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Filed under: Weekend Review

Download Squad Week in Review

DLS logoBeen so busy waiting for your American Airlines flight to actually take off that you haven't had time to catch up on the week's other news? Wait, that doesn't make sense. You've had nothing but time on your hands. Aww, whatever. Here are some of our favorite stories from the past week. No excuses necessary.

Flickr launches video uploads

We've been expecting Flickr to add a video upload feature to the online photo sharing site for some time now. But we never would have guessed that when it finally arrived, Flickr users would be limited to uploading videos of 90 seconds or less. Flickr's justifying the move by saying the clips should be seen as long photos, not YouTube-style content. But that hasn't stopped Flickr traditionalists from forming and anti-video group and starting a petition asking Flickr to withdraw the feature.

Organize your music collection with TagScanner

Have a few thousand music files scattered around your hard drive and need a good way to organize them? While iTunes, Windows Media Player, and several other music players will help you edit your music's metadata to add things like artist names and song and album titles, TagScanner is probably the easiest music tagger for Windows we've ever seen. And it's free to boot.

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Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Google, web 2.0

HuddleChat is dead, long live Campfire

HuddleChat down
That certainly didn't take long. Just a day after going live, HuddleChat is no more. HuddleChat was a web-based multi-user chat room utilizing the new Google App Engine. It bore a striking resemblance to Campfire, a similar application from 37signals. The main difference was that Campfire used a freemium model (free for up to 4 users, fee for more users), while HuddleChat was completely free.

Now, technically, there's nothing wrong with developing an application that looks and feels a lot like a competing application. After all, is it surprising that two web-based multi-user chat rooms are going to look a lot alike? You have a chat window, a message window, a friends list window, and so on. It all seems rather obvious. But while Google App Engine is open to anybody (or at least the first 10,000 users to sign up during the beta), HuddleChat was actually written by two Google employees during their free time. And that made it hard to see as anything other than a direct strike at 37signals' Campfire. It sort of screamed "Hey, we like your product, now we're going to clone it, make it free, and drive you out of business!"

Needles to say, 37signals wasn't very happy to see HuddleChat, and now there's a message on the HuddleChat web site explaining that the application has been removed. So now if you want a multi-user, web-based chat room with transcripts and file uploads for team meetings or group chats, it looks like you'll have to stick with Campfire. Until someone else comes along with a free clone.

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Google, web 2.0

HuddleChat: It's like Campfire, but free

HuddleChat
A lot of folks say that Google's new App Engine is basically a free clone of Amazon's Web Services. And they're pretty much right. So we probably shouldn't be surprised to find that some of the applications already making use of Google App Engine are free clones of other popular programs.

HuddleChat is a web-based mult-user chat application built with Google's App Engine. And it's almost identical to Campfire, a chat application from 37signals. But while Campfire provides free chat rooms for up to 4 users, and charges a fee for rooms with more users, HuddleChat lets an unlimited number of users chat for free.

The interface is pretty slick and offers a bunch of features that make it ideal for virtual team meetings. Chats are automatically archived, and you can upload files like images which will be displayed in the chat. They're also saved on a Transcripts & Files page. You can invite any user by sending out an email from the site, or you can share the room's URL. Best of all, users can sign into a chat room using their Google ID. So if you already have a Gmail, Google Calendar, or Picasa account you don't need to sign up for a new account to use HuddleChat.

Predictably, the folks at 37signals are less than pleased with HuddleChat.

Update: Astute blogger Emily Price noticed that there's at least one important Campfire feature missing from HuddleChat: Search. Which is kind of funny when you consider the fact that HuddleChat is hosted by Google and was developed by two Google employees.

Update 2: HuddleChat is dead.

[via Web Worker Daily]

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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