Social web browsing plugin Yoono has emerged from private beta. The new version still wears a beta label, but it's available to the public. Yoono is basically a utility that hangs out in the Firefox sidebar and gives you quick access to instant messenging services, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Piczo.
The public beta adds support for Firefox. It also packs a few new features:
Filter your friends activity by network, group, or names
Add FriendFeed and Flickr comments
Send Twitter direct messages and replies
Upload pictures to Facebook or poke friends
Browse Digg video
Yoono will also be adding Google Talk and MySpace soon. There does appear to be a bug that prevents Yoono from working properly on Firefox 3 in some cases. The problem seems to show up if you've installed some other browser plugins. Yoono is expected to release an updated version addressing this problem within the next few days.
Digg has legions of followers. They're quite fanatical. The similar service Reddit doesn't have that type of following.
But how many of the Digg fantatics know how Digg works anyways? There's some type of "algorithm" that controls what hits the homepage. Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have hinted to that it involves who is digging what, the rate at which the stories are dugg, and we think that it involves something with the space time continium. That and what side of the bed MC Hammer wakes up on.
But nobody really knows but Digg.
Today, the #1 competitor to Digg, Condé Nast's Reddit, says "Screw you guys, we're going transparent". That's not an actual quote, but the company's actions say that in a nutshell.
Condé Nast is opening up Reddit's codebase to developers, your moms and dads, your pet fish, and whoever else has a computing device hooked up to the interwebs.
Flock, the "Social Web Browser" built on the same Mozilla engine as Firefox, has launched the latest stable version, 1.2. The beta has been available for a while now.
In this version, Digg, Pownce, and AOL Mail integration. Digg and Pownce makes sense, but the AOL mail one didn't really excite us all that much.
It seems like Flock is stockpiling partners and features though and are putting together a very nice user experience "out of the box" that other browsers can't offer.
Firefox is perfect for the ubergeek that wants to install his or her own extensions, but for someone like our mothers or aunts who just want to try out this new fangled web thing, Flock is the answer.
Plus, the browser's blog editor is still the killerest app out there for any browser.
The knock on Flock has been stability which we haven't seen issues with on Windows or Mac, but the loadtime for first startup is a known issue that they're working on.
JS-Kit provides some of the simplest tools around for adding threaded comments, post reviews, and polls to your web site. All you have to do is install two or three lines of code to your blog or web site template and JS-Kit will do the heavy lifting. On the downside, since the code basically calls up a JavaScript application from JS-Kit's servers, some portions of your site might load a little slowly, and if JS-Kit ever goes down, there goes your comment system.
Now JS-Kit has added a new Score tool that lets visitors to your site give content a thumbs up or down. You can also install a Navigator widget which you can then place in a prominent position on your site to let visitors find the most popular stories quickly.
What's wrong with Ubuntu? No, that's not a rhetorical question. The developers behind the popular open-source Linux distribution are soliciting feedback using a Digg-like forum called Ubuntu Brainstorm. Anyone can submit an idea, and other users can vote a story up or down. The top suggestions are then showed on the front page of the site, bringing them more attention.
The concept is based on Dell's IdeaStorm web site, which the computer maker uses to solicit ideas. Right now, some of the top suggestions for Ubuntu are:
A better interface for managing network connections
Use less power
Combine the Preferences and Administration menus and condense some of the submenus
Let users know which application is using a volume that cannot be unmounted because it's in use
A prettier bootloader
Quicker boot speed
And the list goes on. What would you fix in Ubuntu if you had the chance?
If you like the social bookmarking site Digg, but hate actually having to visit the web site to submit and vote on stories, you might want to check out Digg Firefox Extension. Like the Smart Digg Button, which we've previously covered, Digg Firefox Extension will let you see at a glance whether a page you're visiting has been submitted to diggs and how many votes it has received. If the page hasn't been submitted, you can click the button to submit it yourself.
But that's where the similarities end. While Smart Digg Button hangs out in your status bar, Digg Firefox Extension adds a toolbar to Firefox, which makes sense as it has a ton of submenus. For example, you can see the last 10 people who dugg the page you're visiting, and even read recent comments without clicking through to Digg's web site.
You can also forget about the page you're on altogether, and use the Firefox extension to see a list of recently popular, recently submitted, and hot stories. Or you can use the extension sort of like the StumbleUpon toolbar by clicking on "Random Story" to be taken to a random site submitted to Digg.
