We wrote a similar post last November ("30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using 1 Month After Finding Them") and can happily report that we're still loving almost all the services we wrote about then. If a service can make it past the 30-day mark, it has a good chance of sticking around for a while. 22 or 23 in a month is a pretty impressive number really, so go web innovators go!

Here's this month's list. It's split into 3 categories: search-related services, iPhone apps and productivity tools.

Search-related.

1. Twitter Real-time Search in Google

25 days ago we reviewed a simple Greasemonkey add-on that displays Twitter search results for your search query at the top of Google search results pages. The entire team is still using it and Frederic in particular calls it "the best thing since bread came sliced." Sarah Perez says "that twitter google script is the invention of the year, can't image life without it...not kidding."

2. Add Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and more to Google Search Results

We question whether Phil Glockner really saw this one a month ago, since we wrote about it two weeks ago, but it's a keeper!

3. Google Preview

Phil added this one to the list as well; it adds thumbnails to Google search results.

What does a Google search results page look like with all of the above turned on? Here's a screenshot.

4. Google Voice

Frederic reviewed Google Voice earlier this month and he says he's still using it happily!

5. GCal PopUp

The GCal Popup plug-in was a month old for me in our last 30-day round up, but now Phil is a recent convert. This Firefox plug-in gives you super-easy access with a click to your Google Calendar and has increased our use of GCal many-fold. I've tried poking the code to create multiple buttons like it for other sites, Basecamp in particular, but the developer says just that is on the way soon. I hope so.

6. Drag and Drop Zones

I use lots of search engines throughout the day and the Drag and Drop Zones Firefox plug-in has made it super-easy to do. I love it.

iPhone apps.

7. Flickit

Rick reviewed the Flickit Flickr uploader for the iPhone here last month and I've been using it ever since. It goes a long way towards solving the lack of MMS on the phone.

8. NYTimes iPhone App

We reviewed the latest version of the NYTimes iPhone app at the top of this month and both Sarah and I have been using it regularly. I've been flying a lot lately and the off-line reading is great.

9. Instapaper

The only thing better than offline reading of the NYTimes on an iPhone is offline reading of anything. Instapaper recently helped me find the time to read Alex Iskold's last 10 blog posts while flying from Indianapolis to Portland. I landed feeling much smarter. Thanks Instapaper!

10. Yelp

I used to use Google 411 a lot. Now I use Yelp on the iPhone and I love it. I've even discovered restaurants close to my house that I didn't know existed.

11. Tweetie

Apparently Sarah and I both just discovered the best iPhone app for Twitter. I love seeing people innovate on top of Twitter, so hopefully other even cooler apps will come out soon.

12. Kindle on the iPhone

Frederic reviewed the Kindle on the iPhone and liked it so much he's kept it. Steve Jobs may think no one reads anymore, but he's forgetting the people who study the foundational mythology of 11th -13th century British monasteries. That's what Frederic does when he's not writing for RWW and he loves the Kindle on the iPhone!

13. QuickVoice

QuickVoice is a fully featured audio recorder for the iPhone. I'd never heard of it but Sarah Perez likes it and, after looking, I'm about ready to buy it too. It looks awesome!

14. SnapDat

SnapDat is an iPhone digital business card exchanging system. Sarah reviewed it while at DEMO and called it serviceable but not great. Apparently it's good enough because she's still using it.

15. PixelPipe

Frederic and Sarah are big fans of PixelPipe on the iPhone. It lets you post to multiple sites and is similar to Flickit above.

Productivity

16. Morning Coffee

The Morning Coffee plug-in for Firefox lets you set up a list of tabs to open with a single click. It has helped me continue to use websites I might have forgotten about. I'm very thankful for it. Now that I think about it, I should add Basecamp there. Maybe then I could remember to use the darned thing.

17. Doomi

Doomi is a handly little Adobe AIR to-do list. It's simple. I tried it and I like it.

18. DestroyTwitter

DestroyTwitter is an AIR Twitter client that Phil started using more than a month ago and is still using today. When I questioned his choice of clients he said: "Have you used Destroyflickr? It's really amazing.. and DestroyTwitter is the same way.. something about the smooth transitions, the intuitive interface, and its unobtrusiveness appeals to me more than other products."

19. FriendFeed Notifier

Frederic and Sarah are loyal users of this service and I just started using it today. We reviewed it 2 weeks ago but it looks like a keeper. (See picture on the right.) If you're insane and want constant stimulus, which we all are and do here at RWW, give it a try.

20. ClikBall

Phil is still using ClikBall to find and share links. I wrote a very positive review of ClikBall here but found that I didn't know very many people who were using it. It didn't pass my test but it did pass Phil's.

21. PostBox

PostBox is a desktop email manager built by a team that includes the creator of Firefox's Thunderbird. TechCrunch has the best review of the service.

22. Alltop OPML and Search

Looking for the best blogs on a wide variety of topics? Alltop is a good place to start. This Greasemonkey script adds buttons to grab all the blogs in a section of the site as an OPML file and to search inside that section. It's Phil Glockner-approved.

23. Enjoysthin.gs

Enjoysthin.gs is a very visual social sharing service. The user experience is fantastic. We called it a dazzling new way to share multimedia and I've been visiting it every day since then, thanks to the Morning Coffee plug-in described above. It's great for research and inspiration!

That's Our List - What's On Yours?

We'd love to hear which apps, plug-ins, scripts, etc. our readers have tried for a little while and found to have some sticking power.

Zotero also announced a new online component to its plugin, which, in conjunction with the new synchronization features, automatically creates an online backup of your database on Zotero.org.

Zotero, which we highlighted as one of the top application for students last year, features an extensive set of tools for creating and managing bibliographies. While it started out as a very basic tool, its feature set is now up to par with that of other commercial bibliography tools like EndNote or RefWorks.

Zotero integrates tightly with Firefox 3 and allows you to quickly save articles and easily create bibliographies for your papers and articles from most of the major free and for-pay research databases and online newspapers.

The synchronization feature works exactly as advertised and allows you to keep your bibliographies in sync, even if you work on different machines. If you have access to a WebDAV enabled server, Zotero can also sync your attachments automatically.

Needs Firefox 3

Whenever Zotero recognizes that you are surfing a supported site like Google Books, Amazon, YouTube, the New York Times, or JSTOR, it will simply add an icon to your Firefox address bar that allows you to save the bibliographic entry for that page or article with one click. Zotero will automatically extract the bibliographical information for you and it can even create a full-text archive of your saved documents.

Social Networking

Zotero.org now also includes a number of social networking features. You can, for example, search for other users by name, email, affiliation, or discipline. While this feature is still very new, and hence only has a few users so far, this could turn out to be a real boon for academic researchers (and others) who could use this to share their bibliographic databases with colleagues. In the future, Zotero plans to extend this with a Twitter-like stream of your friends' research activity.

Zotero also integrates with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice (though the 1.5b1 version is not compatible with these plugins yet!), and supports over 1,100 different styles, as well as the ability to create your own. You can also just drag and drop entries from Firefox to any other document and it will create a bibliographic entry for you on the fly.

Verdict

Zotero was already one of the best tools for managing large bibliographies. These updates make it even better and allow it to compete directly with its commercial brethren. The new synchronization feature allows you to work on different machines, without having to constantly save and update your database, something that used to give RefWorks (which is essentially an online tool) the upper hand.

Note: While the new sync feature worked great for us, Zotero rightly recommends that you back up your database before you update to version 1.5b1.

Earlier this month, when Bit.ly originally launched their Firefox plugin, we were excited to see how it exposed data like clickthroughs, user profiles, and the expanded URL in a small pop-up window that would appear just by hovering your mouse over the various links on Twitter.

Now Bit.ly's plugin lets you hover over the "in reply to" links on Twitter to see the original message that started the Twitter conversation. This is extremely useful for anyone who uses the Twitter homepage to interact with the service instead of a desktop application.

Why Enhance Twitter.com?

Although when it comes to Twitter, we prefer using desktop software, like TweetDeck for example, we often don't have any other option but to use the Twitter homepage. Thanks to Twitter's hard API limits, heavy use of our desktop programs ends up leaving them stalled out once those limits are reached. That has us constantly switching back from our desktop programs to the homepage itself - a homepage whose simplicity is lacks many of the features we have come to rely on in our Twitter apps.

That's why it's important to keep your eye on developments like this and others that add additional functionality to the Twitter homepage itself. Besides Bit.ly's must-have browser plugin, we also recommend using the relatively new Power Twitter Firefox plugin which adds even more features to Twitter's interface including search, inline videos and photos, Facebook status updates, and more.

The combination of both plugins can turn Twitter.com into a homepage that's a worthy competitor to whatever desktop app you currently use - in fact, you may end up even preferring to use use the homepage as your primary Twitter "client!" If you want to try Bit.ly's new and improved browser plugin, you can download it from here: http://bit.ly/bitlyFirefox. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_improved_bitly_plugin_adds_functionality_to_twitter.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_improved_bitly_plugin_adds_functionality_to_twitter.php Products Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:51:24 -0800 Sarah Perez Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.

Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.

The clickthrough data is great to see, but it's not without some serious shortcomings. Bit.ly queries a long list of URL shortening services' APIs to get traffic data and some of them don't update very frequently. There's also a lot of phantom clicks showing up; the company believes they've found a 3rd party app that's partially loading the destination pages and inflating the numbers, but we'll see if they can do anything about it. For now this data is better for determining the relative popularity of a shortened link than it is for literal numbers.

Twitter users will like the extension because hovering over any username there makes the user's information pop-up. That works quite well and is very useful. It's a fast way to see who someone is talking to in a conversation on Twitter.

The moral of the story here is that in little things like URL shortening, there's a whole lot of valuable information and room for innovation. We're glad that Bit.ly is moving to take advantage of that and we look forward to seeing what still other people will do with the data once it's stockpiled and made available by Bit.ly for further development.

You can get the Bit.ly extension for Firefox here.

What's Glue?

Glue is a new browser plugin from Adaptive Blue. It uses semantic technology to connect you to your friends around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. The plugin places a bar - not a toolbar, just a bar - at the top of your browser window when you visit certain popular web sites like Amazon, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, IMDB, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Last.fm, and many others.

As you read about the album, movie, book, or whatever else it is that you're viewing at the time, you'll have a toolbar at the top of the page where you can see which of your friends had visited the same page, if they liked it, and if they left a comment.

Glue Is Not Co-browsing

Glue is not a co-browsing plugin like Me.dium nor does it try to socialize the entire web surfing experience like Socialbrowse (our coverage). Also, unlike Headup, another semantic browser plugin we covered recently, Glue doesn't bother you with pop-up messages as you surf. Glue simply provides a social element to web pages in context - there's no destination site to join and your social graph doesn't need to be re-created in order to use it.

How It Works

In order to tap into your network of friends, Glue uses APIs from popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to import your friends. You can choose to import one or all of those friend lists into the plugin.

To participate in the Glue network, all you do is continue browsing the web normally. When you visit a supported site, the Glue friend bar appears. If you choose, you can view what your friends say about the item on the page, or you can ignore the bar and continue on your way. However, your visit is recorded and when one of your friends visits that same page, they can see that you've been there recently, though not the exact date or time your visit occurred. This information is only stored for the last 20 things you've visited on the web.

While surfing, if you want to share your thoughts about the item you're viewing, you can optionally use the Glue "like" button and/or the "2 cents" button which lets you add a quick thought about item. You can also click on the bar to see the profiles of your friends, other recent Glue users, and you can explore their interests even further by clicking into their profiles, which display in a pop-up box that appears when you click their avatar. You can also optionally click on "Actions" to explore the item you're viewing on other Glue-supported sites.

Making The Social Web Relevant

By providing this social experience in context, Glue can actually be more useful to you than simply joining isolated social networks surrounding your interests where your data and that of your friends is trapped inside the network's walls. It may also have some appeal over a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed, because you don't have to happen across the information - it's there when you're actively interested in something and have sought it out on the web.

In the official version coming soon, the company is also soon going to provide a method for any web publisher to "Glue-enable" their site by simply adding AB Meta to their sites, by inserting three lines of code in the header of a page.

Glue is the next generation of the Adaptive Blue plugin, a tool that currently has around 350,000 active users. Current Adaptive Blue users will find their plugin updated to Glue through the standard Firefox plugin update process. For everyone else, you can download the plugin here.

Although at the present time Glue is available as a Firefox plugin only, an IE version is in the works and an iPhone plugin will arrive in a few weeks.

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's CEO, Alex Iskold, is a feature writer for RWW.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php Products Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez If cookies were the multi-billion dollar magic for much of the web's first iteration, tiny technologies to power conversation could play a similar role in the future of business online. More fun than that, though, is the innovation we hope to see in the technology of conversation.

Comment and review plug-in suite JS-Kit announced today a new round of funding and the hire as an adviser of one of the web's most forward looking innovators, Data Portability Working Group co-founder Chris Saad. Though JS-Kit has a funny name, the company has a big installed base. In addition to being very easy to install, it recently partnered with red-hot content sharing service ShareThis and acquired the early market leader in plug-and-play commenting, Haloscan. What does the future look like for JS-Kit and how might that relate to the web at large? We asked Chris Saad for his thoughts this morning.

Saad: I think that there is certainly an opportunity for new types of data capture through these sorts of plugins - and if transformed into something useful like APML it can certainly be used for personalizing all sorts of things, including ads. The difference in this iteration of the web, however, is that the user will and must be in control. They will have visibility and utility from the resulting data acquisition.

RWW responds: Saad can't disclose too many specifics here and perhaps it's not in the company's interests to disclose any at all. APML seems like a non-starter at this point, but we'd like to see things like recommendations, pattern detection, benchmarks and time-based analysis of conversation around content.

RWW:How does your engagement with JS-Kit jive with your work on data portability? Isn't off-site discussion hosting the opposite of user (in this case publisher) control over data?

Saad: JS-Kit is unique in that it does not have a destination site so it does not host discussion off site. In fact, the commenting widget specifically syncs all comments back to the base CMS platform so that the publisher can uninstall at any time and not lose any of their comment data.

Also JS-Kit's social plug-ins make it possible for all sites to become social, making 'social networking' a feature of any application a user visits. The question now is how do these sites and applications, as well as other technologies, inter-operate for a web-wide data portability enabled social network?

RWW: How is that different from the recently acquired IntenseDebate or Disqus?

Saad: Both are great companies doing great things; the question is scale, pace and sustainability. The sustainability piece is important too - the fact that JS-Kit is nailing big commercial accounts is very important. Evite, Worldnow, Jetblue, Sun etc.

JS-kit has 550,000 sites, 20 people and has revenue (and now lots more capital). Don't forget breadth of product line also - JS-kit does comments AND ratings and Polls etc. It's well known that ratings are used 5x more than comments on sites.

RWW:One of the biggest critiques the data portability has faced is around "usability," clarity of value proposition and ease of implementation. JS-Kit seems fabulously usable, but we haven't seen much of the deeper possibilities emerge from it yet. What do you think the data portability community can teach the publishing community and what do you think JS-Kit in particular can demonstrate to other vendors?

Saad: I think that proprietary forms of data portability such as Facebook's app platform have been very usable (if not lacking utility). The trick is to achieve the same easy user experience on a web-side platform. As you rightly point out, JS-Kit's widgets are very usable - look for deeper possibilities emerging in the coming months. I think that JS-Kit has a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate data portability principles to publishers and other widget vendors as well. With the scale of JS-Kit we are no longer talking about starting from zero.

RWW: We're excited to see what all the vendors in this space can do. We hope to see developments coming from a data-driven strategy that places a premium on innovation and data portability. The first player in this sector that cries uncle and turns into nothing but an ad network will deserve some derision. These days things are looking good for JS-Kit, though.

Photo Credit: Brian Solis

Adam Pash over at Lifehacker unearthed this extension for a post about three as-yet unapproved ("experimental") Firefox plug-ins. We didn't find the other two Pash highlighted especially inspiring, but UrlbarExt rocks. Here's what it does.

• Copy the URL you're on to the clip board. A whole lot faster than click, drag to highlight, right click, select "copy link to clipboard." A lot faster.
• Create an instant TinyURL link in the address bar. Super fast and smooth. We do wish this button used our favorite URL shortening service, the semantic-web lovin' Bit.ly. We also wish we didn't have to click on the copy link to keyboard button after creating the TinyURL - what else are we going to do with that shortcut if not paste it somewhere?
• Perform a Google site: search inside the domain you're on. Awesome, we do this all day long and this is a big time saver.
• Go up one level in a page's URL, or double click to go to the root URL. How often do you find a page on a site through search or a link and want to visit the home page? You can usually click on the logo or a home link, but why mess around looking when you can just double click? We're not sure how much we'll use this one, but we'll see.
• Add a tag. Ads tags to the local bookmarking in your browser. Seems kinda silly.
• Anonymous surfing. Reloads a page you're on and subsequent pages, through a proxy server. Pretty cool idea. We'd like to know more details about which service this is using before we trust it too much.

We're not able to access any settings options for this browser extension but the plug-in page indicates that future iterations will include more user control. It's a simple tool, but simple is good and this will make many of the things we do every day on the web faster and easier - meaning that we can focus on something else.

You'll have to create a Mozilla account in order to access UrlbarExt, because it's still in the "experimental" section of the plug-in site - but we think it's well worth it to do so.