After banning YouTube and other social Web sites on all overseas computers in May, citing bandwidth and security issues, the U.S. military on Tuesday launched an alternative video-sharing Web site for troops, their families, and supporters.

The new site is called TroopTube and has a look and function very much like YouTube, with one major difference: a Pentagon employee screens each video upload for taste, copyright violations, and national security issues.

Technically, you need to be a member of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, or National Guard to register with the site for uploading. However, there’s no enforcing mechanism to make sure that’s the case. There are also options to register as a family member or civilian friend.

TroopTube limits videos to 5 minutes in length and 20MB in size, as opposed to 10 minutes and 1024MB of YouTube. Unlike YouTube, you can’t rate a video but just leave comments.

According to the Associated Press, TroopTube was built with the help of Delve Networks, a four-month-old start-up that builds advanced tools for approving, sorting, and managing videos.

Delve’s technology automatically generates the video content into different file sizes to feed the viewer best depending on his or her Internet connection. This makes the site more bandwidth-friendly than YouTube and other movie sites. The company also creates a text transcript from the uploaded videos’ sound tracks for better and more relevant search results.

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A Photosynth view of the CNN Center in Atlanta, Ga., retrieved with Microsoft’s Live Search Maps.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft now lets people using its Live Search Maps service get a more immersive view by integrating the company’s Photosynth panoramic viewer technology.

Photosynth stitches multiple images together into a 3D view, and people can in effect gaze around from a virtual vantage point. Areas with Photosynth views can be shown in the “explore collections” view of a map that also lets people see photos and other additions to a map.

I found the feature easy to use–even the Photosynth installation that had given me some headaches when I tried it during its early days. I still don’t like the vast swath of empty green wasted space that could have been used to make the imagery even more immersive, though, and so far there aren’t a huge number of places with Photosynth photos.

For full instructions on how to use Photosynth on Microsoft’s maps, check the Virtual Earth evangelist’s blog from Microsoft.

In addition, Microsoft said Wednesday it added 47 terabytes of new aerial imagery on Wednesday showing new views of Spain, Japan, Canada, the United States, Australia, and assorted European countries, according to the Virtual Earth blog.

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AOL on Monday launched When.com, a rebranded version of Zvents’ online events guide.

The two sites are largely indistinguishable except for one element: “Where when.com differentiates is the addition of Kids and Family activities, which we feel is important to our audience,” said AOL spokeswoman Jaymelina Esmele. Zvents handles the categorization, but AOL draws more attention to the family-friendly events.

Another difference: the AOL version lets people search by popularity and date.

AOL expects more changes. “While it is fully functional, the site today is still a phase one beta site; we’ll be continuing to introduce new features as well as update the site based on user feedback,” she said.

AOL launched its When.com site Monday, a rebranded version of the Zvents online events site. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

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Social aggregator FriendFeed has just rolled out a new option for its users to post some or all of their FriendFeed activity over to Twitter.

Earlier on in the start-up’s life the functionality was introduced to send replies (via FriendFeed) to other people’s Twitter messages. This worked as long as you had plugged in your Twitter credentials to give the app permission to post as you.

This new system is similar to that model, although it can be set to do this for everything you publish to FriendFeed. Users can also select which specific services they’d like cross posted, keeping your Twitter subscribers from being inundated with your comments about threads they have no idea about.

You can now opt to have your FriendFeed entries posted to Twitter, complete with a selection of which services you want it tracked from.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To avoid what could be considered an infinite feedback loop, FriendFeed ignores these Twitter messages, even if you’ve set up your Twitter account to go into your FriendFeed. If other Twitter users reply to you it will simply go into the original FriendFeed entry.

This could mark the start of export publishing to other services, which VentureBeat’s MG Siegler thinks could be a simple play to drive more traffic to FriendFeed through back linking. As it stands any message sent to Twitter from FriendFeed includes a link back to that conversation, which might be enough to hook people.

Personally I really don’t feel the need to use this feature–at least for Twitter. I think Twitter’s strong suit is that it’s text only, and while links are sometimes handy I don’t think my followers want as many as FriendFeed is likely to spit out. FriendFeed does a far better job integrating photos, videos and other media, which is something I doubt Twitter is likely to add; that is unless it develops a plug-in architecture (which the recently updated side-bar suggests). For the sake of my followers I won’t do this.

Where I can see some value in this is for something like Delicious. The tools for sorting through Delicious bookmarks are plentiful and powerful, but lately most of my link sharing has been to FriendFeed because I prefer it’s media-rich bookmarklet. Sure, I could keep adding bookmarks to Delicious, then have them get sucked up in FriendFeed, but I know for a fact that my FriendFeed subscribers would probably be more likely to check out that link, or like it if it had a picture and a snippet of text. With a system in place to push out FriendFeed bookmarks to Delicious, I could avoid this problem altogether, and still keep my Delicious library fresh.

I expect we’ll see other services for export publishing in the near future–the question is whether it’s more for the users or FriendFeed’s traffic.

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Recommendation tools are a dime a dozen these days. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though–the more exposure you get to new content, the greater your chances of finding a new favorite. To aid in that search is newcomer Taste Kid, a search tool that provides simple recommendations for music, books, TV shows and movies.

The tool uses previous user searches to figure out how terms are related, which means as time goes by the results are honed, and hopefully more accurate. While each of these results is missing links to purchasing pages and audio samples, each one has a YouTube video which you can view right from the results.

What makes the site particularly useful are the unrelated items which get stuck on the bottom of each exploration page. The site tacks on the most recently added and popular bands, books, TV shows and movies, which turns each result into its own browsing experience. In just a few minutes you can peruse about a dozen videos to find something you like–and of not, a simple click on something you do takes you to another recommendation page to start the process over again.

Where the tool loses some of its luster is the lack of a breadcrumb trail to get you back to your original search, or any sense that it’s getting to know you better. Mufin, a music recommendation tool I took a look at a few weeks back does this, and it makes it a far more engaging experience. Ideally future iterations of the tool will keep track of this with a cookie.

[via TheNextWeb]

Start a deep dive into music, movies and TV show recommendations with Taste Kid, a simple recommendation tool.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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If you’re unsure where you should be casting your ballet come November 4, Google’s got you covered with a new maps layer that lets you search for local polling locations. Users simply plug in their home address and it figures out both what county they’re in and where their poll location is.

I didn’t have much luck getting this to work from a few business addresses in San Francisco, but it picked up two of my former residential addresses just fine. One of the things that makes the tool useful is the special set of instructions on what you should be looking for at each location, like parking and special entrances. In the case of the church nearby my old apartment (pictured below) it’s smart enough to tell me to use the front side, which could keep me from wandering around aimlessly.

All of this information has been made open source and is available for other application developers to include in their own tools, which should be popping up in the few remaining weeks.

Looking for the proper place to vote near your house? Google Maps now lets you know based on your home address.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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The story I kicked off a few days ago, Tech layoffs: The scorecard, is a real bummer. On it, we’re tracking the current layoffs in the tech economy. I hate the story, since each line on the sheet stands for real people who have lost jobs.

So earlier today I sent a query out to my Twitter followers: Send me good news. That led to this anti-layoff spreadsheet, the one tracking companies that are hiring. I present it here. Most recent entries are at the top. Happy hunting, everyone.

Want to add your open positions to this sheet? Fill out this form. I’d like to see this spreadsheet get bigger than the layoff scorecard.

See also: Crunchboard, Monster.com, Dice.com, etc.

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