Have you ever accidentally visited MySpace? Yeah, we probably have too, though, it was never a noticeable problem. In fact, we can't even remember it happening, but it seems like it has to have happened... right?
Well, this Firefox add-on promises to detect MySpace in Firefox, and provide a pop-up menu to stop unsuspecting web-browsers from hitting up the social network. The plug-in is obviously a joke, but we found a great use for it anyway -- avoiding phishing.
It's called AmIOnMySpace.com? and it can be used to detect the real MySpace site. If for any reason the message doesn't pop-up upon first visiting the social network, you're not on the real site. The biggest problem with using this as a way of avoiding phishing sites is that it doesn't alert users when leaving MySpace, so it's still possible to get attacked from within.
Why do we assume we only get one homepage? For those willing to explore the potential of their browser, we'd like to show you a little out-of-the-box thinking in the form of Morning Coffee.
Though Firefox can set a series of tabs as your "homepage" (select "Use Current Pages" from the preferences menu), this free add-on (shout out to all the free software coders out there) gives you the ability to choose when to open which homepage.
Say, for example, you like to read the NYTimes on days when you work, but you prefer Google Reader on Saturdays and your church's weekly bulletin on Sunday mornings. This program, as you may have already assumed, does just that.
There has always been one major problem with the internet: it's run by humans instead of LOLcats. Sadly, the government isn't into LOLcats, so we'll never see the dream realized. There is, however, a simulation effort. I'd like to introduce the LOLinator.
The LOLinator is a website designed by an underground effort of LOLcats to show the world what an LOLcat internet would look like. It takes any website and sends it back to the LOLcat home base, where LOLcats work quickly and efficiently to create a simulation of an LOLcat version. A couple websites we recommend running through the system are Apple.com, Apple.com/store, and Microsoft.com.
The image above shows what an LOLcat run Download Squad would look like. Personally, we think it's an improvement, but the discrimination against cats in the workplace would never land us any cat employees. What a sad world we live in. Oh yeah, if you have any suggestions for sites to run through the LOLinator, please leave them in the comments.
Now that all the first day iPhone-ers have them up and running, (hopefully, given the backlog that occurred), The next question they might be asking is "Where can I get some applications to fill this sucker up?."
If you've spent last night and this morning tooling around on your new iPhone, have everything set up, and want to check out how some additional applications work on it, DownloadSquad is here to help.
Appleopolis.com - An Apple iPhone application directory. This site was created as a way to help developers and users get the best possible experience for their iPhones. The team is also working on a way for users to start an account and be able to manage all of their iPhone applications from one central location. This site has everything from Digg, Cheap gas, and LivePhone which integrates Xbox Live with the iPhone.
AddFone.com- This site has a directory of over 83 web applications specifically built for the iPhone, and claims to be the largest database. Its simple search interface can be accessed on mobile devices. It contains links to web apps for anything from calculators to bookmark managers to a Google Reader app.
As guessed with many of these applications, the development teams may not have had an Apple iPhone to actually test them on. So, if the apps aren't working properly, you know why. If you have made your application iPhone friendly you can also submit your site to both of these directories.
If making websites just isn't your thing, why not let Jimdo help.
Jimdo is an easy to use web page creation service. Users simply sign in and create a free account, incorporating pictures from Flickr, text, and videos from YouTube in a Jimdo page.
Elements on webpages can be changed with a single click, and there are no page limits. Users can totally customize pages, from background colors, to layout styles, colors and navigation. Everything is so easy to use, it's a joy. The most computer illiterate individual should get a grasp quite quickly as to whets going on, enabling them to build their own custom websites within no time.
There are a few Jimdo plans, a free one that gives users sites under the Jimdo.com domain and 500 MB of space, and another plan for 5 Euros/month that allows users to grab their own domain name to use with 5GB of space.
Is it difficult to find the best websites with search engines or directories? Dfinitive thinks it can help.
As it currently stands, Dfinitive looks as if it is recreating the famous DMOZ open directory project by trying to take the best elements of a directory site, search engine and a bookmarking site and teaming it up with a mix of experts in the areas they feel are lacking.
Dfinitive plans to create a list of definitive sites for each category, in hopes that they will create a unique user experience that helps users find the optimal sites for the topic area they are searching for. Only time will tell how it fares, but as it sits now their categories need a little growth as they only have SEO, Affiliate Marketing, and Blogging listed.
Looking for a way to chat with people that are visiting the same website you are? Yaplet makes it easier to chat with people that visit the same websites, and have the same interests that you do. Started by two college kids as a hobby, this application has been garnering so much interest lately that their servers exploded last week. Through their no installation and registration magic, Yaplet adds a chatroom to every website on the internet. Visiting a website through Yaplet adds a frame on the left of the screen where the chatting takes place, or displays a pop-up.
