Last week we introduced you to FriendDeck, a new online application that lets you monitor FriendFeed in a way that's very similar to how the Adobe AIR app, TweetDeck, monitors Twitter. Within FriendDeck's columns, you can track FriendFeed searches, users, friends, lists, rooms, and more.
Recently, FriendDeck developer Paul Kinlan released an Adobe AIR application of his FriendFeed tracking tool. Although still rough around the edges, this app has potential to become a viable alternative interface to FriendFeed for the service's heaviest users.
In recent days, an application designed for Google's mobile operating system "Android" was accused of wiping data from user's phones. It's not known whether or not the rumors are true, but once again questions are being raised about the safety and security of Google's open platform versus more controlled and regulated platforms like that of Apple's iPhone. For supporters of the iPhone, a story about a rogue Android application proves their point that Apple's oversight and review process is necessary for keeping consumers safe.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're big fans of URL shorteners (although not all URL shorteners mind you). We use them for microblogging sites where we have to conserve characters, tracking how many people are clicking through links we share, and keeping groups of links organized. That's why we like Sqworl, a URL shortener that acts like a lightbox for links we're sharing.
Noovo is a full-on lifestreaming / blogging / bookmarking / everything (except social network) app that launched out of private beta last week. It calls itself a "social discovery engine"; and recommendations technology is part of the overall package. The company Noovo is based in Slovenia, has been around for a long time and counts Esther Dyson amongst its investors. It took us a while to grok the service, but essentially Noovo is a content sharing application similar to Tumblr - but a lot more full-featured. In particular, as well as enabling you to aggregate and add content - as Tumblr does - Noovo lets you discover new content via automated recommendations.
Anyone who has ever built a Web site for a client knows the painful process of gathering feedback on page layout and navigation. That's what makes sketching wireframes such a valuable technique for eliciting those responses - before spending time and energy on design and coding. But trying to capture critical feedback on Photoshop wireframes can be arduous in its own right. iPlotz promises to make the entire wireframe process much easier - and more affordable.
Thanks to MP3s and the Internet, we now have millions of songs readily available to us with the click of a button, but, paradoxically, this has often made it even harder to discover new music to listen to. Every online music store and every social network that focuses on online music, however, now features some kind of music recommendation system, and some services like Pandora or Slacker Radio are indeed nothing else but highly sophisticated music discovery engines. In this post, we will look at the different approaches behind some of the most popular music recommendation and discovery services.
Microsoft today announced the first (and probably only) release candidate of Internet Explorer 8. In terms of its look and feel, IE8 feels a lot like IE7, though Microsoft has made a lot of changes under the hood. IE8 features a new rendering engine, support for CSS 2.1, and a 'smart address bar' that is very similar to Firefox's 'awesome bar.' IE8 has also taken a page from Chrome's playbook and now opens a separate process for every tab. This means that IE8 won't crash outright just because of problems with one tab.
RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.
PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.
Social media has been exhilarating so far - but are you ready to see it become a much bigger target for nefarious forces as it becomes more mainstream? WebSense Security Labs reports that the President's pre-election social network My.BarackObama.com, is being used by at least a handful of parties to spread malicious Trojans to unsuspecting network users.
Now that the "most powerful man on earth" is a "web 2.0" fan, we expect to see attacks and security challenges emerge on a much more significant scale.
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