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"SingShot, the online karaoke service that's taking on kSolo, Bix.com and similar sites, announced a round of new features today.  First off, they're trying to make the site more visual: instead of the song lyrics, users can now upload a photo to be shown when their rendition is played.  For those who want to upload multiple photos and video clips, they've integrated Photobucket.  Recordings that have photos and videos associated with them are marked by a special logo on the site, and the media is also displayed when you post the player to external sites like MySpace or your blog.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test this from the user's perspective, since my \"free trial\" has now ended.  This payment system was my biggest beef with the site originally, and I still think it will hurt the site - it's great to have a business model in mind, but charging for the service too early will no doubt limit their growth.\nThey've also tried to make the site more competitive by adding a slot for the \"Top Recording of This Song\" - this is in addition to the YouTube-inspired social rankings like Most Popular, Most Recent and Most Played.  The other new addition is RSS support - you can now receive updates when new songs are available, when your favorite members record new songs and when members leave comments on your recordings.  You can also subscribe to these updates via email.\nThese additions are nice incremental changes, and more visual content was definitely needed.  I originally expected SingShot to become more like a niche version of YouTube, but this move makes more sense: if you wanted to make a video of yourself singing, you'd post it on YouTube.  SingShot users are probably a bit less extroverted.  Nonetheless, I still think the pricing scheme is unwise: they should be growing the site as quickly as possible in the early stages, and charging users after two weeks seems like a good way to lose those customers.  Should YouTube have charged users, or offered the service for free until they grew big enough to strike deals with Warner Music?  Likewise, would Facebook and MySpace have struck their respective ad deals if they had a small number of paying users, rather than a massive number of free users?\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/09/18/singshot-adds-photobucket-photos-videos/>