Features

The app color codes all the differences between the versions of the document. Hovering over one of the boxes with a different version of a part of the text gives you the option to accept or reject a change. You can also add new text to a document within the app and make minor formatting changes to the text (bulleted lists, italics, bold, etc.). At the end of this process, you can save the newly compiled document for further editing in your word processor. 

CompareMyDocs does have quite a few limitations. It can't handle images and tables, for example, and footnotes simply become part of the text. Because of this, the service works best for relatively straightforward documents as you will have to add all of these assets back into the text after you finish your comparison.

API

TextFlow also launched its new API today. This API, which will be available free of charge, allows developers to integrate TextFlow's document comparison service into their own applications. This would be a great addition to other online office suites and online storage services like DropBox and Box.net, as Josh Lowensohn points out on CNet.

Conversations Instead of Email

To initiate a conversation, you first have to sign up to the service or sign in with your Twitter credentials, which doesn't take more than a minute. On the website itself, Nurphy looks a bit like a cross between Twitter and an email client. After you have signed up, you can start a conversation with anybody who is on the service already or by email. Recipients who don't want to sign up for Nurphy can continue to reply to messages by email.

Conversations on Nurphy are shown in a Twitter-like timeline in reverse chronological order. Conversations can be public, private or by invitation only (though still visible to the public). Public threats - like Nurphy's own customer service site - look a bit like forums and Nurphy recommends that you post links to these public conversations on your social networking profiles so that you can have a 'real' conversation with your friends. Without threaded conversations, however, it can be hard keep track of conversations. Instead of using sub-threads like Yammer, Nurphy borrowed Twitter's @reply structure.

It is clear that Nurphy's designers paid a lot of attention to detail. If you ever registered for a Gravatar in the past, for example, it will automatically choose this picture as your profile image in Nurphy. The service also offers a nifty mobile website, which looks especially good on the iPhone.

Needs some Fine-Tuning

The service, however, also still needs a bit of fine-tuning. You can't edit messages once they have been posted - the only option is to delete the whole message. It can also take a few minutes before an emailed message actually appears in a conversation. There are also a few small design flaws that take a user out of the experience. When you add a message, the whole page reloads, for example, even though the system seems perfectly capable of adding incoming messages to the conversation without a reset.

It almost seems like Nurphy is trying to keep things too simple in its current iteration. While we understand that the company is trying to make it as easy as possible for new users to get started, it would be nice if you could set up a private Yammer-like network for your friends or colleagues, for example.

Mark Up Design and Code

Using the app couldn't be much easier. In the visual part of the app, you can add callouts to any part of the page. Once these are saved to Notable's web service, other team members can see these callouts, add their own, or discuss the design in a comments section underneath the screenshot. The code editor, which is somewhat reminiscent of a simpler version of Firebug, also allows you to quickly annotate any part of a website's HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code.

Once a screenshot is saved and uploaded to the site, it can be shared by email, through a private or public URL, and embedded into any other web page. Users can also download a PDF version of the screenshot and annotations. Of course, users can also continue to add more annotations after the screenshot has been uploaded.

While the Firefox plugin represents the easiest and fastest way to use Notable, you can also simply upload any image (a design mock-up, for example) to the service or use a bookmarklet which also works in IE7 and Safari.

iPhone

The iPhone version of Notable is limited to uploading screenshots to Notable, but while it doesn't do much more than that, it makes for a good companion piece to the web service and should come in useful for designers of iPhone apps and mobile websites.

Pricing

The free version of Notable allows users to create one workspace and collaborate with up to three users and store up to 3GB of data. For $24/month, Notable users can work with up to 5 users and create an unlimited number of workspaces. The service also offers accounts for groups with up to 10, 25 or 50 users. The paid accounts also come with additional security features.

Verdict

Like many of the best apps we have recently seen, Notable was developed internally because none of the available apps really fulfilled the requirements the ZURB team had. The service works without any hiccups, is easy to use, and clearly focused on giving a specific set of users the right tools to get the job done without being encumbered by lots of extra bells and whistles.

