Hot on the heels of the del.icio.us beta plugin for Firefox 3 beta, Yahoo! has released a beta plugin for Internet Explorer. While Firefox is pretty popular these days, we're pretty sure there are still more people using the IE6 or IE7 browser that came with their computer than a beta version of the open source Firefox browser. Which is to say, seriously, Yahoo! is just now getting around to this?
The Internet Explorer plugin packs most of the features of the Firefox version. That means you can search and browse bookmarks from your sidebar, view recent activity, or tag pages with a button in your browser toolbar. The plugin works with IE6, IE7, and IE8 and runs on Windows XP and Vista.
This plugin is being released as a pubic beta, which means some features may change before the final release.
Still trying to figure out if you want to raise your bid for Yahoo! or if you'd rather just buy Jerry Yang some flowers, apologize, and then see if Google is busy Saturday night? Well then, you've obviously had so much on your plate that you might have missed a few other stories this week. So without further ado, we bring you some of our favorite stories from the past 7 days:
Shady business practices work: Apple dramatically increases Safari users Apple got a lot of bad press a few weeks back for bundling the Safari web browser with its software update utility for Windows. Many PC users who thought they were just updating Quicktime or iTunes found themselves with a new web browser they never asked for. But you know what? It looks like it may have worked, because Apple tripled the number of Safari users on Windows.
Flipping the Linux Switch: Xfce, the hidden gem of desktop environments Sure, GNOME and KDE get all the attention. But that's because they hog the limelight, while unassuming little Xfce toils away in the background doing what needs to be done. Xfce is a simple desktop environment for Linux that includes everything you need, and nothing you don't.
Digsby adds support for Facebook Chat Facebook recently launched a chat service that lets you communicate with other Facebook users in real-time -- but only when you're visiting the social network's web site. Now you can use desktop chat client Digsby to chat with your Facebook contacts whether you're on the web site or not. You can also use it to keep up with your AOL, MSN, Yahoo! AND Google Talk contacts.
Gramlee - Website for people who can't write good If the automated spelling and grammar checking features in your word processor aren't enough to make your text readable, Gramlee can help. The web service is staffed by real people who will whip your prose into shape. Just remember, submitting your crappy 10th grade English paper and paying someone to rewrite it for you is wrong. Easy, but wrong.
Michael Dalesandro, CEO of Where I've Been - DLS Interview "Where I've Been" is both a popular Facebook application and a popular web site that lets users share their travel experiences, find travel tips, and plan future trips. We caught up with CEO Michael Dalesandro to ask him a bit about the site's success.
TypeRacer: Competitive typing test - Time Waster TypeRacer could be the best online typing test ever. The web game turns the typing test into a game, and pits you against a handful of other players. Sure, it's not particularly accurate. The tests are too short to properly gauge how many words you can crank out in a minute. But you'll be amazed how quickly you can type when you see another player hot on your tail.
Wrongcards: e-cards for the insensitive If you're the sort of person who always has a hard time finding Hallmark cards that adequately express your feelings, you might want to check out Wrongcards. The site specializes in e-cards that are just... wrong. But funny. But oh so wrong.
Del.icio.us releases Firefox 3 beta plugin Firefox 3 beta has been making the rounds long enough now that we know many Download Squad readers have started to use it as their primary browser. But there are a ton of useful plugins for Firefox 2 that don't yet work with Firefox 3 beta. And up until this week, the popular del.icio.us plugin was one of them. But you can finally cross that one off the list of incompatible plugins, because it's back, and it's better than ever.
While the Firefox 3 web browser is still in beta, it offers a ton of features that you won't find in Firefox 2. There's full page zoom, full history search, and vastly improved speed and performance with many web services. But there's a downside: many add-ons designed for earlier versions of Firefox will not work with Firefox 3 beta. This week that list got a tiny bit shorter as social bookmarking service del.icio.us released a beta version of a Firefox 3 plugin.
For the most part, the plugin works just like the Firefox 2 plugin, allowing users to quickly tag pages or open a sortable list of bookmarks and tabs in their Firefox sidebar. But there are a few new features includng a new layout for saving bookmarks, a status bar showing network activity, and the ability to jump to tags by pressing F2.
While del.icio.us Spy might sound like the name of an upcoming Austin Powers movie, it's actually a new way to find web pages using social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Like the popular Digg Spy visualization tool, Ajaxonomy's del.icio.us Spy presents new links as they're submitted. Each link includes a thumbnail and buttons that make it easy to add a page to your own del.icio.us account, or to Digg or Reddit.
