Spicy News @ Express Speed.

Gabmail, which announced its beta launch at the end of last week, is a new service that offers free video email - it’s an early release from Arizona-based Gabsight, who plan to launch their full product at Gabsight.com later this month. You can use Gabmail’s Flash interface and your webcam to set the volume, record a message, then review it and send it along. The recipient doesn’t get a video embedded in their email, however - instead, they get a link to view the clip over on Gabmail, with the site being monetized by a fairly large ad. In fact, the advertising is probably overkill: the clip begins with a “stay tuned for the ad” message, then ends with a lengthy video. It would be simpler, and probably more effective, if they just ended the clip with a still image ad. There’s another big pain point, too: Gabmail won’t send your mail for you, but rather provides a link to cut and paste into your email program.

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Microsoft is debuting a new social network today called Aggreg8, which aims to be MySpace for IT Pros. The site allows you to create a profile, join groups and create a blog, all with an IT theme. The site bears no relation to the RSS reader of the same name.

Aggreg8 is a social networking and collaboration space for the IT community.  Inside you can keep track of your trusted network, find others through your network with similar interests or situations.  Then you can collaborate with anyone in the community inside our working groups.  It allows you to create your own working groups, choosing if you want to collaborate with the whole community or collaborate in private working groups.  All the expected tools are there for collaboration, allowing you to create postings, post files, share events.  And you can tag, rate reply to any posting.  Of course Aggreg8 can come to you as all the working groups come with an RSS feed.

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ShareYourLook is a new niche community for “fashion addicts, trendsetters, shoppers and designers” that’s currently in beta. The site was co-founded by fashion journalist Melissa Ceria, whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. The idea is simple and appealing: upload photos of yourself in your latest outfit, and allow others to rate your look and leave comments, including compliments and quick style tips. There’s tagging, too, plus the ability to send photos to others, add them to your favorites and post them to your “styleblog”. They also make it super-easy to grab an embeddable photo for your blog or profiles on Friendster, MySpace, hi5 et al (I assume MySpace is popular with the it-crowd, too).

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1videoConference is a free web conferencing tool in alpha stage Like the DimDim. that’s burning up the charts on Sourceforge. it’s software you download and install on your server. It’s designed to be folded into your domain just like your other web pages. Site administrators can then invite users to participate in a video, voice, text chat and screen sharing web conference. The product is far from perfect today, but if these sorts of services can be implemented well in open source they could really change the high priced game of web conferencing. 1videoConference is the 12th most active project on Sourceforge this week and I think it’s one worth watching. 

1videoConference’s promise of integration of web conferencing into any Website is an intriguing one. If video capture for recording can be folded into any page ala VideoEgg, the next logical place for the imagination to go would be to integrated video conferencing. Real time collaboration amongst distributed parties is something that many people are working on; Conceptshare and Thinkature..

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