bookmarked artists (you can subscribe to this too). I like the bookmark feature because it allows you to bookmark any artist that you come across and refer back to it later in your profile page. A great way to build up a list of bands you want to look at. On the top you get your search form. You can search recommendations, artists, albums, songs, and then the community. Now, I will search for the artist, “Fall Out Boy.”

The results for “Fall Out Boy” came up and I selected the band. This will bring you to the Artist Information page. Upto11.net has done an excellent job here. You can see the popularity of the artist, what it is filed under (or tagged), top songs from the artist, top albums, playlists, and best for last, the information area. What is so great about the information area? It gets its information about the band from Wikipedia. Because of this, the information given on a band is very accurate, provides a lot of information, and other information that is provided for the artist from Wikipedia. I found this really helpful because when coming across a band you don’t know, you can now find out its history, favorite songs, the members of the band, and even bands that Wikipedia includes as relation. The information area isn’t my favorite feature of Upto11.net. My favorite feature is the recommendation system.

The music recommendation search uses a very unique method of finding bands for you. As stated earlier, it uses results from P2P and Upto11.net’s own recipe. This is great, but the part that gets me all excited is the popularity slider (top left in the screenshot). With Upto11.net, you can search for an artist and then get popular results at default. But what if you are trying to find the less known bands? That’s something that I am always on the lookout for and because of the slider, now I can simply drag it to the left a little at a time and see the results change by popularity. Most of the popular bands that come up for “Taking Back Sunday,” I already know. So, I took the slider and dragged it back to 75%. Ok, I still know some of them. Let’s move it to 50%. There we go… now it is getting interesting. I know about 10% of the bands listed and now I can view all their information and hopefully find some music to purchase. I really like the use of the popularity slider and I feel that this is what makes the recommendations search so powerful.

The last feature I want to touch up on are the playlists. You can search through playlists that other members have created and you can also create your own. I do feel that the playlists on Upto11.net do lack though. I have come across some buggy searches and don’t usually find a playlist with an artist I like by searching but rather by viewing artist information and then using the related playlists area. The one thing I do like about the playlist area is that you can see what others are interest in or you can find playlists that deal with a specific genre. I also like how it provides you purchasing links to iTunes, Amazon, MSN Music, and Buy.com for all the songs and when you hover over one of the stores, it provides you with some details from the service.

Upto11.net seems to be working great for me. I have already purchased three CD’s because of the service. I feel that the recommendation search and the artist information are the strong points of the service and really are all that I need. If you give the service a try, let me know how relevant your results are. I am interested in seeing if I am the only one that is getting positive results.

View Upto11.net: Intelligent music recommendations.

Above is the main page. On the top, they provide a box for people that may not know what podcasting is and how to search and listen to them (you can hide this area). You can use your current Yahoo! account and if you don’t have one, it is very simple to signup and get going. You get a search bar on the top that allows for searching for either series, episodes, or both series and episodes. On the left they have a noteworthy and a “What we like this week” section along with a “Staffs picks” section. In the middle you can see what people like by popularity or rating. Lastly, on the right, you have the exploration column. They assign podcasts to categories that you can choose from and they even provide tagging. I find this really great because now people that aren’t as tech savvy as some of us can still easily navigate by categories. Not everyone is into folksonomy yet, so it is was a good choice to have categories as an alternate way of finding podcasts.

On the top navigation bar, Yahoo! Podcasts has two sections that are to help the community get started with the service and even how to publish your own podcasts. As you can see from the graphic above, they are quite open with the way they talk and it really does put me in the right mood while browsing the website. The “Getting Started” section has guides on what a podcast is, how to search for podcasts, and how you can listen to them. They suggest to first find a podcast you like on the web and then subscribe to the podcast. They also suggest their Yahoo! Music Engine or Apple iTunes to listen to the subscriptions that you make. In the “Publish a Podcast” section, they provide content on preparing for a podcast, how to record, and lastly how to publish the podcast. They suggest things like being in a closed quiet room and adding background music. Their recording guide goes over the usage of Audacity and Apples GarageBand. The guides that Yahoo! has provided should prove to be very helpful in expanding the podcasting community.

When searching podcasts, you can select to search by both series and episodes or either of the two. I like to use both because Yahoo! Podcasts will seperate the two when you perform a search giving series on the top and episodes right below them. In the search results area, you can see a rating of the podcast and how many subscribers there are. You then can click on the names for more details, subscribe, or listen the podcast. For the most part, the results seem relevant. It doesn’t appear to use any technology like Podscope, but it does find good results matching your keywords. I have also noticed that when a result does not have a tag, it will not show any. But when a result does have tags, it will show the tags each seperated by commas. They are also linked so you can switch search terms to the specific tag you clicked.

Going into the more details page of a result gives you a description about the podcast, a picture that goes along with it, number of episodes, the podcasts website and RSS feed, who the author is, and other information. You can see the current rating and then give a rating your self and while your at it, you can even give a review of the podcast. Around the middle of the page you will see a tag cloud that the series has been assigned along with an easy field that allows you to insert tags, each seperated by a comma. More towards the bottom of the page you get an overview of all the episodes that the series has had. When clicking on a series it will give you a bigger description and a field to add to the tag cloud for the episode. Back to the series page you can also see reviews that the podcast has received. Now, below the image for the series, there are two buttons. One that allows you to listen to the podcast and another that allows for subscription. First lets click on the listen button.

