Sharing video with social media sites

The social media craze show no signs of letting up, with more than 200 million people now using sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Now, there’s a new whole category of social sites and services concentrating on shared photos and video. Here’s a look at a bunch of online services that add imaging and video to your social connections.

With sites like Gawkk cropping up almost daily, it’s clear that social media is the new, new media. Gawkk is like Twitter, but for video, a place to share with your friends via short 140-word updates, videos you’ve made or found online. Friends sign up to follow your “channel.” It’s free and, yes, it cross posts your video favorites to your Twitter followers.

YouTube, of course, started the whole online video craze. And it now has expanded sharing features that will automatically post to Facebook or Twitter. Oh yeah… you can also watch many of the YouTube videos in near high def quality.

Vimeo, a great YouTube rival, has the same thing. Post a video and easily share or cross post it to all your other social media pages.

If you like Hulu for watching videos and movies online, but wish there was a way to interface with social media, then check out the newly revamped Joost. Joost is sort of like Hulu but integrates with Facebook and allows you and friends to swap and share updates and links. And it has an application that delivers nearly 50,000 streaming video to the iPhone.

Then there’s FlickrVision, a site that shows you, over a map of the world, every image that is posted on the popular Flickr photo service… live, in real time. Talk about wasting time… It’s addictive, I warn you.

That’s the thing with all these social media and networking sites – they can turn you from a fan to a fanatic.