If you're disappointed that you let your Twitter "following" (aka "friend" list) get out of hand, there's finally a solution to clean it up that's a million times faster and easier than using Twitter.com itself. It's a new web app called Nest Unclutterer and it simplifies the process of knocking out those Twitter friends who are no longer bringing you value.

Or perhaps you starting using one of those auto-following services like SocialToo because you thought anyone who followed you was worth following back. Wrong again, but you discovered this too late as your tweet stream filled with marketers and dubious "experts" promoting themselves, their products, and their services.

If either of these situations applies to you, then you're going to swoon over Nest Unclutterer.

This new web application lets you specify people to block based on how many people their account is following. Celebs and uber-broadcasters will follow much higher numbers of folks than your everyday Twitter user, you see. Using the Unclutterer app, you can check a box and fill in whatever number you think makes someone a one-way shouter instead of engaging Twitterer. By default, it's set at 750, but you could make it 5000 or 200 or whatever else you desire. There's just one problem with this - it needs to be more than 4-digits long, please!

You can also check a box to unfollow anyone who hasn't tweeted in more than "X" number of days. This feature basically replicates the functionality of a handful of similar Twitter apps like MyCleenr, Twitoria, and UnTweeps. Why bother following people who have abandoned the service? They aren't really interfering with your Twitter stream, sure, but you won't really know your "true" following number if you never clean these folks out. That may or may not be of importance to you, though.

Finally, the app lets you "whitelist" certain Twitter accounts from getting unfollowed or blocked, no matter what criteria gets set above. That's handy if you follow a couple of bots you want to keep around or some celebs you can't help but voyeuristically stalk.

We'd also recommend that you don't go ditching your favorite bloggers, of course. Your ReadWriteWeb team includes Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis, Phil Glockner, Jolie O'Dell, and Doug Coleman.

According to the announcement, the Bebo Open Mobile tools are as follows (quote):

The AOL-owned (for now) 50-million* strong social networking site is most popular in the U.K., but is still a distant third worldwide, lagging far behind both Facebook and MySpace. This new initiative to deploy Bebo to mobile phones is clearly an attempt to grow their numbers by adapting their site to today's new computing platform: the mobile web. Sean Kane, global head of mobile for Bebo, confirms this, saying the move is a way to grow the reach of the network. "A rapid and global shift towards mobile social networking consumption is in progress and Bebo is committed to leading the way," he says.

Bebo Follows Industry Leaders (Again)

But Bebo is hardly "leading the way" here. Other social networks have been on the mobile web for years and already have offerings that extend beyond mobile-ready web sites to also include custom-built applications for popular handsets like Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. In addition, the rise of the mobile web has allowed for even more social networks to spring into existence, such as Brightkite and Loopt, which are both specialized location-based networking services.

As usual, Bebo isn't leading, but following the industry leaders in the social networking arena. While this move may indeed grow Bebo's numbers somewhat, it's doubtful that it will lead to anything more than the usual game of catch-up for the much smaller service.

What's Bebo's Niche?

Bebo, whose web site's design falls somewhere in between the chaotic MySpace and the more structured and trendy Facebook, has historically struggled to define their niche. Case in point: in March of last year, they announced support for both Google's OpenSocial and Facebook's platform - a move that sent a confusing signal since the two platforms were considered competitors.

Then, like now, Bebo tries to succeed by "doing it all," (or so they think) - delivering a mix of services hand-picked from the leading social networks. What they fail to realize is that each leading network defined itself not by being some sort of homogenous blend, but by establishing a clear niche in which they could dominate. For MySpace, that niche was - and still is - music, the reason for the site's existence and now its continuing relevance. For Facebook, the niche was cleaner, more structured profiles (death to glitter text!) and greater focus on both professional and real-life networking.

Bebo's Mobile Tools: No Major Breakthroughs

What Bebo plans to offer in the mobile space will be, like their web site, a bland mix of what Facebook and MySpace already offer. It would have been great to see Bebo do something more innovative - like being the first major social network to incorporate location-based features into their mobile platform. Imagine how great it would have been to see which of your Bebo friends were nearby using the new mobile clients. Considering that the largest portion of Bebo's user base is concentrated in a relatively small part of the globe (the U.K.), an innovative feature like location-based services could have driven adoption of the Bebo platform.

Also missing from the announcement is any hint that AIM (AOL's instant messaging program) will be integrated into the mobile suite. Perhaps it will be at some point - the announcement hints at future initiatives launched throughout the year - but as of now, there's no mention of it. That also seems like a clear miss given that Bebo's parent company is AOL and the IM service was already added to the main web site in 2008. Perhaps skipping AIM integration is a snub towards AOL, who, as rumor has it, may soon be putting Bebo up for sale.

In end, today's announcement is just another example of Bebo's continuing game of copycat and not anything that breaks new ground. However, we're sure some of Bebo's core social network users will be glad to hear that real mobile services will finally become available to them.

* Note: data from comScore via AOL press release

Update: This just in! We've just heard that there may be a new version of the Bebo social network launching tomorrow. That just may prove us wrong on the whole "lack of innovation" thing. If rumors are true, the new version will address conversation fragmentation and will aggregate all your MySpace & Facebook information into your Bebo profile. Now, that could be interesting!

The white-label service LetMeKnow allows any web publisher to easily integrate the company's alerts technology into their web site by using just a small bit of copy-and-paste code. According to branchnext, that means the LetMeKnow platform can be implemented, tested, and released in days without placing the burden of software development on the web publishers themselves.

They call their technology "alerts-as-a-service" or "AaaS," but we think perhaps they haven't read that acronym out loud yet...it's not good. There's no need to use clever abbreviations to sell this product, though; the idea makes sense and can stand on its own without trying to join the "as-a-Service" bandwagon. Put simply, LetMeKnow allows anyone to integrate alerting technology into their site with little effort, adding additional value for their site's visitors, be them blog readers or shoppers.

Using LetMeKnow

After publishers implement LetMeKnow, visitors can use the service to stay informed about new posts, content updates, price changes, new comments, new reviews, saved searches, and more. The alerts they sign up for can arrive via email, mobile (SMS), instant messaging, RSS, or even via a downloadable Adobe AIR desktop software program.

Also included in the LetMeKnow service is the ability to add in extensible widgets that allow broadcasting of the alert notifications across the web, including to sites like Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle. Users wishing to share their alert notifications can do so using email, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon, which are also integrated with the service.

Like Yotify, LetMeKnow also includes the social recommendation technology "AskFriends." With this, users can solicit input from their friends by sharing their scouts on sites like Facebook and FriendFeed and then gathering the responses.

For the Publishers

Besides the ease of implementation, LetMeKnow provides publishers extensive reporting tools which enable them to see how their site's visitors are using the service. There are 50 different metrics tracked that indicate how, when, and where the content is being viewed, shared, and published. Businesses using LetMeKnow also have the option to completely brand the service to their liking, so it appears to be a part of their web site and not some outside tool. Additionally, brandnext promises to deliver 99.9% uptime and support.

How much this will all cost or how well it will work isn't known as of yet. There isn't word on pricing for the service - only a sign-up form for those interested. However, if Yotify is any indication, LetMeKnow may be worth a look.

Robert Scoble just admitted to spending 7 hours per day in FriendFeed. It's easy to see why. The more you explore that service, the more you find, and the deeper you fall down into the rabbit hole that is the social web. It's probably one of the most interesting and powerful social sties that we've seen develop over the past year. Yet it, like many other of today's social web services, seems to be a somewhat incomplete vision of what a real social web could be.

I've just spent the past hour and a half finding new people to subscribe to on FriendFeed. As I clicked into their life streams, I also found a ton of articles which I spent time a long time reading. However, I hesitate to share my FriendFeed stats as openly as, say, Louis Gray does. Why? Because they wouldn't be accurate. 

The problem with FriendFeed is that I tend to be a more passive consumer of the information that flows by on the service. Who I "find interesting," according to FriendFeed, has less to do with who I actually find interesting and more to do with who I remembered to "like" through a click of a button. In fact, the items that get "liked" are more often the items that didn't require a long investment of my time in order to absorb. In my stream of "likes," you're probably going to find a lot of funny photos, cool web apps, tweeted quips, and so on. However, the articles that I spent time reading, like this analysis of the Twitter network or this expose of a government employee caught using a cut-rate diploma or even this review of Burger King's social media efforts, are nowhere to be found in my "likes and discussions" tab. The reason? I didn't know I liked them until I clicked through and read the articles.

Yes, I know what you're going to say: I could have hit the "back" button when I finished my reading and then clicked "like" to show that I enjoyed the articles. But the problem, you see, is that would require me to be a much more organized web citizen than I currently am. Instead, I had haphazardly opened these articles in tabs at some point during the day because I thought I might like to read them later. (Yes, sadly, try as I might, my "Read Later" system always reverts back to being open tabs in Firefox.) After opening these tabs, I had then proceeded to interact with FriendFeed as usual. Thanks to the constant flow of content and updates from FriendFeed's fire hose, the original shares and sources of my discovery were lost to me.

Yet, if anything, I liked these items more than the ones I marked with a "like."

It's Not Just FriendFeed...

It's not just FriendFeed that has this issue - every action we take on the social web requires some sort of user input - we have to "like," "share," "bookmark," "update," every little thing we do...and sometimes, it just doesn't feel that natural. On the flip side, there are tools like the semantically-powered Glue, for instance, that quietly shares our behavior with friends. When we visit Wikipedia, search for a new book, CD, or movie, research local restaurants, discover new wines, and more, Glue makes a note of that action which our friends can later review.

Unfortunately, there's no "Glue" for the social web. There's also no happy medium between what it does - quietly observe, record, and share all your actions - and the control you have with a single, manual "like" on FriendFeed. The ideal social tool would be something in the middle. Not entirely passive, but also not requiring you to click, click, click all the time to register your opinions. What this may be, I can't even imagine, but it would have to be something that ties the social web all together. If I read an article in Google Reader, it could get liked on FriendFeed automatically. With one click, I could then Digg it, bookmark it, Twitter it, etc. Oh, and the starting point shouldn't have to be Google Reader. A great tool would provide that same workflow, no matter where you first saw the content.

Clearly, the perfect social tool has not been invented yet, and - who knows? - we could be years away from even seeing anything like it (although I hope not). But it needs to exist because I need to use it. Not next year, not tomorrow, but now. Won't someone please build this, the perfect social tool?

Originally designed as a solution for e-commerce sites, the service strangely called Adam is not complicated to use. However, the company does estimate that the time it takes from mashup creation to having it live on your web site could be approximately 20 minutes. That's a little bit longer than just linking to a PDF or even uploading it to a document-hosting service like Scridb or Issuu. Still, the extra time may be worth it because Adam lets you create a truly interactive document by allowing you to add videos, HTML, stylized text, and more to what were previously just plain files.

For those familiar with designing web pages, the process may seem familiar. To add content to a document on Adam, you select various "hotspots" in the document and then add the content you want to mashup. This is where you would paste in any text, images, music, or videos you want to appear when the user mouses over that part of the document. The service currently integrates with other content providers including YouTube, flickr, metacafe, Veoh, vimeo, and imeem.

The best way to understand what Adam can do, though, is to view some sample of it in action. You can check out a mashed up floor plan or you can see all the content providers in use on one document.

Adam doesn't provide anything that a talented web designer can't already do on their own, but like every service that comes out of the Web 2.0 movement, it's about letting everyone have access to the tools that previously only skilled professionals knew how to use. If you want to try Adam for yourself, you can sign up here.

1. Chrome Privacy Guard

Chrome Privacy Guard was the first tool to automatically delete the unique Client ID that Google assigns to your Chrome installation. With this tool, that ID is automatically deleted before each run of Chrome. To use Chrome Privacy Guard, you launch an executable file ChromePrivacyGuard.exe instead of launching the browser itself. The tool cans the "Local State" file inside the Chrome directory and removes all information regarding the Client ID. It then automatically starts Chrome.

2. UnChrome

Like Privacy Guard, UnChrome also removes your unique ID from the browser, instead replacing it with a null value. This is a bit more convenient because UnChrome only needs to be run once. After you download and run the tool, you will see a pop-up advertisement for the developer's other applications, but again, it's only a one-time thing. Afterwards, your browser will forever have the unique ID removed.

3. Iron

Iron is a fork of Chrome's Chromium core, the open source project behind Google Chrome. Developed by a German software company SRWare, Iron goes even further than the above tools to protect your privacy. Where the other tools simply remove the unique ID from Google's version of the Chrome browser, Iron is actually its own, separate browser. In addition to removing the unique ID, Iron also makes sure that no user-specific info is sent to Google, including crash reports. When you enter in a URL incorrectly, Iron does not present any alternative error messages like Chrome does. Finally, Iron does not come bundled with the Google Updater tool, which checks with Google to see if there are any new updates for the Google products you have installed.

Do you use any of these tools to protect your privacy? If so, share your experiences or your preferences in the comments.

14 years ago, in 1994, Frank and his brother Payam founded Autoweb ("no haggle pricing for cars"). They did the whole deal of that era: lots of VC, then an IPO in 1999 and then the crash. Frank came away from that experience a bit bruised and wiser. For his next venture, like many other similar entrepreneurs, he decided to use his own money and customers money (aka revenue). After some false starts, Caspio started properly in 2005.

Today, Caspio is a profitable product (not services) company with 30 employees. That is not easy to do. Here is one big gritty cheer!

Why No VC? Risk Difference

I asked Frank, "why no VC?" His response was interesting and is a common refrain from some entrepreneurs. He said that VCs look at your company as just one in a diversified portfolio, a 'shoot for the moon while risking everything' approach. That does not work so well for an entrepreneur who sees his or her company as their one good shot at success. Failure is not an option.

This is interesting because it is contrary to the usual entrepreneur complaint about VCs, that they are too risk averse. Frank (and other entrepreneurs we've spoken to) have observed the opposite!

The Non Programmer Tools Market

I came to this interview with an inbuilt prejudice against the market for tools that can be used by non-programmers to create meaningful applications. I believed that these tools fell between two stools - neither easy enough for laymen, nor powerful enough for programmers.

History is littered with failed attempts at this market. There are plenty of people pitching this right now. Some of them are big companies and some have plenty of VC cash.

So Caspio, with no external financing, doesn't stand a chance? Well, not so fast. They are profitable with 30 employees and have real clients. So what are they doing right?

Where Is Caspio Getting Traction?

Their biggest base of customers today are newspapers and other media companies such as ABC News, LA Times and Boston Globe. The editors/journalists use Caspio to build simple online databases such as restaurant guides. That makes sense. Those apps are way too small to get into the IT Dept queue. It is really all about understanding the content.

Disaster relief is another use case, people who need to quickly compile and distribute lists and want to go beyond email lists.

Caspio Technology

Caspio is built on a Microsoft stack - SQL Server and .Net. I can hear all those Java techies groaning, but this is not targeted at you! The technology is totally abstracted from the user.

This kind of thin horizontal layer on top of a Microsoft stack (or any other stack) would never have worked pre-SaaS. The IT buyers would have killed it. And end users would have fallen at the "install this on .Net" hurdle. That is why this has always failed in the past.

Using a SaaS approach, those barriers go away.

Who Are Caspio's Competitors?

Interestingly, Frank mentioned Offshore Outsourcing as the primary competitor in real projects. That makes sense. Small custom jobs tend to be a bad deal for both buyer and seller. So a DIY approach makes sense.

The BigCo competitors that Caspio see are:

b) Salesforce.com; but this still requires somebody to write code and usually revolves around sales

c) Quickbase from Intuit: Caspio say this is good for internal apps, less for public facing apps.

The SmallCo competitors: Coghead, LongJump, Formsite. This is a long, long list.

Who Will Be Last Man Standing?

This market is bound to consolidate. VC funded ventures that don't get to profitability are unlikely to raise more money. Caspio is serving underserved small niches that BigCos are less interested in. So they have a shot at being the "last man standing".

What questions would you ask this Gritty Entrepreneur?

Using the Mobile Application Generator

Using the tool is simple: you just enter in a blog URL or RSS feed in the box provided in order to get started. Next, you enter in the name of your application. There's an option for you to upload your own image to use as the logo which appears on the launch screen. If you choose not to add an image, the AppLoop logo will display the app launches.

The generator will automatically select a color scheme that matches the first image found in your site's code. You can customize this color scheme if you wish by selecting one of the preset schemes available or you can create your own.

You can then choose an image to use as an Application Icon which appears both in the AppStore and on the mobile device's desktop. You must categorize your app (entertainment, news, etc.) and select which Application Stores you want your app to appear in (iTunes and/or Android).

The final step is setting the price for your application - you can leave it set to free, or set another price using the drop-down list. If you choose to charge for the app, AppLoop will give you 60% of the revenue earned. You can optionally integrate various revenue models or advertising schemes within your application if desired, and the company can help you with those options. If a publisher wants an Ad Hoc version of the app to test before going live the App Store, the company can assist with that as well.

Your app will include the company's analytics package so you can monitor your app's popularity and usage.

Reading The News In The App

Once the app is installed on a mobile device, users have the option to "favorite" an item in the feed to read later. This is similar to starring an item in Google Reader. There's also a button at the bottom of the post to share the item with friends via social media. You can post to Twitter, digg the story, send to Facebook, or even email the story to a friend.

iPod Touch users who have to rely on Wi-Fi will appreciate the app's content caching feature. The data within the application is stored locally on the device so it can be accessed at any time regardless of whether or not an internet connection is available.

Upcoming Features

AppLoop says this mobile app generator tool is only the first version of the application. Upcoming versions will offer new features like support for third-party plugins, commenting, rating, multiple categories and feeds, and other widgets. Another upcoming feature will be a new community layer on top of all applications which will provide for live chat and sharing options. AppLoop may launch these additional features as a premium version of their tool, but the basic version will always be free.

Extending Your Reach

As a publisher, there's a real need today to be able to extend your content beyond your site to other platforms. RSS provides a means to do this, but with the launch of the iPhone, there's another way to reach your readers, too: via iPhone apps. Despite the popularity of the games and other time-wasting apps, there's also a lot of people out there using apps to get the news, too. Take the AP News app, for example. Out of their 16 million pageviews in August on all mobile devices, 95% came from iPhone. With this new tool from AppLoop, any publisher can take advantage of the iPhone platform (and soon the Android platform, too) by making their content more portable and easy to access from anywhere.

Note: Screenshots from a RWW iPhone app, not yet available in App Store

One interesting twist to the story is that Almaer used to be at Google.

What's New About This?

Mozilla already has a "Labs" section, and the relationship between that and this latest development isn't terribly clear. We suspect, though, that Mozilla Labs will continue to build and launch Mozilla specific projects that can be coded against - software like Weave, Snowl, Ubiquity and Geode, for example. The new Open Web Developer Tools Lab will be building tools that can be used in development processes anywhere, not just in projects incorporating Mozilla software.

Update: Almaer responds in comments and explains that this work will go on inside of the existing Mozilla Labs. Thanks Dion!

What Do Developers Say About the Project?

In quickly talking to a few developers about the announcement, it's apparent that the Lab's leaders Almaer and Galbraith are widely liked and admired. The project is one that Open Web advocates seem enthusiastic about so far.

Scott Kveton, Chairman of the Open ID Foundation, told us that he thinks "this is great news and Mozilla is the perfect place for it. Tools are the key to proliferation of open web technologies." Tools, in this case, are contrasted with talk - something that many in the Open Web community have complained there's an excess of relative to tools development.

We asked Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo!, a participant in the newly launched Open Web Foundation and one of the leading voices in support of standards based safe-login protocol OAuth what he thought of Mozilla's announcement and he articulated very specifically the dire need for better tools.

"The quality of open web libraries is generally poor and lacks enough resources to support it. For example, OAuth has libraries in many languages but the implementations are buggy and completely inconsistent. Many developers find it easier to implement from scratch than use available code, and bugs are found on a weekly basis so to have dedicated resources working to bring these technologies to the mainstream by making them available as reliable and supported tools is a very promising proposition.

In terms of the Open Web Foundation, having running code available before specifications are completed is critical. This is by far the most difficult part of any spec-work - getting it up and running. You don't know if something will interoperate until you do it. If Mozilla is going to keep their leadership position in the industry, this sounds like a great way to apply their resources and influence."

We couldn't have said it better. We are very excited to see what comes out of Mozilla's new Lab.

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.

Making a guide or tutorial with Whizle is supposed to be a piece of cake. In our tests of the service we found it to be dead simple. In creating a Whizle, we were given steps for creating a title, mission statement, and steps with descriptions. The service provides both a WYSIWYG editor for formatting text and a more interactive application for creating a whizle. We found the interactive app to be more appealing and easier to use. If you don't need all the bells and whistles the WYSIWYG editor will do just fine. Adding and removing steps for our tutorial was simple. We were also able to add Youtube videos and Flickr photos to help visualize our guide. All in all, the service did exactly what it said it would without any fuss.

Who is Whizle For?

We don't recommend using Whizle for any hardcore tutorials such as a design tutorials. Formatting images is not one of Whizle's specialties. We'd really like to recommend the service to bloggers, marketers, and those in PR looking to create simple guides for clients. Unfortunately, there isn't an option to embed any of the whizles you create. Your creations stay on the Whizle site where viewers are allowed to comment and edit your whizle if you allow them to. The service could also use a little more work in the design department. It's dead simple interface was a bit of a turn-off for us. However this is all preferential. Overall, Whizle is functional enough for beginners, but anyone looking for a more advanced tool will have to keep searching.

Yoono is a Firefox extension that sits in your browser's sidebar and provides access to a ton of widgets that help keep you connected to your friends. The available widgets range from your favorite social networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Flickr, to providing related web page recommendations.However the things that Yoono is able to do are endless. Essentially Yoono is a tool that can do a lot more than it seems at first glance.

How Mainstream and Early Adopters Can Use Yoono

For mainstream users, Yoono is the perfect tool for casual surfing habits. With Yoono in your sidebar you can easily access all of your contacts from popular social networks, instant messaging platforms and receive instant update notifications of what's going on. You can keep up with your Facebook friend's updates (sorry Myspace users). If you're on Flickr, you can view the latest pics from the photostreams of your friends. For those that don't wish to leave their current page just to see one of your friend's latest pics, Yoono provides a fast loading overlay of any picture you hover your mouse over. You can also add comments to Flickr photos and upload your own images right from Yoono. For Twitter users, Yoono pushes the latest replies, direct messages, and updates from your twitter friends with the ability to reply and send updates right back. There are also widgets for Google Reader, Digg, and Youtube.

Early adopters can also find Yoono useful. Of course, the reasons stated above for mainstream users will also apply to early adopters. As an early adopter I've found more unique ways to Yoono. Normally I would overload Google Reader with a bunch of feeds that I'd like to keep track of. Flickr photostreams are a prime example of this for me. Now, I use Yoono instead to keep track of such feeds. Their web notes feature is great for annotating pages and sharing them with friends and contacts. The Discoveries widget is also valuable for finding related sites and services. We don't recommend Yoono for heavy social media usage. However, Yoono can provide assistance in lightening the load of other tools that you might use. It's just that flexible.

Room for Growth

This extension does what it says it does; it compliments your current tools instead of replacing them. There's still plenty of room for Yoono to grow. Some of these widgets are not the real deal. The Gmail, Google Reader, and Digg widgets are more like mobile versions of their web service counterparts. Also, the extension has had numerous problems with several Firefox themes. So if you happen to run into a bug or two, turn off your theme to see if that helps. Installing a bunch of widgets at once could result in a serious overload and make Yoono seem very unappealing. Essentially, keep the amount of widgets you add low.

Learn How to Use Yoono in less than 6 Minutes

We think anyone could find Yoono to be a valuable social media tool that's easy to use. The extension provides numerous offerings and flexible options to users. Signing into social networks is a breeze and updates are instant. Here's a clip on how to use Yoono is less than 6 minutes:

Enter Agglom, a simple little service built by Italian developer Enrico Foschi. It's a Firefox plug-in that will make sharing a list of links far easier than it's been before.

Agglom is a remarkably easy way to create a "slide show" of live links that you can share with other people. See the screencast demo we recorded below.
For those who prefer to read, there's a text description after the video.

After downloading the plug-in, you can click on the Agglom button at any time. It captures all the URLs from each tab in your browser. After making some admin decisions, including public/private or password protection, you receive one link that you can share with anyone else. They can then follow through the slide show along with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.

It's simple but looks quite useful.

Presentation Is Powerful

Earlier this month we wrote about five lightweight apps that are useful for web consultants and trainers. If we had known about Agglom then (we just discovered it today via Marjolein Hoekstra's blog CleverClogs) it would have made a great fit there as well.

The web is changing so fast and there's so much information available that providing accessible ways clearly show people what you're talking about is the best way to help friends, family and co-workers wrap their minds around the powerful new tools now available.

Agglom is simple - that's good. It also looks quite useful. That's a sweetspot for applications these days. Can you imagine using it? We can.