Social Networking and Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Social Software

Many people are now heading back to school, for the fall semester. A new service aims to make the learning experience a socially-sharable one. NoteMesh is a collaborative wiki-like way for students to share their class notes, helping other students who missed a day, are out “sick” or help for exams and term-papers. Finally the collective knowledge of the masses is put to good use in the classroom. I could see online-only students benefiting from the service as well, since the service caters to students who are online anyway. One thing I don’t like about the service is that you can’t use it if you don’t have and use your school’s provided email account. I understandd the need for authentication, but they can’t possibly verify that each person is a part of a certain class anyway, so what’s the point?
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Filed under: Video, Macintosh, Blogging, Yahoo!, Freeware, VoIP, Social Software

With all the hoopla surrounding video in recent weeks, thanks to the video-centric Fall VON trade-show in Boston, it’s no surprise that the folks making VoIP communications tools for the Mac have embraced video-conferencing. Since I did a head-to-head comparison of the four major VoIP communication tools for Macworld back in July, so much has changed. The video has gotten better and easier–so easy, in fact, that MTV’s Total Request Live has made one of these sweet tools a part of its regular broadcast arsenal, allowing viewers of the show to interact with via TRL’s famous video wall–and it’s not Skype.

All of these tools are free downloads, and all of these tools have been around a while.Yahoo Messenger 3.0

The three packages that have undergone improvements since I last examined them are Yahoo! Messenger, Sightspeed, and Skype. But I’ll be honest–the changes to Yahoo! Messenger, now at version 3.0 for the Mac, are superficial at best. There’s still no VoIP for Internet voice calling, there’s still no voice conferencing, and while there’s video, Y! Messenger can’t be taken seriously until it adds audio.

I suspect this problem has its roots in Yahoo’s historic use of a Windows-only audio coder that hasn’t, after close to a decade of Yahoo I.M.’s existence, been made available on the Mac. If Yahoo wants to have a shot at the early adopter crowd, they’ve GOT to bring the Mac version up to speed. As it is now, the most visible change in Y! Messenger 3.0 is its updated look and feel, which is now more Tiger-like: greyscale main window, better icons, etc.

Though Yahoo has added support for sending text I.M.s to MSN users, Mac users won’t be able to place Mac-to-phone calls with their version of Messenger either. Now, I and others have been pretty loud with Yahoo about getting these issues straightened out, but it seems like there must be a pretty compelling reason why they haven’t feature-synced Mac and Win versions of Messenger. Even iChat kicks Messenger in the butt, and “that ain’t sayin’ a whole lot”.

Skype 2.0 (Beta)

Skype for the Mac has improved by leaps and bounds. It’s certainly the most popular Mac-based VoIP tool, with upwards of 6 million (Mac and Windows) users online at a time. I still use Skype more often than the other tools that are available, and Skype’s large slice of the user pie is why. With Skype for the Mac (pictured at the top of this article), a lot has changed since July when I last reviewed it:

• All outbound Mac-to-phone calls are free until the end of the year. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a permanent fixture of Skyping, though.)
• The latest Skype beta, version 2.0.0.2, now offers video conferencing which is on par with the Windows version. I’ve done a few video calls with Windows users of the product, and have had good results. I do occasionally have issues communicating with certain Windows users (a reality that persists with or without Skype), and 2.0.0.2 has crashed on me a few times. But hey, I guess that’s why they call it a beta. For those interested, the current production version of Skype for the Mac is 1.5, it does not have video.
• The look and feel of the buddy list has been improved, with “mood messages” and action buttons now appearing in an auto-expanding line where each contact sits in the list. Much nicer than clumping it all into the toolbar.
• Skype is now a universal binary, which increases performance on Intel-based Macs like my Macbook.