NeighborGoods is currently in alpha testing and accepting users by invitation until October 7th, when it launches publicly. But it is already gaining traction on Twitter (where Krimmel has over 12,000 followers) with people who have early access to the website, like @typefiend, who shared this note:

"Set up my first #Neighborgoods transaction. Someone's borrowing the Bissell Carpet Cleaner for some pet cleanup. http://bit.ly/lh6gR"

Krimmel said she's reaching out to church groups, school groups, green organizations, and mommy groups to get them active on the site and to help identify what goods and services NeighborGoods should target. The site will also launch a Facebook Connect feature.

"We think people will share with people they know at first," says Krimmel. "We want to get people over that hurdle and start telling the story of things: power tools, ladders, camping gear, bicycles. Those are the things we all have in the garage that don't get used very often. I'm hoping that the groups feature will have people sharing all kinds of crazy stuff."

NeighborGoods is fairly intuitive to use, but its success will depend on the quality and usefulness of items offered by the community. A quick look this morning found items ranging from an old analog TV to a wireless router to someone's dog (condition "beat up"). The policing of what's made available and whether the site monitors users will be key to its development. Users are rated, similar to how sellers are ranked on eBay, but what's not clear is what recourse someone has if they don't get a favorite book back or a neighbor breaks their lawnmower.

The service is one of several new barter-type platforms to emerge in the past few months. Where Couchsurfing left off with the post-college hostel crowd, Caravan is picking up, providing access to house-swap listings and rentals for creative professionals. And hungry Angelenos are using Fallen Fruit to find in-season treats from trees around L.A.

All of these projects seem to have a two-fold purpose: getting resources that you need or want, and making new friends in the process. Is using NeighborGoods easier or more productive than just ringing the doorbell? That remains to be seen.

Guest author: Laura Hertzfeld is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. In addition to writing for ReadWriteWeb, she is managing editor of EconomyStory.org, a Public Radio Exchange (PRX) project aggregating public media coverage of the economy.

On its overview page, PostRank will display standard metrics like total page views, a PostRank engagement score and, optionally, the number of Twitter followers you have. PostRank Analytics also offers a wide range of additional features, ranging from daily 'Concierge' emails with a summary of your blog's engagement activity to very detailed reports about specific posts.

The most interesting data can be found under the 'analyze' tab. Here, you can see a mashed-up view of all the posts on your blog and drill down to specific metrics for every post. PostRank aggregates data from all the major social networks and sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook, delicious, Reddit, and digg. In addition, it also uses BackType to track conversations around posts and displays traditional metrics like number of unique visitors and bounce rates from Google Analytics.

Most of the info in PostRank Analytics can obviously be found for free on the Internet already, but getting an aggregate view of all of this data definitely gives you a new way to track engagement around your blog posts. PostRank Analytics is obviously not an enterprise-class social media tracking service like Radian6 or Sysyomos' MAP and Heartbeat, but for $9 a month, it provides a lot of value to publishers who are looking for a convenient way to track engagement around their posts across a multitude of services.

Focus on Narration

As Brainshark's CEO Joe Gustafson and David Klein, the company's product director, pointed out when we talked to them last week, today's presentations at conferences or business meetings either include too much information per slide or consist of nothing more than just a few words and images per slide. While it is great that a lot of speakers make their presentations available after a public talk, most of these slides mean very little without the narration of the presenter. By giving presenters a wide range of options to add narration to their slides and to add videos and other documents, myBrainshark hopes to bring this context back to these disembodied presentations.

In comparison with Slideshare, myBrainshark is more flexible when it comes to how a presentation can be organized. Inside your presentation, you can easily switch back and forth between documents (Brainshark supports Office 2003 and 2007) and videos, for example. A Brainshark presentation doesn't even have to include a PowerPoint file - you can also use the service to voice-annotate a whitepaper, for example, or to narrate that exciting Excel spreadsheet you worked on all weekend long.

