TechAddress

10 Tools to Get the Most Out of GTalk

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:34:25 +0000

For those of us who are active Google Talk (GTalk) users, sometimes chatting is not enough. Luckily, there are tools to make your GTalk experience more interesting like VOIP, translations, and more. Here are 10 third party tools and special features that will help you get the most out of the service.

Which ones are your favorite? Know any more? Tell us in your comments.

Extended Talk

Extended Talk is a free addon for GTalk that brings in enhanced features such as making your chat windows transparent, changing font colors, message and typing areas, creating text filters, using smileys, and custom images. It also provides shortcuts to insert dates, time, IP address, email, etc. in your messages. Overall, the addon is non obstructive and fits quite well with the GTalk interface, while providing a few handy extra features.

Google Talk Shell

Google Talk Shell is another GTalk addon with some extra features that you might like. Firstly, it allows you to add several avatars and make them rotate in short intervals in your GTalk application. You can auto-hide the GTalk main window so that you have a large work area, or you can configure GTalk to always be on top of the desktop. You can also run several GTalk user names simultaneously using this addon. There is even an anti-boss hotkey to hide the GTalk window quickly.

Translation bots

Translation bots are described by Google as pieces of software that act as chat contacts and provide some fun or useful functionality. Whenever you need to translate any word or sentence from one language to another, you can send that as a message to one of the appropriate Google Chat translation bots. The bot then acts as a translator and replies to the translated version of your message. Of course you need to add the translation bot as your GTalk contact beforehand.

Currently there are 50 bots available in two language pairs. The names of the bots have been made of two letter abbreviations of languages, the English to French translation bot is ‘en2fr.’ To add the bots as contacts, you simple need to add the email of the specific bot in this format: name_of_the_bot@bot.talk.google.com. For example, for English to French bot, it’s ‘en2fr@bot.talk.google.com.’

Transliteration bots

Transliteration bots are somewhat similar to translation bots, but here they convert English sentences to scripts of various Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. You can add the bots using their names ‘en2hi’.translit, ‘en2kn.translit,’ ‘en2ml.translit,’ ‘en2ta.translit,’ and ‘en2te.translit,’ ending with ‘@bot.talk.google.com’.

Chatback Badge

Chatback badge is a nice little tool from Google that you can use to chat with non-Google users. The badge can be put on your blog, website, or anywhere you can embed an html code, and it will display your online status along with a ‘Chat with me’ message in a nice chat bubble. You can create the chatback badge in different styles as well.

GTalk Sidebar

GTalk Sidebar is a convenient way of chatting with your GTalk contacts using the Firefox sidebar. Every chat window opens in a new tab in the sidebar itself. You can make the GTalk application pop out in a new window if you wish. Although GTalk Sidebar doesn’t provide any additional feature, it can be another nice alternative, just in case you don’t want to open a Gmail window on your browser and don’t have the desktop client installed. An alternative to this addon is to save the GTalk Gadget as your Firefox bookmark and set the bookmark to load in the sidebar.

GTalk Profile

GTalk Profile is an online service that you can use to find other GTalk users from across the globe. You can simply click anywhere on the world map provided at the GTalk Profile site to look for users in that area. You can also look for users using its search box.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is not an exclusive GTalk application. What it does is update your status on as many as 21 of your social sites including Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Wordpress, Tumbler, Pownce, Blogger, Plurk, Xanga, Friendfeed, etc., and even Mashable, simultaneously. All you need to do is add Ping.fm as a contact in your GTalk application and send it to your status update as a chat message. You also need to create your account at Ping.fm and add your social profiles so that it can do the posting for you.

GTalk to VOIP

GTalk to VOIP offers a number of free and paid VOIP services that you can use with your IM tools including GTalk, Yahoo Messenger, and Live Messenger. These include incoming calls to your IM tools from any mobile, landline phones, or Web services; outgoing calls to SIP phones, Internet radio, video conferencing, offline messaging, IM interoperability, SMS service, etc. Payment can be completed through Paypal.

