In response to our piece about questionable viral tactics, video sharing app Socialcam has made some changes to the way that it displays YouTube videos on its website, as well as within your Facebook Newsfeed and Timeline.

I spoke to Socialcam’s CEO Michael Seibel today and he walked me through these changes, saying the company has “gone out of its way to make it clear that what content comes from YouTube”. While our original piece questioned the tactic of bringing in outside content at all, we’ll let you decide how you feel about it now.

Among the changes, the company has fixed the social sharing button, which would turn itself on when you visited a video via Socialcam on the web. Not only was this annoying, but it caused a stream of content to be shared, unknowingly by users, which of course benefited Socialcam by way of views and registration numbers.

The only catch is that when you turn social sharing off on the web, the settings within its iOS app will still show that it’s on, even though it’s not. There’s a UI fix for this that will that will be released in a future update, I’m told.

Additionally, Socialcam has added two small links that let you remove a video from your Timeline if you have social sharing turned on, or delete the app from your Facebook account completely:

These changes are great, even though the gray links could be highlighted a bit more.

Making things clearer for the users

Clearer labels for YouTube videos on the web:

When you visit a Socialcam video on the web, you’ll see the same social sharing toggle that you saw before, but the company has taken an added step by putting its current mode in the top right of the page. This helps users know exactly what mode they’re in, no matter where their eyes drift on the page. This is a healthy update and think it’s a better experience overall.

Additionally, Socialcam has added “powered by YouTube” graphics to the top of the embedded video, as well as along the right hand side where related videos are shown. Along with the “powered by” graphic, you’ll see that the user attached to the video is listed as “Top YouTube” so there’s no confusion as to where these videos came from:

Clearer Honest labels for YouTube videos on the Facebook:

The thing that really got the viral cycle going for Socialcam with these YouTube videos was how fast they spread on Facebook. When you watched a video, it would pop up in your friend’s Newsfeed and on your Timeline. The video was labeled with “recorded by Socialcam”, even though it obviously wasn’t. This was the tricky situation that really caused people to cry foul on what was going on.

Socialcam has cleaned up its act on this and is now labeling things as “shared with Socialcam” in the Newsfeed:

When you visit someone’s Timeline and hover over the video name, it is now clearly labeled as coming from YouTube:

These particular changes, although seemingly small, address the issues that we brought up about the potential for your friends to be confused as to whether this was user generated content through Socialcam, or simply old popular YouTube videos.

The moral of the story

The question that we asked in our original piece got us some interesting answers. We wanted to know just how far companies would go to be the next “billion dollar app”, and it seems that some will do just about anything to reach a proper “critical mass” to get attention from the press and appear to be huge.

In the case of Socialcam, which we pointed out was using a marketing service called FreeAppADay even though it’s not a free app, it certainly appears that some corners were initially cut by bringing in content from a source like YouTube. Whether those gaffes were made to deceive and inflate its numbers is for you to decide.

I’m told from a source that the FreeAppADay relationship is one that Socialcam didn’t pursue. In fact, the company offered Socialcam prominent placement and services for free. By pushing an app up the charts, especially one that’s in the press quite a bit, is a feather in FreeAppADay’s cap. I had pointed out that using marketing services like this wasn’t against any rules per se, it just didn’t make Socialcam’s growth look organic.

The moral of the story is that “social” is still in its infancy. Facebook’s Open Graph is still very young and people are trying to figure out how best to use it to benefit them.

At the end of the day, if something “feels dirty” then others will eventually pick up on it as “dirty” too. Faking things till you make it isn’t the way to go, no matter how much money is on the line. You’re only fooling yourself, and your users, if you think otherwise.

According to an email popular music video site VEVO is sending to users, it will only be accepting registration via Facebook moving forward starting March 9th, with the subject line of “The new VEVO.com is coming”:

Last September, VEVO announced a Facebook integration that would allow you to share videos with your friends on the social network as part of its launch on Facebook’s Open Graph at f8 last year.

There have been rumors that VEVO, which is owned and operated by Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and the Abu Dhabi Media Company, had been talking to Facebook about moving the hosting of its platform away from Google’s YouTube to the social network’s. This would be a huge coup for Facebook, as musicians are finding quite a bit of success using its social network to share tracks and connect with fans.

In addition to the email announcement that VEVO users will only be able to login with their Facebook account, the login page for the site currently states the same thing, suggesting that a Facebook login will give users “the full VEVO experience”:

Will the full experience soon be one without the VEVO branded YouTube player? It’s unlikely that a deal with Facebook will be struck before the company comes out of its quiet period pre-IPO, but the partnership would likely drive up the interest for buying shares in the company as controlling the experience of music videos from record labels like UMG and Sony would be a huge boon for Facebook advertising.

Last week, Google released SendACallFromSanta.com, a fun way to overexcite children and irk friends and colleagues with a personalized phone call from Santa himself.

By just answering a series of questions about someone and giving Google their phone number, the automated Santa gives them a buzz. It’s kind of cool, actually.

Phone calls weren’t enough apparently, so Google has upped the Holiday anti with personalized videos from a cartoon Santa. The script that he reads is the same from the phone call, but this time you get the visuals.

According to Google, the site has been a huge success:

Last Friday Santa opened up the Ho Ho Hotline and teamed up with Gmail to send personalized holiday phone calls to anyone you know who has been nice (or naughty, for that matter) in the U.S. or Canada. In just a few days Santa has made hundreds of thousands of calls to your friends, family and loved ones, and received many a message from you at his Google Voice number (855-34-SANTA).

Santa even has a Google Voice number.

Here’s a sample of the video that your special someone will get in an email:

Happy Holidays, now go annoy delight everyone you know with Santa greetings from Google!

At least the videos aren’t creepy like the ones we wrote about yesterday.

It’s not that finding music is hard these days thanks to iTunes and Spotify, it’s really about presentation at this point. On iTunes, you can listen to 30 second clips of music before buying, or listen to the whole track on Spotify with a subscription.

Both services have similar desktop apps that are meant to run in the background when interacting with the music you want to hear.

AllSongsBy uses the iTunes and YouTube APIs to make music listening a more visual experience than that. It’s like watching a TV station made up of your favorite artist.

I want my music TV

AllSongBy is a super slick app that lets you search for music by artist or track, then compiles a playlist of videos based on what it finds on YouTube. You don’t have to leave the service at all, everything plays right there.

Once you’ve searched for an artist, for example, the entire catalogue of music by them is shown below the video playlist. You can listen to iTunes previews, or click the link to purchase them on Apple’s platform. For those who really like getting into the entire catalogue of a musicians, AllSongsBy lets you sort by views the video has, title, or what album it’s on.

A search for The Rolling Stones created a playlist of 116 songs, as well as 7 hours and 32 minutes of video footage.

Wow.

I wish the app had direct links to tracks on Spotify, since the platform has its own API too. Understandably, the affiliate links to iTunes might make the developer a few dollars, but this type of music portal could really catch on if it mashed up tracks and data from different services.

Since AllSongsBy taps the YouTube API for its searches, you can find pretty much any artist in the world, even if they don’t have tracks on iTunes.

So why not sit back and queue up over seven hours of The Rolling Stones music? You’ve got the time, right?

➤ AllSongsBy

Curating and sharing links on the web is a hot space. Delicious has relaunched, and services we’ve written about like Snip.it are trying to get you to share all of your links on its service.

Utopic goes a step further in helping you discover and share links, videos, music, and pictures that are relevant to you with its brand new gorgeous design and visual bookmarking launch.

Utopic had this to say about its new visual bookmarking feature:

With one click you can now save, tag, share and later quickly recover anything on the internet that you find interesting. The same goes for your favourites and links already shared on social networks. Utopic allows you to automatically import and publish those links in a beautiful visual profile. Topic-based content discovery through other people sharing your interests is still there as well, albeit with a new design and navigation.

Discovery

When you sign-up for Utopic, you can connect your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google reader accounts. The service will then import all of your shared links and media and save them as bookmarks within the site for automatic tagging. This gives Utopic an idea of what type of content you’d be interested in. The results are pretty spot-on.

Once you’ve connected your accounts, Utopic takes about a half hour to go through your links. Once that process takes place, the home page starts giving you content based on your tastes. The service also displays topic tags and suggested friends to follow on the right hand side as well.

The design is visually stunning, and doesn’t make you feel like there are too many options, something other bookmark sharing sites suffer from. The focus is clearly on the content, which changes as you refresh the page.

Sharing is caring

Sharing content can be done in two ways. Once you discover something on the Utopic site, you can share it to any of your connected accounts with a click of a button. Of course, the fact that you shared something will factor back into Utopic finding more relevant stories for you, so it pays to share what you like using the service.

The second way to share using Utopic is its new visual bookmarking feature, which is actually really nice. When you visit a site or piece of content that you like and want to share or save for yourself, you can simply use their bookmarklet, click “<3 it", and you're given a very lovely window that shows you how the content will be saved. The service even dynamically creates tags based on the content you're sharing. That feature sets it apart from the rest. You're able to add notes to the content, as well as tags later on if you like.

The only limitation of the service is that Utopic doesn’t tell you exactly how or why it’s showing you content. I would personally like to know the context of why a certain video or picture is shown. Right now, you’re only told who originally shared it. That’s something, but not enough to make me really trust what Utopic is showing me. The results were very very relevant for me, so I’m not complaining, but as I use the service more I’d like to see a bit more insight into why things are described as “hot topics” for me.