Apps are to be built using Yahoo!'s proprietary development platform, YAP. The YDN post further noted, "We're working on an array of additional developer monetization opportunities - these will be available soon." The gallery's inaugural class includes YAP-built applications from Mint, Lumosity, Flixter, Target, and WordPress.

For users, the benefit is a slew of widgets to make the Yahoo! portal more intensely personal, whether that experience is one of entertainment, education, practicality, socialization, or information. The apps pop into a lightbox-style layout, called "Small View," on scrollover and go to a full-page "Canvas View" when a user clicks through.

Yahoo! has made conscious and ever-increasing efforts to open themselves to the developer community in what many see as a struggle to remain interesting and viable in the age of the open API. Tools such as YQL, their proprietary query language which we covered in depth, and their YAP application development platform help to foster a sense of relevancy for the aging web giant.

There's a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It's all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it's the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

"YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo's servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small."

In the slightly more technical language presented on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, "The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement."

It also handles authentication for third party sites.

Is there anything like it currently on the market?

"Nothing... It's pretty awesome," said Cannon-Brooks.

Yahoo! Query Language

Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.

Open Data Tables

YQL was used to support a broad range of APIs, almost anything publicly available online, from FriendFeed and Google Reader to the Guardian newspaper. "No one has yet pointed out an API they can't figure out how to map," said Pullara.

However, some data could not be accessed without authentication, such as Google Calendar or Netflix. Those APIs were very often very sophisticated and even complicated for the end developer. For these APIs, Yahoo! rolled out YQL Execute on April 29.

YQL Execute

YQL Execute also allows developers to access multiple services and get a single result back. For example, an app developer could call up New York Times articles with specific tags AND Flickr photos with related tags; YQL Execute would return a combined result with both articles and related photographs. Another benefit for developers is the use of the massive Yahoo! infrastructure, as all the heavy lifting of data is done on Yahoo! servers.

And because of the speed, simplicity, and scope of these tools, implications now range much farther than simple mashups. With access to authenticated and private data, more sophisticated applications can be written quickly and easily.

The Dark Side

The above quotation is from Scott D. Reinhart, who has been eyeball-deep in application development longer than many "social media gurus" have been out of high school.

Right alongside the generally held social media dictum that a rich data stream is inherently bankable, there is the hotly debated issue of data ownership. Especially when data is made more valuable by having been parsed, organized, and compared, and most especially when someone creates a revenue stream from previously unmonetizable data, questions of ownership and copyright flare up around the social web.

"Public APIs allow you to easily develop using mature platforms," said Reinhart, "but they [large IT and social media companies] usually have a hidden intention. In this case they advocate putting your database layer onto their systems... So let's say I use the Yahoo! data layer, I use BizSpark to get my development tools, and I am making MySpace (Open Social) and Facebook apps using jQuery - who owns my code? Technically, they own everything. They can claim I just made a mashup.

"I would, as someone approaching these systems, stop drinking the Kool-Aid and read the terms of use. Check what it says about ownership."

Yahoo! Servers for YQL Developers

"If you create an open data table, there's no requirement to upload it to Yahoo! We do cache data that we pull from APIs and the web to make it faster, but we don't store that data. It passes through without being collected for permanent storage."

By contrast, with other services such as Google or Amazon Web Services, developers are required to upload their data, which is stored and executed on the company's systems. In using Yahoo! YQL, a developer's data has "a very transient experience and expires from the cache," said Pullara. "It's a convenience, not a requirement in any way."

The Price of Free

"We want to enable rather than discourage more useage ," said Pullara. "And while people don't want to pay, they do want to know they're a customer and have a relationship with Yahoo!"

Currently, Yahoo! has set certain limits on use of their infrastructure. App developers are limited to 100,000 calls per day, per IP address. If the application runs in a browser (hence, on many different IPs), it's a non-issue. Pullara said, "The limit targets those who would abuse the platform... people who might spin up DoS attacks. You have to have controls in place to make sure that doesn't happen."

Many developers are enthusiastic about the legitimate and value-adding implementations of the technologies. "The YQL improvements are just sex on legs," said Cannon-Brooks via Twitter. "The most exciting, least talked about 'tech of now' is YQL."

