LiveSteez Relaunches as Social News Site plus…

You may remember when Moguldom Media Group, the makers of Bossip, launched Livesteez not long ago.  It was primarily video UGC not unlike YouTube, well yesterday they relaunched as “The Definitive African-American Online Destination” a term that in my opinion has become sorely over used.  What is most interesting is  LiveSteez’s real identity…Aggregator+Social News+Social Bookmarking+Video.  There is also a social networking component to the site that allows you to login using Facebook Connect in lieu of creating a brand new profile. The site also produces original content under Livestyle, it has the usual categories with an unexpected appearance by a “Tech” category . Here is a quick Rundown:

News

The news area of the site basically shows an overview of the Most Recent, Top Stories, and Most Popular stories.

LiveSteez News Channel

Network

Network is you guessed it, where you would network with others.  This area allows you to search through members and easily see who is ‘Live’ or online.

LiveSteez Network

You can also get to any users profile page pretty easily form here.  Each profile page consists of content and activity from the user like My Pics, My Videos, My Friends, and My Comments.  Any user can also comment on another users page.

LiveSteez Member Profile

Video

The video area will probably remind you more of what the old Livesteez was and is one of the few things in the latest release that has been carried over without much change in terms of content:

LiveSteez Video Channel

There is  a huge improvement on the video player itself and what seems to be whatever infrastructure that powered the videos, there is much less buffering now with is a great improvement.

LiveSteez Video Player

HotLinks

Basically social bookmarking.  You can submit news and vote it up or down.

Live Steez Hotlinks (Social News)

LiveStyle

This is where you can find original content from Livesteez.  Categories include Entertainment, Style, Money, Tech, Love-Sex.

LiveSteez LiveStyle

Overall the new Livesteez is definately a move in the right direction.  There are some key things that I notcied on the site like not being able to submit news or video from LiveSteez easily from within LiveStyle or the Video channel.  This could pose a problem especially as users upload video to LiveSteez, they should easily be able to submit it to the site.  Also I think the member profile pages could be more robust, allowing comments to function more like a wall and MySteez actually being status updates versus a short Bio.  I actually though it was for status updates since the character limit was 150, no doubt I have been subliminally brainwashed by Twitter though, lol. We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on LiveSteez, I’m especially interested in seeing how Moguldom Media will or won’t integrate its other properties.  Enough of what I think…What do you think the steez is on LiveSteez?

About the Author
Angela Benton is the Founder and Publisher of BlackWeb20.com. Her experience spans a variety of industries including consultative relationships with companies such as UPS, Bizjournals.com, Realestate.com, and Lendingtree.com.
See all posts by Angela.