The online media world was in one helluva tizzy late Wednesday and early Thursday when someone discovered that CoveritLive, the live publishing interface used by many brands and news organizations, was no longer offering free accounts. Many of us have been using the ad-supported version of CiL to hold reader chats and publish liveblogs for years now – and we were quite surprised. With several big conferences and annual news events coming up, news orgs will need some alternatives in place very quickly.

As of Wednesday, CoveritLive’s trial/free plan allows for only 25 “clicks” (whatever those are) per month, with all other plans charging per “click” with a capped limit each month. In other words – this is no longer a viable option for most newsrooms.

Having only recently posted my praises of CoveritLive, I felt compelled to help by pulling together a list of alternative workarounds for live chats and liveblogging.

Discover and join the vibe around your city, neighborhood, or building. Chat anonymously with people nearby without necessarily knowing them!

Vibe displays thoughts (text and photos) posted by nearby users whether at work, home, school, parties, ball games, conferences, etc. There's no registration so it's quick, easy and anonymous.

To contribute to the vibe, just post what's on your mind and select how far and for how long you want it visible.

You can share text, photos, and videos with people within 160 feet or miles away and for as little as 15 minutes or up to 30 days. You also have the option to tweet your vibes to your followers.

Vibe is useful at work (back channel for meetings and conferences), at school (lectures and campus life), sports (football and baseball games), and for fun (clubs, parties, treasure hunts).

Here are the distance and time options of your vibes:

Doweet is fun and simple way to create social activities with the people around you.

Doweet revolutionizes the way we do things together
and make the world real social.


Features:

• Create real life activities for you and your friends.

• Select privately small group of close friends & family and share your activity with them.

• Chat and discuss your “Doweets”.

• Get immediate notifications and see who is joining.

• Track real time social activities stream from the people you love.

• Define “what”, “when” and “where” and Doweet!!

Part photo game, part social camera, piictu is a fun + simple way to talk and play with piics from your mobile phone.

Simply snap a piic, post it and watch it come to life with picture replies.

Create photo contests, compete with friends and strangers, ask questions, or start a conversation through piics. No rules, it’s up to your imagination.

Interact and play with friends and the community at large through the exchange of pictures.

Features:
- Best photo UI in the market (we’ll pay you a beer if you prove us wrong)
- Share instantly on Facebook and Twitter
- Initiate and reply to picture streams with friends and strangers
- Share and play with anybody on your contact list (even if they don’t have the app)
- Front and back camera support
- Unlimited uploads and storage

One wish I have is to have it be even easier to share things that I find around the web. Google has made it easy for sites to add a +1 button but it isn’t exactly easy to share content. It isn’t to copy a URL and paste it into Google+ but come on, shouldn’t computers help us out here?
To that end, I have put together this bookmarklet to make sharing easier.

Therein lies the real battle over photo-sharing sites: Who owns what?

Here is your chance to spark a conversation with that Twitter acquaintance you’ve been wanting to meet or kick off your own group activity feed with some friends!

Consider it my gift to you, because I like you! Now you can enjoy personal messaging and group chats from your web-enabled phone, tablet or computer.

Here’s a quick explanation of how things work:

When you start a conversation, it gets its own unique, private URL on Umagram.com which you can comfortably share in public because only those who are part of the conversation will be able to access it. That is, if you send a message to @Billy and @Julia, I’ll know exactly who you’re talking about and only @Billy, @Julia, and you will be able to access that conversation. Even if Billy and Julia aren’t Umagram members, they’ll still be able to participate in the conversation as often as they’d like—for free.

This is probably our biggest release to date. Ever since we launched, the most strident feature request from our users has been the private sharing of documents on Slideshare. We’ve had lots of people writing to us about privacy and how it could help them in their work lives. We are happy to bring that wait to an end. It’s taken us a while to arrive at the best way of doing this, but we think the result should be worth the wait.

Get together better! Use Fast Society to create temporary teams of friends around fun events in your life!

Team Texting + Team Instant Conference Calls + Team Location Sharing

- Invite anyone! Works with every phone on every carrier in the US.
- Temporary teams means no commitment and no spam.
- Totally private.

Several users who are dissatisfied with the new iTunes interface or other enhancements, or are experiencing problems with third-party add-ons or other issues may seek to downgrade to iTunes 9.2.1. Here’s the procedure:

More than half (52 per cent) of mobile phone users are now using the mobile Internet with email and social networking the most popular activities, according to new findings released today. The mobile Internet usage poll, carried out by user experience consultancy, Webcredible, revealed that of the respondents who used the mobile Internet, over half (55 per cent) mostly used it for emailing and social networking, demonstrating the evolution of mobile Internet usage since the poll was last conducted in 2007.

The percentage of online Americans in each demographic category who have a profile on a social network website:

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

MixApp lets you and your friends gather online and listen to your music together.

Rate My Talk (@talkr on Twitter) is a service that allows conference attendees to provide immediate feedback on a conference via Twitter or through our web site.

Utterz is the first way you can instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas, anywhere, using all the capabilities of your mobile phone. Utterz mashes together the voice, video, pictures, and text you call or send in and creates an 'Utter' that can

We developped the BuzzMonitor, an open source application that "listens" to what people are saying about the World Bank across blogs and other sites in order to help the organization understand and engage in social media.

The question underlying Chris Allen's valuable essay on the history of social software is, why do we need a new term? Is there anything new going on, or there just a new generation of people discovering the same old thing, like each generation of teenager