Over the past month, the Evernote team has been cranking out new features left-and-right. If you haven't been following the news, here's what you've missed:

• Clip to Evernote Bookmarklet: the Clip to Evernote bookmarklet was updated to allow you to clip either part of a web page or the whole thing. Plus, you can create a simple quick note without launching Evernote.
• Safari Clipper: Evernote added a Safari version of the Web Clipper which, in addition to the standard features, also lets you save web pages as PDFs. Growl support notifies you of new syncs and clippings.
• Firefox Clipper for Mac: For those who prefer Firefox on Mac, the new Firefox clipper for Mac is tightly integrated with the desktop client.
• Android Client Gets a Makeover: The mobile version for Android was revamped, adding in improved searching and navigation. It also optimized the interface for touch screens, enabled portrait and landscape viewing, and now takes full advantage of the Android browser.

The new Web Clipper

Shoeboxed Integration

Perhaps the biggest and best update, though, is the partnership with scanning service Shoeboxed - a partnership which was announced a little less than a month ago. This service lets you either mail in or email in scans of receipts and business cards. They do the tedious work of scanning them for you and then they post the scanned images online. With the Shoeboxed + Evernote integration, you can now send your Shoeboxed scans directly to your Evernote account.

Finally, if you can't get enough Evernote, the company has also introduced a podcast about their service. The first one, released mid-March, features discussions about the company itself as well as company news and tips. You can get the MP3 here or subscribe in iTunes.

Do you use Evernote? Tell us about it in the comments!

Why Use ContextMiner?

Marketers will probably be interested in how this free tool is able to track views and links, but that's not really the purpose behind ContextMiner's creation. Instead, the tool is designed more for research than anything else. For example, one of the main reasons to use ConextMiner is its ability to document the cultural phenomena of viral videos.

Often, when a video goes viral, very few people are aware of where it came from, what the story is behind it, who created it and why. As time goes by, finding the original video creator and source is even harder as the video spreads across the internet. But now, thanks to ContextMiner, the history behind a video's creation is no longer a mystery.

Take for instance, Vote Different, the mashup of Hillary Clinton with the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad and one of the most popular videos on YouTube. We've probably all seen this video at one point or another, but did you ever want to know who created it and why?

With ContextMiner, that information can easily be discovered. Because of its ability to pull the inbound links to a video, we can see that the original creator of the video, a user by the name of "ParkRidge47," is the subject of one of the inbound links to the video. A blog post on TechPresident titled "Who is ParkRidge47?" gives us a great history of this particular video's creation. You could also sort through the links provided to find the very first person to link to the video, which is often the creator themselves.

ContextMiner is still under development. In the future, the developers hope to offer tools and policies for exporting the videos, blog pages, and metadata. That's probably not an empty promise - there's already an an option to "download Flash video from YouTube" on the campaign creation form, it's just disabled right now. When that feature becomes available, we think it would be fine to then call ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool. Since "Archive" implies making a backup copy, until then we think ContextMiner should really just be considered a research tool. Still, we have to say, it's a pretty good one.

With Cloud, there is no desktop. You turn on your computer and it boots up to a Google Chrome web browser page which includes a dock of application shortcuts similar to what you would see on an Apple PC. Introduced at the recent Netbook World Summit in Paris, this simplified "OS" is an ideal install for the new ultraportable notebook computers called "netbooks," according to the company, as it is both fast and lightweight. It really is a true netbook, after all - it embodies the name in a way that none of the other netbook operating systems do.

However, unlike the various Linux-based netbook operating systems out there, including Good OS's failed "gOs" that was installed on the now-discontinued gPCs, Cloud OS does not intend to replace Windows. Instead, it runs alongside it. Presenting a hybrid approach to computing, Cloud gives you quick access to a number of web apps directly from the dock, including Google's Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Docs, Blogger, and YouTube, which you can launch alongside other rich client applications like Skype.

When you need to do heavier lifting, which on a netbook probably means running Microsoft Office, you can switch over to Windows or whatever OS may be running. (Cloud is compatible with all operating systems, says Good OS).

