Social Networking and Web 2.0

A new Search Engine has been started by former Google employees. Could this be the next Google killer? How will this affect Google and your rankings?

Filed under: Utilities, Social Software, web 2.0

We haven’t written much about Dopplr, a social network for travelers, since we talked about its launch last year. If you’re a jetsetter, or even someone who travels a couple of times a year and has a lot of friends, we’d like to direct your attention to the new features in Dopplr’s “Copenhagen” release, which has been out for less than a month. The key improvements include the ability to add trips by e-mail, Twitter and SMS, and the introduction of public profiles.

These new methods of adding trips are a followup to the iCal and Google Calendar support that Dopplr added earlier this year. Now you can either automatically update your Dopplr by updating your calendar, or you can send in your trips in almost any way you could wish for, short of mental telepathy. Public profiles mean you can show your trips to anybody, not just your Dopplr contacts, and choose how much information you want to share. At this point, we’re basically looking for excuses to travel, just so we can use Dopplr.
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Filed under: Blogging, Social Software

Adobe AIR-based microblogging client Twhirl already supported Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic, and now its coverage of the world of mini-updates gets even broader with the addition of Identi.ca. Identi.ca is something like a less-popular open-source version of Twitter. This is a big deal for the Identi.ca folks, because Twhirl may actually be better-known than their service.

Along with potentially pumping up the userbase of a fledgling microblogging site, Twhirl has also position itself to be to these micropost what Trillian and Adium are to IM. Keeping several services readily accessible from the same app is a proven winner when it’s done right, and Twhirl delivers on the usability and appearance side of things. It was already one of the most popular clients back when it could only handle Twitter, and its main competition is going to come from some of the better Twitter-specific clients that attract people who don’t use the other sites Twhirl handles.

[via ReadWriteWeb]
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Web services, Social Software

At some point you’ve probably used evite, either by receiving or sending an invitation. In the past the online application was great for sending invitations but it was a one shot deal - create and send an evite and when the event is over, the evite is dead.

Last year evite went mobile in an effort to keep up with all of us and on Friday, evite went 2.0. Users can now integrate photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and playlists from Imeem. The changes should make it easier to integrate content you already have on the web into your evite options instead of requiring separate uploads of information.

The redesign also attempts to make evite easier to navigate, introducing more tabs for organizing different sections of the site. Developers have also added some custom options for the way hosts and attendees can interact with each other.

[via Mashable, CNET]
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This week, we’re taking a look at a new ranking patent that has been granted to Yahoo. This patent can help you to better understand how to get higher rankings on Yahoo and Google.

Filed under: Developer, Blogging, Productivity, Social Software

SweetCron is a bit of self-hosted lifestreaming software from Yongfook, the creator of opensourcefood. It’s kind of like a hybrid of Tumblr and Friendfeed. While SweetCron hasn’t officially been released yet, Yongfook is already using it on his own blog, so we have a pretty clear idea of what you can do with it: feed in photos, videos, status updates, bookmarks, etc, each with a distinct look, so a reader can distinguish content types at a glance.

If this sounds a bit like Tumblr, that’s probably because part of it uses the Tumblr API. SweetCron is customizable and extensible via new PHP classes, though, and it lives on your own domain, so you have greater control over the data you’re feeding into it. The basic theme can be seen on Yongfook’s blog, where he’s testing it out, but he says you’ll be able to develop your own themes through a template editor. If you’re interested in SweetCron, sign up to be notified when it launches.

[via ReadWriteWeb]
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It’s a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video.

For example, someone asked “is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to stop it from killing five people?” The responses ranged from “Right: he’s fat” to “Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore.” This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful — because hey, they’re at zero now, and it can only get better.
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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Social Software, Browsers

Flock has released a second public beta of Flock 2, a web browser based on Firefox 3. What sets Flock apart from Firefox is the integration with a ton of social networking services including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, PhotoBucket, and more. There’s a blog editor for updating your web site from the browser, and a media bar for viewing images and videos shared by your friends without navigating away from your current web page.

Flock has always been based on Firefox, but what sets Flock 2 beta apart from Flock 1.x is that the beta version is built on Firefox 3. That means you get a redesigned location bar, a new bookmark manager, and a new rendering engine that helps most web pages load faster.

The Flock team has addressed over 175 bugs that were found in the first beta of Flock 2. Aside from bug fixes, there aren’t many new features in Flock 2 beta 2. But the browser is based on Firefox 3.01, which means it also includes some important security updates. So if you’re using Flock 2 beta 1, we’d recommend upgrading.

[via Mozilla Links]
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Filed under: Productivity, P2P, Social Software, Search

Attention, law-abiding citizens! If you believe in BitTorrent as a means of distribution for large files, but you’re concerned about the claims of piracy that are often associated with it, you should take a look at YouTorrent. Despite having to shut down for a while because of legal issues, YouTorrent is back in operation, with a reported 67,170 torrents that are all legal to share.

YouTorrent is a meta-search that can find verified torrents across a number of popular torrent sites, including Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova’s featured torrents section. With all those sites combined, you can use YouTorrent to search over 6TB of data. This is a very good thing for the torrent community in general, as it shows how widely BitTorrent is used for non-piracy purposes.

[via TorrentFreak]
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Open Source, Social Software, Beta

The newest version of the VLC media player isn’t ready for the streets yet, but if you’re they type who doesn’t mind risking your precious computer for the sake of satisfying a primal curiosity for experimental software, the pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 is now available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, anybody with a Windows 98/ME or OS X 10.3.9 machine is out luck since such technology is no longer socially acceptable as those operating systems are no longer supported.

It now supports Last.fm (AKA Audioscrobbler) straight out of the box disk image, so it’ll update your Last.fm account as you play music through VLC. To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber, but don’t forget to visit Control interfaces to check the box labeled “Submission of played songs to Last.fm.”

Other changes also include better tag support, more subtitle support, improved mouse gestures, album art support, Shoutcast TV listings, and a lot more that we don’t want to bore you with, but you’re more than welcome to check out the whole list on the VLC forums.

[via CyberNet]
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Filed under: Internet, Features, News, Social Software

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.

Continue reading 10 + tools to pimp out your Friendfeed

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Do you want to get customers from outside the United States? Is your business located in Europe or another part of the world? There are a few things to consider if your website is aimed at people outside the United States.

Filed under: Features, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Only a few months after its last major release, the WordPress crew has just unleashed WordPress 2.6 into the wild. While the changes with this update aren’t as visually sweeping as those ushered in with 2.5, but they do add some great new options and optimizations. WordPress encourages users to upgrade, as the old 2.5 branch will no-longer be maintained, and they have outlined the upgrade process here or you can use the fantastic automatic-update plugin.

We’ve been playing around with 2.6 on our local installs since the first beta was released, and we think this is a very, very solid release.

The WordPress team posted video showing off some of the new features:

Read on for our take on the new WordPress!

Continue reading WordPress 2.6 released

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

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.
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Facebook will soon be rolling out a new site design that, among other things, will change the way your profile looks. But you can check it out today by logging into your account and then visiting www.new.facebook.com.

One of the most prominent new features will be an emphasis on the mini-feed. In fact, it might be safer to start calling it a news feed, since it’s not so mini-anymore. When you first view a profile, what you’ll see is a list of recent activity on that account.

You can also click on tabs for Info, Photos, or Boxes. Info brings up your contact information, group membership, and other info. Boxes shows all the Facebook apps that are currently littering your main profile page. And we’re going to let you figure out for yourself what shows up in the Photos tab.

[via Mashable]

Update: Facebook seems to have disabled the www.new.facebook.com page sometime in the last few hours. But trust us, it looks something like the image above!
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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Social Software, web 2.0

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.

[via Sarah in Tampa]
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Filed under: Social Software, AOL, iPhone

One of the most striking things about the first crop of iPhone apps is the divide between those that work with the phone’s user interface, and those that either don’t take advantage of the phone or ignore the design specs altogether. The AOL Instant Messenger app for iPhone scores points in some UI areas, but could be more intuitive and feel more like an iPhone app in others.

