When we hear from Aviary it’s bound to be something entertaining and fun. The New York based company remains in private beta but adds to its suite of image manipulation products regularly. The newest tool is called Dodo, a web-based time machine.

A video demo is below. You upload an image to the service and it will “age” it based on user input. An example: upload a picture of yourself, tell it how many years out you want it to age you, tell it how much you drink and smoke, and not any planned plastic surgery. It will then show you what it thinks you’ll look like down the road.

Aviary says the tool isn’t just for fun – that it may also be useful for “tracking down long missing children,” and “determining if a girlfriend will end up looking like her mother.” Demo video below.

What’s the technology behind it? Well, it’s pretty close to magic. Anything is possible in early April, it seems.

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Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It’s my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well.

Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.

Like Digg and Reddit, users submit stories to the site, and others can comment and vote on them. But Hacker News is also a forum of sorts, where users can simply post questions for others to answer – see this one asking for advice on creating a demo video for a new startup. Popular stories and questions move to the home page over time.

Hacker News used to be called Startup News and was launched in February 2007 by Y Combinator. They say “the most important goal of news.ycombinator was to create a place where founders and would-be founders can meet and talk.”

Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won’t be lost.

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Tens of millions of people have been busy the last few years building Facebook’s most valuable asset – their social graph. As people add friends, and those people add friends, Facebook gets to understand exactly how its users know each other. And as we saw with their “social ads platform,” where users essentially (and sometimes unwittingly) pimp services to each other, it’s not hard to make a little money from data like this.

Google, as usual, is not far behind. But they are taking a much different and more open approach to the social graph. Today they are launching the Social Graph API, which will allow third parties to grab social graph data that is produced by every day activities across the web – linking.

Who you are (defined by Flickr, blogs, Twitter and other web services) and who you know, can be determined by data included with links, or in other data included on web pages but not shown in a browser. The two standards around this, XFN and FOAF, provide explicit and public data to Google (and anyone else that looks) on who you are and who you know.

Technically this is pretty simple stuff. Links may contain XFN tags to state a a relationship, such as “me” or “friend.” These are explicit, public statements of relationships and are built in to many web applications, or can simply be added by humans.

Google is taking the resulting data and making it available to third parties, who can build this into their applications (including their Google Open Social applications).

Third parties are already jumping on board. Plaxo is adding the data to their Pulse profile pages to show additional relationships among users.

Companies can use this data as they please. A simple example is to remind a user of their Google-determined friends, and ask them if they want to add them on the new application, too.

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Music search engines are just one of the many ways to get free music on the Internet (BitTorrent and MP3Sparks, formerly AllofMP3, are other popular ways). But for some users they are a near perfect way to listen to music on demand, and/or round out their music collection.

Three that we’ve been tracking are SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr.

All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. Users search by artist or song. MP3s or other non-DRM sound files with metadata matching the query are served as results.

Unlike sites like LaLa, Imeem and Pandora (and many others), which are all trying to play by various RIAA rules to deliver music to users, music search engines generally don’t pay royalties of any kind. The music itself is never on their servers, so they have significantly less copyright exposure. More on that below.

Of the three, Seeqpod is the most useful. It has an index of 8 million individual songs, auto-spell checks queries to find common misspellings, and allows users to create playlists. Seeqpod also has embeddable players, and will try to find music videos of songs you are playing. Seeqpod, by the way, was originally a project of the Lawrence Berkely National Lab.

SeeqPod Music beta – Playable SearchSongza also allows users to create playlists and provide embeddable players.Skreemr has bare bones functionality and the hit rate is a little iffy. But they have one feature that the others do not – a direct link to the file on the third party server. That means downloading the song to your hard drive is just a right mouse click away.

A fourth company, Deezer, changed its model in the face of litigation in France.

Copyright, Schmopyright

There’s no reason to mince words here – the music these sites are playing is almost always copyright infringing. But it’s distributed on servers unaffiliated with the search engine itself, making it effectively impossible for the RIAA and its international equivalents to do much about it other than try to force the largest infringers to remove the content. That’s because there is little recourse against the search engines themselves.

None of those legalities affect the search engines, though. It’s unlikely that under current U.S. law the RIAA can do anything at all to stop them.

Current case law gives a lot of leeway to search engines. I spoke this evening with Andrew Bridges, counsel for Google in Perfect 10 v. Google. In that case, Google was held not held to be infringing the copyright on images just by displaying a thumbnail of the image in search results.

The same arguments are valid with the music search engines, says Bridges (with the caveat that he’d have to look much more closely at the specific facts of any case).

The services may still be liable for contributory infringement, he says, but there just isn’t any definitive U.S. case law on matter yet. And no statutes cover contributory infringement.

So for now the search engines are free to link to infringing songs, and even stream them on their site. Just so long as the songs themselves are never stored on their servers. That’s good news for Deezer, Seeqpod and Skreemr, and the users who’ve come to rely on them.

Seeqpod

Loading information about Seeqpod…

songza

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Lala

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Pandora

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Imeem

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Can’t see the video? Click here

Tailrank founder Kevin Burton notified us that version 2.5 of his news aggregation site has launched, as well as a new version of the engine behind it called Spinn3r. We’ve taken a look at the new site, and in our opinion it still falls short of being a useful application.

