We're big fans of FriendFeed, the social network aggregator that helps you keep track of your friends' activities across different platforms like Twitter, LastFM, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and about 1,000 36 others. If you're a fan or if you're just getting started, below are 10 tools to help you experience it just the way you like, after the jump.
As expected, Twitter has purchased Summize, a search engine designed for the micro-blogging service. The pairing seems pretty obvious. While Twitter may have started as a means of individual expression, the service has quickly grown into a repository of news and opinions.
Want to know what people think of the latest blockbuster movie? Just enter the title into Summize and you'll get a whole slew of results. Want to see what people are saying about a politician? Summize can help. The search engine can also help you find other Twitter users who share your interests, making it easy to expand your own social network.
Twitter has launched a new site that looks and works pretty much exactly like Summize, at search.twitter.com. The only difference is that the new site says Twitter and not Summize. If you visit Summize.com, you'll automatically be taken to the new site.
Terms of the deal have not been made public, but Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter paid $15 million for Summize. It might have made more sense for the company to develop its own search engine in-house. But since somebody's already done the work, and since Twitter is sitting on a pile of venture capital, an acquisition was probably the easiest way to go.
There's no shortage of desktop clients for Twitter and FriendFeed. But Posty goes a few steps beyond popular clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy by adding support for Jaiku and Tumblr as well as Pownce.
Posty's main window features a list of supported services with check boxes next to each. Just enter a status update and select the networks you want to send the update out to, and you can post simultaneously to all 5 places. You can also select the individual tab for each service to see recent updates from your contacts or from the public timelines if they're available. You can also respond to comments or send direct messages directly from Posty.
One of the only complaints we had with Posty is that while the window is resizable, it starts out at 550 pixels wide and there's no way to make it smaller. Bigger, yes. But smaller? Not so much. So it takes up a fair bit of screne real estate.
Like most applications built on Adobe AIR, Posty is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
You've just downloaded that must have program only to realize that Windows has no idea what to do with it. After an hour of Google searching, forum posting, and being called n00b, you finally figure it out.
If only there was a guide that showed you how to get all those needed programs. We at Download Squad feel your pain and have put together a list of 10 free programs that will take care of those pesky "Windows cannot open this file" messages once and for all.
Note: See a blatant omission or oversight? Please add it to the comments. With your help, we hope to re-post a more complete list the future.
File Types: DivX, XviD, AVI, Mpeg 1-4, AC3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, FLV, OGG, VOB, and tons you've never heard of.
Description: Why there are 85,000,000 different audio and video types we have no idea. What we do know is trying to install codecs one at a time generally ends in a reformat.
Thankfully, the good people from K-Lite (Koors Lite?) have bundled all the software and codecs you need into one executable. Cheers!
Description: Before the days of Youtube, the Real Player and QuickTime were kings of Internet multimedia. Sure you had to deal with popups, reminders, updates, and bloatware, but that 1" video was so worth it.
Fortunately, the Real and Quicktime Alternatives removed the real in Real Player and restored the quick to QuickTime. Enjoy your 1" video!
HelloTxt is a web service that lets you send out status updates to your contacts on a wide array of social networking and micro-blogging services. The site makes it easy to send identical updates to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Plurk, Tumblr, and other popular and not so popular services. But up until recently there was one major problem with HelloTxt: The communication was one way. You could send, but not receive status updates.
Now HelloTxt has added a new feature called Status Snap which lets you read updates from your contacts on supported networks. Right now, only Twitter and Facebook are supported, but HelloTxt plans to add more networks to Status Snap over time.
In order to enable Status Snap you need to login to your HelloTxt account and click the Status Snap boxes next to each network you want to enable the service for. HelloTxt has also added a lifestreaming feature that shows all of your recent activity on your main page.
OpenSUSE has always been an odd sort of Linux distribution. It's always been reasonably user friendly, very stable, and quite nicely pulled off the not-so-easy task of being good for new users while offering advanced and power users the flexibility and freedom they require.
Yet OpenSUSE often gets a bad wrap. There's that whole Novell/Microsoft/the world is ending conspiracy thing going on, for one thing. Certainly when Novell bought SuSE, it was disturbing. What were Novell's intentions? Where were things going to go from this point? Was openSUSE going to suffer for it?
Suffer? We probably wouldn't go as far as to say that. Were the changes and improvements to the distribution immediately after Novell took the helm earth-shaking? No, not particularly. They were modest, and worked well enough, but nothing that seemed leaps and bounds beyond the previous versions.
Nothing seemed leaps and bounds beyond -- until now. Today, OpenSUSE officially rolled out the 11.0 release. OpenSUSE seems to have scrutinized itself, from the kernel to the community. The developers pushed away from what seemed like an "adapt to survive" mode, and rolled out a release with changes so dramatic and beautiful that the distribution's chameleon ("geeko") mascot seems less cute and instead genuinely fitting.
