Forget everything you think you know about the humdrummery of the competitive but me-too echo chamber of the social photo sharing space. While most of the world has gone gaga over faux artistry around filters that make amateur photographers feel like experts, CoolIris' LiveShare team has been creating one of the most intriguing visual platforms I've seen - taking what I already liked about their platform, including a fun way to share photos around events and groups and vaulting into a new world of real-time, with video, shared links, and text updates.

The result looks almost magical, even to the cynical observer who thinks he's seen everything.

Sitting in on a preview of their new platform, which is expected to become available in the next month or two, LiveShare looks like they've finally delivered on their name, as I saw the company's three cofounders create and share photos, video and URLs instantly between devices, and this content was available for immediate playback and interaction from the receiving party.

For all the hype about "real time" and "near real time" and instant, maybe the terms have gotten fuzzy, but if there was any kind of delay, to me it was imperceptible. When one person would hit publish, the item would immediately display on the other device. Multiple photos would cleanly lay themselves out in a sharp grid, and video never even considered buffering. The result is a new platform for real-time visual communications that I haven't seen anyone else attempt, and one that should be available on any modern platform, thanks to adherence to cutting-edge Web standards.

"By the time you move your finger from the button, it should show up," said Soujanya Bhumkar, explaining his interpretation of real-time.

In an internal note to the LiveShare development team, he wrote: "For the first time, you can capture moments and share them with friends and family with absolutely no delay at all - the instant your finger taps the camera icon your photo or video instantly appears in your personal stream on your phone, iPad and the Web even before the content is fully uploaded. No waiting, no uploading - there is nothing out there in this space that delivers such instant gratification."

LiveShare's origins are in the photo sharing space, and the company may be known for its media consumption, but as they said Wednesday, the natural evolution, based on user feedback, is to discover media highly relevant to the individual, and to assign social velocity to relevant people, so that instead of broadcasting to everyone or narrowcasting to a select few, you and your content is discoverable by those interested.

"If this is possible, my expectation for what live sharing is has completely changed," said Austin Shoemaker, cofounder and CTO of CoolIris. "No more progress bars and hourglasses. Reality and speed are matched to consumer expectations."

The new platform is engineered using WebGL on HTML 5, meaning that on day one, it works in Safari, Chrome, FireFox and Opera. Not only can you passively view content in the browser, but you can drag and drop content from your host PC onto any LiveShare stream and make it an active participant in any ongoing stream. "Consumption on the Web is not a second-class experience," Shoemaker added.

One doesn't have to think too hard about the dramatic use case of curating events around topics and locations with the new LiveShare platform, going beyond siloed areas for photos and other siloed areas for texts. As the company promises, they aren't trying to create yet another walled garden, but instead, to fill the gaps that remain in email and social networking. And I'll tell you, even for this Android-leaning geek, the demo of sharing content on the new LiveShare between two iPad 2s was so sleek, it was tempting to jump back on the bandwagon. Make sure you check out their demo video. It'll have you lusting after their new platform - coming soon.

Monday's announcement that the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color had launched its application gallery was much anticipated, with leaks and rumors galore over the last few months, as industry watchers have been curious how the eReader would adapt to a world in between the single mindedness of a Kindle and the do-anything catch all of a full-fledged tablet device. Full disclosures up front, due to my role at my6sense, I've known the Barnes & Noble app plans for several months, and our app was included as one of the first to be included on launch day. But as a user who already owns an Android tablet in the Samsung Galaxy Tab and a pair of iPads besides, I was independently eager to get my hands on these apps, and I believe what has been delivered is a smartly curated, less intimidating way to bring the best features of Android to users who don't want to lose the comfort or familiarity of a device centered around reading.


   My NOOK home screen with apps and the apps gallery

As was much covered by the mainstream technology press, the NOOK Color app gallery features more than 100 select applications across a broad reach of categories, with an emphasis on those that would be in high demand by the most active readers. For us, it made sense that those reading books might also want to read and engage with their social and news streams. For others, the option to bring to-do lists, email, comic book apps and more make sense in the intuitive seven-inch form factor. And yes, everybody loves games, and if a device has a screen these days, you know Angry Birds is there.


Much like Apple's iTunes store, the app store on the NOOK Color adds applications to a marketplace already designed for more traditional entertainment goods. Instead of music and video titles, magazines, newspapers and books are the headliner, with apps likely to play an increasing role over time. Without a full-fledged Android Market, with hundreds of thousands of apps, every app on the NOOK has a chance to be found, and its not amateur hour. Each app was planned for inclusion well in advance and carries the implied support of the NOOK team.

For Android users, the visibility of apps like Pulse, Epicurious and QuickOffice is comfortably familiar. Other titles have never crossed my radar. The addition of a standard email client that supports multiple accounts is also very welcome, eliminating yet another need for multiple devices when I can just close the page on a book (or close an app) and pull up email to both read and send messages, synced with your cloud server. With little fanfare, the NOOK has always also had the option to support your own media, including music files and photos as well, for a light multimedia experience.


  Composing and Reading Email on the NOOK Color

Those calling for the NOOK to become even more of a full-fledged tablet are trying to make it something it's not really aimed to be - no more than the iPod is trying to be an iPad. The single homescreen button and lacking hard-wired buttons for "Back" and "Menu", common on Android smartphones, takes some getting used to, but functionality to navigate one's library, content and the store is very easy to pick up. The apps each are intuitive, and if they assume back and menu buttons, as ours has, you can emulate that in software.

