Posterous is a new blogging service that's being touted as even simpler and easier to use than Tumblr. The process is extraordinarily simple: send something to post@posterous.com. Hey, look, you've started a blog. When you want to add something to it, send another e-mail to the same address. Simple as that. Supported attachments include everything from JPGs to PDFs to Mp3s.
It's not as if Tumblr is extraordinarily complicated, but Posterous presents some interesting possibilities. You can post your cameraphone pics and other moblogging material via e-mail, and have comments sent to you and reply to them on the go (again, via email). Also, we're not complaining about a blogging service that lets you skip past all those annoying signup processes. You already have an email account, so what do you need yet another login for?
Posterous obviously has to be careful about security, since forging email addresses isn't all that difficult. Michael Arrington offered a free TechCrunch t-shirt to the first person to forge a post on his Posterous blog, and the challenge was over pretty quickly. Posterous addresses these security concerns in their FAQ: "If we think it might not be you, we ask you to confirm the email before we post it. No matter what, you always get an email notification of every post we put online for your blog, with an easy link to remove the post if you didn't do it."
Ping.fm is a new service that lets you update a bunch of social network/messaging sites all at once. Instead of logging into Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, and Tumblr and manually posting updates, you can just visit Ping.fm and write a single message which will be sent to each site. So far, it sounds a lot like HelloTXT, right? Well, it is, but Ping.fm has a few features that make it a lot more useful than HelloTXT.
First of all, you can post updates via email. When you sign up for a Ping.fm account you'll be assigned an email address. Just send a message to that address and the message will show up on all of your linked accounts. You can also enable an IM update option. Right now you need to have an AOL Instant Messenger account to use the IM posting option. But you don't have to use the official AIM client. As you can see in our screenshot, Pidgin works just as well, as should Adium, Trillian, Meebo or Digsby.
Ping.fm is still in private beta, but we've got 100 invites to giveaway. Just enter the code dls on the signup page.
Mahalo, the human powered search engine, has announced a new add-on for Firefox that submits sites to many popular web services at once. How many times have you found a link that you want share with your friends and realize you have to submit it to more than one service such as del.icio.us, twitter, and so on?
Mahalo's new add-on, called Mahalo Follow for Firefox solves this problem by submitting your link to services including Twitter, Jaiku, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, and Tumblr. This seems to be an extremely useful tool.
To get started, head on over to Mahalo's site and install the Firefox add-in, put in your credentials for your various services, and share away.
It's fairly inarguable that Firefox needs to exist. Going back just a few years ago to when Mozilla introduced what would quickly become their flagship browser, much of the internet was in the equivalent of the digital dark ages. Netscape was struggling along after Internet Explorer had successfully derailed its efforts years ago, but even IE was suffering from a stagnating development process and an industry that was trying to move forward with efforts in standards and compatibility. Sure, Opera was always on the outer fringes, but its market share hasn't really seen much of the leap that its devoted following believes it deserves.
Along comes Firefox in 2004, and everything changes. Netscape drops even farther off the list of many a user, and Internet Explorer begins slowly, but steadily, losing market share to the open source Mozilla alternative that opened up the public's eye to the wonders of extensions and add-ons. It is at this moment in time, however, when Firefox also began to slowly replace Internet Explorer as a dominant and, in some ways, proprietary force on the web.
In 2007, Firefox certainly hasn't destroyed IE's market share, but it sure has made a dent. While that's a positive thing in the name of choice and the triumph of good software, Firefox has quite possibly made a negative impact on the development of web sites and software when viewed in the context of accessibility. Think about it: before Firefox, most websites were not only 'optimized' for IE, you pretty much had to view them in IE if you wanted to see anything more than the equivalent of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle blown apart with a shotgun. Even though it could be argued that web design standards have come quite a ways since then (and they certainly have), the damage done from Firefox's wild popularity among the tech savvy (and even not-so-savvy) primarily lies in this new frontier of web apps and services.
Many years ago, car manufacturers emphasized only new features to entice new buyers. Then some time in the early 90's car safety became important and car manufacturers put safety features top of the selling points for new model.
I feel that right now Web 2.0 service providers are operating like those car manufacturers before the shift to car safety.
Ever since the infant days of the internet, people have been putting more and more data online (emails, newsgroup posts and IRC conversations) without giving it any thought. But in the Web 2.0 age we are leaving behind a trail of data much more personal than ever before. We tell people about our lives, our thoughts, and where we've been with our photos (some even tagged with geo-data).
Back in December Apple released a beta version of Dashcode, a programming environment which makes it easy to develop OS X Dashboard widgets. The problem with Dashcode is that there is not much information on how to use it available on the internet. Even the documentation that comes with Dashcode provides only the most basic information and does not currently link back to Dashboard documentation.
Meanwhile, we like Tumblr here at Download Squad. It is great for posting quick snippet of content onto a blog-like web page without the need to compose a full length blog post. Tumblr provides a great bookmarklet to make this process even easier. You just click on it to post the current web page in your browser to Tumblr, or you can select some text which becomes a quote on your Tumblr.
Last week, I realised that Tumblr makes an ideal candidate for a Dashboard widget! So I decided to combine these two ingredients and see how easy it is to make a Tumblr widget using Dashcode.
