Verizon Wireless Announces Apps, New Features

We’re headed off to San Francisco tomorrow to cover CTIA at the Moscone center, but Verizon Wireless has decided to already jump the gun with a few noteworthy announcements.

SocialLife
The first is called SocialLife. For $1.49 per month, on Get It Now capable phones, you can access a host of social networking sites including AsianAve, BlackPlanet, FaithBase, GLEE, LiveJournal, MiGente, My Space Photobucket, Rabble, and MTV’s Tr3s to approve friend requests or view messages and post comments on friends’ profiles. We’d like to see Flickr and Facebook added to this to apply to a larger market.

The service will even allow you to set your new profile picture with any picture you take on your mobile handset.

Ringback Buddies
We admit that teens will probably love this feature, but why won’t wireless carriers just let ringtones and ringbacks die? Verizon Wireless is launching Ringback Buddies which is a Facebook application that lets you view the music your friends like or want and even purchase those and assign them to certain people so that they hear their favorite song when they call you. So your little sister can hear The Jonas Brothers while she calls and your mother can jam to Young Jeezy every time she rings to say the authorities are hot on your trail. Ringback tones cost $1.99 each, per year, so you can’t even keep what you buy, and the service costs an ongoing $.99 per month just to keep activated.

City ID
Owners of LG’s Voyager phone will now see the city and state of any incoming phone call to their phone, provided that they’re calling from any of 20,000 cities in the United States.

New York Times Through VZW Web Portal
Verizon Wireless and The New York Times have a joint agreement to share blogs, news, and movie show times, and stock quotes directly to Mobile Web enabled handsets as part of Verizon Wireless’ Unlimited Mobile Web plan which costs $15.00 per month or $1.99 per megabyte of data consumed.

M.VCast.Com
Verizon Wireless’ V Cast videos will now be available through handset Web browsers as well as through the VCast Video icon on some phones. The new Web version will help users share the content with friends on other carriers through social networking Web sites. To check it out visit m.vcast.com on your mobile handset. We checked the site out on our AT&T BlackBerry Curve ($264.99) last night and liked the clean formatting and ability to search, but alas, were not able to watch videos because we weren’t accessing it from a Verizon Wireless handset. But we did notice that we could immediately twitter a video, or send it off in a message, or add it to a playlist or favorites list.