Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

favorites posts

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0, Microblogging

Explore Twitter Favourites with Favstar

I'm constantly fascinated by Twitter favourites - they're one of the least-used aspects of the service, and serve as a great way to save humourous (or ever useful) updates from other users for your perusal. But let's be honest, it's always nice to know who's finding your own updates interesting or amusing. That's where the likes of Favrd and Twitfave come in - two great services that let you know who's been adding your updates to their favourites.

However, I've always had this craving for yet more information about favourites, with more visualisation of who's favourite-ing which updates: and that's where Favstar comes in. Once you've signed into Twitter via OAuth and authorised Favstar to access your account, you'll be able to continue browsing tweets that others have favourited as well as see information on exactly who has marked your updates as a favourite.

When it comes to showing you who's marking your updates as a favourite, there's a number of options: from all-time 'greatest hits' of your most 'popular tweets' (here's mine - Ed: contains rude words) to a list of the number of favourites you've received from other users (again, here's mine) Favstar has all the bases covered - and since its launch become one of my most-visited Twitter mashups.

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Twitterbelle: use favorites to find new people to follow

Favorites are a dramatically underused feature on Twitter, but if you know where to look, you can use them to find some people you might be interested in following. Twitterbelle is a new site that makes that process easier. Just put in the username of someone you think is interesting and has good taste in friends, and you'll see a list of the people he or she has awarded favorites to.

This is a bit more effective than just going down someone's following list, which will be chronological, not ranked, and sometimes extremely long. Maybe someone's following thousands of people, but favorites point out who they're really paying attention to. You can obviously also use Twitterbelle to check out your own favorites and see who's getting the most gold stars from you.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Folder View adds recent and favorite folders to Windows Explorer

Folder ViewFolder View is a free Windows utility that gives you quick access to the folders you use most often in Windows Explorer. You can add shortcuts for every folder in My Documents, or choose custom folders to add to the toolbar. We'd advise against selecting an entire drive, since you'll wind up with a toolbar several rows deep filled with folders. It sort of defeats the purpose of having shortcuts when it takes you five minutes to find the one you're looking for.

As Martin at gHacks points out, one of the most useful features of Folder View is the recent folders toolbar. If you've accidentally closed a folder that you want to recover, this feature can be a life saver. It's not quite as magical as the recover closed tab feature in Firefox, but it's actually more useful since you can also use the Recent folders button to access your most frequently used folders in a snap.

Folder View also shows up in your Windows download and upload dialog boxes, making it easy to keep your files organized if you like to store your downloaded files in several different directories.

Filed under: Fun, Web services, Social Software

Favrd - Twitter with none of the "webcock"

Believe us when we say that we know you're sick of hearing about Twitter, but there's a good reason it's one of Download Squad's favorite toys. We often find out about new software on Twitter before it gets blogged anywhere else, and the readers reap all the benefits. And did we mention that some people's Twitter streams are flat-out hilarious? Favrd, a new service from Dean Allen, will help you find some of the best. It keeps track of which posts people are marking as favorites, so you only have to read the good stuff.

Dean also uses a mysterious algorithm to filter out "webcock," a term he coined to describe "online-marketing, web-strategy, killer-startup cheerleaders/water-carriers." This is sure to offend some people, but it keeps the focus of Favrd on people who use Twitter to entertain. To put it another way, a way that probably wouldn't make it past Dean's algorithm, Favrd is crowdsourcing comedy, and everybody wins.

Filed under: Internet, Browser Tips

Add download folders to Firefox with FavLoc

FavLoc

FavLoc is one of those FireFox extensions that should really have been built into the web browser. What it lets you do is create a list of download folders that is easily accessible from the right-click menu in Firefox.

Normally when you want to download a link or file you can either just download it to your default folder or click "Save Link As" and browse to a folder. With FavLoc installed, you can choose from a list of predefined folders, no browsing necessary. For example if you always download programs to one location, music to another, and videos to a third, you can create three favorites and save yourself a lot of time.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Freeware

All Browser Bookmarks: access your favorites from the menubar

All Browser Bookmarks
All Browser Bookmarks, from the makers of 1Password, is a free program that gives you easy access to your Internet bookmarks from multiple browsers via the Mac OS X menubar. Instead of launching Safari or Firefox and then opening the respective favorites menu and selecting a favorite, you can click the menu bar icon for All Browser Bookmarks and choose a bookmark.

The program lets you view your favorites separated by browser or combined, and you can choose which browser's favorites you want All Browser Bookmarks to show. 1Password users will find a section for their saved web forms making it easy to get to sites requiring authentication.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Productivity

Organize your IE7 Favorites

IE7Recently, we told you about some ways to organize and manage your Firefox bookmarks, and one of our readers asked for similar suggestions to use with Internet Explorer. Since we want Michael and our other IE-using friends to loved too, we put together a few ideas for you.

Favorites Box
lets you add extra attributes to your bookmarks to make them easier to find and organize. Add comments, categories, tags, or login information or even set up a reminders. This one's free to try, but sets you back $19.95 if you want to keep it.

Favorites Finder
is a free extension that adds keyword functionality to your bookmarked sites so you can access them in just a couple of keystrokes. Just type a few letters of the site you're looking for and Favorites Finder will search your bookmarks and find all the matches, including whatever's in your folders.

Power Favorites
is a slick little extension that merges bookmarks from IE, Opera, and Firefox, then syncs them across multiples computers. You can annotate each bookmark with notes and tags, then view them by tag list or tag clouds. (Tag clouds? Are you listening, Foxmarks?) Power Favorites has a 30-day free trial, then it's $19.95.