Sightspeed 5.0
Despite all of Skype’s advances, Sightspeed is increasingly the Mac video-conferencing tool of choice. While I do have some nits with the way the Sightspeed user interface is laid out, these complaints are easily forgive. The folks at Sightspeed are two steps ahead of their competitors in many respects:

• Unlike Skype, Sightspeed is a standards-based product which uses SIP for setting up and tearing down calls. This means that it may be possible to use Sightspeed with other services at some point.
• Sightspeed allows Mac-to-phone calling in its most current release, version 5.
• Sightspeed offers a driver solution for Windows that allows you to remotely view your television programming from anywhere on the Internet. So, you could be sitting in Venice sipping Bavarian suds while watching the newest episode of Lost via your Windows Media edition PC (sorry guys, this is a PC-only feature). Hopefully, the Sightspeed guys have already had a chat or two with the brains behind EyeTV so we can get this functionality added to the Macintosh version.
• The video-quality on Sightspeed is adaptive to the conditions of your broadband link, and the synchronization between audio and video is better on Sightspeed than on any of the other Mac video-conferencing tools. No more mouthing the words you say four seconds after you say them. This alone makes Sightspeed a better candidate for serious use than Skype or iChat.
• While Sightspeed supports video-conferencing, it does limit you to four participants at a time. This seems to be par for the course. But I’d really like to see somebody support ten or twelve participants. I suspect this limit will eventually disappear.
• Sightspeed videomail is a feature that can be used for video-blogging, or “vlogging“–you record the video on Sightspeed and it gets posted to the net for you to link to on your blog. Easy, simple, and fast. The videomail feature is also used to record messages if you’re trying to get ahold of your Sightspeed contacts while they’re offline.

So, the Mac offerings for VoIP and video communications are truly exceptional–and the most exceptional of those Sightspeed, is probably the one I would try first, if I were just getting into this stuff.
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Filed under: News, P2P, Social Software

Another one bites the dust folks, well not yet. Morpheus, the p2p file sharing network owned by StreamCast, lost its case in court. The network, like many others is now in danger of being shut down because of copyright infringement charges. LimeWire was similarly sued by the RIAA in August, as well as Grokster, Napster, Kazaa, and many others. Some of these networks have been shut-down, had to shut-down, or have regrouped and come back reborn like Napster. Morpheus still holds out hope for some sort of appeal to work in their favor, but at this point the prospects don’t look too good, at least from my small corner of the great and powerful blogosphere. Where Morpheus ends up remains to be seen, and despite their court loss, there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel at least for consumers, with a few studios and companies starting to see that DRM-less music may be the way to boost sales.
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MySpace seems like Lake Wobegon gone horribly wrong: a place where all the women are fast, the men are hard-drinking, and the children take an above-average interest in imitating them. In August MySpace accounted for 81% of visitors to…

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Google, Social Software

It’s been a long time coming, but Google has finally handed over Orkut data to Brazilian authorities. Google is complying by surrendering data on users with the requests that were requested by Brazilian courts.

Brazilian prosecutors are investing illegal activity that might be going on inside of Orkut, Google’s social network, and sued Google for the requested information. Google has been fighting the requests because Brazilian prosecutors had requested information from Google’s Brazilian subsidiary, but Google US owns and runs Orkut from the US. Thus extending the process because all requests had to be sent to the California offices.
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Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Microsoft, Social Software

The MySpace competition is huge, and social networking is a giant place in today’s online world. It’s taken some time, but Microsoft is almost ready to launch their social network. Wallop has been around the Microsoft campus for awhile now, hiding down deep inside the MSN labs. Earlier this year Microsoft has decided to spin Wallop off as its own company, headed by Karl Jacob, the founder, and funded by a couple of VC companies. The difference between Wallop and all of the other social networks out there is that Microsoft’s version introduces forms of personal expression into the mix. Developers and Designers can sign up for a special program to design and sell interactive flash widget like modules, like backgrounds, animations, toys, games and mini applications, that Wallop users can buy and add to their sites.

Unfortunately at the moment, Wallop is by invitation only, and I don’t have one yet to test it out. So if anyone has a spare….or if anyone has had some experience using Wallop, we would all love to hear about it.

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Filed under: Internet, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Productivity, Web services, Google, Freeware, Social Software, Unix

Google has announced what is quite possibly the largest update to Google Reader since its inception, bringing an entirely new UI, more keyboard shortcuts, new bookmarklets and a whole lotta results from user feedback to the table. Overall, as a Google Reader fan for some time, I am pleasantly surprised by this wholly positive and usable update, but it isn’t without a few confusing quirks.

The first and most noticeable update is the radical change to Google Reader’s UI, bringing it more in line with the tried and tested UI of many other online readers, but still with much of the Google engineers’ unique genius baked in everywhere. Above you can see Reader has adopted the typical folder/grouping system on the left, while headlines can be listed on the right.

You can also chose to list your feeds and headlines in Expanded view (pictured above), flipping through each one with the traditional Reader and Gmail shortcuts of j/k and n/p. One feature I quickly fell in love with in this new UI is the way the List view allows you to page through headlines and expand individual articles within the list of headlines, like so:

Pressing enter expands a headline like this, while pressing it again collapses it back into uniform with the rest of the listed headlines. What’s even nicer is that n/p can be used in the list view like this, allowing you scroll through headlines without expanding them, while j/k let you expand each headline in place like I have pictured above - it’s your choice, and I thoroughly appreciate this flexibility, as it feels a lot more useful than my reigning champion RSS reader - NetNewsWire (Mac only).

Moving beyond the new UI however, Google has worked in a lot of smaller but welcome changes, such as a ‘mark all as read’ button, unread counts for folders and feeds, new keyboard shortcuts (including new ones for navigating feeds, tags and folders), an automatically generated HTML page for shared items (in addition to the RSS feed) for a sort of basic blog/linked list, a set of new bookmarklets, and much more. However, with all this new goodness, there are still a couple of kinks to iron out, and it’s a good thing they’re encouraging feedback. For example: with the transition, Reader seems to build a user’s set of folders/groups from their tagging structure, but the tagging system still exists for organizing feeds and headlines, in addition to the new foldering scheme for feeds. Pressing g + l to invoke the label selector (though ‘labels’ are now called ‘tags’ in the Settings) brings up a list of labels/tags, but selecting one actually choses a folder in the left column. Confused yet? Me too.

Another longstanding gripe still hasn’t been resolved with this new update: support for authenticated feeds. I’m sure the majority of the news outlets and blogospheres aren’t picking up authentication like a hot celebrity-inspired fad, but I have a couple feeds for which I (believe it or not) pay for, and I’d love it if they could join the Google Reader party with the rest of my 300+ feeds.

Aside from a few gotchas like this, which I’ll chalk up to a beta app taking a huge beta step, I honestly can’t say enough good things about this most major of updates. The revamped UI feels zippy, responsive and fundamentally more mature. Their already logical system of keyboard shortcuts has naturally evolved for the new features, and I can sincerely recommend Google Reader as a serious competitor for other online RSS services, and even traditionally more robust desktop apps. For more details on what’s new, check out the announcements on the official Google and Google Reader blogs, or dive in yourself.
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Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Microsoft, Social Software

Microsoft has released version 6.0 of its chat client Messenger for Mac. This version, like the previous one, requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later. New features include custom emoticons, integration with Yahoo! IM contacts, the ability to display the currently playing iTunes song (a la iChat), and the option to have multiple contact list windows (this may be helpful in decreasing the likelihood of accidentally sending a steamy IM to your boss instead of your significant other). Additionally, if you’re using Live Communications Server, you get the added benefits of secure chat, encrypted file transfers. Oh, and did I mention it’s a universal binary version? Add one more to the list of apps that will run natively on Intel Macs.

[Thanks, Spluch!]
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Piczo's traffic has grown 393% in one year (comScore Mediametrix) and now boasts 4 million unique visitors in the UK, reaching 60% of the young teen demographic in the UK. FULL ARTICLE @ NETIMPERATIVE Mark Brooks: I don't see…

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Cingular has teamed up with YouTube for an online promotion allowing independent musicians to submit videos that the YouTube community can then vote for. The four winning bands will appear on Good Morning America and receive airtime on Sirius….

