If you have half a dozen social networks and microblogs that you like to update simultaneously, you probably need to go outside and get some fresh air. But before you do that, you can post an update to let all your friends know that you're going outside to get some fresh air using HelloTxt.
Last time we looked on on the site, you could post messages to 10 different services including Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku. And that was about all you could do. But now the service has rolled out a new feature that lets you post images and videos. Well, sort of. You can upload an image to the HelloTxt server and get a shortened URL to place in your message so that anyone can click through and see the image. But HelloTxt doesn't actually host the videos. You'll need to copy the embed code from another site like YouTube or Vimeo. You do still get a shortened URL that you can send out to friends, so there's some value in the video feature. Just not as much as we'd like.
Somewhat ironically, while HelloTxt will give you shortened URLs for videos and images, there's no option to shorten a regular URL, so you'll have to rely on old standbys like TinyURL if you just want to share a link.
The bright developer behind Inquisitor has announced today that Yahoo! has acquired the rights to his program, which searches for and suggests results as you type. It's very similar to Spotlight except that it searches the Internet instead of your Mac's HDDs.
We worry that Yahoo! might ruin Inquisitor by preventing it from working with other search engines, but the developer insists he will remain the lead mind behind the program. He will not be working with Yahoo! as their official employee, so at least he's keeping his creative freedom. Though we don't know if the company will allow him to apply that freedom to the program since it's technically Yahoo's now.
Our suggestion, if you use Inquisitor, is to turn off the search for updates feature, which may lead you to accidentally update the program to a crippled version. If you're happy with the way Inquisitor works, there's no point in risking an update. Otherwise, don't agree to an update without researching the changes first. We wouldn't want you to restrict Safari's search bar to Yahoo. No one deserves that.
The Photoshop Express public beta launched about six weeks ago and other than some early concerns about the ToS, we continue to be impressed with the service. Today, Adobe has added a number of new features to the service, including support for Flickr.
At the conference call in March, we asked Adobe about their plans for integrating Photoshop Express with other web services and they assured us Flickr support was on the way. It's available now and we think it adds a lot of value to both services. Now you can download your Flickr photos directly into Photoshop Express for cropping, color correction, digital effects, etc. Photos edited with Photoshop Express can be immediately re-exported/uploaded to Flickr all in one seamless step.
Additionally, Adobe has added a new "Save As" feature so that you can save multiple versions of a photo in addition to the original image. Adobe has also introduced a new embeddable media player for photo slideshows that can be used with Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites.
It's 7:30 in the morning. You're trying to get the kids fed, clothed, and out the door on their way to school without being late for work yet again. And the phone rings. You don't recognize the number, but you pick it up anyway because who knows? It might be important. "Hello?" you say. "Hello?" No answer. Just as you're about to hang up, you hear a click and then a friendly voice finally comes on, asking if you'd like to apply for a credit card, change power companies, or purchase a burial plot. There goes two minutes of your day that you'll never be able to get back. And odds are it's going to happen again tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that.
We're not entirely sure that CallerComplaints will get those nasty telemarketers off your case any more than asking them to remove your number from their list. But it certainly might make you feel better.
When you visit the web site, you can type in the phone number of the people who have been calling and hanging up on you to find out if other people have complained about calls from that number. You can read their comments and enter your own. Or if you're just bored and want to read some horror stories, you can click on the most reported numbers from the past week, month, or all time. And if you've got any tips for getting a telemarketer to stop calling, you can share them with the community. Or better yet, share them with us in the comments!
We're always on the lookout for good desktop Twitter clients. Because while the microblogging service is kind of useful as a web-based tool for sharing your thoughts, desktop clients make Twitter feel more like an instant messaging platform that allows you to communicate with hundreds, even thousands of people at once.
While there are a couple of excellent Twitter clients for Windows and OS X, Linux users have had a more limited selection. A few months ago we looked at gTwitter, an application for reading and sending Tweets from your Linux desktop. While gTwitter will get the job done, it lacks some of the features we use the most, like URL shortening and the ability to reply to tweets from other users with the click of a button.
So we were pretty excited when we read about Twitux, another Twitter client designed for Linux. Installation couldn't have been easier. We downloaded a deb file for Ubuntu, and our system automatically downloaded all the required dependencies and instlled Twtiux. And then we saw that it was almost as basic as gTwitter. Twitux gives you more control over your timeline view, allowing you to see the public timeline, your friends timeline, your own timeline, direct messages, or replies. But if you want to send a reply or direct message you'll have to do it manually. There's no option to click on a friends' name in the timeline and respond.
Fortunately, now that Adobe has released a version of their AIR platform for Linux, you can run popular AIR-based Twitter clients like Spaz and Twhirl, So while we're still kind of hoping that someone will develop a full-featured Twitter client that runs natively in Linux, we'll happily settle for the cross-platform Twhirl client. A new version of Twhirl was released this week with a few bug fixes and one major new feature: support for Friendfeed discussions.
Apparently social browser plugins are the next big thing. The other day we told you about Yoono, a Firefox add-on that brings FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking features to your web browser. Today it's Minggl's turn.
Minggl is a browser toolbar that works with Firefox or Internet Explorer. Every few minutes Minggl will scan your social networking accounts and display the latest updates. You can pull up a list of your friends or view an actvity stream in your sidebar.
The nice thing about toolbars like Minggl is that they let you keep up with the activity on your social networks without constantly opening a half dozen web pages and hitting the refresh button. On the other hand, the toolbar takes up some valuable screen real estate and provides a constant source of distraction.
The Minggl toolbar is currently in public beta, and supports Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, and LinkedIn, with more services cming soon.
That popular Unix and Linux text editor known as Vi is now the proud brother of an online clone that should run in most javascript enabled browsers. It's called jsvi, and now you can write your own programs and HTML code from anywhere!
Such remote locations include but are not limited to:
your local library
the internet cafe down the street from work
your aunt's house
those weird McDonald's locations with internet computers inside
the boss' laptop
Russia
On a more serious note, the Vi simulator works with nearly all the traditional keys and substitution commands, and you can copy/paste from the clipboard. It also includes a built-in spell checker for those long-night moments when you've stared a word for too long and can no longer remember how to spell it. Does that happen to other people, or is it just us?
Intwition is a little bit like Technorati for Twitter. Enter a URL and Intwition will let you know how many pages have been linked to by Twitter users, who your most active Tweeters are, and how many times they've tweeted your messages.
There are plenty of services that let you know when your web site has been mentioned by another blog, but the is the first service we've seen that lets you track the Twitter actvity related to your blog. Intwition provides a good way for bloggers to figure out who some of their biggets fans are, and make sure to follow their feeds to help build a sense of community.
Of course, you can also use Intwition to try to gauge the popularity of other web sites in the Twitopshere. Want to see how often a competitor's site is mentioned when compared to your own? You don't need to own a URL to enter it, so nothing's stopping you.
It seems like every day a new company comes along with a service that lets you send huge files over email. Or rather, they let you upload a file to a server and then send the download link to a friend. Filemail may be one of the newer kids on the block, but there's a lot to like about this service.
Filemail lets users send files up to 2GB for free. You can also password protect your files, and customize how many times each file can be downloaded and how many days it will be available on the site. Filemail also lets you ZIP and encrypt multiple files. And you can receive email notification when a file is downloaded.
When we took Filemail for a spin, the upload and download speeds were good, but not spectacular, at around 200KB/s. We've had problems with corrupted files the last few times we've tried our previous favorite file sending service, so it's nice to find another alternative.
For $2.91 per month you can sign up for a premium account and send files up to 5GB. Or if you want to send files up to 25GB, you can snag a corporate account for $24.91 per month. Premium and Corporate account holders get a few other benefits as well, including the ability to leave files onine for longer periods, and an option to let each file be downloaded more than 20 times (which is the limit for free users).
Note to anyone developing an RSS reader: If you don't support OPML, we're not interested. While adding feeds for your favorite web sites one at a time might have sound like fun, once you've got more than 10 feeds, the charm of entering them by hand kind of wears off. And over the last few years, we've accumulated just a few more feeds than that. So when we first heard about new kid on the RSS reader block Shyftr a few months ago, we pretty much ignored the site. But now that Shyftr has added OPML support, we decided to upload our 465 feeds and take it for a spin.
What sets Shyftr apart from RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines is the service's social aspects. Users can leave comments on items they read, and those comments can be seen by any other Shyftr users who subscribe to the same feed. Shyftr got a bit of bad press last month when the company tried to add comments from the original article page to Shyftr, and eventually decided to remove this feature. The issue might not have been as controversial if comments left on Shyftr were automatically added to the original page, thus alleviating allegations that Shyftr was trying to move the discussion away from the blog itself and into the Shyftr community. But there are some technical challenges associated with doing that, not the least of which is that there are a number of different protocols that blogs use for posting comments.
Like any good social network, Shyftr lets you become "friends" with other users, view their profiles and activity, and invite friends who haven't already signed up for the free service.
One thing to note is that while Shyftr now has an OPML import feature, it's slow. It only takes a few moments to import a few hundred feeds. But it takes much, much longer to "process" those feeds. And if they don't process correctly they won't show up in your feed reader. So if you've got more than a few hundred feeds, you might want to hit the import button right before heading out for your lunch break. Maybe it'll be done by the time you get back. But if you leave the page during the process, you'll have to start all over again.
Microsoft is expanding that successful I'm Initiative we heard about last year to include Hotmail. The company started the I'm Initiative in 2007's March and has so far raised nearly $1.5 million to give to charities.
The "service" makes using Microsoft's services -- specifically Hotmail and Messenger -- beneficial to several causes. Microsoft shares a portion of its advertising revenue collected through its email and instant messaging apps, and although this is "nice" on Microsoft's part, there's a clear business-minded motivation behind it.
Despite that, at least there's some good coming out of the ridiculous amount of instant messaging and emailing we all do. Though we can't praise Microsoft too much: $1.5 million out of the billions Microsoft makes everyday is hardly significant. Then again, if more companies donated a tiny portion of the tremendous amount of money they make everyday, the world could benefit significantly.
Google Reader users have long had the option of sharing items from their feeds. Just click the share button and anyone who knows the URL of your shared item feed can subscribe or view your shared items in a blog-like format. A few months ago, Google even started showing your shared items to your Gmail contacts automatically. But if you wanted to share items or web pages from sites that you didn't subscribe to, you were out of luck.
Now Google has launched several new tools that turn Google Reader into a bit more of a blogging/communication tool. There's a new browser bookmarklet that you can use to share any item on the web, whether the site has an RSS feed or not. Google has alsdo added a new Notes section to Google Reader that lets you enter text notes to share with your contacts. You can either enter a standalone note or click the "share with note" button on any article you're looking at in Google Reader to add your thoughts to a shared item.
You can also choose one of four graphic headers for your shared items page. There's the default Google Reader icon, ice cream, ninjas, or sea. No, we have no idea why these four, but we wouldn't be surprised to see Google add to the list of graphics later.
Remember Lycos? Once upon a time they were a search engine and internet portal, just like Google and Yahoo! And today they're... well, actually they're still around, much to our surprise. And today the company launched its most interesting product in ages: an online video site with a social twist.
When you start watching a movie in Lycos Cinema, you can invite friends to watch along with you, no matter where they are. The video will play back on all of your computers at almost exactly the same instant. So users can chat about the movie in real-time as they watch. The person who starts the movie can pause, rewind, and fast forward the video stream. And the controls are almost instantaneous. If you've got a broadband connection, you can skip ahead to the end of a movie in just a matter of seconds, with no buffering.
The site features both free and paid content. When you rent a movie, you can pay one fee for a one person rental, another for "5 seats," and the top price for "10 seats." The prices seem reasonable, topping out at around $6 for 10 seats. But there's one major problem. The content sucks. We're talking, makes Joost, and even Babelgum look good sucks. The most exciting thing we could find in the free content was a Godzilla movie. The rental store content is about as fresh, with titles like Convoy and Monster from a Prehistoric Planet in the featured content section. You can imagine what the non-featured content looks like.
It's official - SourceForge.net has joined the OpenID bandwagon. SourceForge, the world's largest open source software development website, is a little late to the party but nonetheless, it's nice to see a leader of the open source community adopting OpenID and walking the walk.
OpenID is an open source, decentralized, digital identity user system which allows users to have one identity across the internet and alleviates the hassle of having multiple user names and passwords to log-in to different sites.
OpenID is gaining traction with big companies such as AOL, Sun, Microsoft, and Novell who are accepting and providing OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins. Thanks FF!
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