Cloud: OS or PXE?

If Cloud was installed on a traditional laptop or desktop, on the other hand, it would be akin to the Preboot Execution Environments (PXEs) installed on consumers PCs. It is in these PXEs that we may initially test the waters of a cloud OS's potential. Take for example Dell's forthcoming Latitude ON: a  Linux-based system-on-a-chip that consists of a low-power ARM processor and flash memory running independently of the laptop's CPU and hard disk drive. With it, you'll be able to launch a Firefox-based browser, web mail, calendar, and contacts application as well as a Microsoft Office and PDF viewer. Cloud OS is merely an alternative to that software, albeit without the Microsoft Office/PDF support.

But is a PXE really the Cloud OS of our dreams? In our imaginations, at least, there was no app that still required the computing power of the desktop. Is that ever going to be a reality?

Do We Really Want or Need a Cloud OS?

Today's computer users may not need to run as many desktop applications as they did in the past, but there are still several apps whose cloud versions exist only as lightweight counterparts to the real deal. Adobe's Photoshop is a great example of this - although there are several web based photo-editing apps, most would argue that they don't compare in either features or richness to their desktop counterpart. Then there is, of course, the staple: Microsoft Office. It will soon come in a web-flavored version called Microsoft Office Web Applications, but will it really replace the desktop software entirely? Even more, do we want it to?

As we transition to the cloud, we're seeing more attempts at merging the online and offline worlds. Adobe gave us AIR apps, which can be designed to run in offline mode, syncing data back to their various motherships when your internet connection returns. Google delivered Google Gears, a simple yet somewhat clunky implementation that takes web apps offline. Why clunky? Gears doesn't automatically detect a lost connection, you see. (Switch off your Wi-Fi and see what Google Reader does. Oops, an error occurred, it will say.) Instead, using Gears means you must first click the provided button or link which saves the data to your computer for offline viewing. If it wasn't for the syncing it offered, this wouldn't be much more of an improvement over the good ol' "make this web page available offline" trick.

The Drawback to the Cloud OS: An Offline World

So far, these hybrid approaches to dealing with the cloud seem to imply that we're not entirely ready for a complete transition. Internet is not everywhere yet, unfortunately. So where does that leave our hopes for a true cloud OS? Do we first need ubiquitous broadband and Wi-Fi before a cloud OS can become a reality?  Or will we one day surf a free second internet provided by Google? Is Google right now perfecting a hybrid OS in secret? Whatever the case, despite its name, Cloud OS doesn't feel like like the cloud-based OS we dreamed of, but it may be a good first step in that direction.

A company called FaceTime Communications, based in Belmont, California, recently introduced their new inspection and classification technology called "ACE," which simply stands for Application Control Engine. This patented security technology is capable of scanning a network and identifying more than 1400 Web 2.0 applications and more than 50,000 social networks widgets distributed by sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut.

Scanning for rogue applications on the network is nothing new for I.T., but what's interesting about FaceTime's ACE technology is its focus on scanning for the technologies that often fly under I.T.'s radar: web apps.

The Danger of Web 2.0 Behind the Firewall

As we've mentioned before, I.T.'s failure to adapt to the changing needs of their user base, now younger and more digitally savvy than ever before, has led to a lot of self-provisioning of the easy-to-use applications found on the web. These tools can include anything from Facebook groups to standalone apps like the SharePoint-lite team pages found on Google Sites.

Of course, when users become their own I.T. department, they're unknowingly introducing inherent risks into the previously hardened network infrastructure. Just because a web app is easy to operate, that doesn't make it safe and secure for enterprise use. As users upload and share sensitive files through these unapproved backchannels or have business-related conversations through web-based IM chatrooms, they might not only be putting their company's data at risk, they could also be breaking various compliance laws as well. 

The Difficulty of Monitoring Web Apps in the Enterprise

For I.T., the challenge is keeping up with the barrage of new web apps out there and shutting down those that present a threat. In an independent study commissioned by FaceTime Communications, 62% of I.T. respondents said that there were eight or more Internet applications installed on their enterprise networks - a 300% increase over the first study conducted in 2005. More importantly, the respondents noted that about one-third of their users downloaded the applications they wanted to use - regardless of company policy. Those apps were a mix between apps for business and those used for personal reasons.

