Perhaps in response to the new Google Sites offering, Microsoft has decided to open up its hosted version of SharePoint to smaller businesses. The hosted SharePoint offering was previously only available to large enterprises, but the beta has now been opened to businesses with 5,000 or fewer users.

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Communiversity provides a place for prospective students to find genuine, trustworthy information about schools. It gives existing students a place to take pride in their school and share their experiences with prospective students. Students publish information about their school by using the site’s wiki format. Users can register as a prosective student, a current student, an alumni, or a visitor.

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Orgoo jumped in to the video chat market with their public beta this week. The site was announced at TechCrunch40 last year. The rest of Orgoo’s features (IM, email, and SMS) are all still in private beta.

Orgoo is one of the first in the market to provide video chat all within the web browser. Typically companies in this market require a download of a plugin and mostly Windows only. At launch there was a cap of 1,000 broadcasters site-wide, but that cap is being raised daily (good idea to keep the site from grinding to a halt). I tried to check out the service myself, but there was no one online and I have no friends to chat with… I know, it’s sad.

TechCrunch has good coverage…

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You know, if there was any company I would invest money in, it would be one founded by M.C. Hammer: a man who was $13 million in debt and had to file bankruptcy. Ok, perhaps that is some what unfair… he has been relatively successful financially since then. But I digress…

DanceJam, founded by M.C. Hammer, and Geofrrey Arone and Anthony Young from Flock, launched in to public beta on March 3rd. The company has closed $4.5 million in funding, with a some portion coming from TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. The company intends to bring dance battles to the Internet where users have a “dance off” against each other with viewers voting for the best. The site also offers general dance videos uploaded by users and from external sites (YouTube).

Some of the videos are pretty amusing and make me feel a lot better about my dance skills. Casual observation: not a lot of white guys showing up there.

An example of a battle can be see here: http://dancejam.com/battles/990294947

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Totspot is an interesting idea in the world of social networking, although they like to think of the site more as a social publishing tool.

TotSpot is a place for parents to publish stuff about their kids, collect memories from friends and family, and organize the things they’ve already published (online) into a coherent narrative. Childhood is an ongoing story and Totspot is the first site that makes it super easy for parents to securely share their kid’s story with friends and family.

The site just entered private beta and is targeting new parents and families. Totspot allows for profiles to be created to capture the memories of children and share that information with friends and family. Profiles will not be publically viewable — access is restricted to either other Totspot members or select friends in the network.

TechCrunch covered the site and there are a lot of constructive comments from the readers there. The people at Totspot have also responded to some of the comments.

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According to the WebCanvas site, WebCanvas is “the world’s largest collaborative painting.” Interesting idea, but I just don’t get it. The site allows users to draw and/or upload images to the “work of art.” The technology also makes it possible to watch other users painting in the same viewing area. WebCanvas evolved from GraffyWall which was “the first web site to allow users to draw directly onto a boundless WebCanvas simply using a web browser.”

WebCanvas is an interesting bit of technology. It works, albeit slowly for me. But I fail to find the usefulness of this technology. Maybe someone will clue me in someday…

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Simkl came out of private beta and opened up to the world as a publc beta this week. Simkl History Saver saves all of your IM conversations, maintains a backup of contacts, and provides a search interface for your chat history. The service is compatible with all of the major chat clients (48 in total) out there, including iChat for Mac OS X, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Trillian, and Adium. Simkl has been testing in private beta since December 2007 with more than 10,000 users.

Otis Collier has posted this demo of Simkl on YouTube (he is not associated with the project).

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