You can also filter results by keyword so that you're more likely to find links you're interested in. Because let's face it, people submit all sorts of crap to del.icio.us, which makes del.icio.us Spy a bit more of a crap shoot than Digg Spy.
But somebody should totally write to Mike Myers about using the name on his next movie as well.
If you're anything like us, you probably run across dozens of web pages, news articles, and blog posts every day that look interesting, but which you don't have time to read right away. There are hundreds of ways to bookmark pages for reviewing later. But we find that whether we're using browser bookmarking tools, online services like del.icio.us, or a combination like the Read it Later bookmarklet, we wind up getting buried in a pile of unread links after just a few days.
The problem is that most bookmarking methods either make it hard to organize your pages or include a rather cumbersome tagging scheme. Instapaper avoids these problems by offering simple one-click bookmarking. There's no real organization to speak of other than read and unread items. But if your goal is to save a handful of pages to read later today or over the weekend and don't need to save them for all eternity, Intapaper can be incredibly useful.
All you need to do is register for a free account (no password necessary, just enter a name or email address) and drag a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. When you visit a site you want to read later, just click the bookmarklet and it will be added to your Instapaper page. When you want to see the list, just visit Instapaper.com. Every time you click on a link it will be marked as read. Or you can delete links you no longer need. That's it.
Instapaper probably won't win any awards for the largest number of features packed into a web site. But it does one thing and does it well.
Mahalo, the human powered search engine, has announced a new add-on for Firefox that submits sites to many popular web services at once. How many times have you found a link that you want share with your friends and realize you have to submit it to more than one service such as del.icio.us, twitter, and so on?
Mahalo's new add-on, called Mahalo Follow for Firefox solves this problem by submitting your link to services including Twitter, Jaiku, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, and Tumblr. This seems to be an extremely useful tool.
To get started, head on over to Mahalo's site and install the Firefox add-in, put in your credentials for your various services, and share away.
While we're still waiting for Digg to roll out a dedicated image section, many of the top 'stories" submitted to social news sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us are funny, interesting, or beautiful images. Picurls collects the all and makes it easy to find some of the most viewed pictures of the day from popular websites.
Picurls pulls images from all of the sites we mentioned, plus Flickr, Simpy, Furl, Boing Boing, and Wired.
You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for images from each website, or all websites. There are discussion links next to each image, but Picurls doesn't seem to have a very active community. There's not a single comment next to any image on the front page today.
While Picurls does provide a handy service fro finding popular images, it's a bit troubling that the site links only to the original image source, and not to the Digg, Reddit, or Del.icio.us submission page. If this site picks up steam, we suspect the big wigs at those social news/bookmarking sites might have a few complaints.
Digg has a problem. What was once a haven of obscure, insightful, and breaking news has become a cesspool of dated headlines, generic brand commentary, and fan-boy-blog spam. What happened? Why do the vast majority of front page links come from "popular" websites who feature a prominent "digg it" button on every article? Is there some conspiracy afloat? Is digg rewarding websites that send them a lot of traffic?
Can we demand a recount?
Sadly no. Digg's problem isn't one of cronyism or corruption, it is far worse. Digg has always been a poorly planned community. There, we said it.
To make matters worse, digg's phenomenal growth illustrates its own failure. If it were a nation, we would call it a failing state with a bumming population. A population easily and unwittingly manipulated by the craftiness of other large and powerful websites.
Need proof?
Of the 15 front page articles this morning:
7 were from popular blogs that featured the familiar "digg it" badge
5 were from popular sites that featured a prominent submit to digg button
2 were from popular mainstream news sites
1 was from a small town newspaper.
The problem really starts on the upcoming page. Here digg's increasing popularity attracts far more submissions than the diggers on the upcoming page can handle. A random check reveals 34 new links in the last two minutes. In another two minutes those links will be buried on the 4th or 5th page having never received a digg. A visit to page 40 in the upcoming queue reveals only one link that has garnered more than 3 diggs, and that link is from a popular website with the (you guessed it) digg it button at the top of the page.
How could this happen? Have diggers simply stopped caring about their own community?
Launched over the weekend as part of a one-day-startup party, Tagmindr links up with your del.icio.us account and lets you easily and automatically send yourself bookmarks in the future. Simply signup and then tag your del.icio.us bookmarks with the tagmindr tag and a date in the format of "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". Tagmindr will then put your bookmark in an RSS feed on the date you indicated. Eventually they may support SMS, Email and IM. But it probably wouldn't be wise to hold your breath.
The product took about 6 and a half hours to create (plus 4 hours of cleanup) last Saturday as part of a Seattle Saturday House meeting. Leo Dirac has some more detail on the process if you are interested. Hopefully we'll see more slick and useful tools created in this manner.
Ever wonder what you're missing if you read Digg every morning but skip the New York Times? Or vice versa? The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a study comparing stories on user-driven news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us with mainstream news. Here's what they found:
Most of the top stories on Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us were not top stories in the mainstream media.
There's little follow-up on user-driven sites. A story pops up once, and then disappears.
User news sites draw from different sources than mainstream media, with many stories linking to blogs and popular websites.
Different user news sites are strong in different areas. Reddit is the most likely to include political stories, Digg is good for tech news, while Del.icio.us is kind of all over the place.
Mainstream news sites were more likely to cover international news than the user-driven sites.
The study covered one week in June, but the results seem pretty realistic to us. The one thing we'd point out though is that user-driven "news" sites are often devoid of actual independent reporting. You can learn a lot by reading the comments on Digg or Slashdot. But most of the articles are actually links to original reporting done by mainstream media or articles written and published on other blogs or news sites.
Social news sites aren't replacing traditional media. They're replacing the editor's judgment of what news should go on the paper's front page. While a wider range of topics might make the front page of Reddit than The New York Times, if you want consistent quality and editorially sound articles written by people who make a living reporting the facts, you might not want to rely on Digg readers to deliver all your news.
The team behind del.icio.us has been feverishly redeveloping and scaling the application since yahoo purchased it over a year ago. del.icio.us has been building a new platform that speeds up the bookmarking process and enables it to grow without issues, adding more functionality and proper user interface design. Well, the time has come to let a select few inside the doors of the delicious preview to see what's hiding.
Notice there are no ".'s" in the name. Could they be taking the "web2.0" fad out and replacing it with a more mature application?
Let's begin with what's new. First off, the del.icio.us design has been revamped and looks totally refreshing. They have worked with users and gone over tons of feedback from the current site in order to build this new rendition. Complete with new links, navigation areas, sidebars and brand spanking new user interface design, any bookmarker will be happy.
Here's a rundown of the new goodies you can expect:
Deep in the redesign of their online bookmarking service, del.icio.us has found time to build a Facebook application. The new application allows Facebook users to log into their del.icio.us accounts from the social network and display their bookmarks.
With the bookmark integration users can choose to either show del.icio.us activity in their Facebook news feed, and/or show a del.icio.us summary of recent bookmarks in their user profile with recent bookmarks or tag clouds. There is however an annoying delays of up to 30 minutes for all changes and for content to appear. Only bookmarks that have been checked as shared will appear.
Apparently there are a few bugs reported by users, but these will surely be worked out by del.icio.us staff promptly.
If you're reading Download Squad, odds are you know all about Digg, Reddit, Netscape, Furl, and del.icio.us. But if you've ever had trouble explaining to your friends, relatives, and coworkers why it makes more sense to share news/store bookmarks online, this video is for you.
The folks at Common Craft have put together a series of videos explaining complex Web 2.0 using Web -1.0 tools (like paper). One of our favorites Common Craft's RSS in Plain English video.
One of the problems with mobile web browsers is that they generally don't support the plugins and add-ons that work with their desktop counterparts. So while you can use sites like del.icio.us to store and share your bookmarks, it can be kind of a hassle to submit bookmarks using a program like Pocket Internet Explorer.
Fortunately, one kind soul has taken pity on Windows Mobile users and developed a del.icio.us plugin for Pocket Internet Explorer.
The plugin is written in C++ and requires Windows Mobile 5.0 or newer, and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0.
Lifehacker points us to a fantastic Greasemonkey script called Pagerization that will automatically extend pages downwards by appending the contents of the next page to the bottom. This is useful on sites like Google (Search, Image, News, Group, Video), Yahoo, Wikipedia, Hatena, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, digg and Userscripts.org.
We've been using the precursor, GoogleAutoPager, for a while now and loving it. It's fantastic to see this concept extended to be useful on so many other sites.
Still trying to figure out if you want to raise your bid for Yahoo! or if you'd rather just buy Jerry Yang some flowers, apologize, and then see if Google is busy Saturday night? Well then, you've obviously had so much on your plate that you might have missed a few other stories this week. So without further ado, we bring you some of our favorite stories from the past 7 days:
