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.