When you finally decide to winnow down that super-long list of Favorites you've accumulated over the past two years, it's a pain to have to check each bookmark to make sure the site still exists. Use the free tool Favorites Inspector instead. It will plow through your whole list for you and alert you to any "404 error" pages so you can delete those Favorites instead of filing them.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Freeware, Unix

Opera 9.2: Speed dial your favorite websites

Opera Speed Dial
If you're like most people, you probably have 5 or 10 websites, beside DownloadSquad, that you visit every day. But you've probably got dozens, if not hundreds of bookmarks cluttering up the bookmarks/favorites menu of your web browser.

That makes sense, because you want to bookmark pages you visit regularly, but not every day. And of course you bookmark pages you think you might come back to later, but never do.

The latest version of the Opera web browser has a nifty new feature that makes it easy to jump to your favorite pages. Every time you open a new tab, you're presented with 9 boxes with thumbnails of your favorite sites. You can either select sites yourself, or choose your most visited sites based on your browser history.

Each site is assigned a number, and you can automatically load each page by pressing Crtl+1, Crtl+2, etc. When you're on a blank tab, looking at the thumbnails, you can click Crtl+R to reload the images to see if anything changed while you were trying to decide which page to read first. This also handy because the thumbnails are not supposed to reload every time you start the browser (although in this initial release, they do).

[Thanks Jordan!]

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source, Social Software

fav.icio.us2 - favicons for del.icio.us GM script

fav.icio.us2When favicons first started to become popular, I have to admit that I didn't really "get" them. I couldn't see what the value was to having a dinky little icon in the address bar. Maybe I'm slow, but it also took me awhile to figure out that my browser could remember the favicon for my bookmarks or favorites that I'd visited, making it easier to pick them out from a long listing of links.

Of course, now that I'm used to them, I feel like I can't live without them. In fact, any listing of links that doesn't use favicons frustrates me, particularly if I use it a lot. One tool that I use a lot that unfortunately does not support favicons is del.icio.us. Of course, what do you do if there's something on the web that you wish was different? Well, if you're a programmer you just hack yourself together a greasemonkey script. And if you're like me, you just cross your fingers and hope that some kindly developer has hacked together a script to do what you were wishing you could do.

In my case, I'm happy to report that someone has in fact written a greasemonkey script to add favicons to del.icio.us. Creatively called fav.icio.us2, it does what it says it will do, and that's good enough for me.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Blogging, Productivity, Freeware, Browser Tips

AM-DeadLink bookmark validator - Today's Browser Tip

AM-DeadLinkSometimes finding a download turns out to be a homecoming of sorts. AM-DeadLink is like a long-lost friend. I used it regularly on a machine I had at least 5 years ago, then lost track of it for some reason in an intervening system upgrade. Luckily, it's still around, and appears to be being actively developed.

AM-DeadLink does everything you would expect a bookmark validator to do - it tells you when your bookmarks have, for want of a better term, expired, and also lets you know which ones are redirecting, and may need to be updated, and will find duplicate entries that can be deleted. An added feature is that AM-DeadLink can update all of the favicons as it hits each server to check if it's still there. These updated favicons can be saved right into your bookmarks or favorites, so that the next time you look at your list of bookmarks, it's a little more visually interesting.

AM-DeadLink is compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla and Opera bookmarks, as well as comma-separated or tab-separated text files of links.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Office, Productivity, Web services, Social Software

Manage your life with Synapse

synapse life life managerSynapse is an online life manager. As of yet, there is no information as to whether this is a free web based application or not. Synapse is working up to their October 2006 release date, and it looks like it has some nice potential. The Synapse website lists off the main features that it will help users to manage their lives with. These include:
  • People - personal contact manager
  • Calendar - calendar and appointment tracker
  • Broadcast - send out email blasts to contact lists
  • Lists - daily to-do's
  • Ledger - financial tracker
  • Feeds - RSS feed reader
  • Favorites - bookmark list that is accessible from anywhere
  • Tags - easily find your favorite items and feeds
I personally can't wait to check out the release of Synapse. All of your most important daily items bundled together in one powerful tool.

Filed under: Internet, News, Blogging, Web services

Technorati relaunched with new design/features

Ahh, Technorati, what would we do without you. You are the reason we obsessively tag all our posts, and you dutifully respond to our pings in mere minutes (under 5 according to Technorati Principal Engineer Kevin Marks) to crawl our data. On today, your third birthday, you provide us with even more excitement, in the form of a spiffy re-design and some interesting new features. The new design is more modular than in its previous state, complete with standard issue Web 2.0 graded header bars decked out in desaturated colors.

Front and center (well, top right anyway) is the new "Discover" feature. Discover allows users to view the most active posts within set categories including life, entertainment, tech and business. Users can also Discover by specifying tags or groups of tags. Keep in mind that the Discover feature is still under construction, and thus features may come and go before they reach a stable plateau. The new Discover functionality is similar to the popular site Techmeme.

Other differences from previous versions of the site include changes to the way favorites are displayed. Favorites now give more weight to a users favorites as opposed to simply which posts are most popular in the blogosphere.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Yahoo!

150 hacks for del.icio.us

delicious listIt's a categorized, very complete and researched, magnificent list of hacks, links, and tools for del.icio.us. So, naturally there's a little something for everyone in there. How about mashups, skins, and even more lists? Out of the bunch I've picked through so far, my favorite has to be DiggLicious. With the perfect blend of digg's latest, a handy pause button, and the ability to add to my del.icio.us favorites, it's a real time saver. Once you're done with the del.icio.us stuff, head down to the bottom of the page and check out the Top 10 Google Services.

[via del.icio.us of course]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio