Archive for the ‘Applications’ Category
Is Pownce emerging as the new Twitter? March 3rd, 2008
There must be something in the air (pun not intended!) or it is that time of year again. SXSW is coming up in two weeks and I wonder if any particular service will emerge from SXSW as the Twitter of 2008? You may remember that Twitter rocketed in popularity during and after the 2007 SXSW and has been cruising since then. Unfortunately Twitter has also been plagued by a series of outages to the point where it is no longer news that Twitter is down anymore. That isn’t great news for Twitter and it must be really frustrating for the Twitter people that the service isn’t coping with the phenomenal demand.
It was probably only a matter of time before talk returns to Twitter alternatives like Pownce (although people who I have read who are talking about Pownce and Twitter are talking about each as having their place in the ecoystem rather than Pownce being a Twitter killer). There is a little buzz at the moment about Dave Winer’s post raving about the updated Pownce API.
Sorry Ev and Biz and Jack, but they got your number over there at Pownce.
I’ve been asking Twitter to support payloads for months now, and now I have what I was asking for, but it came from Pownce, and it’s beautifully implemented, far more than what I was asking Twitter for.
…
Twitter was my first love, but now I’m seriously considering a fling with Pownce.
Leo Laporte chatted to Winer on This Week in Tech 134 (looking forward to that one) and I am sure there will be even more about this in the coming days. What I am wondering is whether Pownce is going to suddenly pick up loads of users in the coming weeks due, in part, to frustration with Twitter going down so often. While Pownce and Twitter are intended for different things, you can use Pownce for status updates and IRC-style chats that people use Twitter for. There is even a mobile client for Pownce in addition to the AIR app. I am not saying Pownce is going to overtake Twitter and become the new black. I just think it will be really interesting to see what happens next.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, dave winer, twit, leo laporte
Posted in Applications, Blogging, People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
Afrigator stepped up a notch or three May 21st, 2007
I am, admittedly, an Amatomu fanboy and I have been a little unsure what to make of Afrigator since its launch. Both chilibean and one of my other blogs have been listed on Afrigator for a couple weeks now and while there have been a couple things I would have liked to see added to Afrigator, I have been happy to let the site evolve and watch that happen.
The Afrigator guys just announced some upgrades to Afrigator which are pretty snappy! There is a pretty detailed list of new features on the Afrigator blog so I won’t rehash them (I am sure a few other bloggers are doing just that anyway). Instead I’ll tell you what I think is really cool about the new feature-set.
When Afrigator launched a while ago I had a couple reservations about the way the content was being reproduced on the site. That issue was dealt with a while ago and you can no longer see the full content of a post on the Afrigator site simply by clicking on the title link. Beyond that it was a cool site that seemed to do a decent job, given its purpose to aggregate blog content from the African content. There were a couple niggling issues and features which were absent or just not quite up to scratch (blog stats were a little underdeveloped compared to similar services out in the Wild). Most, if not all of those issues I had with the original version of the site have been addressed and there are one or two extras I didn’t think of which make a difference.
The additional feature I like the most is the OpenID functionality so users can now log in using their OpenID rather than having to create yet another account. Not only can you log in using your OpenID credentials but you can now also use your OpenID credentials to replace your existing Afrigator log in (unless I have this wrong? Justin?). This is simply awesome because it doesn’t render my OpenID option useless just because I created an Afrigator account before it became available. This is a great example of a little thing that makes such a big difference.
Another addition is the ability to add multiple blogs to a single account. This feature has been in demand for some time now and I am glad it has been added to the mix. It is the sort of feature which is noticeable when it is absent and taken for granted when it is in place and that makes it essential, I think. Another handy addition is the ability to add tags, or labels, to your Afrigator page. These labels are basically the same as the tags in del.icio.us and very useful. Where labels differ from del.icio.us tags is that the posts listed on Afrigator don’t seem to have labels attached to them so it seems labels are really keywords that are contained within blog posts, rather than metadata (data used to describe the post). I’d like to see some way of adding labels to individual posts, perhaps when they are added to the “MyGator” page?
The site has also had a facelift and it looks a lot sharper and clearer than it did before. The basic design is pretty much the same. I do prefer the old tag clouds though. The new tag clouds seem a little cramped even though they are easier to read. Afrigator’s stats have also been beefed up and this is welcome improvement. Accurate and flexible stats are a must for this sort of service and this is one area where Vincent and Matt have done a great job with Amatomu.
