Ultimately, Shazzle’s biggest strength is the application’s ability to make sharing easier. Share files, share ideas; share anything you can move around digitally. One thing you might not intuitively think of as being a thing you can share with a file sharing application is “links,” or your favorite websites. Here’s how it works in Shazzle…

Share Web Addresses and YouTube Clips

• Share YouTube Videos - Say you have a handful of favorite YouTube videos. You’d like to share these videos with your friends; store a bunch of them in one spot. Just create a community. Designate one folder as your “links” or your “YouTube Clips” folder (call it whatever you want). Then just click “add links” and start adding links. Type in the address of the YouTube clips you like and everyone who enters your community can watch the movies in the viewer by double clicking on the link that’s in the folder you just created.
• Share and Sort Your Favorite Websites - When you create a community, you can share a bunch of things AT ONCE…so you have a folder for music, a folder for pictures, and a folder for links/websites. You can share YouTube videos, but you can also set up a folder full of your “favorite” websites. Or a few folders. Your favorite sports sites, interesting political blogs, etc. You can do all that in your personal community too. That lets people get a fuller picture of who you are and what you like.

Personally, I really like the YouTube links. Right now there are a couple of “movie clip” communities up (check out the Shazzle World, the hierarchy right when you sign in, under the category “movies”). Having a place to house all of these movies clips is pretty interesting. Public communities with a ton of people in there’ll be interesting, because you chat and throw the links up, and check out who’s saying what about the movies. You can look up and down a member list, then check their personal profiles really quickly. If you don’t want your community spamed and you’d rather restrict things to you and your friends, wall the thing off by making it a private community; that way, only people you know can see and add to the list of links.

So yeah: go play around with the links and let us know what you think.

Thanks for reading,

Tom Demers

OK so the Shazzle download has been up for a couple days. It’s been given a chance to marinate. If you downloaded the app and played around with it: thanks! Really. All right now to the post…

Shazzle, as an application, does a lot of the things you’re already doing online. We like to think that it brings these things together in novel, useful, meaningful ways. Whether it does or it doesn’t, though: the Shazzle application works a little different than what you’re used to. You can share files with Shazzle, but it’s not exactly a “file sharing” application. You have a shazzle personal profile, but it’s not a “social networking” app, in the strictest sense. Same goes for instant messaging and web browsing. SO, since some of the Shazzle functions are likely to be a little different than what you’re used to, what I thought I’d do today, is ask and answer this question: “I just downloaded Shazzle…what now?”

• Sign Up - This part’s easy. The sign up wizard’ll take you through the process. You’re creating your “personal community” here, too: but don’t worry: you can always go back and edit it (top left hand corner of your screen, yank down your Shazzle drop-down and open up “my community settings”). Fill out whatever you want, but FYI: the college and high school info defaults to 1908, so you’re probably going to look pretty silly if you don’t set a year (unless you graduated high school or college in 1908. If that’s the case: good for you! Email me and we’ll put you in Shazzle commercials or something).
• Start or Join a Community - Most of the stuff going on inside the Shazzle app is happening in communities. Find a community you like an join it, or start your own. Right now, there are Shazzle featured artist communities (go to Shazzle World and check out “music”), right now, there are a couple of “great movie clip” communities under “movies.” You can go check out people’s personal communities, as well…or invite them to join yours. Browse through “Shazzle People” to find out who’s on Shazzle.
• Share some stuff - Start swapping…trade files (documents, PDFs, audio, video…whatever), or trade LINKS. One of the cool things about Shazzle is that you can click on the handy “add link” button and upload all kinds of links into a folder. You can store all your favorite Youtube clips in one place; create a “funny clips” folder and a “news” folder and a “great movies” folder…whatever you want.
• Chat and IM - If you go to “IM sign on” you can sign into pretty much any and all of your IM accounts. Let your friends know what your screen name is on Shazzle, and find out theirs. Then, just click “buddies.” Once you’re in the wizard, click “add.” Now their on your buddy list. You can IM, check out their profile or personal community…whatever. Live chatting is going on within communities, too: personal communities, private communties, public communities: there is perpetual chatting in all the communities.

All right, well that should get you started. If you have questions…support questions, functionality questions, “how can I do something” questions, or if you have some sort of Shazzle suggestion: let us know. Post em here in the comments, or head over to the forum, and someone will answer them there.

Thanks for reading,

Tom Demers