• a small dot in the 'Compose Tweet' button to show the presence of a draft
• a super-handy 'home' button that takes you back to your original list of tweets when you're drilling-down in the options
• the auto-loading of more tweets once you reach the bottom of the list
• integration with services like Favrd.

Continue reading Birdfeed: A slick Twitter client for your iPhone

Birdfeed: A slick Twitter client for your iPhone originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

DropRecord: send one file to multiple hosting providers originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Netflix Prize update: do we have a winner? originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my queue of things to listen seems to be growing constantly; I can never catch up. What's frustrating about this is that most people talk too slowly on podcasts. To be fair, they are speaking at a reasonable conversational pace, but when you are simply listening to a conversation rather than taking part in it, you can take it all in at a much faster pace.

While iPods have been able to speed up audio books for some time, the latest 3.0 iPhone / iPod Touch release has added the ability to speed up (and slow down) podcasts as well as audiobooks. That's the good news. The bad news is that whatever the algorithm is that is being used to speed up the audio ends up sounding quite rough.

For podcast listeners that are not using an iPhone or iPod Touch, there are not many options for speeding up podcasts, short of doing it yourself manually with a program like Audacity.

Luckily, there's a new site that is looking to take care of this problem for us. PodShifter is a site that will allow you to enter the RSS feed for a given podcast, and it will spit out a new feed URL that will deliver podcasts that are sped up to exactly the speed you prefer. You can choose from slowing down your feed to 0.6 times its original speed, all the way up to 3.0 times the original speed, in increments of 0.2. Based on the demo MP3s on PodShifter's homepage, the sped-up audio is quite smooth.

Unfortunately, in my testing PodShifter has generated new podcast RSS URLs, but when I put them into iTunes, the audio files that I get are exactly the same speed as the originals. I was surprised that they downloaded at all to begin with, so I'm hopeful that there is processing going on in the background and a new version of the podcast will arrive that actually is sped up.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is quite likely that some podcast publishers will not be thrilled about a republishing service such as this. Larger podcasts that rely on download statistics for determining advertising rates could potentially lose track of the subscribers that sit behind a republishing service like PodShifter. And unfortunately PodShifter's site is not particularly forthcoming with information, so it's hard to determine whether they offer publishers some manner of tracking statistics properly.

In any event, the service that PodShifter provides is a very useful one, and one I hope will succeed. Now excuse me while I go refresh my podcasts to see if any of my PodShifter subscriptions have delivered on its promise.

[via Lifehacker]

PodShifter speeds up spoken-word podcasts originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Track your spending online with TextHog originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If your job has you tasked with monitoring your company's online presence, you're probably dealing with Twitter in some way. Running occasional manual searches for your company's name is one way to go, but a better way would be to sign up with a service like TweetBeep.

TweetBeep is a free service that will email you as frequently as once per hour with any Twitter mentions of the search terms of your choice. The service is ad-supported, but if you find that you need it, TweetBeep also offers a premium option for $20US/month that allows you to receive updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, up to 200 different alert searches, and no advertising.

While TweetBeep allows you to set a number of criteria for your alerts, one of the most interesting is the ability to set an "Attitude" criteria. You can choose from three:

• Positive attitude
• Negative attitude
• Asking a question

This appears to be a fantastic way to stay on top of how people are perceiving your company or brand, and gives you the ability to very quickly react to your customers or users. It can also be useful for heavy Twitter users to ensure they don't miss any mentions. I should note that as of the time of this writing I had some difficulty with the email confirmation process - it took multiple requests and over an hour before my email confirmation arrived in my inbox.

[via Stay N' Alive]

TweetBeep - track Twitter mentions via email originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google asks users to make the web faster by using Page Speed originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Is Twitter a popularity contest? If you think so, then you might be interested in Twitter-Train, but for the sane people reading this you'll probably want to move on.

Twitter-Train is essentially a pyramid scheme whereby if you follow a prescribed list of Twitter accounts, you will be added to that same list for the next 40 Twitter-Train users. Basically, by willfully polluting your Twitter stream with updates from Twitter accounts that you care nothing about, you get the benefit of being followed by 40 people that care nothing about you. That's a win-win if I ever saw one.

I mean seriously, what is the point of this? I can think of only one, and that would be if you somehow got paid to inflate an account's Twitter followers by any means possible. But in terms of real value, there is none to be had here. You now have to filter through tweets that mean nothing to you, and the "followers" that you acquire are essentially doing the same thing.