I.T. has traditionally struggled to shut down many of today's web applications because they are not all strictly browser-based. Knowing that their adoption rate is dependent on behind-the-back installs on company desktops, many of the apps make sure they can't be blocked by a URL signature. The apps may also masquerade themselves as HTTP, FTP, SMTP and Telnet traffic while exhibiting evasive techniques that help them penetrate the company firewall and escape detection by the current crop of Unified Threat Management systems.

With FaceTime's ACE, though, more than 1,400 of these web applications can be identified and even more social networking widgets can be isolated, too. Those apps can be discovered and shut down regardless of the port, protocol, or evasive technique they use. In addition, the ACE software developers kit (SDK) allows third party solution providers the ability to extend their offerings in order to help their customers manage instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing, social networking, Web 2.0, voice-over-IP, anonymizers, IPTV, multimedia, games, virtual worlds, and unified communications. 

What This Means for Enterprise 2.0

If FaceTime's ACE or other similar technologies become a mainstay in the enterprise I.T. toolkit, the explosion of Web 2.0 for business use, a trend typically called Enterprise 2.0, may be dealt quite a blow. The only Enterprise 2.0 apps that will succeed given that scenario will be the ones that worked with the I.T. admins from the very beginning to assure them of their safety. The apps reliant on a slew of the company's rule-breaking users for adoption, however, will be out of luck. Perhaps being sneaky may not have been a great business model after all.

We asked our staff and a number of other advanced social web users what the one thing is that they like most to show people who are less experienced with the web than they are. Some of our favorite responses are below, maybe they'll give you some fresh ideas about how to have that big conversation with the people in your life - maybe some of them will even be new for you.

The Big Picture

There were a number of people who said that showing people how to use browser tabs made a big difference. (This author has a hard time comprehending that, to be honest.) Communications consultant Jordan Guthman says he likes to show people Google's "advanced search" and in particular the option to limit searches to content posted within the last 24 hours. (I must admit that's a new one to me!) That probably helps illustrate that the new web is always fresh and changing.

Betsy Weber works at TechSmith, makers of screen casting programs Camtasia and Jing, tools people use to share new things about the web with each other every day. Betsy says she likes to show people Firefox Mouse Gestures. Macbook Pro owners should check out the similar multi-touch command app MultiClutch. Both of these are big time savers, helping users navigate quickly through the expansive web.

Useful: Syndication

Syndication and RSS are life changing stuff, so we weren't surprised to that many people we talked to said that some variation of RSS is the first thing they show people.

Google Alerts are very popular but they aren't the only way to introduce people to the subscribable web. (This season's newest addition to the service - RSS feeds for Google Alerts, is pretty cool though.)

Using RSS feeds helps users move beyond stumbling through a handful of websites, caught unaware of emerging information unless by chance visits to sites. It puts us in command of a personalized information flow, increased in timeliness and breadth by orders of magnitude over our old browsing habits.

PR pro Mike Maney says he starts with an RSS reader (specifically, NetNewsWire from Newsgator) because it's "amazing watching people immediately grok the power of the web coming to them." We've found too that simply showing people a filled-up RSS reader turns on light bulbs immediately. Talking about the idea, not so much.

Josh Bancroft checks out cool new things and then shows them to other people for a living, at Intel. He likes to start people out with the Common Craft video RSS in Plain English. We like that video a lot, too.

SocialText's Schott Schnaars says he pointed his family to FriendFeed, where they can find all of his activity syndicated in one place. That makes a lot of sense to us, though we suspect that a separate lifestreaming account might best keep family from being overwhelmed by too much work-related information they aren't interested in.

Marshall's Pick

What do I like to show people to turn them on to syndication? I generally show them Netvibes or iGoogle but after that, I like to show them how to find feeds to fill those pages up with. There's no better way to do that than with Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious. Specifically, I like to show them links like http://delicious.com/tag/TopicOfInterest+blog. Check out the most popular links there and you'll find some of the best blogs on whatever your topic of interest is. We discussed this and similar strategies in a post here titled Comparing Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche.