Focus on Professionals

While the company is mostly targeting business users - something that's clearly in Brainshark's DNA - users can also easily create a photo slideshow with the service. While Brainshark is marketing this feature as an opportunity for real-estate agents to showcase their offerings, nobody is going to stop you from putting up a narrated slideshow of your latest family picnic, either.

Selling Presentations

MyBrainshark also gives professionals the ability to sell their presentations. While anybody can register for a free account, Brainshark will give professionals the opportunity to go through a vetting process and then sell their presentations on the site. One example currently available on the service is a presentation about sexual harassment prevention for managers, which is selling for $15. These professionals (Brainshark calls them 'Learning Providers') can set their own prices for these presentations.

Verdict

Overall, the fact that Brainshark has been in this business for 10 years clearly shows in the product, which is very polished. Even though it only offers a subset of the features available in Brainshark's enterprise product, myBrainshark still offers more features and flexibility than most other online presentation services.

]]> Sponsor

As the company's founder and CEO Ilan Abehassera told us earlier today, Producteev wants to be a "multichannel group productivity application" that goes far beyond simple task management for groups. The most interesting new feature Producteev launched today is the ability to "crowdsource tasks." This features allows users to make some of their tasks public and publish them to their Twitter or Facebook feeds. These messages will then include a shortened link back to Producteev, where your friends, colleagues, and random followers can provide you with answers or ideas (after identifying themselves through Facebook Connect or Twitter Connect). Basically, this feature allows you to manage all the answers you would usually get as @replies on Twitter, for example.

FriendFeed for Productivity Apps

Producteev also offers what it calls a "FriendFeed for your productivity apps." The service can aggregate the activity from team members on Zoho, Google Reader, Docstoc, GitHub, SlideShare, and others. The company will continue to add support for other services, including Google Docs, in the near future. If a team member uploads a new document to Zoho, for example, a notification will appear in the other team members' Producteev real-time live feed, which is available on the site and in the mobile and desktop apps. This feed was clearly modeled after the Facebook news feed - down to the notifications icon in the bottom right corner of the window. Just like in FriendFeed and Facebook, users can 'like' status updates and comment on them.

In addition, of course, Producteev also offers all the standard task management features one would expect from a modern task management applicaiton, including the ability to delegate tasks to other team members. Users can also upload files and Producteev offers a basic revision system for these files as well. Another nice feature is that users can add new tasks by sending a DM to Producteev's Twitter account or by sending an email to Producteev.

These social features also set Producteev apart from some if its competitors, including Basecamp. It is also important to note that Producteev offers apps for a wide range of mobile phones, including the iPhone (iTunes link), Android, Windows Mobile, and Nokia S60 phones. In addition, there is also a cross-platform Adobe Air app and a Blackberry client will be released within the next couple of days.

Pricing

Producteev offers 7 different account types, ranging from free trial accounts with three users and 10MB of storage ($5/month after the free trial) all the way up to the Gold business account ($99/month) for up to 100 users and 1GB of storage. There are three different tiers of business accounts (Bronze, Silver, Gold), all of which feature customizable dashboards, sync with Outlook and iCal, as well as priority support by email.

There is also a free account for students, with support for up to 40 users. According to Ilan Abehassera, Producteev's founder and CEO, the educational market is clearly on the company's radar and Producteev is working on a number of deals that would provide a white-label version of its service to universities and colleges.

Get a Free Gold Account

Producteev gave us 10 Gold accounts ($99/month) to give away to our readers. These will be valid for one year. If you want one, leave us a comment below within the next 24 hours and explain how you would use this application for personal or business use. We will pick the 10 most interesting comments and Producteev will set you up with a Gold account.