We’ve been a bit harsh on Tailrank over the last few months, even suggesting that it may be time to deadpool it. But the site was without any content at all for a few weeks, and when Burton said it was fixed the site was filled with spam (Burton writes about the spam attack here).

So back to the new version…the spam is gone, but the stories are all at least a day old. Burton originally promised this release in early July. It came three months later, which is not unexpected when software is involved. But he knew that we’d be taking a critical look at the site. If his indexing engine can’t keep up with the news, how can he expect people to spend time visiting the site? We just criticized competitor shoutingmat.ch yesterday for the same problem. This is a competitive space (Techmeme is the clear leader, and there are lots of others), and anything short of perfect won’t stand a chance.

We’ll keep giving Tailrank the benefit of the doubt and hope to see it improve soon. But I’m not sure anyone else out there will do the same.

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oDesk, a next generation marketplace for contract developers, has recently seen a spike in requests for Facebook developers.

oDesk offers developers a number of aptitude tests to certify their programming skills in various areas – existing tests include Ajax, CSS, .Net, DHTML and ASP, among others. They’ve now added a forty minute Facebook aptitude test as well. Companies can now sort through developers based on their skill level in creating Facebook applications.

In related news, VentureBeat is reporting that a new course, called Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook will be offered this fall in Stanford’s computer science department. Dave McClure is a co-instructor.

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This image resizing and manipulation demonstration is sort of jaw dropping, particularly as the video goes on. The related paper, written by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan is available here.

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Three weeks ago we noted that blog news engine TailRank was looking like a ghost town: No new news was showing on the site, and people noted that the Technology section had been a blank for weeks. Founder Kevin Burton was outraged, said our post bordered on “complete journalistic incompetence,” demanded an “apology and a retraction” and promised big news within a week.

That week has come and gone, as have two additional ones. No news. And today the top story on TailRank is a viagra spam post. The second headline story is a porn spam post. Below that are real stories but they’re months old. This is from the site that was “designed with spam prevention in mind.”

There’s absolutely nothing in the technology section.

Should TailRank be added to the TechCrunch DeadPool or, as Burton commented on our last post, is it at “healthiest point we’ve EVER been as a company?” You decide below.

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Streamy, which we wrote about last week, is sending out early beta invitations and I had a chance to be one of the first people to poke around on the site. The video we included in that post still shows a very current user interface, and the feel of the product is very close to what is shown there. Or click on the image to the right for a very large screen shot of the home page.

Streamy takes features from many new web startups, but it is not a competitor to Digg. No voting to drive stories to the top, for example. It’s a personalized news service and social network. Digg isn’t personalized. It’s news for the masses based on popular opinion.

At its core, this is a social network, where adding friends is the first order of business. Once you have friends, you can share news items with them, and get recommendations from them via email or a built in, Meebo-like instant messaging service.

You also need to build out your profile. Do this by adding a picture and personal information, joining groups, adding feed subscriptions, etc. A screen shot of co-founder Donald Mosites’ profile is here.

Streamy, The News Recommender

But Streamy is all about the news, and the social network is there to spread the good stuff. Like many who’ve tried and failed (see the discussion under “Mgnet” on this post), Streamy is offering a personalized news service. News items shown to you on the home page are based on it’s idea of what you will like. It takes into account the types of news feeds you subscribe to, what you are commenting on, and what your friends are reading.

Above the recommendations, though, are the top stories. This is the only place where Streamy will compete with Digg, in pushing popular stuff to the masses. The stories are image-driven (see top of first screen shot above). AOL also went this way with their new Mgnet product after a lot of user testing – people like pictures, apparently.

Each news item can be commented (very similar to what Newsvine is doing), emailed, or dragged into an IM conversation. Users can also set up topic-based filters to drill down to stuff they really want to see.

Is It Viral?

I’m sticking to my initial opinion of Streamy (”It is well designed, has lots of intelligent features, and is almost sure to drop into obscurity immediately after launch.”). It’s pretty and extremely well thought-out, but it’s not clear that it does anything new enough to grab people’s attention.

There is, however, one feature that’s pure brilliance…the built in instant messaging feature already integrates with AIM, so you can see your AIM buddies on Streamy and send them stuff from the site. In the next few days they say they’ll be adding support for Live Messenger, Yahoo and GTalk as well, which gives it most of the functionality of Meebo. Users will have the ability to quickly spread news items to their friends right on the site, and this is a very viral feature.

I do have one complaint – the site makes a lot of noises, similar to I’mInLikeWithYou, and there is no obvious way to turn it off without muting the speakers. Not good for use at work.

Streamy is based in Hermosa Beach, CA (Los Angeles). They raised $100,000 in May 2007 from Driftwood Investments.

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There isn’t much out there about new startup Streamyyet, other than the screencast above, a TechCrunch Forums post and writeups from a couple of blogs. It’s a social news site, with customized pages for each user and the ability to add friends and share links/stories.

It is well designed, has lots of intelligent features, and is almost sure to drop into obscurity immediately after launch. Lots of casualties in the customized news space (see paragraph 3 here).

Thanks for the tip, Orli.

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