YouFig is a free social platform for collaboration that just entered public beta.

During its closed beta period, which started in January, it saw activity in over sixty communities including one used by an internal Cisco team. While there are a number of similar (and more feature complete) competitors already available, YouFig hopes to set itself apart by emphasizing security and an improved social networking experience.

YouFig centers on small, quick widgets that can be manipulated in realtime alongside a user list and chat window. So far the site’s widgets include editable documents, file downloads, and games.

YouFig’s API allows developers to design their own widgets, which can be used on and off the site. While it’s good that there’s an API, YouFig is currently notably lacking in several features that can already be found on competitors’ sites, such as spreadsheets and calendars (though both, we’re told, will be implemented soon).

In catering toward large corporations and universities, YouFig has included support for a matchmaking system that analyzes usage behavior and recommends possible co-workers for collaboration. They have placed a heavy emphasis on privacy and security, using proxies to help secure widgets that interact with external sites such as YouTube.

In practice, the site’s widgets seem to work well, though it is difficult to tell how useful they will be in a work environment - many may choose to use more robust editors like those included on Google Documents. That said, the community features have been thought through and the site’s accessible design could help it gain a following outside of the corporate world.

YouFig sees its greatest competition in Jive Software and 37 Signals. The Israeli company has raised $268k in funding, the majority of which has come from ICQ founding investor Yossi Vardi.

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Montreal based MediaScrape, a Google News meets video translation service has taken $3.2 million in a new round from we don’t know who, for total funding or over how many rounds we have no idea either.

MediaScrape’s new service is updated every 30 minutes and gives users full control on the way they receive their news, from on demand through to regional loops. The company syndicates content from Reuters, AP, Canadian Press, Dogan News Agency, and others, and translates these clips into English when required. MediaScrape claims to have a distribution deal with YouTube as well.

The site has received fairly extensive positive press coverage in Canada, but there are a couple of oddities that I cant quite work out. There was no details on the investors; it’s not completely unusual that investors don’t want to be named, but usually this would be noted by the company, it wasn’t in this case. MediaScrape claim the $3.2 million is a second round, and yet when they talked to the Montreal Gazette in September 2007 when they took $1 million, they claimed the $1 million was their third round (making todays round the 4th). They claim to be a “leading online broadcast news network” and yet their traffic is so small that they aren’t being tracked by comScore, and even Alexa puts them at over 200,000; their so-called YouTube syndication deal has only netted 714 videos in 7 months, with most videos getting viewer numbers only in the low three figures. Then there’s the web site, with the cheap logo, the stolen BBC world map down the left hand side, cheapy Google logos and just a general look and feel of a site done on the cheap, not by a company with 2-4 rounds of funding who apparently leads the field in news syndication.

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…and I really only say that because FriendFeed is one of those rare services that has the ability to convey a strong sense of culture that’s relevant to the user.  It doesn’t try to pollute it or dilute it or otherwise overpower it with a corporate branding effort like, say, Facebook.  When you’re logged into FriendFeed and have a group of folks with which you’re familiar with added to your circle, you can’t help but feel a little like you’re home.

DeviantArt portrays the same sort of feeling of community and strong culture, without being overbearing  in nature. DeviantArt has been around a whole lot longer than FriendFeed, of course, and has had time to cultivate it’s very strong community (back when they still called them communities, instead of social networks); I’ve been a member of the service since 2003, myself.

I recently had a chance to sit down and talk about the history of DeviantArt with one of it’s founders, still active in the company, Angelo Sotira.Given the fact that despite having an immense userbase that’s been creating tens of millions of art pieces for the last eight years, they’ve recieved surprisingly little press. Angelo and I discussed why that is (hint: it’s by design), a little bit of their history, and perhaps most interestingly how their culture has adapted to the new popularity of Web 2.0 and social media.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

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