On the whole, the new version is a great improvement on the older version and I suspect there is a lot more to come. I believe this is still version 0.2 Alpha and that means there is lots of room to grow.
Technorati Tags:
afrigator, amatomu, blog aggregator, blog search, justin hartman, mike stopforth, mark forrester
Posted in Applications, Sharing | Comments (0)
Introducing Google’s Presently April 18th, 2007
Google is going to launch a presentation web app (which I believe is going to be called “Presently”) to complement its existing pseudo-Office offering in the form of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It announced the new addition to its Web-based productivity apps on the Google blog yesterday in a post titled “We’re expecting” (love the title!):
Well, we tried to keep it a secret as long as we could, but to be honest, we’ve been dying to tell you about the bun we’ve got in the oven. We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.
The catalyst for this new offering was Google’s recent acquisition of Tonic Systems which is “a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management - Tonic Systems Builder, Tonic Systems Filter, Tonic Systems Transformer, Tonic Systems Viewer, and JarJar Links. Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools.”
Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt made a point of arguing that Google was not out to challenge Microsoft’s own Office suite with its Web apps. He spoke to John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday about the new addition:
“We don’t think it’s a competitor to Microsoft Office,” Schmidt said. “It’s casual and sharing, and a better fit to how people use the Web. My guess is many companies in the audience are building products like this or other variants of this using the emerging architecture.”
Regardless of what Google may say, an offering including a word processor, spreadsheet app and now a presentation app is bound to give non-power users a pretty decent alternative to Microsoft’s well built and yet expensive Office suite. There is a preview of what you can expect from Presently on Garret Rogers’ blog on ZDNet, certainly from the perspective of support for the PowerPoint format.
For more about Presently (or whatever it will actually be called), take a look at these sources:
Technorati Tags:
google, presently, google docs & spreadsheets, google office, office, microsoft office
Posted in Applications, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
Drug induced luxury car drivers out shopping for viagra … April 16th, 2007
If we took the spam we have been receiving in the last week or two as an indication of prevailing trends, that would seem to be who and what people on the Web are doing these days. Like many of you we are inundated with comment spam. It drives us nuts and even though our spam filters do manage to identify incoming spam as spam, we are still forced to scroll through pages of rubbish to find the few legitimate comments. Unfortunately we wind up spending way to much time doing this so we have decided that enough is enough. These spammers can take their erectile dysfunction afflicted, roadster drivers and go bug someone else.
As a last ditch effort to limit the amount of spam that comes in we have extended our Captcha verification tool to comments and user registration forms. If this doesn’t reduce the amount of spam coming in (the vast majority of which is anonymous as opposed to fake registered users) we will be forced to restrict comments to registered users. It would be really great if you would register anyway because registered users’ comments bypass our moderation queue and are posted immediately. You do have to be logged in to the site first, though.
Technorati Tags:
spam, captcha, spammers, driving us nutty
Posted in Applications, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
BT does Enterprise 2.0 March 27th, 2007
BT has launched an Enterprise 2.0 service called BT Tradespace which is aimed at SMEs:
BT Tradespace provides small businesses with simple online publishing tools that allow you to quickly and easily create and post content to the web.
Each BT Tradespace member’s page includes blogs, photos, podcasts, contact information, maps, virtual business card, and Click to Call … and there’s more under development
Members can create vibrant pages of content related to their business that they can easily and quickly update every day.
The service also allows members to connect through channels based on their industry and areas of interest.
More popular content is presented through the community channels and members will have an opportunity to “plug” content (Muti-style) and the most plugged content will also be shown on the relevant community channel.
In short, this service is really a sort of Facebook/MySpace for business. It is a great idea because it seems to make it pretty easy for SMEs to get into the social media space. This quote on Vecosys by Ivan Croxford expresses it quite well:
“We’re trying to solve a number of problems for small businesses,” Ivan tells me. “We know people have had trouble getting online full stop. The difficulties of SEO etc are tricky and can be costly. Small businesses don’t have the time or skills. BT Tradespace exposes the utility of blogging as it’s simple and easy to create presence for an SME.
“Rather than static marketing copy, we’re trying to get them into using it as a conversational marketing tool. We’ll see a lot of people put up one post and that’s it, but we have a woman blogging furniture in manchester who does it weekly.”
Incorporating new media elements into your business is not a prohibitively complex process. There is a lot of jargon going around but the principles guiding the adoption of these technologies are pretty straightforward - have better conversations with your customers and employees, listen to what is being said about you and share your knowledge (incidentally, this is what we are all about). From there it is really a matter of picking the right tools for the job so chat to people who know the tools, tell them what you want and go from there.
Technorati Tags:
sme, bt tradespace, new media, social media, enterprise 2.0, for business
Posted in Applications, Infrastructure, Tools | Comments (1)
Wikia.com and the path to profitability March 8th, 2007
There is a great article on CNNMoney.com about Wikia which was formed by the people behind Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Wikipedia is a non-profit service and you won’t even find Google AdSense on the site. It relies largely on donations to keep itself going.
Wikia is a hosted wiki service based on MediaWiki software (the same engine that powers Wikipedia). Users can create wikis of their own on Wikia and have them hosted there for free. There is a review process to ensure that there are no similar wikis already in place (if there are you will be encouraged to join those wikis instead). The revenue model seems to be advertising revenue (Google AdSense is on the site) using the huge numbers of people who visit the many wikis on the site each day. There are a number of really popular wikis on Wikia including the Muppet wiki.
What strikes me about wikis is that there is a strong sense that the wiki doesn’t belong to one person but rather to the community that updates it. With a blog there is a clear sense than the bloggers control the blog and pretty much own the process but with wikis it is the opposite. A person may establish the wiki and contribute to it but it belongs to the community at large.
(Source: Social Media)
Tags: wikia, wiki, mediawiki, jimmy wales, angela beesley, muppet wiki, wikipedia
Posted in Applications, People, Sharing, Wiki | Comments (0)
PBWiki, now with 30boxes February 27th, 2007
PBwiki (did you know the ‘PB’ is an abbreviation for ‘peanut butter’ from the assertion that a PBwiki is "as easy to make as a peanut butter sandwich"), the wiki engine that has been used locally to arrange events ranging from geek dinners to the 27dinners to the webpr+ conference, will soon have calendar functionality in the form of a 30Boxes calendar. The 30Boxes calendar will be added to PBwiki as a template option (if it hasn’t already been added).
This development is part of a partnership between the calendaring web application, 30Boxes, and the popular and very easy to use wiki service. This is a great addition to the service, particularly for groups who use PBwiki to arrange events. Of course it makes sense to use the new 30Boxes functionality on any wiki that involves some form of scheduling.
(Source: TechCrunch)
Posted in Applications, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
Spanning Sync Public Beta reopened February 5th, 2007
The day has come. The Public Beta test of Spanning Sync has reopened. The software is available for download but bear in mind that this is still beta software so make sure you backup your calendars just in case something goes badly.
Tags: spanning sync, public beta, download, test, google calendar, ical
Posted in Applications, Infrastructure | Comments (0)
Mac PR: both hands clapping February 5th, 2007
I just received an email from Apple. The message: “Go beyond Vista. It’s time to get a Mac.” Apple is known for it’s innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, so this instance is no real exception, however I still love the way they have taken the opportunity provided by Vista’s launch, as blogged by Paul earlier this week, to promote themselves. [1]
Here’s a screenshot of the email, the link is http://www.apple.com/getamac/
[1] For the record, I do not own a Mac, neither do I run any Mac products beyond iTunes.
Tags: apple mac, mac, apple, windows vista, vista, microsoft, mac os x, leopard, tiger
Posted in Applications, Devices | Comments (1)
Adium 1.0 released February 3rd, 2007
Adium is a fantastic instant messaging client. It works with most of the major IM services (GTalk, Jabber, AIM, MSN and Yahoo!) and gives you one application to use for all your instant messaging needs rather than having to open half a dozen applications to keep in touch with your contacts:
Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X, released under the GNU GPL and developed by the Adium team. With Adium, you can connect to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services and then chat with other people using those services.
Supported services
- AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and .Mac)
- Jabber (Including Google Talk)
- MSN Messenger
- Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan)
- Bonjour (Compatible with iChat)
- Gadu-Gadu
- LiveJournal
- Novell Groupwise
- Lotus Sametime
Notable Features
Adium is only available for Mac OS X users so this is yet another reason to consider switching to Mac.
One of the great features of Adium is how you can customise it. There is a variety of dock icons, emoticons, contact list styles, message styles, plugins, status icons and more available on the Adium site to help you achieve that perfect look and feel for the application you could find yourself spending so much time using.
This is definitely an application to have if you are a Mac user.
Tags: adium 1.0, instant messaging, adium, extensible, IM, Mac OS
Posted in Applications, Useful stuff | Comments (1)