TechAddress

Google Chrome: Object in Mirror is Much Larger Than it Appears

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:35:07 +0000

Google Chrome has been grabbing the tech world’s attention for a few days now, and its impact on the market is showing to be significant. Massively significant. Permanently significant. That goes for everything from conceptual execution to the download count. According to Hitslink Market Share, it’s already grabbed north of 1% of the browser market. And Hitwise shows Google’s Chrome page to be nearing the top 10 of sites offering software downloads of any kind.

Big news? Yes indeed. And the reason for this is entirely evident. The blog world has been frenzied for the last 72 hours over this, and it’s been channeled through all the big media outlets, including print, television, Web. That’s on a global scale. So of course the number of downloads will be high. And the barrel of fodder is far from empty, so I imagine this boomer of a browser is going to climb a good bit higher still. The trend says so.

The question to ask, though, is just how high will it go? Is it going grow so large as to eat others’ shares of the market? Is it going to be a Red Alert phase at Mozilla for the foreseeable future? Will IE decline further? What about the bottom feeders, Opera, Safari, et al.?

In short, the answers are: pretty high; yes; yes; yes; those’ll budge a little. Indeed, Chrome is that big. It will be, anyway.

Let’s look sensibly at the situation here. Chrome was released to a resounding applause. Everyone’s voiced pros and cons, more the first than the second. And it hasn’t even had time to make itself feel briefly at home on the Mac OS X. Not to say that Mac adoption will draw enormous oohs and aahs, but OS X users tend to be a more tech savvy bunch. More in tune with the ways of this progressive chaos we show such love for. I count myself part of that club. And they’ll download in great numbers as well, and you can bet that those numbers to come will bump Chrome up even further. The biggest loser in that case will presumably be Safari, which, despite its conveniences, is hardly the force that Firefox has become.

Now, in Firefox’s case, it’s a far more complex picture. I dare say Mozilla isn’t very happy with Chrome’s release, because it can only slow the rate of Firefox 3 downloads. And Mozilla is very much about growth at this point. It has been for some time. It saw that, given the right amount of noise at the grassroots, it could yoink some pie from MSFT. And more and more. The record set for browser downloads in June only furthered its advantage. And now Google comes along, promising something open source as well, with some core aspects that surely make folks at the Foundation envious, if not a bit sour. Mozilla will continue, no doubt. But it sees that it isn’t the only slick magician in town, and having to compete while watching its own tail isn’t something it’s really very used to. Sure, Mozilla thinks the IE team has moved forward a bit with its feature set, but it can’t seriously think that what Microsoft offers is really so cool. Mozilla is the bad-ass benchmark. Now Google has stolen some of that hard-earned thunder. Even though Google has done so completely legitimately.

It’s true, Google says it’s not out to conquer. It’s lending a helping hand. So everyone is better off. But as with anything it’s done as good or better than other big-name Internet companies, once it tastes success, it cannot help but add fuel to the fire. And add fuel it will. Enough Web users will be happy to try something “better,” “more convenient,” “more reliable,” “safer,” even though the gauges for such metrics are hugely subjective and vary case-by-case, that the company will see that 1% climb to 2%. And well beyond, I think. No, not to the point of surpassing IE. But a low double-digit it will be. Give it 12-24 months, and see how the field looks then.

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Circos Relaunched: Search for Food and Bed Via Consumer Reviews

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:35:03 +0000

Source:Mashable!

If you’re in search for two things of major importance each day, they undoubtedly are 1) food, and 2) a roof. Which is why a search engine by the name of Circos, which we spotlighted briefly back in January and has just been re-launched, is so compelling. The items on which it pays focus are twofold: restaurants and hotels. That’s all. For now, at least.

What’s most interesting is the way Circos is organized. It can be used as something of an arbitrary, emotion-based search utility. It provides a menu of checkboxes for users to specify as a personality match. Once a choice is made, a click of the ‘Go’ button near the center of the page takes you to a list of results. The accuracy of the engine when used in that manner is of course dependent on one’s location, which Circos determines automatically, so if you’re scouring Small Town, America, what follows might be considered lacking. Or, if you have trouble taking the keywords for what they’re worth, you can customize a search via the box at the top of the page. Enter a city name, type of food, type of hotel (“luxury,” “cheap,” etc.), and proceed to the next page.