I suspect this is one of the reasons that Twitter has not yet added host-side filtering to the service (the other being that Twitter seems busy just keeping the service up). Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop offer client-side filtering, which allows you to "follow" huge amounts of people while actually ignoring them. While I suppose to each their own, it's still frustrating to see how users willfully abuse a system just to inflate their follower numbers to appear more important. Twitter seems to agree, given that they are disabling the auto-follow feature that had been enabled for certain select Twitter users.

I think Twitter should hide follower counts so that there is very little ego-boost from having a huge number of followers. This isn't going to stop people that want to use Twitter as a spamming service, but it will kill the ego game that is plaguing most social networks.

Twitter-Train - pyramid scheme for low-value Twitter followers originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

CrowdEye: the real-time search space is getting crowded originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Extend your Twitter posts with uri.is originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There are plenty of good reasons to use web-based mapping tools besides simply finding directions from point a to point b. For example, let's say you're taking a holiday to Cork and you want to know where the good swimming spots are.

Fortunately for you, Microsoft and the European Environment Agency have just the thing for you. The Eye on Earth Water Watch does exactly that for countless spots across the continent.

Find a suitable spot, click the water quality icon, and the Bing-powered map displays an overlay containing a Virtual Earth image as well as live webcams and user submitted photos (if available, of course).

There's more to it than finding a place to have a relaxing dip, of course. As Microsoft's Rob Bernard puts it, "Eye on Earth is a great example of how technology has the power to help governments, business and individuals understand what is happening to our environment. Eye on Earth provides people with information which has historically been difficult to find."

[via Softpedia]

In Europe? Bing-powered Water Watch shows you where it's safe to swim originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

City of Bozeman requires social logins and passwords in exchange for job originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Aviary launches Falcon, web-based image markup tool originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Spezify combines several media types into an impressive visual search tool originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A trio of practical anonymous torrenting options have arrived originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

While some modern browsers include built-in spell checkers, and some operating systems include built-in spelling and grammar checkers, there are people out there using operating systems and browsers that do not have these features.

If you're looking for some help with your writing and don't have access to Microsoft Word or a similarly-powered word processor, there is a solution available on the web called After the Deadline. The site (at the memorable URL polishmywriting.com) offers spelling and grammar help, and even writing style suggestions.

Continue reading After the Deadline polishes your writing online

After the Deadline polishes your writing online originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

With Unite, Opera 10 becomes both a browser and a content server originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

John Watson, the man behind the many fun photo-related web applications at BigHugeLabs was feeling a little down last week, and in response he produced yet another web app. But this one is a little different; while his other web apps often provide inspiration as a by-product of other actions, Watson's latest site, dubbed Ideas, is intended as a source of inspiration as a primary focus.

When you visit Ideas, you are presented with a large search box, beside which sits a button that simply states, "inspire me!" Type in a word, and the site will present you with a series of sets of information that is somehow related to the word entered. If you're feeling bereft of ideas for even a word to enter, a few examples are provided such as love, beauty, sorrow, yes, red, winter, home, africa, kiss.

Depending on the word you enter, Ideas may or may not be able to find examples of the following types:

• Famous quote
• Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr
• Color swatches from COLOURlovers.com
• Songs from Last.fm
• Related words from BigHugeLabs.com
• Videos from YouTube.com
• Listings from Etsy.com
• Bookmarks from Delicious.com
• Article from Wikipedia.com

What a great way for creative people that are looking for a little boost in the inspiration department to start with a specific word and serendipitously follow a trail to something that may well inspire them.

Find inspiration with Ideas originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Greasemonkey script decodes an impressive list of TinyURLs originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Hot on the heels of Facebook's big username land-grab comes news that Facebook may be using the email addresses you import even after you choose not to add them as friends.

The issue occurs if and when you let Facebook search your email contacts for people to invite to become your Facebook friend. As part of this process Facebook will list every contact you have that is already on Facebook, and offer you the chance to "friend" them all at once. You can choose to uncheck the ones that you don't want to friend, essentially skipping them, or choose to skip all of them.

While Facebook makes it clear that they will not store the password for your email account, what they don't make so clear is that they will store the addresses of everyone it found in your email account and keep them associated with you, even the ones that you chose to skip.

So how does Facebook use this information? They present you as a possible contact to the people that you skipped - even if that person has never shown Facebook a connection of any kind to you. Nice, eh? Effectively, Facebook is ignoring your preference to not contact these people by going behind your back to ask them if they want to friend you.

Continue reading Facebook goes behind your back to present your profile to people you've chosen not to friend

Facebook goes behind your back to present your profile to people you've chosen not to friend originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.