Monday Google unveiled yet another beta site. Google Reader is now formatted for the iPhone. iPhone users tired of pinching and stretching and tapping text only links in the normal version of Reader or dealing with the plain Classic mobile version of Reader can head over to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to check out the new beta site.
With the iPhone-enabled web-app, Google joins Ask.com in the web-based RSS reader marketplace. Ask.com's Bloglines has had an iPhone version available to users since July 19, 2007. iBloglines was created with less than a 1000 lines of code on a lark by an internal developer who bought an iPhone and wanted better access to the site.
RIM and Microsoft have announced a deal that will officially bring Windows Live Services -- specifically Hotmail and Messenger -- to Blackberry handsets. Has hell frozen over? We wouldn't know. What we do know is the two companies have been rivals in the mobile industry up until now, but they both gain significantly from agreement.
Microsoft is no stranger to the idea of playing in a competitor's sandbox (remember Office for Mac?). By making Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail more accessible on the Crackberry, the company further pushes its communications services towards mass standardization especially in the business world. RIM also benefits from the agreement in the same way Apple benefits from Office for Mac: an OS is only as good as the software on it.
Messenger on Blackberry should retain most of its functions. It looks like users will be able to do the usual: IM, set status, pull up buddy lists, save conversations, use emoticons, and even send and receive files. While it looks like users can join group chats, creating group chats seems to be absent from the feature list.
Can't decide whether to upload a file to Rapidshare, MegaUpload, Badongo, or another service? Each site basically offers the same service. You can upload files and share the link with friends or strangers over emal, IM, web sites, or user forums. But some of the services might be blocked by various ISPs, or the people you're trying to share the files with might have registered accounts with one site, but not the others.
Uploadjockey solves these admittedly small problems by making it easy to upload your files to multiple sites. Just grab any file under 100MB from your desktop, and Uploadjockey will send it to six different file sharing sites and provide you with download links.
Beware, the Uploadjockey interface is choc full of obtrusive ads and pop-ups. But if you're willing to brave the advertising, we can't think of a simpler way to upload you large files to multiple sites.
Fuelfrog is a web service for tracking your gas mileage and cost-per-gallon trends which can provide insight into your empty wallet. By adding simple information each time you fill up your car, Fuelfrog will chart that data to provide a gas history.
Fuelfrog accepts updates via its website, but it also can accept data via Twitter direct message. Simply add your Twitter account to your Fuelfrog profile and Twitter the miles since your last fill up, price per gallon, and number of gallons purchased to @fuelfrog.
Someday you'll be able to log in to Fuelfrog and tell your children, "See, back in my day I only paid $4.00 for a gallon of gas!"
Last year two services launched, giving bloggers easy access to threaded comments, spam control, avatars, and other advanced features. Disqus and Intense Debate also let you create a single profile which you can use to leave comments on any participating blog or web site. No need to register for each individual blog.
And since last year, thousands of web sites have adopted these two commenting systems. Considering there are millions of blogs out there, that's just a drop in the bucket. But every filled bucket starts with a single drop. Or something like that. Anyway, if any of the blogs you follow use Disqus, gReader Comments is a pretty nifty Firefox plugin that will let you see comments in Google Reader without clicking through to the blog.
Once you install gReader Comments, you should notice a new box in your Google Reader post windows that says Comments. Click on this box and a Disqus window will pop up showing you the comments left on the post and offering you the chance to leave your own comments.
The plugin still needs some work. We tested it with Firefox 2.0.0.14 and Firefox 3 beta 5, and in both browsers gReader Comments failed to accurately show how many comments each post had. At first it would show no comments, and then when you click the box on a post that actually has, say 3 comments, all the boxes may say 3 comments whether here are actually comments or not. But with a little more work, this could be an extraordinarily useful plugin for anyone who spends most of their time online in Google Reader.
Twitter may have started off as a micro-blogging tool that asked users "what are you doing" right now? But the service has grown into a complex communications platform. Some people use Twitter to keep in touch with a few friends, while others use it take part in wider discussions taking place throughout the blogosphere. Still others use it as a sort of micro-broadcast medium, sending out updates, but rarely responding to messages posted by others. One thing is clear though: People post a lot of links to interesting articles on Twitter.