Inezha

Inezha allows you to use your Gtalk application as a feed reader. Simply send the RSS feed url to the Inezha bot on your GTalk and ask to be notified on all future updates. You can also access you online account at the Inezha site and add the feeds you want to subscribe to. There are also Firefox and Internet Explorer bookmarklets and widgets that you can add to your blog. Inezha also provides a social networking feature where you can add your friends and subscribe to their updates.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

18 Tools to Turn Firefox 3 into a Communications Portal

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:36:06 +0000

Source:Mashable!

This is a guest post written by Michael Cerda. He blogs about startups, people and the variety hour at Cerdafied.

Outsourcing product development (or parts of development) offshore sounds like a good idea at the time. After all, you can augment your dev group quickly and on the cheap. But it only seems to work under certain conditions; mileage does vary depending on the company. Longer-term enterprise development projects tend to be better suited for outsourcing than shorter-term consumer Internet projects for example (I learned this the hard way). It has to do with development cycles, level of skill required for tasks, time to market, and the ability to iterate.

Arguably, you shouldn’t ever completely outsource your product development. Some things are just too strategic to lose control over. If you do decide to outsource some parts, here are some tips.

1. Hire one of them

Hire someone locally who was originally from the country you’re outsourcing to. Oftentimes different languages or dialects exist in other countries, so be sure your guy speaks the lingo. Also be tuned into other cultural nuances (for example, make sure there aren’t centuries-old bad blood between your guy and the people at the firm you use).

2. Nurture them

You’ll want to take the time and make the investment in having an occasional call or even a visit to the offshore location. Offering a face and voice from the top helps gain buy-in, support and motivation for the project. Obviously if you have to do too much of this, it’s not worth it.

3. Package the tasks

Be mindful not to overwhelm them with a complex project with multiple touch points and dependencies. Have a baked, signed off spec completed and committed to and assign straightforward pieces of it. When you assign something, ask for a time/cost estimate which you can measure back to later. Once the work has been verified and tested you’ll be able to establish a baseline level of quality and performance; from there you’ll be able to give them more rope.

4. Top grade

Offshore dev shops tend to assign you a mixed team of some good folks, some ok folks, and some green folks. These proportions are simply part of their business model. Just don’t let it get the best of your development cycle and product quality. Ask for resumes and interviews of the people they’re assigning to your team.

5. Communicate with one voice

Use the guy from #1 to funnel all communications between your team and theirs. Besides language and time zone issues, there are project management and accountability requirements. The more chiefs you have, the more fingers you have pointing. You can’t afford the he said/she said.

Source:Mashable!

Firefox can be made into so much more than just a browser via its huge extension base. Yes, this means you can replace some of your instant messenger, chat and microblogging needs by adding just a few extensions. Here are 18 tools that will let you turn your Firefox 3 browser into a communications portal.

Whenever we discuss numerous Firefox add-ons, we like to remind you that we do not recommend you install ALL of them unless you like your browser slowing down.

Messaging

ChatZilla! - In a time before instant messengers exploded in popularity, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was all the rage, and it is still quite popular. This extension will add an IRC client to your browser so you don’t have to open a separate program.

Gabbly Chat Sidebar - A sidebar client for Gabbly chats hosted on any Web page or community.

Google Talk - Allows you to add Google Talk integration to your browser.

GTalk Sidebar - This sidebar extension allows you to use Google Talk in your window without having to stay on GMail all the time. It also lets you save yourself the effort of installing the stand alone GTalk application for your desktop.

Meebo - Adds integrated instant messaging via the Meebo system inside of your browser. In the sidebar you can see which buddies are online, as well as which system they are using, and when need be, you can drag links and images over to them. You can learn more about Meebo in this episode of Mashable Conversations.

SamePlace - Works in Firefox, Flock and Thunderbird to give you the ability to chat with your contacts on AIM, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Twitter and Yahoo.

SMS Sidebar - This extensions gives you the ability to send SMS messages to just about any phone in the world. It does cost money after the first 50 text messages, but seems to be reasonably priced and offers numerous features.

WataCrackaz AutoSMS - Allows free two-way SMS text messaging to phones all around the world and actually allows you to receive replies.

Yaplet - Adds the Yaplet chat system to your sidebar so you no longer have to switch tabs while you chat and can continue to surf as you talk.