Show people how to find and subscribe to the top blogs on topics they are interested in and most people will be quickly engaged. It's really useful - far more useful than platitudes about "joining the conversation." Most people don't know where to look to find the conversation. Show them and they get really excited.

Next Page: Fun! Visualization and Music

Fun: Visualization and Music

Reading blogs and feeds may be good for work but work alone can sustain no one. Nor can it sustain most peoples' interest in all the new things going on online.

A number of people that we asked said that Google Maps, Earth and Streetview were their favorite things to show new users. Those certainly make a big impression. That's especially true with the new redesign of Google Maps and Streetview. For the sheer power of Google's view of the globe to be compacted down into my little browser is truly awe inspiring.

Looking at images of our world and the streets we live on isn't the only visualization that's easy to get excited about, though. Hardware blogger Mari Silbey says she shows people image browser CoolIris. That's fast becoming a very popular browser extension.

None of those visualization tools offer quite the feeling of teeming humanity that journalist Craig McGinty's favorite, TwitterVision, does. This world map of real time Twitter messages immediately communicates that there are everyday people all around the world communicating with new online tools, all day long. It's quite compelling.

While you're perusing all this imagery, why not listen to some music in the background? A number of people we asked said that they liked to show people music recommendation sites Pandora and Last.fm or MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine.

Showing people not just free and legal music online, but free and legal music where the discovery is powered by algorithms, network effects and economies of scale - that's an exciting experience for almost anyone. It still excites me every time I visit these sites and think about what's going on.

Perspective: History

All of these tools and toys that we show people to share our excitement about the new web deserve some amount of criticism, as well, for a balanced perspective. The wisdom of the crowd may not be the best way to have your editorial decisions made in music, news or other content. Google's omniscience warrants some serious skepticism. RSS increases information consumption but may very well cost us contemplation.

We believe that these tools are still worth using, though. When used well, they give us super-powers as information workers. Those powers can be used for good.

There was a time in history when access to knowledge came in the form of monthly rides on a horse into the local town where the library was located. Those times had their up-sides, but our relationship to this kind of knowledge about the world was not one of them.

None the less, life before Web 2.0, life before the internet, certainly had a lot to offer. The Digital Divide not withstanding, we who live in many parts of the world will find ourselves, relatively soon, with no one in our lives who remembers what the world was like before the internet. That will be a significant loss for our collective knowledge.

Perhaps talking to people who do not live in the web, showing them what we're excited about, can be a learning experience for us as well as for them.

What about you? What do you like to show people first who are unfamiliar with all of this? Let us know in comments; those wonder-filled moments of discovery are fun to think about. Perhaps it's the memory of that high that keeps so many of us tuned in to all the new applications that launch every day - the hope that we will find "another RSS," another Pandora/Last.fm, another game changer that we couldn't even imagine before it came into our lives.

Keeping tabs on all the happenings across the social web can be a challenge. For some, FriendFeed is the destination of choice as it lets you see streams of information from all your friends as they share, comment, and participate in social media. Others find the application too noisy, as it requires a lot of manual tweaking and filtering to remove unwanted content.

A good alternative for those who want to keep up with the social web in a more organized fashion is PeopleBrowsr, a virtual dashboard for tracking your online identities. It's very much inspired by TweetDeck with panels that you scroll through horizontally. It also has a "Groups" feature, but its implementation was somewhat confusing. We'll give it a pass for now, though, as the application is still in alpha.

How To Use It

To get started with PeopleBrowsr, you simply add your online IDs and authorize the PeopleBrowsr service when necessary, as with flickr and YouTube. Once you're finished, you can then switch over to the PeopleBrowsr app itself.

There are actually two different views to choose from: the stream view (which resembles TweetDeck) and the Gallery view which lays out the avatars of your friends across the page. You must select your view of choice upon login. In the Gallery view, you can click on friends' avatars to see their latest updates and then interact with those updates accordingly, depending on what network you are browsing at the time.