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Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Google, Social Software

Google Notebook, the Ajaxy bookmarking app I praised when it launched back in May, has taken a cue from Writely and Google Spreadsheets and added collaboration features. Whereas previously sharing was limited to letting others view your Notebook, it is now possible to invite other people to add to and modify your Notebook. This could be ideal for group research projects, trip planning–basically any situation in which several people are all collecting information online for a single purpose.

In addition to collaboration, Google Notebook has a couple other minor new features, including improved drag and drop support, Trash and undo (so when you accidentally delete something, it’s not actually gone), and a Notebook gadget for Google Personalized Home. As always, I’m relieved to see Google is still developing this project instead of leaving it to gather dust.

[Via Lifehacker]
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“Content is King and Web design is Queen” - That fact reverberates in the mind of site owners and webmasters. Recently, there have been several alternatives to what must be considered 'queen' like linking, web metrics, interaction, relevance or…

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“Content is King and Web design is Queen” - That fact reverberates in the mind of site owners and webmasters. Recently, there have been several alternatives to what must be considered 'queen' like linking, web metrics, interaction, relevance or…

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Blogging, Freeware, Social Software

This one’s for all you Windows-using digg fans out there. For awhile now Mac users have had a swanky little application called DiggUpdate that presents a tidy little window with information about the status of the articles you submit to digg on your desktop. I’ve seen many comments from Windows users begging for something similar for Windows, and now their wish has come true. DiggUpdate is now available in both Mac and Windows flavors.

Of course you digg users are also using Netscape, right? Social news is the way of the future!
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Have you any e-book? Did you grant resale rights to accumulate earning possibilities? How do you start the selling process and end it with a sale? Some e-books don't sell as expected. What might be the reasons behind dismal…

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Google uses two indexes for its search results. The normal index and the supplemental results index. This article explains how to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google’s supplemental results.

Holiday season is fast approaching. In fact, it is slowly gathering the steam in the e-commerce arena. Busines owners are now busy contemplating on ideas that would trigger more sales. Further, some of these businesses have started with their…

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Filed under: News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Google, Social Software

While you were busy learning how to sync your Google Calendars and Gmail with Outlook, the search giant cranked out some unique new Calendar features and fired up their translation engines. First on the list is the addition of ‘web content events’ - you can now easily add icons to the top of your calendars that display the weather, phases of the moon and when new Google Doodles land on their search page. You can even publish this new data in the iCal format, and instructions on all this can be found at the announcement post.

The other big update is the addition of 17 new languages to the Google Calendar UI, including: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Polish, and English (UK) (those are all Links to Google Calendar in their respective tongues).

As usual, these are good updates to a nice Google service, but I can’t help dinging them for blatantly missing some of the fundamentals of the calendaring paradigm, such as a bloody todo list (like, um, every other calendar app on the planet) and the ability to set alarms on all events, instead of just those in the default calendar.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful though, as I am a happy user of gCal, and thankfully, users in 17 new languages can be too.
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Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Today Facebook, the U.S.’s second-largest largest social networking site, opened its doors to the world. With the long-anticipated addition of regional networks, new Facebook registrants no longer need an email address from a Facebook-approved college or company to join. Facebook’s Carolyn Abram explains the privacy implications of the change on the official (and frustratingly feed-less) Facebook blog, and there’s now a How this expansion affects you page as well. Facebook was originally planning to launch the expansion shortly after the launch of the News Feed, but after users had a bit of a privacy freak-out, they delayed the expansion to give the community a little time to get their heart rates back under control. There was still widespread resistance to the move, but nothing on the scale of the News Feed. Users seem pacified by the fact that college, high school, and work networks are still as exclusive as ever, and the riff-raff (like me) still can’t get too close.
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“A letter to the community from the employees of Tribe.net” Thanks to recent management changes, we, the employees, are taking back the site and are happy to announce some real improvements ( based upon the tons of feedback you've…

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