If we had one word, and only one word to use to describe OpenSUSE 11.0, it would be this:
Fast.
Yes, dear readers. We just used the word "fast" (boldface, even) in relation to an OpenSUSE release. It starts and runs applications quickly, and we can say completely honestly, it installs quickly. We aren't just talking system updates and "here and there" YaST additions. No... You can boot the liveCD and have a complete OpenSUSE 11.0 system on your hard drive in what seems even slightly less time than an Ubuntu install.
At first glance, Toluu looks like a stripped down version of the RSS aggregator Fav.or.it, which we reviewed earlier, but it's not. They both serve the same purpose - recommending new feeds based on your current subscriptions. The difference lies in how each web site gets this done. To use Fav.or.it, you have to abandon your current RSS reader in order to benefit from their recommendations. On the other hand, Toluu works with your RSS reader, to make these recommendations.
Getting started couldn't be easier. Import the OPML file from your RSS reader and it instantly matches your feeds with other members who have similar taste. You can then discover and read new feeds directly in Toluu before deciding to subscribe.
Using the provided bookmarklet, you can add new feeds to Toluu - so you can continue to benefit from updated recommendations - and subscribe in your preferred reader simultaneously. Supported readers include Google Reader, My AOL and Netvibes, amongst others. You can also connect Toluu directly to Twitter, sending an update every time you add a new feed.
Toluu is currently in private beta and invites seemed to be going out pretty slowly, and while it's certainly worth the wait, we have invites for the first 100 readers to leave a comment below.
Update: We've got another 25 invites to give away. First come, first served!
Want to download popular music without paying and without breaking the law? Qtrax is a new advertising-supported service that lets you download music from two of the four major labels, Universal and EMI as well as several smaller labels. The service uses a modified version of the Songbird Media player to let you search or browse for music and download tracks. Some music willbe available through P2P connections while music from Universal and EMI will be hosted on Qtrax servers.
The files use Windows Media digital rights management and are designed to be played with the Qtrax media player. But once you play a song using the Qtrax software and acquire a valid license key, you shold be able to play it using the media player of your choice. The one thing you cannot do is transfer songs to a portable media device like an iPod. That makes sense, since Qtrax makes money by showing ads while you search for and listen to music. There's no particularly good way to do that on a mobile device.
The music selection is somewhat limited at the moment. Not only are Sony and Warner Music Group tracks missing, but there are plenty of albums that show up in the Qtrax interface even though the songs are not yet available for download. But since the service just launched in beta, we're willing to cut Qtrax some slack.
The Qtrax client is Windows only for now, but a Mac version is in the works.
Now that Firefox 3 has finally shipped, the developers at Mozilla are starting to make time for other projects. Don't get us wrong, those busy little bees are already working on Firefox 3.1, but they're also working on something entirely new: a mobile web browser.
The mobile version of Firefox, (currently codenamed Fennec -- a final name hasn't been picked yet), will use the same rendering engine as Firefox 3. In other words, any web page you can view with the desktop browser will be usable on a mobile device. That includes AJAX-heavy web applications. But nobody's pretending that you can just run Firefox 3 on a cellphone without making any changes. After all, mobile devices have small screens, slow processors, low amounts of memory, and often rely on relatively slow internet connections.
Last week we showed you a first look at a concept interface that might make its way into the final product. But it might not. So we decided to speak with Jay Sullivan, VP of Mobile for Mozilla. He gave us a run down of what's in store for Fennec, including what types of devices will be supported and when you'll be able to try the browser out for yourself.
A NYT article says that Americans waste $650 BILLION dollars over-checking their email obsessively. BILLION. Not Millions. Not Thousands. BILLIONS. Crazier? We waste $650 BILLION dollars trying to get back into the groove of work after checking our email obsessively.
Why do we do it? Are we that afraid of missing something?
Some of us here can say that we too check our email obsessively. Even going so far as to click on the Gmail logo over and over to refresh the page. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you're apparently not alone.
How do we stop? How do we combat this problem? Do we love email that much? We hear people complaining all of the time about information and email overload, so maybe we're trying to get a jump on controlling it before it controls us?
Many questions and not a lot of answers, but if these numbers from the NYT are true, oh boy do we have to change some things.
First things first.
Stop. Look, and Listen.
Stop checking your email so often
Look and notice that Gmail already refreshes itself
Listen for emails to come in automatically via POP or IMAP
You won't miss something.
What's your favorite way to catch email? We find that checking email on the mobile slows us down a bit. Unless you get too obsessed with that...can you say Crackberry?
Someone tells you that they live 3.2 miles away, and instantly your brain starts turning, trying to figure out things like how long it would take to walk there, to ride a bike, or to drive a car. But what if you can't quite comprehend 3.2 miles? Wouldn't it be easier if someone said it was the equivalent of 47 football fields?