For each result you can see short quotes from reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and Yahoo Travel, plus an option on view what people speak of when they discuss a particular place. Click through to a specific page and you’ll see a graphical view of what people have said. And if you chose to observe tags in “word view,” and you specify one label or another, the corresponding reviews will emerge in kind.

Granted, such options are a bit more playful than some users might like. But the overall objective is achieved, I think. It’s a less clinical option for discovering places to eat and/or stay than services which deliver massive amounts of information to sift through, chock-full of figures, dollar-for-dollar comparisons and so forth. If you want to take a public opinion-influenced approach to your search for restaurants and hotels, Circos is something to consider.

It isn’t just visual appeal that Circos provides. It’s really quite useful. Other engines will do more. Some, much more. But it’s a pleasing alternative.

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Bookmark Real World Destinations With We Heart Places (The Startup Review)

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:33:44 +0000

Source:Mashable!

The Real World Change 2.0 series with Leslie Poston is an ongoing look at how people are using social media tools and their personal and professional social media networks to bridge the chasm from the Internet and social media bubble to the real world to do a variety of things to effect true change.

Change can come in waves or inch along in baby steps. When you have a great need for positive change, worrying about the level of impact your effort may have or the recognition it may attain for you only slows the change down. It’s better to think of it in terms of driving action.

People in the social media space are starting to take this innate ability of social media to drive action to heart. Often, social media lovers are accused of existing in a social media bubble made up of what non-Internet types consider inane activities like Twittering or posting to sites like FriendFeed and Ning.

These activities may seem inane to some, but they carry the power of immediate connection. We toss the word conversation around like so much candy, but the power of social media has never been solely about the conversation to me. Instead the power of social media is the ability to make genuine and valuable connections between businesses or people in a matter of moments.

Leveraging these connections to effect change offers us a power to offer help greater even than some government functions. Recent examples of social media banding together online to organize and help people offline happened this past weekend as Hurricane Gustav barreled down on the Gulf Coast.

Within hours of the projected path hitting weather sources, social media types like Andy Carvin have spearheaded efforts to create a network for those fleeing from the hurricane to get help if they need it, and for those headed that way to help to find out where they were most needed.

How did something that takes massive, well funded governments and government agencies days to set up take mere hours? Carvin used tools like Twitter and Ning and the social network of contacts he had built up on tools like Twitter to form a group of willing volunteers, with each volunteer assuming a task and running with it to the next level.

Carvin’s effort to help get a network in place for Hurricane Gustav (and later to have one ready for Hannah in case it escalated to hurricane levels) is only one recent, large scale example of the fat mobilization potential of social media. Social media has also been instrumental in finding people emergency housing in floods, helping arrested bloggers, tracking police raids at the Republican National Convention and more.

In this series I will be taking a look at our efforts for change in social media and the efforts of others in the social media space. I will be showcasing various ways we are organizing our massive networks to make things happen offline, and I will be writing pieces that help you mobilize your own social networks to make change happen for you close to home.

(Image via Flickr/ Ion-Bogdan Dumitrescu)

Source:Mashable!

Despite the reams of new job postings being released day in and day out, the treachery of the job search has been greatly facilitated with online engines and listing services. And specific to the tech sector, sites like Dice, and even various new media publications have really put strong emphasis on niche positions and connecting the seeking with the seekers. Still, having to browse multiple sites for something like a spot within a startup isn’t especially easy. Enter, HotStartupJobs.

The service is just starting out itself. It marked its official debut only hours ago. But already it has pulled substantial amounts of listings from various sources and RSS feeds from around the Web, including sites like Dice, TechZulu, ResumeBucket, KillerStartups, and NeoHire. Mashable, too. Hot Startup Jobs pulls from numerous sources, and designates available work to unique channels.