Above is a screenshot of the podcast player used when selecting the listen button. It is a simple interface that allows you to play and stop or go to the next or previous episode. It tells you where the cast is from, what the podcast is, and how you can view reviews or make a review or rating yourself. One thing that I did not notice in here was that in the exclusive podcast with John Furrier and Geoff Ralston, they mention that there are to be some fun things you can do with the podcasts like making it increase its speed. Geoff has said, “when you listen to a podcast on the web you can actually speed it up and listen to it a higher speed – if you want to jump through it to get to the content that you’re looking for.” I however had not seen this available yet. Maybe they are working on it?

Subscribing is very simple with Yahoo! Podcasts and you can tell that they really wanted to be open to what technology you are to use. They provide you with the RSS feed and you can subscribe using either Yahoo! Music Engine or Apple iTunes. I, being an iTunes user went straight to the subscribe with iTunes button and got started. At first, when not selecting a method of subscribing, it brings you to a page that you can select either the Music Engine or iTunes. But, once you choose one, supposedly you can’t get back to that page? Or at least not that I am aware of. I am also a happy user of the Music Engine and wanted to see how they have incorporated the podcasts with it. So, I clicked on subscribe again but it just assumes I am wanting to continue using iTunes. This is good, but I wanted to see how the Music Engine looked and could not find any page that I could reset or edit my settings or even a way to choose a file for the Music Engine instead. A problem? No. I am sure the average user would select the application of choice and stick to using that.

Yahoo! Podcasts has proven to be very useful in finding, learning, and listening to podcasts. The website is clearly very easy to use but also provides some more features for the more tech savvy, like tagging, where others may understand the categories more. I feel that this is a huge move for Yahoo! and will definitely make the podcasting community a larger. On top of all that, I really get a kick out of them saying, “What the heck is a podcast?” Great work, Yahoo! I now am a happy user of launch, the Music Engine, and now I am giving Yahoo! Podcasts a go.

View Yahoo! Podcasts.

Update: Thanks to Joe, in the comments, who has pointed out to me that you need to use Internet Explorer to view the Playback Speed effects, as seen below:

The playback option actually sounds surprisingly clear when setting it all the way up. I was expecting a little chipmunks/Mickey Mouse type voice, but it actually is pretty clear and understandable. It also looks great too.

After listening to the podcast, I wrote down some notes and here are some of the key elements:

A prime focus with Yahoo Podcasts was to be pleasant, simple, and easy. They wanted to make it work as easily as it can for you to use the service with your jukeboxes and podcasting applications. They also were looking for more fun features such as when listening to a podcast on the web, you can speed it up and listen to it at a faster speed. As for the community, you can rate, view, tag, and they also allow the community to talk about podcasts. Geoff Ralston also says, “If you have a podcast we’re going to find you, and if we haven’t found you then you can come to our website and give us your RSS feed and we’ll get it into our index within 24 hours.”

This is amazing news and I am really excited to see how this all plays out in comparison to other services out there.

At this moment of posting, Yahoo Podcasts is not up as it is still propagating. TechCrunch has been informed by John that the press release will be issued shortly.

View Yahoo Podcasts.

ePlatform has many available applications to use, but I am going to just touchup on a few. The first is the calendar. From the looks of it, it looks to be a nicely organized calendar system. It allows for viewing by day, week, month, and years in your own defined time-zones, business days, etc.. You can share your calendar with friends and family and even see events from their calendars that they allow you to view on your calendars.

The next application that looks great is the Address Book. As you can see from the screenshot above, it uses Google Maps, which I find really neat for an address book. It allows you to import your Outlook and Netscape contacts, maintain email distribution lists, easy organization, PDF printing, and more. It looks like it uses a simple three column design, which I would assume would work great for the Google Map integration.

I love music, so when I saw the screenshot of the music application for ePlatform (they also have one for movies), I got pretty excited. It looks packed with features. You can store your music collection, create playlists of the music that you have, manage music that you have loaned to others, write and rate reviews, and even music publishing. The music publishing is really cool. You can publish your music to other members of the network in that you can promote to and on top of that, they can even purchase your music. Don’t want only networked music? Well, loooks like that have that covered as well by allowing you to purchase CD’s from music stores. Or maybe you are interested in buying an instrument? They’ve got that covered as well.

I am very interested in seeing how ePlatform plays out. From the looks of it, you can do just about anything. There are also some applications that do not have details or screenshots, such as Social Networking, Fashion, Classifieds, Real Estate, and even Jobs.

Now, just one last feeling about this. First, I am very excited to see the outcome of ePlatform. This is all amazing, really, but what I am just wondering about is this. Do we want to store all of our information that we normally would store on our own computers into the hands of an online service? Most of these applications are available already on our computers and secure. I guess we won’t really know until we get a peak at the service. Any thoughts about this?

View ePlatform – Now this is impressive. (via del.icio.us)