Mashable!

Founded in July 2005, Mashable is the world's largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what's new on the web and offering social media resources and guides.

Remember Joost? There was a time when the peer-to-peer video sharing site was one of the hottest startups on the planet, with famous founders, tens of millions of dollars in investment, and thousands of people clamoring for invites.

But those days are long over, as the likes of Hulu and YouTube have plowed past it in the realm of video content, without the download that Joost required until relatively recently. Today, Joost as we know it met its demise as its assets were acquired by Adconion Group.

According to C21 Media, “Adconion will use the Joost acquisition to build up its online video ad network Adconion.TV, which it launched out of its US base a year ago,” though Joost.com will still remain operational as “a means for clients to showcase and distribute their branded entertainment.”

For more on the demise of Joost, which has been foreseen for some time now, check out “The Joost Story: Sometimes Good Projects Also Fail.”

Reviews: Hulu, YouTube

Tags: joost, video

Remember when mashups were all the rage? Lately, they’re rarely mentioned, but that doesn’t mean a good mashup can’t be a fantastic service, even one that can replace several others.

A mashup called Roomatlas ended up in our inbox, with a fairly simple description: it combines Google Maps with Expedia’s database of hotels and TripAdvisor’s reviews. Add to that the fact that RoomAtlas reduces the number of steps you need to take to get the information you need, and you get a great, simple way to find and book hotels.

Roomatlas has a couple of little details that make it stand out from other similar services. It displays room prices directly in the hotel icons; the price is also indicated by the icon colors. It lets you apply most of the important filters in the upper left corner; you can even type in your check-in and check-out date directly on the map. Example: finding all the five star hotels that have a swimming pool in Vienna took me a couple of seconds; finding the same thing on Hotels.com took me a couple of minutes.

While Roomatlas probably won’t shatter your world, it’s been better for finding hotels than any other tool I’ve tried, and that’s good enough for me. Since there’s no premium for booking a hotel via Roomatlas, it definitely can’t hurt to try it out.

Reviews: Google Maps

Tags: Roomatlas, travel

If you haven’t been following Palm’s little bundle of joy, the Pre, too closely, then you may have been oblivious to the fact that (just like the iPhone in its early days) it is devoid of video recording, although it has a perfectly capable camera.

Well, that’s no longer true; a new app called the Precorder lets users record 480 x 320-pixel video, at 30fps, with sound.

The formats supported are AAC, AMRNB, and MP3 for audio as well as MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264/AVC for video, but unfortunately the app is in very early alpha stage, meaning that it doesn’t even have preview of the video while you record it. But hey, it works, so if you’re not afraid of the alpha tag, and lack of video on the Pre has been a source of pain and anguish for you, jump right on it.

[image courtesy of precentral.net]

Tags: Palm Pre, video, webOS

With such strong competition from Mozilla and Microsoft, the only thing Opera can do to stay competitive is to innovate. And one has to hand it to them: although it doesn’t have a huge user base in the desktop web browser space, Opera is always one step ahead of the rest, for better or for worse.

With version 10.10, Opera has taken its biggest step into the unknown so far, marrying the web browser with the web server. It definitely makes it unique in the world of web browsers, but there’s always the lingering question whether all these new features are really something we need, or is it just confusing the users?

With Opera Unite integrated into the browser, the web becomes a read/write affair. You can share photos (10 GB of them), stream music, serve a chat or even an entire web site directly from your browser. At Opera, they have high hopes for the technology. From the official site:

“Our devices will evolve. From in-dash computers in trucks to entertainment systems in airplanes, and from a netbook in North Dakota to a phone in North Africa, every device is both a consumer and a provider of content.”

The idea is certainly interesting, but the web has been moving in another direction in the past couple of years: the cloud. Instead of having stuff run on your computer, your applications and your data reside in the cloud, with all the resources and the know-how provided by a company like Google. So yes, with Opera Unite, you can host a web site on your own home computer, but you might run into bandwidth issues; with Google Sites, you can easily create a web site without worrying about bandwidth, but you’re at Google’s mercy, so to say. So far, despite possible privacy and security issues, cloud computing has been taking over, and it’s hard to imagine Opera turning the tide in the other direction. Some Unite applications, however, like the media server or the chat, are quite useful and might win over some converts for the Norwegian browser.

Other interesting features in the new Opera 10.10 include Opera’s Turbo technology, which speeds up browsing by compressing web pages on Opera’s servers and delivering you the “lite” version, Opera Link, which lets you synchronize data across several computers, a slick new look with a resizable tab bar, and a BitTorrent-enabled download manager. See the full list of features here.

Reviews: Google, Opera

Tags: opera, web browser