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Juste (dot) ru, the video scam that’s been spreading rapidly on Twitter, is actually a double-headed beast.

We’re now getting reports of the same video links being spammed through user accounts on Facebook, too - a screenshot of such a mail is below. If you get a Facebook message with a link to Juste.ru, DO NOT click the link or visit the site - it appears to steal your credentials for both Twitter and Facebook, then abuse them to spread the scam further. Your Facebook friends get spam messages, and your Twitter followers get sent malicious Tweets.

This is perhaps the most vicious of social networking scams we’ve seen, affecting two networks simultaneously. Given that it’s able to grab logins from both sites, we’re assuming that it works by installing malware on the host machine, rather than simply asking for login details. We’ll continue to update once we have more information.

Current advisory: do not click links to “juste (dot) ru” on either Twitter or Facebook today. Also avoid any links on Facebook that simply say “Video” or “Best Video” - I’ve seen at least one example where it seems the link is hidden behind a short URL.

If you think you might be affected (ie. your Twitter or Facebook accounts are sending out spam links), run a full virus and spyware scan, clear your browser cookies and change your passwords on both services.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: facebook, juste, twitter, videos

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Dana Oshiro is a Canadian PR strategist and writer. She blogs regularly at Villagers With Pitchforks.

It’s unlikely that you’ve wooed someone by holding an iPod over your head in the rain. How we enjoy, share, discover, market and remix music has dramatically changed in the last two decades. While many of us are still rabid fans, technology allows us to wear the hat of producer, musician and distributor. Below are some of the latest trends in music and technology.

If you’d like to contribute to the list, please add your thoughts in the comments below.

1. The F Word: P2P File Sharing

Always a controversial topic, peer-to-peer file-sharing was once exceedingly difficult having raised the ire of the Recording Industry Association of America. Music has traveled via FTP, torrents and now via the cloud. However, one Swedish company appears to take the title of today’s file transfer darling. From the land of the Pirate Bay comes SoundCloud, a service that allows users to upload tracks and listen to streaming music quickly and easily. In the words of Stephen Colbert, “We’re not all brainiacs on the nerd patrol.” While a few select geeks still get their glitch from private back channels, many fans are clamoring to sites like SoundCloud for a fast fix on tunes.

Similar services include Imeem, Deezer, GrooveShark, 8 Tracks and Project Playlist.

2. Mashups: Remix Fandemonium

One of the fastest ways to make a song and its various parts viral is to encourage fan collaboration - just ask Radiohead. As part of the evolution of remix culture, web-based mixers allow fans to mix on the fly without the aid of professional audio suites. “Flash based sequencers are toys in the hands of an experienced audio engineer; however, artists consider [web sequencers] part of marketing and a possible revenue stream,” said Todd Tate, one of the organizers for San Fran MusicTech Summit.

Demoed at the Music Summit, MixMatchMusic’s Remix Wizard allows fans to create new tracks instantaneously out of pre-released stems. While the tool is certainly not a professional quality mixing board, it’s a great way to increase distribution and sell stems. Many musicians will purchase stems to add to their original compilations.

Two similar web-based collaboration tools include JamStudio and Indaba Music’s Session. Meanwhile, Donk DJ, reminds us that amateur remixing can be reduced to earsplitting simplicity. Built on top of the coveted EchoNest Remix API, Donk DJ lets users upload tracks only to shred them in a tornado of donk disaster.

3. App Happy: Mobile Music

There are more than 1,300 music-related mobile applications in the iPhone app store alone, and consumers can only expect to see more as third-party developers build for the Android Market, BlackBerry’s App World and the much anticipated June release of the Palm Pre.

Some of the more interesting music applications include the ever-popular Pandora app, which is available on for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices; Smule’s gesture-based app instrument, the Leaf Trombone; Song lyric look up tool, LyricFind; and Tapulous’ Tap Tap Revenge 2 - a beefier iPhone version of Guitar Hero.

Pricing for most of these applications is between zero to three dollars. Given that the iPhone takes its design cue from the iPod, the device is a particularly intuitive medium for music games and players.

4. Concert Sales: Monopoly or Fanopoly

For more than ten years, musicians have had a bittersweet relationship with Ticketmaster. In the nineties Pearl Jam boycotted the concert giant for “creating a virtual monopoly of tickets” and more recently Springsteen and the New Jersey Attorney General went toe to toe with Ticketmaster after Boss fans were wrongfully directed to buy marked up tickets from a subsidiary reseller. Several online ticket search engines have emerged to buck the one player ticketing system.

US-based SeatQuest and FanSnap aggregate tickets from a variety of resale vendors including StubHub and TicketNetwork while Seatwave lets UK fans get a piece of the action.

5. Benjamins: Getting Paid

Whether you’re an acoustic purist or a vocoding fool, Bandcamp helps starving musicians power their online stores and put food on their tables. Given the incorporation of valuable social media widgets and the ability to upload a variety of formats, the colorful adage is completely understandable.

Similar services include Fairtilizer, TopSpin Media’s self service tool and the much-anticipated second coming of Muxtape.

More music resources from Mashable:

- Social Music: Top 5 Music Recommendation Services

- The Rise of Social Music: How the Web Transformed Audio

- 18 of the Best Music Tumblelogs

- 16 Great Music Add-Ons for Firefox

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, EasyBuy4U

Reviews: Grooveshark, imeem

Tags: digital music, Lists, Mobile 2.0, music, social music, trends

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If you’re a fan of the Susan Boyle phenomenon, you’ll want to check out Susan’s final performance, which aired on Britain’s Got Talent minutes ago. And if you’re not a fan, perhaps rejoice in the fact that this social media obsession - which credits its spread to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook - is perhaps nearing an end.

Unless, that is, Boyle wins…in which case this may just be the beginning for the unlikely Scottish star.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: britainsgottalent, susan boyle, video, youtube

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Part of Electronic Arts’ success has been due to a legion of devoted fans who buy a new version of popular titles like Madden and NBA Live every year. However, that audience might be waning, as EA’s growth has slowed in recent times for a number of reasons, one of them being competition from online gaming.

To that end, EA announced an interesting new experiment today – Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online. Unlike Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, which, like EA’s other sports games is released on a disc every year across popular consoles and usually sells for around $60, the online version will be billed as a monthly, recurring subscription fee. Virtual goods might also be a part of the revenue mix.

User Experience

For users, this is good because it means less money out-of-pocket to begin gameplay, and if you don’t like it, you can cancel. It also means automatic updates; in the case of the Tiger Woods game, things like new golf courses, but if you were to extend this model to a title like Madden, you could imagine new players, rosters, stadiums, and jerseys, in addition to standard feature updates.

In other words, updates you’re used to receiving each year on the disc would be automatically delivered over the Web instead. Additionally, the ability to save a game online means you can resume it wherever you are – your desktop, your laptop, or an Internet café somewhere, just by logging into the Tiger Woods Online site.

Business Model

For EA, this model is good because it’s recurring revenue. Users pay subscription fees, and as EA adds more users, their monthly revenue will continue to climb. However, it’s not quite as simple as porting the game from the console to the Web – PaidContent notes that EA has invested upwards of $300 million in the online subscription model, so they have a lot of subscriptions to sell before they break even.

The Social

There’s also an interesting social angle with moving EA’s games to the Web, most notably, the potential for competition with friends through services like Facebook Connect and MySpace ID.

Like other games that utilize portable identities from the big social networks, this would allow you to login and find friends to play against, keep track of scoring records, and in the case of sports games, enable the type of ongoing competition (seasons, franchises, etc) that can be so addictive.

Lost, however, is the experience of sitting with a group of friends of the couch, in front of your 50″ television with surround sound and dual shock controllers.

Will It Work?

A big part of EA’s bet here is that they’ll be able to change user behavior. As significant as the advantages of online gameplay might sound, buying the latest version of Madden (and other EA games) is almost a religious experience for many people. Additionally, some EA games have already implemented online features, and will likely continue to do so, making some of the advantages of online-only games less relevant.

Of course, it’s not necessarily an either/or decision between online and console. Diehard gamers might want to play Tiger Woods both on their console at home and online when they’re on-the-go. And EA is likely to continue to offer both options for the foreseeable future, using the Tiger Woods game as a measuring stick for whether they’ll be able to successfully apply the model to some of their other, huge franchises. It all makes sense on paper, but ultimately the gamers will decide.

Tags: electronic arts, gaming, madden, online gaming, tiger woods, video games

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: CardStar

Quick Pitch: CardStar is a consumer-focused platform connecting loyalty cards, merchants and coupons via mobile devices.

Genius Idea: What do you have a card for? Seriously, think about the amount of cards an average person could acquire after a few years - one or two for grocery store discounts, one or two for airline rewards, several for your favorite stores, one for the pharmacy, one for the gym, and maybe a few for hotels, car rentals, and more. This is a problem that CardStar is trying to eliminate.

CardStar simply turns all of your cards digital. With the name of the retailer or merchant and your card number, CardStar can create a virtual representation of the card, complete with scannable barcode. It’s really quite simple and rather ingenious

Beyond inputting your number and merchant for each card, you can also play with advanced settings like symbology, which changes the type of barcode displayed, and invertation, which just makes it easier to scan if you prefer to give your iPhone to a merchant in the other direction.

Yes, you will have to give your phone to the merchant to the scan, which might initially perplex the kid running the cash register at your local Blockbuster. Yet it’s a better alternative than lugging a dozen cards around or forgetting to bring it with you on an errand trip.

Now, go to your local grocery store, then come back and tell us how the clerk reacted to your new membership card in the comments.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest - use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: CardStar, PHP

Tags: bizspark, iphone, Mobile 2.0

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Twitter is fast becoming one of the most important ways to share information quickly, easily, and instantly over the web. Users and developers have found a lot of innovative ways to pack a ton of utility into just 140 characters, including sharing images, sharing video, and sharing documents. What about music? Turns out, there are plenty of ways to share tunes on Twitter as well. Below are ten of the best ways to tweet about what you’re listening to.

If you know of any other ways to share music on Twitter that we should be aware of, please let us know in the comments.

1. Tinysong

Tinysong is a very basic URL shortener for music powered by P2P music sharing service Grooveshark. On the plus side, that means it has a huge library of songs to draw from, but it also isn’t very tightly integrated with Twitter. Tinysong is dead simple: search for songs, find the one you want, get a shortened URL pointing toward that track. Actually sharing it on Twitter is up to you. Tinysong has an API, meaning that developers could easily integrate it into their applications.

2. Twisten.fm

If you want a more complete integration between Grooveshark and Twitter, you’ll want to check out Twisten.fm. Like Tinysong, Twisten.fm searches the Grooveshark library for songs, but it goes two steps further by allowing you to share what you’re listening to directly from the site, and also monitoring your timeline to create a stream of what your friends are listening to.

3. Song.ly

Song.ly is a Twitter music sharing service powered by the Russian media search engine Tagoo. You search for an artist or track and press the tweet button, which sends you to Twitter and pre-populates the tweet field with a Song.ly shortened URL pointing at your song. Song.ly has IE and Firefox add-ons and an API.

4. Blip.fm

On its own, Blip.fm is kind of like Twitter for music, where users share tracks with one another in a Twitter-style real-time stream. But Blip.fm also integrates with Twitter (among other sites), and allows you to share tracks back out to your Twitter friends with one click once you have synced your accounts. The site borrows some concepts straight from Twitter — like reblipping, which is akin to retweeting — and helps users find friends to follow that have similar music tastes in order to build a real-time “radio station” stream.

5. Twt.fm

Twt.fm uses OAuth to connect you to your Twitter account then recreates your Twitter page, including your background and avatar, to store your playlist of music tweets, each including a Flash-player. The site allows you to search for tracks (which it pulls from imeem), or add direct links to MP3s, YouTube music videos, SoundCloud, or imeem. You can then tweet those songs directly from the site using a Twt.fm short URL. Unfortunately, sometimes the tracks it finds are just clips, and it doesn’t allow you to search by just artist or track, so you have to know the entire name of the song you want to play, who sings it, and how to correctly spell it.

6. Twiturm

Twiturm (the “urm” stands for “ur music”) is really aimed at artists looking to share music with their fans. The site lets users upload MP3 files, or point to existing MP3 links on the web, then share them directly on Twitter via a shortened URL that links to a Twiturm player page. The player page allows visitors to play, download, or retweet the tracks, and keeps stats on how many plays and downloads each song gets.

7. Musebin

Musebin lets you share your favorite albums and artists over Twitter using exquisitely tiny URLs made possible by using a domain with a non-standard character: http://♬.ws/ The shared URLs link to a simple page about the artist or album that includes information about the year of release, record label, cover art, links to additional info, and a stream of tweets about the artist.

8. Twittytunes

Twittytunes is a companion Firefox (and Flock) plugin for the Foxytunes music player plugin from Yahoo! Music. Twittytunes essentially adds a button to the Foxytunes player that lets users tweet about what they’re listening to in one click. Tweets don’t actually include links to playable songs, but they do include links to Foxytunes informational sites about the artist that often include song clips and music videos.

9. imeem

Music sharing site imeem, on which many of the other sites in this round up rely, added their own“Tweet This” buttons a couple of months ago. It’s a pretty basic way to tweet about the music you’re listening to, essentially just sending you to Twitter with a pre-populated form field that includes the name of the artist and track and a link to the song’s page on imeem. But imeem has a huge library of music to search, so it’s definitely a good site to have in your arsenal when sharing music on Twitter.

10. SongTwit

SongTwit is one of the newest options on this list, and lets you search imeem and YouTube for songs, point to MP3 links, or upload an MP3, M4A, WAV, WMA, OGG or ACC file. You then log into Twitter (no OAuth), add a message in the remaining ~115 characters, and send your tweet. Your message should probably include the song’s title, since SongTwit doesn’t automatically include it. When I tested it, it was a bit finicky (or my connection was) and kept timing out before it would actually share something, but I have actually seen SongTwit working for some people in the wild.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- Twitter to Facebook: 5 Ways to Post to Both

- HOW TO: Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds

- 25 Twitter Apps to Manage Multiple Accounts

- 29 Twitter Apps for the iPhone Compared

- HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Twitter #Hashtags

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, simonox

Reviews: Blip.fm, Firefox, Flock, FoxyTunes, Grooveshark, Twitter, YouTube, imeem

Tags: blip.fm, FoxyTunes, grooveshark, imeem, Lists, musebin, music, song.ly, songtwit, tinysong, twisten, twitter, twittertunes, twiturm, twt.fm

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Domain name susanboyle.com is now up for sale for $US 25,000. However, don’t start cursing those damn cybersquatters just yet, because the owner (and the seller) of the domain is none other than Susan Boyle.

Although everyone’s eyes are fixed on the British singing sensation, there is more than one Susan Boyle in the world. American artist, Susan K. Boyle, has owned the domain since 2002., but in the recent couple of weeks she’s experience a huge surge in traffic. Many of the visitors were unhappy about reaching the wrong site, while some of them figured that the singing sensation is into painting, leaving messages about loving “her” work.

Deciding that she doesn’t need that extra - and, for the most part, misdirected - attention, Susan K. Boyle decided to move her site to a new domain, sboyleart.com, and sell the susanboyle.com domain to someone that can make better use of it.

So, now we’ve got two famous artists named Susan Boyle: one paints, while the other sings. If you want to refresh your memory on the latest (singing) Susan Boyle performance (you know you do), you can check the video here.

Tags: susan boyle, Susan K. Boyle, susanboyle.com

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Earlier this week, Twitter users were up in arms over the notion of a Twitter TV show (heck, Ashton even threatened to quit).

Although it was quickly revealed that there is no “official” Twitter TV show, there is indeed a show from production company Reveille and Brillstein in the works that will incorporate the microblogging tool.

Now, we’ve learned that MTV is also jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, with a show of their own that will integrate Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools into the viewing experience. Dubbed It’s On With Alexa Chung, MTV has signed deals with both Facebook and Twitter, and will debut the show next month.

CNET has some further details on how the show will work:

“A talk show format inspired in part by late-night programming, with topics ranging from movies and music to the latest YouTube sensations (whom Chung plans to regularly bring onto the set to see if their singing, dancing, or other oddball talents are for real). And there will be no screaming crowds in Times Square. Instead, there will be tweets.”

As for the Facebook component:

“There will also, of course, be a “fan page” for the show itself, where viewers can submit questions to celebrity guests, vote on which songs they want bands to play when they appear live, and provide general feedback.”

Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook adds:

“Basically, they’ll ‘friend’ them for about two hours, the duration of the show, and then they’re going to encourage people to do mobile uploads during the show, mobile status updates, mobile photos, et cetera.”

Facebook will also make money on the deal, through sponsorships and integrations on the Pages for It’s On. Twitter, on the other hand, will not generate revenue from the partnership, and in reality, it’s hard to see how they could. Like we said with the earlier Twitter TV talk, an official deal isn’t even really needed to utilize Twitter in this way, but it’s beneficial for Twitter to get the exposure that comes with it.

The bigger trend, however, is that social tools are continuing to become integrated with mainstream media. From simply replacing the “email or IM us” prompts that anchors were using during their broadcasts a few years ago with “send us a Tweet or write on our Facebook Wall,” to integrated productions like MTV is attempting, the future of TV appears to have a lot of social baked into it.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: alexa chung, facebook, mtv, social media, twitter

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Do you like data visualizations? How about visualizations on the go? Thanks to several very cool iPhone tools, you can turn your data into graphs, experience 3D worlds, or turn music into real-time visualizations in the palm of your hand. We bring you videos of five great iPhone visualization apps in action.

1. RoamBi

Probably the most useful of the applications listed here, RoamBi is a powerful tool that turns your data into dynamic visualizations on the iPhone. RoamBi works with several data sources, like Excel, Salesforce, Crystal Reports, WebIntelligence, and others; turn the data into a RoamBi View, and view, analyze, modify or share RoamBi visualizations directly from your iPhone.

2. Ziostation 3D

This demo shows Ziostation 3D, a system that renders high resolution CT images on a remote server. You can access the server from the iPhone, and view and interact with the rendered images in real time. The application, although in proof-of-concept stage, makes full use of the iPhone’s multitouch interface with some amazing results.

3. Audiogasm

Anyone who was ever hooked to WinAmp’s old-school visualizations will love this one. Audiogasm is a powerful visualization tool that uses the iPhone’s microphone to visualize music in real time. You can shake the iPhone if you want to switch to a different animation, and you can save the current image to your iPhone, and set it as wallpaper at any time.

4. iGrapher

iGrapher is an iPhone optimized stock market data analysis tool that lets you create visual graphs and comparisons for indices and stocks on the market. It still has a long way to go before it becomes usable in real life, but it promises a lot of neat features, including 3D data visualizations, in the future.

5. Augmented Reality

This one is really something else. Augmented Reality is a system that enables you to explore a 3D virtual world using special visual markers. In the video below, the user explores a 3D environment that shows various aspects of the Star Trek ship U.S.S. Enterprise, including its exterior, interior, warping etc. You can print the marker on a piece of paper, or you can download a special image on your iPhone, and place it in front of your webcam, and you can behold the Enterprise in all its 3D glory.

See another video that shows how Augmented Reality can be used on the iPhone here.

See also: Data Visualizations: 5 Beautiful Social Media Videos

Tags: data visualizations, iphone, iphone apps, Lists

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The Web’s struggle with Scientology has been well-documented. Anti-scientology protesters have put out YouTube videos, attacked Scientology’s website, and organized worldwide protests as part of Project Chanology. Scientology has responded on the web with online campaigns of their own, but it looks like they took it a little too far for Wikipedia’s tastes.

According to The Register, Wikipedia has banned multiple IP addresses related to the Church of Scientology for extreme, one-sided editing in an attempt to remove Scientology criticism from the Web. The decision wasn’t an easy one though: Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee took nearly half a year to resolve the matter.

The decision, made after users submitted statements, responses, and considerations in what is equivalent to a virtual courtroom, involved votes on 19 principles stating essentially that the Scientology-related accounts violated the core principles of Wikipedia on multiple occasions - even likely coordinating their efforts to erase any critical mentions of Scientology.

The Wikipedia arbitration committee, in a unanimous vote, made the following statement:

3.0) This longstanding dispute is a struggle between two rival factions: admirers of Scientology and critics of Scientology.

A) Editors from each side have gamed policy to obtain advantage and disputes have spilled over into, for example, articles for deletion, the reliable sources noticeboard, the conflict of interests noticeboard, and sometimes the administrators’ noticeboard.

B) Aggravating factors have been (i) the presence of editors openly editing from Church of Scientology equipment and apparently coordinating their activities; and (ii) the apparent presence of notable critics of Scientology, from several Internet organisations, apparently editing under their own names and citing either their own or each other’s self-published material.

C) Each side wishes the articles within this topic to reflect their point of view and have resorted to battlefield editing tactics, with edits being abruptly reverted without any attempt to incorporate what is good, to maintain their preferred status quo.

D) The worst casualties have been biographies of living people, where attempts have been repeatedly made to slant the article either towards or against the subject, depending on the point of view of the contributing editor.

E) However, this problem is not limited to biographies and many Scientology articles fail to reflect a neutral point of view and instead are either disparaging or complimentary.

F) Neutral editors entering this topic are frequently attacked from both sides and stand little chance of making progress until the key players disengage or are required to disengage.

The end result has been the banning or restriction of dozens of Scientology accounts. While Wikipedia has made every effort to be fair and transparent in the process, this is probably not the end. After all, this is the fourth Scientology-related arbitration in four years, and we doubt banning a few dozen accounts will end the editing wars.

Reviews: Wikipedia, YouTube

Tags: scientology, wikipedia

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