Are you a .Mac subscriber who's been using the built-in bookmark syncing app? Come Sunday that service will no longer exist as part of the MobileMe transition, so if you want to do one last sync you've got to get it done this weekend.
Shortly after the MobileMe announcement last month Apple sent out an e-mail to current .Mac subscribers detailing this change. Friday, the company extended the transfer deadline to July 6, along with providing a how-to guide to make sure you've got everything synced up one last time. You can get full instructions on how to do the sync here.
The July 6 deadline, which is Sunday, leads me to believe that the MobileMe changeover may be dropping a day or two early from the expected July 11 release date.
If you're at work and your co-workers won't stop chatting, there are two options: either tell them to go talk elsewhere or get a good pair of earplugs and/or headphones. If you've gone for the latter and can't seem to get over the concentration hump of focusing with music blaring, there's SimplyNoise, a white noise generator that runs right in your browser.
I've had a white noise loop kicking around on my iPod for years, and it doubles as a great way to get in the zone for napping. In SimplyNoise's case, you can dial in how much noise you want with a simple volume slider that's independent of your system volume. This works great in theory, but managed to crash my browser nearly every time I messed around with the slider, so your mileage may vary.
If you're looking to get a similar white noise experience on your computer, there's also a standalone player over on Download.com.
If you're a serious airline geek like me, you've saved every airline boarding pass you've ever used. No, it doesn't make sense but you do it anyway. But until recently, my boarding passes sat in a box with really no practical use except for the occasional bookmark. That was until I learned about a Web site that lets you put your flight history to very good use.
FlightMemory.com is a fantastic and free Web site that allows you to log your commercial flights into a database that will then give you oodles of cool statistics. You can see how long you've spent in the air, how many miles/kilometers you've flown, your total number of flights, your shortest and longest flights, a map of all your routes and your top airlines, airports, routes and aircraft types. FlightMemory even will tell you how how many times you've circles the Earth, and how many times you've flown to the moon and the sun. Logging in all those flights does take a lot of time, but the results are worth it once you add everything in. Though my boarding passes only dated back to 1996, I was able to recall most of prior flights from memory (geek alert!). For many flights I couldn't recall whether I had a window, middle or aisle seat, but the site will track that as well.
And abroad
(Credit: FlightMemory.com)
According to my profile I've circumnavigated the Earth 16.47 times and I've flown to the moon 1.7 times. I've barely made it to the Sun but I doubt I I'll fly 93 million miles in my whole life. My total flying distance is 410,056 miles, which translates to 39.01 days in the air. Yet that's nothing when compared to my friend who is a flight attendant with United Airlines. He's flown 3.56 million miles (that's 14.92 trips to the moon) and has spent 10.93 months aloft. And he still has flights to record.
FlightMemory also lets you purchase a poster with a world map of all your routes. I want to make it to South America before buying mine, but I'm saving space on my wall now.
Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It's time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? HeySpread, a service from the folks at Particles was just updated Thursday morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.
Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they're there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It'll also let you compare it with other videos (even if they're not yours).
In case you're already entrenched in YouTube, a built-in tool called YouClone will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.
The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three 5 cent credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked, and tracked. If you're a videographer looking to get a video out there it's not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth.
If you're a cheapskate like me, there's also a free video stat-tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services, though, you're on your own.
Video chat tool TokBox on Thursday morning quietly slipped in a new feature called public feed, which lets anyone with a Web cam leave a message for others on the service to reply to. Until now, the service has been mainly a P2P chat service between people who know one another, but this new feature is turning it into a social network for budding Web cam enthusiasts.
TokBox's new public feed lets you post a message to the entire community.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Seesmic, another video start-up, has had this as its main feature until recently, when it's gone toward blog owners to get them to use its video recording and threading for video comments.
One thing that separates this new feature from Seesmic's is that your replies don't show up underneath other people's videos. You can reply to anyone's public video directly, and even call that person, but others won't see your response, making the conversation a little one-sided. Still, it's a nice addition to viewing what other people are up to without instigating a live chat with them, and I can see publicized replies being added later on down the line.
The feature goes hand-in-hand with another people-finding tool that was recently introduced. If you're friends with another TokBox user and you two share similar friends, it'll pull up a listing of 'people you may know' the same way Facebook does.
The service also recently introduced AIM and MSN integration, so you'll be able to pull in your buddy list from either of those services and chat with your buddies on the service's Webtop.
Facebook chat users have also not been left out in the dark, as the company quietly released a Firefox plug-in Wednesday that lets you add video chat to Facebook's chat service. Once installed, you get a new option in FB chat to send someone a video chat request which will send them a link to a special TokBox room where both of you can talk without leaving the page.
Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your user names on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon and Yelp.
What's nice is that Swurl will retroactively seek out all your old posts and filter them in. Each post is set up by your day of activity, so if you didn't add anything to any of these services there simply won't be a post. You can also view your entire stream of activity in a large calendar, called a 'timeline' that can be perused by year (check out mine here).
Besides aggregating your news feed, Swurl has a social component that lets you do the same with others. You can follow other users just like you would with Twitter or Tumblr, and their streams of information will show up in chronological order in the friends tab. You're also able to see their friends list, and dig into their timelines to view their past activity.
There's already an active community of Swurlers using the service. Advanced users should also not shy away from what seems like a very simple tool; you can drop in custom CSS, tweak the colors, and look and feel of your page down to a very high degree.
One thing missing is a way to create entirely new posts through Swurl, so it's definitely not attempting to take over standard blogging platforms. FriendFeed, which essentially does the same thing as Swurl, will aggregate your business from all these networks and also manages to add its own publishing tool to boot. There is no such system on Swurl at the moment, but there should be.
Swurl turns your social activity stream into both a blog and this handy timeline. Here you can see shared pictures on Twitter, links on Delicious, and Twitter tweets--all on the same page.
Google is making its Google Talk instant messaging application available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch.
One of Google's software engineers posted the news in a blog on Wednesday.
(Credit: Google)
'In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you're on the move, too!' Adam Connors, of Google's mobile team said in the blog.
The application doesn't require any software to be installed or downloaded. Instead it works within the phone's browsers, so users can simply go to the site www.google.com/talk, sign in and start chatting.
Connors pointed out that there are a few differences to using Google Talk on the iPhone versus a computer. For one, to receive messages, the application needs to be open on the Safari phone browser. When users navigate away from the Google Talk window in the browser, their status is set to 'unavailable.'
That said Google has tried to keep the experience close to what users experience on their desktop or laptop computers. They can select contacts from a quicklist, search contacts, and manage conversations.
Announced Monday and now live for all registered users, Digg's new recommendation engine adds a new layer of social context to the upcoming section that lists stories dugg by other users and how much their reading habits match up with yours.
Like I said earlier this week, it's a two-fold effort: one to give the social-networking element of the site some love by giving users more exposure to like-minded people, and another to make sure the site's massive influx of submitted stories gets a little more attention.
The problem is, the new system does little to solve that second problem, and in fact has taken the site a step backward from its previous version.
This no longer exists.
I speak of course of the removal of a very necessary feature called the cloud view. This would take the list of stories from just 15 a page to hundreds of headlines in a huge swarm. Better yet, those stories would be sorted in chunks (by the hour), and were set up to let you quickly eyeball stories that had begun to gain traction by headline size and color.
The cloud view has up and disappeared on us. Attempting to go to an old link with it enabled will give you an error page, and there's not a way in the user preferences to toggle it on and off. This means to go through a few hundred stories in the upcoming section, you'll need to page through at said 15 pages at a time. This wouldn't be such a big issue at a few hundred a day, but as founder Kevin Rose said Monday, we're dealing with an excess of 16,000 submissions--a number that's only getting bigger.
The fix:
The first thing that needs to be done is to bring cloud view back, but I'm almost forgetting in my nostalgia that it was a flawed system to begin with.
Cloud was great, but it was not easy on the eyes. Headlines were small, and the only way to get around that was to increase the text size in your browser.
Digg's Swarm offers an interesting prospect--tiny headlines that can expand to unveil nearly the entire entry.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
What could make it even better is something that already exists as part of Digg labs, Digg's playground for visualizations put together by the folks at Stamen Design. One in particular, Swarm is one of the most popular and jaw-dropping cool ones on there. It tracks stories in little flying blobs. Clicking on any of these will expand it with the title, description, and current digg count. From there you can dig deeper (no pun intended) and see the actual Digg submission page with user comments and all sorts of sharing options. Thus the exploration process is complete.
Applying a similar model of swarm to cloud view is a very feasible way to make the section far more useful. People could see headlines and simply click on them to know more without having to visit another page on the site and get lost from the upcoming section entirely. Likewise, the new recommendation engine could highlight items worth looking at, without relegating them away from other submissions that might catch the user's eyeballs.
I'm afraid in the current state the upcoming section is certainly more targeted, but it's pulling users away from some of the discovery that makes Digg so fun and engaging, which is what keeps users like me coming back. Without that, it's just another popular link site.