After testing Opera 10 for a while, it quickly becomes clear that it is a perfectly capable browser. It's got everything the majority of users would ever want, ranging from the 'speed dial' homepage to a sidebar for taking notes, which are synced between different machines, just like your bookmarks. There is a 'magic wand' that automatically fills in passwords from Opera 10's built-in password manager, mouse-gestures, real-time fraud protection, a BitTorrent client,  and the tabs now optionally show a rendered version of the page for a more visual experience. The 'visual tabs' can also be put into a sidebar, a nice feature in the age where vertical space is limited as users have moved to wide-screen displays.

Opera 10 is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris.

Speed

In our informal tests, Opera 10 couldn't match Firefox, Safari 4, and Chrome in most benchmarks. On a MacBook, Safari finished the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 711ms while Opera needed over 5700ms. In daily use, however, these benchmarks tend to mean very little and we barely noticed any difference.

Even though Opera has always been a good browser with a very passionate user base, it never quite caught on with mainstream users. Opera 10 is definitely Opera's best browser to date, but chances are that even this new version won't help Opera to gain a lot of market share as other browsers now have the momentum. However, if you haven't looked at Opera for a while, now is a good time to give it a try again. And if you often find yourself in a situation where you have to deal with a sluggish Internet connection (airports, hotels, etc.), Opera Turbo alone makes this a handy browser to have around, even if you don't make it your default browser.

In case a flight is indeed canceled, WorldMate offers a built-in hotel search courtesy of Hotels.com. In addition, the app also offers users the ability to find alternative flights, as well as weather forecasts, a tip calculator, and a currency converter. All of these are available in the free and paid versions of the app.

What makes the app stand out, though, is that you just have to email your travel confirmations from airlines and hotels to WorldMate and the service will automatically translate these documents into an itinerary and display the info in the iPhone app. On iTunes, a number of users complain that WorldMate wasn't able to understand their email confirmations. For me, this worked perfectly, though your mileage may vary.

In this respect, the app is quite similar to TripIt, which also converts confirmation emails into itineraries and displays them on the phone. TripIt's iPhone app, however, does not send out push notifications.

Overall, the app is definitely aimed at the frequent traveler, though it can still be extremely helpful if you are just going away for a short trip. I tested it during a recent weekend trip and it worked like a charm. When my flight was delayed, I promptly received an update and the app also notified me of a gate change long before the gate agent even made the announcement.

If you frequently find yourself wandering down airport concourses, WorldMate is the perfect app to have around. You don't have to constantly update the airline's website or check FlightStats to see if your flight is on time. Instead, WorldMate will just automatically let you know if something is wrong.

WorldMate is also available for the BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS.

Get WorldMate Pro for Free

WorldMate offered us 15 free pro versions for our readers. Just send an email to rww AT worldmate.com and WorldMate will contact you with more details on how to claim your WorldMate Gold invite.

When Posterous launched, the only way to upload content to the site was to email it to post@posterous.com. If you hadn't already registered an account, Posterous would automatically set up a blog for you and email you back with all the details. The iPhone application follows a similar philosophy, though with a strong focus on pictures and videos. You don't have to register for the service to upload pictures - your new Posterous domain name will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Another nice feature of the app is that you can easily add new pictures and videos to an album without starting a new blog post.

Good, But Not Perfect

Not everything is perfect, however. While the app does a nice job with media content, you can't actually use it to forward links or just straightforward text to your site.

Once you are registered with Posterous, you can also choose to forward your images to a number of services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or your own blog. From within the app, however, you can't control where your images go, though you can turn Posterous' auto-post function on or off from within the app when you start a new album.

Some earlier reviews of the app noted that any image that wasn't taking in landscape mode would appear on its side once uploaded to the service. In reality, however, it just takes a few minutes for the site to detect the orientation of the image and the problem will correct itself automatically.

Overall, this app is a good start. If you are at an event, for example, you could easily snap pictures and videos from within the app and upload them to your Posterous blog within seconds. Thanks to Posterous' ability to auto-post your files to other services, your friends don't even have to come to your site - the images will just go to whatever service they are already on.

The app brings Posterous' philosophy of keeping things very simple to the iPhone, though sometimes to the detriment of the user experience. Until the Posterous team fixes some of these issues with the app, we are more likely to just continue to email our media files and texts to Posterous than to fire up PicPosterous.

Of course, this is only a first attempt and we laud the Wikipedia Mobile team for releasing this app as an open-source application. However, the fact that the search field is populated with "::Home" when you first open up the app shows that the app still needs a lot of polish before it can compete with the 'unofficial' apps. For now, if you just want a lightweight way of accessing Wikipedia articles from your phone and you don't want to install an app, just use the official mobile site.

Of course, before you push your video out to Twitter, you can review your recording and add a description. Sending videos to Twitter is optional, though for a lot of users, this will be the main reason to use Screenr. The integration with Twitter also goes one step further, as you can re-tweet a screencast right from within the application and when you leave a comment, you can also choose to send it to Twitter as an @reply to the author.

Once the recording is finished, you can watch your video on the Screenr site or embed it in a blog post. You can also upload it directly to YouTube, or download it to your desktop for further editing. By default, all the videos on Screenr are public and there are no privacy settings.

The video quality is very high and thanks to the fact that the embedded player comes with an HD mode, these videos also look very good in full-screen mode.

We should also note that Screenr offers a very nice mobile interface for the iPhone, so even Twitter users on a mobile client will be able to watch your videos.

Of course, Screenr goes up against a number of established online tools like ScreenToaster and Jing, one of the most popular desktop tools for taking screenshots and creating screencasts (Update: as our commenters point out below, Screenjelly is also quite similar to Screenr). All of these tools offer a similar range of features, though Screenr stands out because of how incredibly easy it is to record a screencast and share it with your friends on Twitter.

Pricing

Personal accounts with one channel cost $10 per month (up to 10 concurrent viewers) and the company also offers accounts for small businesses at $100 per month (with 10 channels) and an account geared towards larger enterprises at $1,000 per month (which allows for 100 channels with 1000 concurrent streams). Not-for-profits, as well as education and religious organizations can also get access to this account for $1,000 per month.

Compatibility

Because of the company's reliance on its proprietary P2P architecture, however, users will have to install a plugin when they want to watch your streams. Currently, Dyyno doesn't offer a plugin for Macs, so this might be a deal breaker for quite a few potential users for now, though the company expects to ship its Mac plugin soon. While Dyyno works well in Firefox and Internet Explorer, we should also point out that Google's Chrome also isn't supported yet.

Easy to Use, Excellent Video Quality

When it works, however, Dyyno works extremely well and just as advertised. To share any part of your screen, you just drag and drop the Dyyno logo from the desktop client to any window and the sharing session will start. If you want to switch to another application, just drag the logo over to the next application. The video quality was generally excellent and you can also manually set the output resolution (up to 1024x768) and frame rate (up to 20 frames per second). In addition, you can also broadcast sounds from your computer as well.

WebEx

Because Dyyno can easily stream video from any application, including webcams, video players, and games, it makes for a very flexible platform. In addition, Dyyno also offers a solution for Cisco's popular WebEx online meeting solution. This brings all of Dyyno's capabilities to WebEx and makes it easy to integrate Dyyno into a platform that a lot of companies have already invested in.

A Few Missing Features

We did miss a few features, though. It would be nice, for example, if channels featured a chat room, something we have come to expect from similar solutions. It is also currently not possible to embed a video stream on another site. The company tells us that these features are forthcoming, but for the time being, they are sorely missed.

Overall, though, assuming you are on a Windows PC, Dyyno offers a high-quality solution for anybody who needs to stream video from a desktop directly to the web.

Below we briefly review two of these services, Apture and Zemanta's Balloons. Is this kind of product really worth using? Once you add a pop-up of someone's LinkedIn profile next to their name as you type it, you may never want to go back to not having a tool like this at your disposal.

Apture

We started by testing out Apture's WordPress plug-in (on my personal blog) and were very happy with the results. It takes just a few minutes to install, and learning to use it is quite intuitive. We wrote an extensive review of Apture in February.

Pros:

• It's beautiful. From the admin section to the pop-up windows, design has been emphasized at Apture.


• Lots of user control. The amount of control users have over what's included in their pop-ups is amazing. You can choose between assets with a few clicks, or you can pick out start and end timestamps in an embedded YouTube video. The list of options is big and keeps getting bigger, as evidenced by the recent addition of really nice LinkedIn and Twitter profile options.


• You can now include multiple tabs in one link, making it easy to pack a lot of information inside.


• The user experience is solid, and the product is pretty well baked.

Cons:

• Apture is proprietary software offered by one company, unlike Zemanta's standards-based offering, which was built as part of a consortium of developer- and community-minded companies.


• Sometimes it hangs on the UI. We found one bug that the company has since fixed, but pop-up loading is sometimes slower than we'd like.

Zemanta

Zemanta is a feature-rich service for bloggers and has a great API that developers can use to automatically discover keywords in bodies of text in lots of different scenarios. You should check it out. It's quite easy to use. Last week the company released a feature that competes with Apture, called Balloons. Balloons is now automatically included in the blogging plug-in from Zemanta, which is very easy to get started with.

To be frank, we would recommend installing the core Zemanta plug-in for the rest of its features but using Apture for info pop-ups instead. The way the two products are administered is very different; Zemanta detects key concepts in the text of your post and suggests Balloon links you can add with a click. You're limited to adding just those handful of Balloons; you can't link up just any text you want.

Pros:

• Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It feels good to use.


• Zemanta works with the rest of the tech community and has some awesome tools for supporting non-profit organizations. Did we mention that it feels good to use Zemanta?


• The auto-detection of key concepts -- just click on the buttons and they're linked to resources -- makes Zemanta a little bit faster to use than Apture. It takes fewer clicks.

Cons:

• This tool isn't nearly as pretty. In fact, the pop-ups are almost the opposite of pretty.


• You have far less control over the sources of information you can include. Zemanta's Balloons is tied to the ambitious CommonTags standards effort and apparently does not include anything outside the world of standards. That's noble but limiting.


• Most of the links Zemanta inserts are to FreeBase, which is like a machine-readable version of Wikipedia but also a noble, well-funded mess. Thus the pop-ups you get from Zemanta are quite hit and miss.


• There are Amazon affiliate ads in the Zemanta product; Apture's business strategy appears to be to serve bloggers for free and ad-free and charge big publishers to white-label the service. Zemanta's Amazon ads might get on your nerves.


• This is a very early product, having just launched last week. We hope it is further developed.

That's our experience so far with these tools. If you've tried either or both, we'd love to know about your experience as well.

The TweetBlocker dashboard allows you to unfollow and block users individually or as a group. You can also hover over a user's avatar and see their last couple of tweets - just in case you are not quite sure if somebody is really a spammer.

Grades

Overall, TweetBlocker works just as advertised. We noticed, however, that while it did really well for those Twitter users it gave a C or D to, there were quite a few false positives among those users it graded with an F. These are supposed to be the worst of the worst spammers, but far too often they just turned out to be hapless Twitter users or people who had abandoned their accounts after a short time. 

APIs, Bookmarklets, and Integration

While the website is obviously the central focus of TweetBlocker, the company also provides an API for developers, as well as a bookmarklet that allows users to report spammers to TweetBlocker directly.

As a standalone service, TweetBlocker is already quite interesting. Things might get a lot more interesting in the near future, though. Jonathan Nelson, the product director of Hashrocket, tells us that Tweetie, the popular Twitter app, will integrate TweetBlocker with the next version of its application.

Note: Whenever you suspect that somebody is indeed a spammer, you can also send a direct message to @spam, Twitter's own spam fighting account.