Be Your Own Star…on the web

Blogs, wikis, social sites, and even personal web sites are getting more and more personal.  Each person is creating their own brand and big brands are allowing people to become the stars of new entertainment creations.

New technologies such as Ajax and Adobe Flex are making it possible to create animated or rich internet applications that also connect to databases and web services around the world.  Sharing the internal workings of those applications is now becoming more accesible to the average web surfer and everyone is looking to be their own star, taking with it their 15 minutes of fame, on the web.  Just look at anyone’s personal page on YouTube, MySpace, their blog or their own personal web site.

Social expression products are available in many forms today including online greeting cards from AGInteractive, Blue Mountain Cards, and even a new site called MushyGushy.com.  In most cases, the cards have a fixed message, animation, sounds and the like.  Most e-greeting cards allow only changes to the message text when sending it to another person.  Though personal, it isn’t lilke creating your own by programming it in flash. 

MushyGushy.com takes the e-greeting card one step further by allowing you to include a picture of your own or your friend’s head in each greeting.  Fantastic technology!  Ping-a-Pal takes a different approach by allowing you to create your own scenes and messages to actually tell a story.  While Ping-a-Pal doesn’t allow you to upload pictures and crop your head like they do on MushyGushy, it is a very interesting means of personalized e-greetings that goes beyond the very fixed message in a card you may buy from Blue Mountain.  Maybe Mushy-Gushy and Ping-a-Pal should merge!

Corporations have begun using this personalized technology for driving traffic to their site.  ElfYourself.com was one of the most visited web sites last Christmas with nearly 40,000 people uploading pictures of themselves PER HOUR!  Sponsored by OfficeMax, this little personal part of the web was a fantastic way for people to make themselves a star, if even for only one Christmas season. 

For every one of these sites, the creators are re-inventing the ability to cut out your own head and include it in a Flash movie.  Personiva hopes to change all that with their technology, which is an automatic face recognition product that can be included in any of these personalized services.  Chevrolet recently used the technology for an online personalized Super Bowl ad.  Levis, HP, Dial Soap and others are embedding Personiva into their online animations and making the web even more personal and engaging for the masses. 

Today you have a mix and match of these abilities with advertisers representing global brands leading the way.  Tomorrow, companies like Flickr will give you the ability to use your images in things such as e-cards, online games and a slew of new internet applications that will take personal expression products to a whole new level. 

Hey, putting that all together sounds like a niftly little business!