For instance, if you happen to take well to website programming, Java or IU projects in particular, or regard yourself as mobile savvy, or even desire a title of blogger or copywriter, this engine makes it that much easier to find the right gig, short-term or long. And each channel can be subscribed to, so you’re always kept aware of items that enter the fold.

It’s well-crafted, overall. There are small accouterments that the service’s designers have included for users to browse in addition to the main course. Industry news takes a sliver-sized column. But it holds well to the idea of a basic resource. Quick to navigate and eminently useful, if you want a big catch to rummage, this is the place to check out.

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: We Heart Places

20-word Description: It is delicious for places. We Heart Places is a utility for bookmarking places and addresses in the real world.

CEO’s Pitch: We Heart Places is a tool we built to scratch an itch of mine. I’d like to be able to note down places I’d like to visit, then recall them on a city-by-city basis. We built it as a social utility, because it’d also be awesome to recommend places to our friends when we knew they were going to be visiting a city, as well as being able to see my friends recommendations on a city by city basis.

Mashable’s Take: Many are wont to get up and go, depart from their daily routines and travel the globe in search of geographic fulfillment (or something to that effect). We make lists of destinations. “When the time is right, I’m going here, here, here, and here. And here. And there.” In that case, there are plenty of simple ways to chart one’s course, as it were, with online mapping and photography and the like. Only several days back we stole a glance at Placefav, which, put briefly, allows users to place a dozen locations on a page to share with friends and Web users at large. That goes for places near and far. We Heart Places is very similar in concept. They differ in two ways, though, both of which make We Heart Places worth a browse and maybe even a sign-up regardless of one’s interest in Placefav.

First, the purpose of We Heart Places is to do as much memorializing as planning. You can of course share where you’ve been. Nothing really stops you from doing that. But if you want to tell the small, budding crowd at We Heart Places your nomadic, Earth-bound goals, you can do that, too. On a technical note, We Heart Places connects with the vast pool of photography on Flickr. Placefav is about Panoramio. That is because Placefav is more about location, and where the user is currently in relation to his or her favorite places. We Heart Places takes a more generalist approach. This I happen to enjoy as much or perhaps more than the strict 100-Main-St. approach.

On to the topic of utility. Wonderfully enough, We Heart Places is easy to operate. Immensely so. The process of adding a location, complete with imagery, can take mere seconds. For example, say you want to visit the Eiffel Tower sometime in the future. Just enter the place of destination, click on the location field, and the website automatically produces the basic address. Add a brief memo to your post if you wish, and you can then browse a pool of photographs culled from the public Flickr archive tagged with corresponding metadata. That’s all there is to it. Furthermore, you can edit after the fact, so if you change your mind on the graphic or want to rearrange your list for any reason, you may.

As you can see by the frequency of updates published to the website’s blog, development of We Heart Places is ongoing, and so things you might find absent or lacking may well be addressed in short order. But on the whole, it’s safe to assume things will remain much the same as they are today insofar as design and function. Which is good. That in my view was what previously set Placefav in a unique light when it debuted last month. And it is what makes We Heart Places just as intriguing - if not more so.

HotStartupJobs Helps You Find Your Next Startup Position

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:32:19 +0000

Source:Mashable!

(Image via Flickr/ Ion-Bogdan Dumitrescu)

Source:Mashable!

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Top 10 Web Applications for FriendFeed

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:30:44 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Over the last few months, a plethora of tools — addons, scripts, Web apps — have emerged using the FriendFeed API. Here is a list of the top 10 Web applications that you can check out to get the most out of the service.

Which do you use? Tell us more in the comments.

NoiseRiver

NoiseRiver adds some neat extra functionality to FriendFeed, like rating other users and shared items with keywords and descriptions such as ‘I love it’ or ‘I don’t care.’ Another nice NoiseRiver feature is that it gathers all the comments clusters about the same subject and groups them in one place so that you don’t have comments about one particular topic scattered all over. You can also share video and audio on FriendFeed.This is one of those applications that might tempt you to use it permanently instead of the normal FriendFeed site.