To select the network you want to see, there's a navigation bar at the top left side of the page. You can scroll through the various online sites listed, selecting those you want displayed. In the Stream view, this is more practical as it loads up each new network in a separate panel, letting you then scroll horizontally from Twitter, to flickr, to YouTube, etc.

Your Streams

Each network provides different options for the types of views you can add to your paneled view. Clicking on the network from the navigation bar (see above) will add some default views to the window, but you can also choose to add other views from the navigation bar above the streams themselves. For Twitter, the views to choose from may include things like Replies and your Friends Timeline, for Flickr it includes options like Favorites and Friends' photos, and for YouTube, it includes your videos, your favorites, and so on.

PeopleBrowsr also has "PeopleTags" which let you tag friends in order to create cross-network groups. This feature wasn't entirely intuitive to use because the "My Groups" option appears at the top of the page even when no groups have been created. It seems to respond to a click but does nothing even though you're assuming that it will open up a pane for group creation as in TweetDeck. However, as you click on the individual posted items in your streams, you have the option of tagging them in order to create groups which then makes the "My Groups" link functional.

PeopleBrowsr Shows Promise

For an alpha app, this is a great first start. There are still some tweaks, like the Groups feature for example, that need to be made. Also, although it was possible to add a FriendFeed ID, FriendFeed did not appear in the top navigation for some reason. Without its inclusion, this would be an incomplete application. The app was also slow at times, once even crashing Firefox entirely. However, it's hard to tell for sure whether that's the app at fault or the pre-beta OS the testing was done on. That said, PeopleBrowsr definitely looks like a promising tool to organize your social streams in ways that make sense to you.

Yotify lets you track any number of things from hotel room rates to sports scores or even the latest videos on YouTube. The list of things you can track is practically endless. To help you find the scout you need, the different types are organized into broad categories which include shopping, fun, travel, classifieds, and news and blogs.

Saving Money

When it comes to product searches, Yotify is very smart. It doesn't just look at keywords, but also lets you know what the current best price is and then lets you select a checkbox to have the service alert you if the price drops below a certain point. You can also optionally check to be alerted when there are new product reviews available. The shopping section features scouts for common searches like digital cameras and laptops, but the shortcuts section lets you create more specific searches for a keyword, like a product ID or model number.

Staying Informed

The News and Blogs section lets you search a handful of sites, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Huffington Post among others, but most people won't be satisfied with the small selection provided and will need to turn to the shortcuts section instead. From here, you can track any site's RSS feed, or for sites without RSS, you can search the blog itself just by entering its URL. You can also track changes to search results as well as track vanity search results for your name.

The shortcuts section includes a few other useful scouts, too, including one which lets you track a profile on LinkedIn, another to track local events (provided by Eventful), one for eBay auctions, and even one that tracks your FriendFeed.

Asking For Help

The social aspect of Yotify comes into play under the "Ask Friends" section. Here, you can share your scouts on Facebook and FriendFeed and get responses. Using either option will post your query directly to those social networks and when people reply you'll be informed via email. If you want to share a scout with select friends only, that can be done under the "Edit Scout" section where you can enter in individual email addresses instead. You can also share the scout with your friends on Yotify.

How It Compares

In a lot of ways, Yotify is reminiscent of the newly launched Alerts.com, a service which differentiates itself by letting you receive updates via SMS, email, voice, or IM. In a lot of ways, those various contact options from Alerts.com makes that service the more useful of the two, especially since a lot of our information overload today begins with email, which is currently the only way to receive Yotify updates. However, Yotify's options for sharing your scouts with friends give it a unique twist as do the various options for fine-tuning your searches.

Still, we definitely like the new direction Yotify is going with their service. Instead of adding to our social media burden by creating yet another place to "hang out" online, they're using the network of connections we've already built to make their service more useful to us. Our lives are busy enough, so we hope this is the start of a new trend of smart social apps.

Do you hate calling customer service at a large company? It's safe to say we all do. Nearly every large corporation today utilizes phone menus to route your call to the correct department and it's nearly impossible to get a real person on the phone. Wouldn't it be great if there was a web app that did the calling for you and then rang you back when they reached the right spot in the phone menu? That would be a truly useful service, wouldn't it?