We’ve got no complaints about the look of AIM, but there are some places where it doesn’t feel right. For example, we were really hoping for a horizontal mode in this app, to take advantage of the wider keyboard. Groups are supported, but you can only view them one at a time, which makes them much less useful than on desktop versions of AIM. While a mobile AIM app like this is a dream we’ve had since high school, we favor the more intuitive Meebo mobile web app. It supports mutliple chat clients, too … can we get an app store version of that?

Oh, and here’s a tip, because we’ve seen a lot of people confused by this: to change your screenname, you have to go to your iPhone Settings. It’s not in the AIM app itself.
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Favthumbs takes a visual approach to your del.icio.us bookmarks. Instead of the usual text based Links found on the Del.icio.us web site, Favthumbs displays image thumbnails of your bookmarks giving them a Web 2.0 look and feel.

No setup is required to use Favthumbs, simply enter in your del.icio.us user name and Favthumbs will generate thumbnails of all your bookmarks in either a grid or carousel (think cover flow) layout. You can further narrow down your bookmarks by clicking on your tags to the right of the screen.

We found that it took a bit longer to display our bookmarks on Favthumbs than using del.icio.us directly. This delay may be the result of Favthumbs fetching the images. But if thumbnails are your thing then you might want to give Favthumbs a try.

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Filed under: Social Software, iPhone

Sometimes Download Squad has to agree to disagree about a new app, and this is one of those times. Although some on the team have knocked the iPhone version of Twitterrific, I actually like it better than its big brother on the desktop. What can the iPhone version do that the desktop version can’t? Well, for one, it can pop Twitter open within the app - sometimes you want to scope someone’s page (to see what a friend was replying to, for example). I haven’t seen another iPhone app that uses the same trick to browse web pages without quitting and switching to Safari.

Just like the browser trick, the rest of the UI is elegant. Tweets look great and are easy to read - the premium version lets you switch to a lighter theme that also looks good, if that’s up your alley. @reply Links are clickable, and short profiles are viewable without opening a webpage at all. I’ll grant that there seem to be some issues with icon caching - when a tweet goes off-screen, the icon has to be reloaded when you scroll back to it — but I’m not sure if that’s an iPhone issue or a Twitterrific one. Throw in the ability to update your location with the iPhone’s built in location services, and this is an app that uses the platform to its fullest.
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Filed under: Developer, Social Software, iPhone

Slick UI seems to be the norm for most ‘big name’ iPhone applications on the AppStore. Twitterrific easily gets the top spot in terms of having attractive UI and navigation. However, UI and usability are not synonymous. When I use my phone, I want to accomplish what I want to do quickly and easily. Unfortunately Twitterrific falls short in a few area which makes it one of the most frustrating apps to use on the iPhone.

Until recently, the only way for developers to test an iPhone application was to use the simulator. While it does a great job in allowing developers to see and interact with the app as they develop it, it doesn’t show how the app performs in real-life situation.

There are two major differences between the simulator and the real iPhone that are at play here. One is the computer speed and the other internet connection speed. Even the slowest MacBook Air runs faster than the iPhone and thus any performance issue would be masked. Likewise with internet connection, there is no straightforward way to simulate the speed and latency of a EDGE connection and therefore any deficiency of the code in the app would not be exposed until the developers try it out on the real iPhone with spotty EDGE connection.

Twitterrific suffers from both of these problems. The scrolling performance of the message list is so jerky and slow that initially I thought there was something wrong with my iPhone. As I waited patiently for the list to scroll up and down, I also noticed that Twitterrific loads and re-loads every single user picture, even if it has previously been loaded. I stared at my iPhone in dis-belief because I could not comprehend how any sane developers would be as inefficient as that. My hunch that the reloading issue is tied to connection speed was confirmed last night when I got home and connected to the net via wi-fi. Both scrolling and picture reloading sped up because of the much faster connection I have at home.

Continue reading iPhone App Review: Twitterrific exercises your EDGE connection and your patience

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