FriendFeed Spy

FriendFeed Spy is a fun and useful FriendFeed Web application. The site displays the FriendFeed public timeline with every new shared item appearing automatically on top of the page, without you having to refresh the page. You can choose to pause the scroll if you want. You can comment or like any shared item on FriendFeed Spy and it will reflect on FriendFeed. The scroll has a ‘filter by services’ option as well. For example, you can choose to see only items that FriendFeed users have dugg, twitted, or bookmarked in Delicious.

FriendFeed Links

FriendFeed Links is a meme tracker that finds all the links shared on FriendFeed and displays them neatly with the names of FriendFeed users who have shared them. There is a homepage section where you will find the links shared by the most number of people, a Digg section that shows stories dugg the most number of times, recently popular links, and recent stories. You can also customize FriendFeed Links by links shared with various services such as Digg, Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Netvibes, and Delicious; order by number of shares or item dates; keywords, or sorted by items in a specific time period.FriendFeedMachine

FriendFeedMachine is a neat FriendFeed Web application that displays your FriendFeed friends along with the icons of various services they use to share items on FriendFeed. When you click on one of these icons it displays the latest items that your friends have shared using that service. You can view that item without having to leave the site, thanks to a nicely implemented sliding window.

The basic idea behind FriendFeedMachine is that currently FriendFeed shows you the shared items of your friends chronologically and sometimes you might miss out on what your real friends have been posting. FriendFeedMachine seeks to resolve that issue by listing individuals instead. You can even choose to set your ‘Close Friends’ from your contacts.

MioNews

MioNews is another FriendFeed Web application with some nice features like bringing you stories according to the preferences you set, in a reading pane similar to that of MS Outlook. The left hand sidebar lists your topics of interest, FriendFeed rooms, and your friends. Your friends and rooms can be grouped in folders. You can also use MioNews to post entries to your blog, Twitter, and FriendFeed simultaneously. There is also a browser bookmarklet that you can use to share stories to MioNews.

FriendFeed Grid

FriendFeed Grid is a fun Web application that provides nice looking grids of the profile pictures of various FriendFeed users segregated by ‘20 most subscribed to users,’ ‘10 most commenting users’ and just ‘random users.’ When you hover your mouse on each picture, the profile names are displayed. There is also a list of 500 FriendFeed public rooms with the highest number of members, and a list of top 100 most linked to pages in FriendFeed. Then there is an interesting image comparison tool as well, though not useful, might make you smile a bit.

FriendFeed Like Compatibility Calculator

FriendFeed Like Compatibility Calculator, like the names suggests, calculates and displays FriendFeed users who have shared the most number of likes with you. Talk about who shares the most common interests with you on Friendfeed, use this tool to find out. You can filter the calculation by opting to include other commenters, posts you have commented on, and users whose posts you liked the most.

Frienderati

Frienderati is an Alltop page displaying the top FriendFeed users and their most recent shared items. As Alltop mentions in its site, this page can be a good starting point to find FriendFeed users who you can check out and follow, if you are a complete newbie on FriendFeed.

Moopz

Moopz is an interesting tool that aggregates separate conversations, links, and likes on a particular topic on FriendFeed and presents them in a single combined thread. Moopz also tries to provide a summary and image of each item and also tags each item automatically. There is also a list of most active conversations in the last 24 hours. This could be a nice way of reducing the noise on FriendFeed and choosing items to follow more clearly.

FriendFeed Embed

FriendFeed Embed, coming straight from FriendFeed, is a recently launched collection of widgets that you can embed on your blog or sites. The FriendFeed badge shows off your profile picture, number of likes and comments, and the various services you use. There is also a ‘Share on FriendFeed’ link and a feed widget, chiclet widget, and a status widget. The tool has been much awaited and soon we are likely to see many bloggers using these widgets. It’s definitely worth a mention on this list.

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Get Buzzed on FriendFeed With FFHolic

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:30:24 +0000

Source:Mashable!

I’m sorry, I can’t help it - I’m a sucker for mashups. Which is why I have to bring the latest one to your attention: Tumbltape.

It’s exactly how it sounds: a Muxtape for Tumblr. Just when you thought Muxtape was gone for good, it has inspired John Zanussi and Adam Gotterer to catch on the music sharing wave and create Tumbltape, which takes the latest songs (aka - audio files) from each user’s tumblelog and creates a playlist.