Yoono - The Yoono sidebar can be updated with widgets for all major instant messengers.

Microblogging

FirePownce - An official extension from Pownce that allows you to update your account via a button added to Firefox.

Fownce -Allows you to post the current URL you are viewing to Pownce or just post a general update to your account.

Mahalo Share - Lets you recommend a page across numerous services, including Pownce and Twitter.

Shareaholic.com - Lets you update numerous services from one handy plugin, including Pownce and Twitter.

Twitkit - Highly customizable Twitter application that allows you to choose colors, look up your account information, manage your followers and more.

TwitterBar - An interesting extension for Firefox that allows you to use the browser’s address bat to also send Tweets to your account on Twitter.

TwittyTunes - Feel a burning desire to tell Twitter what you are listening to via FoxyTunes? This extension will solve your dilemma.

Twitzer - Twitzer is not a Twitter client, but a tool to help you get more than the 140 characters into that little box.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Twitter is Not a Micro-Blogging Tool

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:02:23 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Last week, it was very clear to most of us not in line for the iPhone that the most exciting aspect of the iPhone 3G release were the GPS capabilities. We haven’t seen more announcements for locationally aware social networks come across our newsbox here at Mashable (or anything that takes advantage of GPS technology) before or since.

One such network is one called Whrrl. It’s not particular to the iPhone, but it is one location aware socnet that’s been getting a fair amount of buzz lately. Kristen initially reviewed it here at Mashable, describing it as “Yelp Plus Twitter.”

The topic that Sean and I grapple with today on Mashable Conversations is exactly why it is you’d want the whole world knowing exactly where you are at any given point. Aside from just wanting to have a little anonymity, it seemed to us that we’d occasionally want to slip down to the bar without the wife knowing. Or perhaps go with our friends to a batchelor party while still being eligible to run for public office a decade later.

The internet has a long memory (at least a year long). We’re already responsible for every errant word spoken ont he net. Would you like to also be responsible for everywhere you’ve ever been?

We explore this a bit further in the show, and then are joined by the folks from Whrrl at Seattle SummerMash, as they tell us a bit more about the service.

Never Miss an Episode!

Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here (video feed).

Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here (audio feed).

Source:Mashable!

Blogging for all intents and purposes has been around for about the ten year mark. During that time it has gone through many changes as more platforms and tools became available that made it easier and easier for just about anyone to become a blogger. Styles of blogs have grown as well with everything from the original personal weblog style right through to today’s political blogs, tech blogs, and one of the hottest niches around – mommy blogging.

Through all this though, there have been those who have wanted to make blogging even easier and as such we see things like tumblr and now a new one called posterous, which allows you to email your thoughts to the service and they get posted automatically. Then amongst all this we have the arrival of things like Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, which strove to lower the bar even further by making everything we typed into their character limited text boxes a new form of blogging. This new form was quickly named micro-blogging and without any real questioning it became the defacto term for all those millions of tweets flying around the Internet like annoying little gnats.

It amazes me how anyone in all seriousness can even consider the inane twaddle that permeates the Internet from services like Twitter as even coming close to blogging or micro-blogging. Has anyone really paid attention to what is being said on Twitter these days – that is if you can make it through the growing amount of spam that is occurring. Sure micro-blogging is a valid term when used to describe things like tumblr or posterous but not when used to describe Twitter.

If anything, as a blogger I find it insulting that Twitter is even considered to be in the same field as blogs or even micro-blogs. The idea that someone can send a 140 character twitpitch or let the world know where about in some city street they are is considered to be blogging is stupid and devalues the hard work that most bloggers do everyday.

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a place for Twitter. On the contrary it serves a good use in keeping you in contact with friends, but that isn’t blogging. The fact is that Twitter is no different than another service that we have had for a very long time on the Web and it’s called Internet Messenger or Gtalk or any number of messenger type services. There is nothing wrong with admitting that Twitter is just another form of IM but trying to make it more important than it is by equating it to blogging in any form is wrong.

Twitter is not blogging. It is not even micro-blogging. It is just another glorified messenger service with a fancy Fail Whale graphic for when it decides that it can’t even be a messenger service.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.