As we reported earlier, Yahoo! Buzz is now in public beta. Buzz is similar to Digg in that it lets users promote/demote ("Buzz") content to the top of the metaphoric hive. However, currently only publishers involved in the beta can have content submitted to the site, which makes Buzz (much) more restricted than Digg.
Yahoo says that they have "members of their team" choose promoted stories to appear on the Yahoo homepage, but they do not choose what appears on the Buzz site. Like Digg, Buzz uses an algorithm to determine a story's "Buzz Score" based on number of votes, number of times the story is shared, and the number of search results for the story's subject matter.
If you want to start Buzz-ing, you'll need a Yahoo account. Then, like Digg, click the voting button next to the story to promote a story. Oddly you can also submit stories directly to other social news sites (including Digg). You won't yet be able to view your voting history, and Buzz lacks "community features" like seeing what your friends have Buzz-ed. Oh, and you can't comment on stories on the Buzz site.
So if you want a featureless Digg clone with stories coming only from a specific set of sources, then try Buzz now! But hey, it's still in beta.
While Yahoo! fields merger/hostile takeover offers, the company's development team continues to push out new services. Today Yahoo! launched a retooled version of its video site. And Valleywag is reporting that the company will be launching a brand spanking new service on February 26th: A news and entertainment page featuring popular stories from around the web.
Yahoo! Buzz as it will reportedly be known will be something of a cross between Digg and Google Trends. Top stories will be chosen through a combination of user votes and popular search results.
But Digg has one thing that Yahoo! Buzz won't. At least not immediately. And that's a list of links from an unlimited number of web pages. Yahoo! Buzz will only feature links to about 100 web publishers at first. Eventually the company will reportedly open Buzz up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, which means that anyone who sells Yahoo! ads on their site could be featured on Yahoo! Buzz.
While that might sound like a good reason for people to sign up for the publisher network, as incentive to get more social networking traffic, it also means that Yahoo! Buzz is by definition going to be more limited than Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social news and bookmarking sites. But this is all rumor and speculation at this point. It's possible Yahoo! Buzz won't be as limited as Valleywag suggests. Or maybe it's not even real.
If you go to buzz.yahoo.com today you'll find a page with top search results trends. But if Valleywag is correct, that site will be the future home of Yahoo! Buzz.
Want to set up a Digg-like site that lets users vote on the cutest photos of puppies, the best photos of overdressed people in fast food restaurants, or the most interesting news affecting your small town community? Pligg lets anyone with a little technical know-how set up their own personal Digg.
But if you have a big idea and no idea how to design a site, Pligg wants to help. The company plans to launch a new service called Fraxi soon. Fraxi will let users set up a hosted social bookmarking/voting site with the URL "yourname.fraxi.com." Since there's no need to upload any code to your own server, the setup process should be simple enough for novices. All you'll have to do is choose from a list of options on Fraxi's website.
There's not much more in the way of details. But so far it sounds like Fraxi will be for Digg-clones what Blogger is for blogs, or what Ning is for social networks: Super easy to use, and not necessarily as powerful or pretty as alternative services that require a bit more elbow grease.
Posted Dec 19th 2007 10:00AM by Todd Ritter Filed under: Kids
On Monday Slashdot reported that a Pennsylvania high school student had received two hours of detention for using the powerful Firefox web browser to do his classwork while in school. The original blog posting (including a scan of the detention letter) was dugg over 8000 times and outcry ensued. Turns out, the scanned letter was altered (Photoshop anyone?) and a response from the school principal implies that the student received detention for engaging in "non-academic activities."
Just because Firefox is amazing does not mean students should be able to violate a school district's acceptable use policy for the computer network. The outcry was spurred by thoughts like "Firefox is better than IE, how could the school district be so foolish!" or "open-source software is better than closed source, so that teacher is dumb!" In reality, the matter is much more simple. Whether the student was using Firefox or a college prep software package, if he is not permitted to use certain software based on district policy, then he should be disciplined.
When it comes to finding out what tech related news items peers find the most important, Digg is probably king. And while Digg also features political news, arts stories, and other subjects, there are some topics that you just aren't likely to find.
Enter Blingd. This site serves all the freshest hip hop news items, in a Digg social story submission style. It's easy to see that every aspect of this lifestyle gets represented here from dance, fashion, graffiti, books, music, sports and movies. It might not be the prettiest site, but it is starting to bring a community together to a place where top news can be shared in an easy to reach location.