There are three ways to activate chat on a website:
Use the Yaplet bookmarklet.
Enter a URL into the yaplet URL field.
Add a "Chat Here" button to your website.
If you want to check out the current Yaplet sites, here is a list of the top sites that people are chatting on right now.
Get badged, by going to badged.net, where you can simply build a custom badge widget for your site or blog. The list of available badges you can include in your custom widget is pretty good:
Digg This Story
Sphere It
Add to Technorati Favorites
View Blog Reactions (via Technorati)
Add to del.icio.us
Add to Furl
Add to Netscape
Add to Yahoo! Myweb
Add to Google Bookmarks
Add to Newsvine
Add to Blinklist
Add to Reddit
Add to Blogmarks
Add to Magnolia
Add to Windows Live
Add to Tailrank
Add to Favorites (Internet Explorer)
Email This
You type in your site URL and name, check the boxes, and get the code at the bottom of the page. It could not be any easier to do and you can insert the whole thing at the bottom of your posts, your site, whatever. Sweet, slick, and fan-tas-tic. Here is what the actual badge I created looks like:
[Via The Global Geek Podcast]
Weebly lets you create a website very simply in a few minutes, and the default library contains many different layouts, all ready for you to explore and drag to your own website interface. Weebly is great for the complete novice to create a very decent-looking site without any prior knowledge of how the web works. Many pre-made layouts, that include video from Google, YouTube, YouAreTV video, Flickr, Badgr, AdBrite, RSS feeds, and other layouts, it is easy to put together something fun. Once you pick out your Weebly subdomain, you are good to go and you can display your site. This wouldn't be great for any kind of real web presence, but perhaps mom and dad will get a kick out of it over pie this year. You be the judge.
The Experience Project is a site where you can anonymously share your life experiences in a very web 2.0 (social) way. The site reminds me of 43things, where you list your goals, but the Experience Project is a bit different. You can join groups that align with things you have experienced, have not experienced, or plan to in the future. You can meet up with people (anonymously), share your plans, secrets, dreams, and well, experiences with everyone. In the interest of anonymity, the site will even automatically blur a picture of you as your icon, so you are not recognizable to everyone else. You might find the site interesting or just downright annoying, it is hard to tell. If nothing else, go check out the software this site uses. It is interesting, not to mention the notion of why anyone would ever want to share things like this on the web. Two words: morbid curiosity.
I know, I hear the chuckles, Amberjack is not what you call high school sweethearts who seem to be joined at the hip (and personally, should just flippin get a room already). Instead Amberjack in this case is an easy open-source way for web developers to create tours of their sites without doing a truck-load of needless work. Amberjack has done a bunch of work for you. There are several skins to choose from, or you can edit the skin with your mad-crazy CSS skills, if you want to. Amberjack has a Wizard to help you step through the process of creating a site tour, consisting of some code to insert into pages on your site to generate the tour. This nifty little web-app comes with a killer price-tag that is one word I love to hear: FREE. Some of the skins make your site tour quite web 2.0-ey indeed.
Anyone eager to climb Google's pagerankings - listen up, as Google has just introduced a slew of tools specifically designed to allow webmasters to learn more about and interact with Google's crawling and indexing systems. Complete with a topic-specific blog, this new Webmaster Central service offers tools like a site status wizard (I thought we were getting away from 'wizards' in the industry), statistics, diagnostics and sitemap submission tools, as well as a discussion group and a webmaster help center for good measure.
I took a quick breeze through the offerings in Webmaster Central, and it looks like a fairly comprehensive set of tools. Of course, with Google's typical track record for pricing with similar services, everything under the Webmaster Central umbrella is free, so what are you waiting for?
It appears that Napster might be ready to say uncle, ZDNet is reporting. The company has stated they "do not have our heads in the sand regarding an M&A (merger and acquisition) transaction", which is more or less a nice way of saying they just might be licked. Over the march quarter their 512,000 strong subscriber base fell 7 percent as they transitioned to its free website model, but excluding 4,000 university subscriptions, their number of paid subscribers actually grew 26 percent year-over-year.
An analyst from Stifel Nicolaus & Co also cited in ZDNet's article said "Napster's still trying to find a working business model, which is bad from an operating standpoint", also noting that they see an increased likelihood that the company would sell, especially since the possibility came straight down from management.
Either way, things don't sound so good for the renegade-come-legit digital music service. Also of note is their website; it might be the fact that I'm on a Mac, but their site seems dishearteningly bare these days. not even a remnant of the hip Flash site they built when they offered the web-based free model. I guess time will tell what happens to the music libraries of all those subscribing users.