TweetWire attempts to take some of the most interesting links and organize them in a newspaper style web page. Tweets are broken up into a handful of categories, including elections, technology, sports, and celebrities. And the links are collected using a combination of the Twitter search engine TweetScan and the Yahoo! Pipes RSS remixing utility.
The results are... mixed. On the one hand, we love the idea of finding some of the best links from Twitter laid out on a simple web page. This way you don't have to sift through page after page of messages from your contacts to find out what people are talking about. But TweetWire isn't going to replace your daily newspaper anytime soon. On the one hand, all the links were at least interesting enough for someone to post them online. On the other hand, a lot of the day's top stories might never make it to TweetWire simply because nobody bothered to tweet about them.
If you're only interested in tech news, you might want to check out TwitLinks, which compiles tweets from a handful of influential technology bloggers.
Quick, what do the twenty images above have in common? If you guessed they're all images pulled from Google Images, you guessed right. But that's not the answer we're looking for. The correct answer is Windows. And now you pretty much know how to play Guess the Google.
The game picks a random word, performs a Google Image search, and then gives you the results. You have 20 seconds to figure out the original search query. The faster you figure it out, the more points you get. The game is simple, but surprisingly addictive.
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.
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!
Free webmail is nothing new. But the field is pretty much dominated by big names like Google, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Zenbe is a startup that hopes there's room for one more. And the company's webmail client makes a pretty strong case that there should be.
Zenbe is a free email service that gives users 4GB of storage for emails and attachments. But that's just the start. The service features an attractive interface that combines some of the best aspects of Gmail and Outlook. For example, you can star messages and add tags like you do with Gmail. But you also ahve access to an integrated calendar and task manager like you get with Outlook.
There are also a few featues you won't find in other services, like the ability to star messages with different colors, or create ZenPages that let you organize messages, appointment, attachments, and other information on a single web page which you can share with other users.
Zenbe is currently in private beta, but you can request an invitation from the company's home page.
Update: We've got invites for the first 100 people who sign up through this link.
Google has udated its language translation page, adding support for Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, and Swedish. That brings the total number of language you can translate to and from to 24.
But the most useful feature of the new Google Translate is the automatic language detection feature. You no longer have to select the language of a web page in order to translate it to English. Just choose "Detect language" and Google will attempt to figure out the source language for you and translate the page or text to the language of your choice.
Of course, the machine translation is still far from perfect. But awkward phrases and baffling idiom translations are a small price to pay for being able to read Norwegian newspapers.
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?
Twitter may seem nice and innocent to a nonchalant user, but they may soon start killing spammy accounts with one stone. According to a recent News.com article, accounts flagged as spam will be removed. Employees of Twitter have been chirping up a storm about the new policy in their Google group forum.
Previously, blacklisted accounts were simply frozen to adding new followers, but as the amount of users on the service has increased, so have the spammers -- therefore, new policies had to be put into place. Users will be notified prior to their accounts being removed and have a chance to plead their case to the big bird in Twitterville.
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.
BooRah searches the web for mentions of restaurants in blogs and websites and analyzes the languages in the post to determine whether the reviewer was giving the restaurant a thumbs down (boo) or a thumbs up (Rah). The amount of Boo's and Rah's a restaurant gets are tallied up on the site and then the restaurant is given an overall score. BooRah users can add their own tags to a particular restaurants page, and can weigh in by giving a particular place a Boo or Rah directly on the site.
Currently the service is limited to just 20 large metro areas, with more expected to be rolled out later on. If you're fortunate enough to live in one of those areas you can search for restaurants by your particular neighborhood, and sign up for an RSS feed for your area so you always know about the latest place in town.
Fuelfrog
Twitter
BooRah searches the web for mentions of restaurants in blogs and websites and analyzes the languages in the post to determine whether the reviewer was giving the restaurant a thumbs down (boo) or a thumbs up (Rah). The amount of Boo's and Rah's a restaurant gets are tallied up on the site and then the restaurant is given an overall score. BooRah users can add their own tags to a particular restaurants page, and can weigh in by giving a particular place a Boo or Rah directly on the site.