If hip hop is your game, and you want to stay on top of who released the top album of the week, who drives the best pimped out ride, and who the latest one signed to Bad Boy is, this might be your place. One thing we would like to see, a little more Bling in the design. Blingd does use the open source Pligg for its CMS.
Surprising no one, Digg has added a new images section. Many of the top stories on Digg over the past year or so have been funny or interesting pictures, but since the site lacked thumbnails, the only way to distinguish the pictures from text-based articles was by placing (PIC) or some other indicator in the headline.
Now, honestly, we seriously considered skipping this announcement. We've reported several times that Digg was planning on launching a new images section, and now that it's here, well, it's here. So what? But Digg is still probably the biggest name in social news, and when they sneeze, the rest of the industry tends to notice.
Digg has also rolled out several new categories, including a new Lifestyle section with subcategories like Arts & Culture, Autos, Travel, and Food & Drink. In other words, Digg is trying to lose its image as a site for ubernerds only. But Digg faces some stiff competition for that audience from established companies like Reddit, Propeller and StumbleUpon.
If you're starting your own blog, there's no question that WordPress is one of the most customizable, powerful blogging platforms around. But Google's blogger is attractive because it doesn't require a hosting solution, and it's ridiculously easy to use.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of plugins for WordPress that just don't work with Blogger. That's starting to change, and it's not necessarily because Google is rolling out support for new features. No, it's because developers are moving away from hosted scripts and offering up javascript based applications.
ShareThis is a popular WordPress plugin that puts a little "share this" icon near every post on your blog. Click it and you get the option to email the post to your friends or submit it to several popular social bookmarking sites..
Up until recently, you could only install ShareThis on WordPress blogs. But now the company has released ShareThis 2.0, which is a javascript version that works with Blogger as well. Well, almost works. Right now there's an error that prevents ShareThis from showing up on more than one post per page. But the team is working to fix that problem.
ShareThis 2.0 loads slower than ShareThis 1.0, but because of the redesign, you can track how people are using your ShareThis icons. If you'd rather install the old version of the plugin, it's still available.
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.
Leopard, Gmail, IMAP, Facebook, and Digg. If you know what at least four out of five of these things are, you can probably skip the rest of this article. If not, it's time to catch up on some of what you've missed this week. That's right, it's time for another fabulous edition of Download Squad's Week in Review.
Gmail Gets IMAP Some people have been waiting for years for one thing: IMAP support in Gmail. Now it's finally here. That means full synchronization between Gmail and third party e-mail clients, including Outlook, Thunderbird, and even an iPhone. Delete a message in Outlook and it'll disappear from your Gmail web interface as well. Not everyone has access to this feature yet, so keep checking the settings tab in your Gmail account to see if it's been enabled.
Digg has legions of followers. They're quite fanatical. The similar service Reddit doesn't have that type of following.
Flock, the "Social Web Browser" built on the same Mozilla engine as Firefox, has launched the latest stable version, 1.2. The beta has been available for a while now.
As we reported earlier, Yahoo! Buzz is now in public beta. Buzz is similar to Digg in that it lets users promote/demote ("Buzz") content to the top of the metaphoric hive. However, currently only publishers involved in the beta can have content submitted to the site, which makes Buzz (much) more restricted than Digg.
Want to set up a Digg-like site that lets users vote on the cutest photos of puppies, the best photos of overdressed people in fast food restaurants, or the most interesting news affecting your small town community? Pligg lets anyone with a little technical know-how set up their own personal Digg. 
On Monday Slashdot reported that a Pennsylvania high school student had received two hours of detention for using the powerful Firefox web browser to do his classwork while in school. The original blog posting (including a scan of the detention letter) was dugg over 8000 times and outcry ensued. Turns out, the scanned letter was altered (Photoshop anyone?) and a response from the school principal implies that the student received detention for engaging in "non-academic activities." 
If you're starting your own blog, there's no question that WordPress is one of the most customizable, powerful blogging platforms around. But Google's blogger is attractive because it doesn't require a hosting solution, and it's ridiculously easy to use.
Leopard, Gmail, IMAP, Facebook, and Digg. If you know what at least four out of five of these things are, you can probably skip the rest of this article. If not, it's time to catch up on some of what you've missed this week. That's right, it's time for another fabulous edition of Download Squad's Week in Review.