No? Yeah, we didn't think so. But that's exactly the sort of information you can get from SensibleUnits. Just type in any length or weight, using pounds, kilograms, centimeters, inches, feet, miles or kilometers, and SensibleUnits will spit out useful information letting you know how many cats, textbooks or cans of baked beans it would take to match your weight.
The information is almost completely pointless. And after a while you start to notice that you're getting the same measurements each time you type in similar weights. But that didn't stop us from wasting about a half hour entering measurements and marveling at the results.
Want to know if a movie's worth checking out? You could read reviews written by people you've never met. Or you could ask a friend or two who has already seen the movie. or you could ask a few thousand Twitter users. FlixPulse takes the latter approach.
FlixPulse is sort of like Rotten Tomatoes. But instead of compiling average ratings from dozens of professional movie reviews, FlixPulse scans Twitter for mentions of current movies. Then real live human beings look at each tweet and decide whether the comment was good, bad, or indifferent. The result shows up as a percentage on the main page, and if you click on a movie title you can read the actual messages left by Twitter users.
The concept is kind of cool. But since most people probably don't realize that their remarks are being aggregated, it's not clear that random Twitter users are providing accurate reviews. Every movie on the front page of FlixPulse has a score well above 50%, which means that either every movie in theaters right now is awesome, or people are more likely to comment on films they liked.
There are plenty of attractive visualizations for Flickr images. But Tag Galaxy is certainly the spaciest. Enter a keyword and Tag Galaxy will search Flickr for related images. You can either click the big ball of gas at the center of your screen to see some of the images, or you can check out one of the little related-tag planets orbiting the center of your tag galaxy (or solar system, really).
The picture doesn't really do Tag Galaxy justice. Each planet is in motion, and you can navigate by dragging and dropping various parts of the screen. When you actually click on a tag to view the images, you can spin the ball around to find more images, and click an image to enlarge it.
Be forewarned, Tag Galaxy can make your web browser go Supernova if you're not careful. Firefox froze up on us a couple of times while we were playing with the web page. We also had a bunch of other tabs open, but Tag Galaxy certainly seemed to take a toll on our CPU and RAM usage.
Once upon a time if you wanted to (legally) download Hollywood movies or TV shows, you turned to sites like MovieLink and CinemaNow. With all the attention focused on Apple, Amazon, Joost, and Netflix these days, we kind of forgot that these companies still existed. And then we got a friendly email from CinemaNow letting us know that starting today you could access the service through Windows Media Center, which is actually kind of awesome.
You'll need to register for a CinemaNow account to use the service. And of course, you'll need Windows Media Center, which is built into Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate. You should be able to find the CinemaNow icon in the More TV section. If you don't see it, go into your Media Center settings and force your computer to download updates.
CinemaNow is actually kind of late to the game here. MovieLink and Vongo have had Windows MCE applications for ages. But with CinemaNow making its 3400 feature length films, 3000 TV episodes, and 2900 music videos available, we're going to say better late than never. Now if only Amazon, Apple, and Netflix would release Widnows MCE applications.
Update: As we've been reminded, this is not the first time you've been able to access CinemaNow from Windows Media Center. The company released a plugin for earlier versions of MCE which you could download and install in order to watch movies using the media center "10 foot interface." To our knowledge, this is the first time CinemaNow has been available to all Windows Vista MCE users without a separate download though.
We are a little bit disturbed. Not in a "We just watched a David Lynch movie" sort of way, but still, it is a little unnerving to think that our last post on Ulteo hinted at a world domination plot... and now it seems that goal is within their reach.
It is also a little unsettling to eat our words. We read about Ulteo's Virtual Desktop and its claims to run Linux apps quickly and smoothly under Windows. And we thought, "Yeah, right." We've used embedded Linux on Windows before. It works in a pinch, but it's not terribly responsive. It's also a little disorienting to be working in Linux, and then need to manually perform some key combination or mouse gesture to get to a Windows application.
Like andLinux, Ulteo's Virtual Desktop (often referred to with the rather misfortunate name UlteoVD) runs off a coLinux base. There is no virtualization software involved. But we'd especially recommend UlteoVD for those pondering whether a Linux switch could work for them, for a number of reasons.
OpenSUSE has always been an odd sort of Linux distribution. It's always been reasonably user friendly, very stable, and quite nicely pulled off the not-so-easy task of being good for new users while offering advanced and power users the flexibility and freedom they require.
At first glance, Toluu looks like a stripped down version of the RSS aggregator Fav.or.it, which we reviewed earlier, but it's not. They both serve the same purpose - recommending new feeds based on your current subscriptions. The difference lies in how each web site gets this done. To use Fav.or.it, you have to abandon your current RSS reader in order to benefit from their recommendations. On the other hand, Toluu works with your RSS reader, to make these recommendations. 
Check this out y'all:
We are a little bit disturbed. Not in a "We just watched a David Lynch movie" sort of way, but still, it is a little unnerving to think that our last post on Ulteo hinted at a world domination plot... and now it seems that goal is within their reach.
