Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write Javascript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.
It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4 minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.
The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, is set to begin shortly at 3.30pm PST (6.30pm EST). This week's topic is online music and we have 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, whose startup Webjay was acquired by Yahoo in January 2006; and Rob Williams, Senior Vice President of Music Software at RealNetworks. The show is hosted by Sean Ammirati and also features myself and Marshall Kirkpatrick. We encourage you to listen to the show live and ask questions via the chat in TalkShoe (our hosts). The podcast widget is below...
Mixi, the giant Japanese social network, announced last week that it is now acting as an OpenID provider. The implementation is particularly sophisticated, Six Apart's David Recordon says they are the first major provider to support the exchange of user profile data via OpenID. The service is also providing a mechanism for users of 3rd party sites to limit access to content elsewhere to visitors who are their friends on Mixi.
All of it begs the question - where's Facebook with OpenID and why do we need the proprietary framework of Facebook Connect when Mixi is doing many of the same things with open standards?
Just in time for the first day of the Democratic Convention in the U.S., Kevin Rose today announced a new feature on Digg: Digg Dialogg. The idea here is to allow the Digg community to submit questions that will then later be posed during interviews with "thought leaders and tastemakers." The first person to be interviewed this way is going to be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The interview will be streamed live online on Wednesday the 27th.
Just a few days ago, we wrote about OpenClip - an open framework for implementing copy and paste on the iPhone. Developer Zac White had found a loophole that allowed for the creation of a shared clipboard, as long as all applications followed the same guidelines. Today, however, Zac announced that the next generation of the iPhone firmware (2.1) will close this loophole. OpenClip will still work within a single application, but sharing between applications is now impossible.
Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online. However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow. Partly that's due to user reticence: writing a document online and sharing it with others (via Google Docs, Office Live, Zoho, or whatever you use) is one thing. Entering sensitive financial information into your browser is harder to adjust to.
This week's RWW Live podcast show (Monday 3.30pm PST) is on the topic of online music. We have 2-3 very special guests (so far we have representatives from Yahoo and Imeem, please email me if you're interested in coming on the show, we have 1 final place to confirm). We've been writing a lot about online music lately. Last week Marshall asked: What would the perfect streaming music look like?. We got some great comments to that. But we're also interested in what your current favorite streaming music service is.
Machines can do wonderful things. Side by side with the rise of a new world of publishers, the computer scientists of the world are cranking it up as well - building new ways to create value from the sea of data being published by people. And then they take their work and they sell it to advertisers!
Barf-o-rama!
One of the many philosophical questions that came up in this year's fabulous Gnomedex conference was whether PR agents should vote for their clients in anonymous online polls or not. We argue that they should not due to conflict of interest, others argue that anyone should feel free to vote in such polls and tiny startups would be crazy not to rally all the support they can get.
Maybe it's no big deal, but we think it's an interesting question. What do you think? Let us know in the poll below, even if you work in PR yourself.
It's the weekend, so time to review the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we looked at the first reported Android phone, checked out the winners of the Firefox 3 Extensions contest, reviewed Microsoft's new 3D online photo app, dabbled with screencasting, and reported on Pandora's imminent demise. On the trends side we tried to define our perfect online music service, investigated whether FriendFeed's popularity is fading, checked out 10 emerging Web platforms, and polled you on the most exciting web apps on the Web today. We also introduced you to ReadWriteWeb's new feature: the Enterprise Channel!