I see the NOOK as a serious hybrid. It's both an eReader and a tablet, but like the Prius, it's not going to beat a Porsche in a speed test for going 0-60. It just quietly does its job, has an amazing battery life, and brings the features you would expect. While the app store is only a few days old, I've already seen my interaction with the device change, transforming from one of passivity, mostly consuming content, to a more engaged role, creating emails, and interacting with new apps.

Disclosures: As noted above, my6sense, where I am VP of Marketing, is a launch partner with Barnes & Noble for their app store.

Considering the dramatic success of Apple's App Store for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, it seems remarkable that at the 2007 introduction of iPhone, the device was not set up for third party native applications, with Steve Jobs and crew suggesting standards-based Web apps were the way for developers to design for the device. A June 2007 press release gushed over secure and reliable apps designed on Web 2.0 Internet standards, but by July of 2008, the App Store launched as part of iTunes, and hundreds of thousands of apps have found their way to iDevices. Meanwhile, the Web Apps directory on the Apple Web site has atrophied, not having updated in nearly five months - while competitors such as Google push for Web app development inside Chrome.

The Web Apps directory on Apple.com looks much like the iTunes App store, Mac App Store or other application directory, including the Android Market, with "Most Recent", "Most Popular", "Alphabetical" and "Staff Picks" across many different categories, including "Games", "News", "Social Networking" and others. But if you look at the most recent content, you don't see anything new since December 3rd 2010, and Puck Billiards, posted on November 30th, has enjoyed the exclusive Staff Picks position for the entirety of the duration.


Prior to the directory's freeze, staff picks for Web apps were issued every few days. The staff picks page shows other highlighted apps posted November 18th, 29th, 30th, December 2nd and 3rd and then nothing. No mention of a change in status for the directory, or future plans. If you are a developer looking to submit a Web App, you can still do so, or provide feedback to the directory, but it's not completely clear anybody's listening.


In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of apps on the App Store, Apple's Web Apps splash page mentions "over 1700 web apps to flick and scroll through", but this page too is clearly in the dustbin of history. The 1,700 number was live as of January 2009 (according to Archive.org), made even more antiquated with no mention of the iPad, referring only to iPhone and iPod touch.

iOS has been an incredible platform, an extremely lucrative one for Apple and its developer community. But the silence on Web apps makes it look as if they just walked away. The right thing to do would be to close submissions, shut down the page, and put up a note saying the directory won't be updated.

Flickchart, the movie comparison site that has film buffs ranking their all-time favorites, for any decade, genre and many other ways to debate cinema, is inches away from taking Movieweb to court for "a rather obvious duplication of the concept, functionality, user interface, and formatting" of their site. An 11-page legal brief from Flickchart's lawyers to Movieweb, submitted Thursday, alleges theft, infringement and "a complete lack of any attempt by Movieweb to conceal its wrongdoing".

The legal brawl was sparked following the introduction of a feature on Movieweb's site called "Face-Off" last Saturday, April 16th, which they called "the coolest movie ranking app yet". Similar to Flickchart, the Face-Off feature let users rank movies in terms of which they thought was best, have head to head "face-offs" between favorites, and the ability to compare tastes with other users. All of these are features highlighted by Flickchart since the site debuted in 2009.


(Side Note: The initial post on Flickchart was on this blog in May of 2009)

Flickchart's founders, Nathan Chase and Jeremy Thompson, are not taking kindly to the new competition. The next day, April 17th, Chase posted a link to Movieweb's new offering on Twitter, saying, "Well, I guess they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?" By Monday April 18th, Chase posted a series of thumbnails comparing Flickchart to MovieWeb's Face-off on FriendFeed, the social service aggregator owned by Facebook, and said "we've already contacted our lawyer."

The series of thumbnails in that post, and the blog post issued Friday, April 22, draw up a clear parallel in terms of features and display from Flickchart and the new Face-off, including feature set, wording, placement, graphics, social site integration, and more. While it's entirely possible to create a similar site either in parallel or inspired by competition, the direction seems like a clear duplication of the Flickchart service.

The legal missive spares little in its wording saying "Movieweb has stolen the fruit of years of work... in such a blatant manner that, quite frankly, shocks the conscience." The filing reports the copying is fed in no small manner by the direct copying by one of Movieweb's employees, as it states "a managing editor of Movieweb registered an account with Flickchart in December 2009, and has logged in as recently as April 6, 2011." This would have been 10 days prior to the launch of Face-off, making any argument that Movieweb was unaware of Flickchart's similar functionality appear dead on arrival.

The brief says Face-Off! "would not exist" had it not been for the reproduction, duplication and copying of Flickchart, which violates the site's terms of service. If Face-Off! is not immediately removed from the site, Flickchart anticipates filing suit "to seek statuatory damages, actual damages, punitive damages, disgorgement of Movieweb's profits, injunctive relief and an award of attorney's fees and costs." Deadline was given for Face-Off's removal by 5 PM Pacific time on Friday April 22nd, and that deadline has since passed, with Face-Off! remaining up and running.

The full brief, hosted by Google Docs, is below: