Social network, Youmeo is brain child of 19 year old entrepreneur Calum Brannan. Calum started the site back in 2005 as “pplparty.com” then recently rebranded as the much nicer (in my opinion) Youmeo.

What I find most impressive is how much Calum has achieved in such a short space of time. Starting pplparty when he was just 15 he now heads up a 10 man team in his London office.

At 17 I went to work for Doug Richard (one of BBC2’s Dragons from Dragons Den) and his team for mobile texting company Trutap. I was working alongside world-class people with backgrounds ranging in companies such as Yahoo, Ebay and T-mobile.

When I first started the business I was working from my bedroom at my parents house whilst doing my GCSEs, then I had our whole team working from my front room until just a few months ago when we moved into office space.

In the time since the pplparty launch in 2005 the site has gained a fair bit of traction currently boasting over 400,000 members. Whilst it still has a fair way to go to make a dent in some of the big boys it seems to have a thriving community and should continue to grow with the recent sexy rebrand.

Recently launched YouLiveSee is a slimmed down version of popular video streaming sites justin.tv or ustream.com with an emphasis heavily on chatting with other people. Anyone can start a new “topic” on the site and wait for other members (or guests) to come in and start chatting.

It’s a simple concept that isn’t completely ground breaking but I really like the way they’ve stripped down all the unnecessary features and kept everything simple and to the point. I managed to setup an account and start chatting in under a minute.

Here’s me testing the site with Mike from WPcandy.

I dropped the sites owner an email and he was more than happy to give me a bit more information on where the idea for the site came from.

There is one very important thing to keep in mind. The future of human development, as electronics, computers and machines take more and more jobs that humans did in the past, is – simplicity of use and not complexity! More simple the devices, software and hardware will be, while focusing on core functionality, more things you will be able to do. When I was studying engineering I remember when we went to visit an underground coal mine, and conditions for both workers and engineers were awful. So, I thought to myself, why are all these people here? Through simple global collaboration of individual technicians and engineers where they can quickly exchange 3D data and talk live a consortium could be set up and massive robotic mining systems could be manufactured to replace at least half of those people under ground, while they could be sent to surface to control those robots through network channels. Each worker could thus dig more ore and do less work.

I really like this site and service. I’ll be using it for sure.

Social networks are a relatively un-tapped source for music. Sites like myspace and bebo have massive amounts of streaming music at their disposal but do little more than encourage struggling musicians to create profiles and add as many friends as possible.

Qbox has found a way to utilize this massive collection of music.

Our player essentially works like a remote control that lets you take control of all the social network music available for streaming.

There is also a desktop application that I unfortunately couldn’t test (I’m on a mac and currently it’s windows only) but this video outlines some of the features of the software.

In recent times it’s rare to come across a social networking website with a genuine unique selling point so when I discovered redkaroke i was understandably refreshed.

RedKaroke lets its users sing, record and share karoke songs. It has a surprisingly large collection of music for users to sing along to and each has the lyrics that flash up on screen as your singing.

I signed up with the intent of recording a song and embedding it here but after numerous failed attempts (nothing at all was wrong with the system, just my singing) I decided to embed a song from one of the sites top users.

This embed is just an audio track but users also have the option of recording a video to go along with their singing.

The two co-founders (and brothers) Miguel and Richard Ferreira had the original idea. They both have years of experience in the Spanish internet industry, having worked for Yahoo! Spain, Terra.es, and Ya.com. They saw the increasing popularity of music shows, and worked through the technical difficulties, ultimately coming up with the Spanish site, RedKaraoke.es which proved to be very successful. This is the international version which launched recently.

I’d love to see some indiestartups.com readers trying to do some karoke. If you feel brave post links to your attempts in the comments.

Twitter has a wonderfully loyal and dedicated userbase so when twitter inevitability goes down people get rather annoyed. It’s also no secret that twitter has been having some recent scaling issues so twitter has been going down noticeably often. So often in fact that it prompted someone to make a handy “is twitter down?” website.

When twitter goes down, twitabit steps up. It lets you que up tweets that will then be submitted the second twitter comes back online.

I’m haven’t tested this out yet (twitter is currently up!) but it looks like it’s a handy little app for twitter addicts. Stick it in your bookmarks then next time twitter goes down you’re covered.