When new songs are added, your Tumbltape playlist is automatically updated. Plus, you can choose to let Tumbltape figure out the artist and track names based on the text from your post, or you can type in the artists and track titles yourself. Simple as that.

Secretly I am wondering how long this will last, but if the Tumblr community loves it and Muxtape users pick up on the service it will certainly be hard to shut down, at least until the RIAA finds out about it.

Source:Mashable!

Have you been wondering how many rooms on FriendFeed are private? Do you know how many active and public users there are? Are you curious as to whether people “comment” or “like” more?

Do you even care?

For those people who have fallen head over heels for FriendFeed and have been searching for a way to see “what’s popular,” I introduce to you FFHolic. The site, which just launched yesterday, is a place where FriendFeed fanatics can check out what the latest buzz is.

Visitors can search through ‘most liked entries and videos,’ ‘most commented entries and videos,’ and ‘most popular users.’ The idea seems to be taken blatantly from Twitterholic, but unlike its “light” rival FFHolic provides more than just lists of names. It gives insight to popular trends on the rapidly growing social network and serves as a makeshift database for statistics on usage.

The site itself is pretty raw at this point — still in Beta stage — and there’s not much to look at. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if it improves and becomes the natural meeting site for FriendFeedaholics Anonymous.

Here is a peek at the latest FriendFeed commentary around FFHolic.com:

User FFHolic.com said: “FFHolic.com is publicly launched for beta. We still have hundreds of things to do. During our beta launch please report any problem you experience. And of course your ideas…”

Showing the most popular people just reinforces the “contest” mentality. As you have data at your disposal to activity per user (comments/likes, etc.) wouldn’t it make more sense to also show most active individuals and show correlations between popularity and activity? - Louis Gray

How many servers are you guys running? The search page keeps crashing under load I assume. - Jim McCusker

the layout is all screwed up now - the right side content is filling up the page and squishing the left side users list… - Steve Isaacs

+1 Louis. I agree - Kyle Lacy

Plus it looks lousy on a 1024×768 screen. - Sean McGee

Your FF Badge is rather long on the width side - Outsanity

@Louis Gray: That’s a great idea thank you. - FFHolic.com

@Jim McCusker: We are working on that problem. Thank you. - FFHolic.com

You can follow the Mashable staff who actively use FriendFeed here:

* Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins

* Sean P. Aune

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Think Facebook Beta is Sexy? Lots Don’t. Yet.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:35:31 +0000

Source:Mashable!

New versus old. That’s the divide currently being managed by Facebook across its membership. From the vantage of Compete.com, the new option offered by the network has its fair share of adopters. But many are reverting to the original, too.

It is said that in mid-August, Facebook saw 60% of its users venturing to try the new site. Sounds good, right? Sure. Of course, the company has made it a point to perform a gradual rollout of the update, so the general trend to click for the refresh does steal some of the wow from the above mentioned figure. Furthermore, 40% of users who have trialed the update are choosing to go back.

There are two lessons to take from this. First, if users are given the option to make an impermanent move, many will play, but some won’t stay. Second, Facebook is smart to have made this choice available. It’s completely sensible. The update is a big change. Particularly for developers. And Facebook has already incurred its fair share of negative press from the user-powered Beacon marketing adventure. So something of this scale is better to lay softly on the membership. Something along the lines of, “Hey, check out this new candy we got. No contracts or long-term agreements. Honest. If you like, you like. If you don’t, no problem.” Facebook touts more than 100 million users. It surely wouldn’t want to tick off anywhere close to half that pie.

It’ll inevitably have to force some holdouts, for the simple fact that it has to manage its Platform, and the cloud isn’t like your local OS. And more broadly speaking, it’ll be some time before Facebook clocks a near complete majority for its summertime launch. Several months more, perhaps. But a swift mandate wouldn’t have done kind things to its reputation among users. It would have only created a headache for those not ready to “buy in” to the release. In all, the adoption rate seems pretty good. Not great. But good.

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