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personalized posts

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

Google Maps adds community maps to search results

Google Maps community maps
Google is starting to add user-generated information to Google Maps search results. For example, if you search for "bike paths in New York," several of the top results will include a note showing where the East River Bike Path narrows as well as listings for bike shops. The user-generated results show up with blue icons, and for this particular query are a lot more accurate than the standard results.

Google Maps users have been able to create personalized maps for a while now by adding notes to various locations and saving the maps to "my maps." In case you had any illusions that this was private data, this is the pool of information Google is using to beef up its search results.

If you'd rather not share your favorite coffee shop with the whole world, just make sure not to set your personalized map to public.

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Blogging, Web services, Google

Google Talk's new gadget

google talks new gadgetGoogle has unleashed a new Google Talk Gadget for use on your Google personalized homepage. The Talk client -- still only available for PC users -- can be semi-enjoyed by Mac users with this new Gadget implementation that resembles what PC users have been enjoying for quite a while, although it adds a few slick features.

The new Google Talk Gadget shares the functionality of the standalone application where users can see contacts online and chat with them, but has the added bonus of not requiring a download, being accessible from anywhere you have a browser and a connection. It's also embeddable into a blog or website with a single line of code.

The best new features of the Talk Gadget enables users to see previews of photos and videos in conversation windows when URL's from YouTube or Picasa Web Albums are pasted into chat windows.

Check out a video presentation of the Google Talk Gadget in action after the jump.

Read more →

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Kids, Time-Wasters

ImageChef - Today's Time Waster

Do you want to play a game?ImageChef is a family-friendly site that allows you to create custom images for your blog, forum signature or general amusement. Without having to register any kind of account, you can modify text in a variety of image templates. The resulting pictures can be easily saved or emailed to friends.

ImageChef will host your pictures if you're a registered user (registration is free), and provide the snip-its of code so that you can embed your artwork in your MySpace, Friendster or TypePad account.

Though sometimes cheesy, the provided image templates do allow for some creative Tom Foolerly. If you find yourself wasting a lot of time, please feel free - no, encouraged! - to post a link to your creation via the comments.

Filed under: Web services

Pageflakes: Personalized home page of the moment

PageflakesYep, yet another one. Pageflakes is a personalized home page along the lines of Google Personalized Home, Netvibes, and so on. It's nice and AJAXy as we've come to expect and has a pretty good selection of widgets ("flakes"), including address book, sticky notes, to-do lists, Gmail, headlines, and so on. One nice feature not seen everywhere else is the ability to create multiple pages, which take the form of tabs at the top of the page and let you have multiple sets of widgets organized for, say, Work and Play. It also has a third-party API for creating your own widgets and just now they're sponsoring a widget contest the grand prize for which is an Xbox 360.

Filed under: Web services

ItsAStart.com: Another personalized homepage

ItsAStart.comThe torrent of personalized AJAXy homepages continues. This week's contender is ItsAStart.com, a site with poor punctuation but all the standard features. It has RSS feeds, weather, bookmarks, sticky notes, and a clock. It has a Google Search widget but no others--a shame when other services offer unlimited, custom search boxes. Also, the RSS feeds can be expanded to show entire items, which some services lack. But perhaps ItsAStart's sole stand-out feature is the tag search, which makes a widget that displays an up-to-date feed of blog posts matching your pet tag.

Filed under: Web services

Favoor: Yet another personalized homepage

FavoorBetween Google's Personalized Homepage, Microsoft's Start.com, NetVibes, Protopage, and Goowy, It's getting hard to keep track of all of these personalized homepage services. Favoor is another such service. It works mostly like the others, but as Martin at Tipmonkies points out the only "widgets" allowed are links, RSS feeds, and sticky notes. What, no custom search boxes? It is, of course, packed with AJAX and it's free to sign up.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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