We're beginning to wonder if David Karp and the others behind Tumblr, the increasingly cool tumblelog service, have forgotten the meaning of the word 'sleep,' as some recent updates have brought even more coolness to the table. First up is a dramatically improved bookmarklet that gives users a lot more control over what they're posting and how. To its credit, the previous bookmarklet was pretty smart about knowing whether you want to share things like a quote, a picture or a video, but it didn't give you a say in the matter. Now, the new tabbed version (officially version 3) puts the choice back into your hands, just in case you have something different in mind than what Tumblr's clever javascript choses.
Next on the big-hitters list is Tumblr.com/Radar (in alpha, cuz beta is so yesterdy), a page that lets you watch the new posts appearing across all Tumblr blogs. This is a great idea, though we figure this should simply be the main page for Tumblr.com to help introduce those who are new to the concept of a tumbelog and to help potential users get the ball rolling (Exhibit A: the del.icio.us main page).
Other notable changes include a clean new theme added to the growing list, dynamic quote sizes for quote posts, new 'links with descriptions' and 'YouTube Videos' options for feed importing and something that should put a smile on the face of developers and blog hackers everywhere: an official Tumblr API.
Nice work yet again for the service that makes stream-of-conscious blogging perhaps easier than it should ever be.
We just felt a great tremor in the web - as if millions of mobloggers cried out in unified celebration. Tumblr, the new tumblelog service that we're already big fans of, just introduced a mobile uploads feature which allows anyone with an email-capable phone to get their tumbling on. Sending a message with a photo to a private email address that you obtain in your settings will publish it to your tumblelog, and the subject line will be used as a caption.
We specify a message with a photo not only because this is the language Tumblr uses for the feature, but also because sending a simple SMS or email with nothing but text seems to fall on deaf ears; nothing was published, which is at least a minor bummer. What about all those witty or "what'd they say?" one-liners we hear in public, Tumblr? Here's hoping that you really mean 'beta' with this feature, as it could use some fleshing out.
Another major addition to the Tumblr service is permalinks. Depending on the default theme design (or how you customize your own), each of your posts should now contain a permalink for optimum linking and re-blogging by all. Be on the lookout, however, as some of the themes actually hide the permalink until you mouse over the post.
We're becoming big fans of Tumblr here at DLS headquarters, and the 'blogging scrapbook' service just introduced a new feed importing feature that makes it an even more appealing tool. A new option in the settings area allows users to add multiple feeds from their other blogs, with the ability to aggregate your other content as regular posts, photos (say, from a Flickr feed) or mere referential links. Combine this feature with Tumblr's option to publish under a custom domain name, and you have one powerful über-blogging service that could even trump Yahoo!'s Pipes in terms of making it easy to aggregate yourself on the web. This way, you get a live HTTP page, as well as an RSS feed, of everything you're publishing.
Setup is dead-simple, and feed aggregation kicks into gear almost immediately. While there is certainly the potential here for this to be abused (as in Tumblr users aggregating and re-publishing content they don't have the rights to), we aren't too worried about it. All in all, this looks like a great new feature to one of the more unique publishing services to arise out of this whole blogging movement.
Tumblr is a new tumblelog service whose FAQs probably describe itself a nutshell the best: "To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks." It has the look, feel and functionality of a stream-of-consciousness blog, instead of the typical structure and theme/agenda that the traditional blogging platform has (sidenote: can we really refer to an aspect of blogging as 'traditional' just yet?). Everything that doesn't fit in another online space or blogging platform is probably a sure-fire candidate for a tumblelog. I also like to think of it as a linkblog on steriods, offering easy linkage and embedding of video, pictures, conversations, quotes and more.
A carefully-chosen tool set reinforces this linkblog ideal, offering a streamlined experience that oozes the "everything you need, nothing you don't" philosophy. The signup process is dead-easy, and after choosing a theme and a few other settings, Tumblr offers a simple though eerily intelligent bookmarklet that does all the heavy lifting when sharing that Flickr pic or embedding a YouTube video.
For those who want some control over their tumblelog, Tumblr offers some key features above and beyond the simple point and click. Customization is present in just about all the right places. The themes are 100% editable, and the official Tumblr blog says even more themes are on their way, with a "hugely robust system" for really strutting your stuff. You can also chose to redirect your Tumblr blog to your own domain, with fairly simple instructions in the FAQs.
All in all this tumbellog/linkblog is a fairly simple concept with much greater implications, and Tumblr's executing is fantastic. I'm already hooked, and I've added a new bookmark and 'marklet to my tool belt. The service is free and, like so many other web 2.0 startups, will remain free, with the possibility of a more feature-packed premium offering debuting at a later date.
Posterous is a new blogging service that's being touted as even simpler and easier to use than Tumblr. The process is extraordinarily simple: send something to post@posterous.com. Hey, look, you've started a blog. When you want to add something to it, send another e-mail to the same address. Simple as that. Supported attachments include everything from JPGs to PDFs to Mp3s. 
It's fairly inarguable that Firefox needs to exist. Going back just a few years ago to when Mozilla introduced what would quickly become their flagship browser, much of the internet was in the equivalent of the digital dark ages. Netscape was struggling along after Internet Explorer had successfully derailed its efforts years ago, but even IE was suffering from a stagnating development process and an industry that was trying to move forward with efforts in standards and compatibility. Sure, Opera was always on the outer fringes, but its market share hasn't really seen much of the leap that its devoted following believes it deserves.