Now there's an app that will do the deep dialing for you. It's called Fonolo and it's dead-simple to use. To get started, you first find the company you want to call in the Fonolo directory and then click to display that company's phone menu. Instead of having to navigate the company's phone tree yourself, you just find the area or department you need to call and click the button that reads "call here."

Fonolo will then place the call and navigate the menu for you. When they reach the right spot, they'll call your phone and you'll be connected.

Although Fonolo's directory is nowhere near as extensive at the one at GetHuman.com, another popular site for getting a person on the phone, the big difference between the two sites is that Fonolo directs you to the area you want - which may or may not be speaking with a customer service agent. For example, you may just want to check an order status - there's really no need to speak to a person to do so - but people get frustrated with the menu so they just take the shortcut to customer service.

Unfortunately, after testing a few companies, it was easy to see why the company is still in private beta - the call quality was very poor. However, the company is aware of this and are working on this problem with their termination provider. The issue is due to the volume of calls - more than they expected, apparently. But if they can get that problem fixed, this will be an invaluable service.

The Developer Platform

The company has also just introduced a developer platform and API, which lets developers build applications that interact with the Deep Dialing service. Developers will be able to:

• Search Fonolo's directory of companies;
• Display the full text of the phone menu for a selected company;
• Initiate a Deep Dial process to any node in the phone menu;
• Route calls to any PSTN number or SIP address.

Developers can sign up at developer.fonolo.com.

A future API release will cover Fonolo's "Intelligent Call History" service, providing access to Deep Dial Bookmarks, call recordings and user notes. "We want users to access the power of these innovations through as many channels as possible, including mobile applications, soft-phone plug-ins and carrier integration," said Fonolo co-founder and CEO Shai Berger. "Today's announcement is the first step in making that possible."

Invites!

After the app leaves beta, there will be a few more features available, like the ability to bookmark individual spots in a phone tree and the ability to record your calls.

If you would like to take a sneak peek at Fonolo, which is still in private beta, let us know by leaving a comment. We have 100 invites to distribute to our readers. Remember OpenID users, your comment won't display your email address, so please leave it in your comment itself.

Yesterday, PutPlace's service launched into public beta. With this launch, Windows users (for now - Mac is coming later) can create an account and set up the folders they want backed up on their home computers' using the PutPlace desktop software. The software is not restricted to a certain number of machines, either. It can be - and should be - installed on all the PCs in the home. That's because PutPlace is designed for tracking the various versions of digital files as they move around your personal home network as well as when they make it to various online storage service, like flickr.

PutPlace knows that users with several computers in the home often end up with multiple copies of the same file and it can hard to determine which one is the newest. To determine the file versions, PutPlace digitally fingerprints each file with a hash so that it can then track it wherever it goes - whether to your laptop or online.

Adding "Web Places"

After setting up your folders to be backed up on your home computers, you can then add "web places" to your account. At the time of launch, this is a very short list - only flickr is included, but supposedly, in the future, the service will include other sites as well.

However, despite this lack of supported web services at the moment, one of PutPlace's better features is its ability to monitor specified folders on your computer and auto-publish them to sharing services. With this option turned on, you can have PutPlace setup to push all your pictures to flickr without having to manually use flickr's uploader tool. For those that publish a lot of pictures to flickr, this feature could be a huge timesaver.

The Desktop Software

Setting up the desktop software is easy enough to do and there's even an online Quick Start Guide with screenshots to walk you through the process. There are other online guides and a FAQ available from the service's help page. Configuring folders to auto-publish must be done from the web interface to PutPlace, not the desktop software, which honestly took me a couple of minutes to realize after exploring all the options in the desktop software's menus.

The Public Beta

While PutPlace is in beta, the software is free*. (*Up to 2 GB). After the beta period is over, pricing will be determined, but it will be on an pay-for-what-you-use basis.

In this early state, some have compared PutPlace to syncplicity without the sync and collaboration. That's somewhat true except for PutPlace's emphasis on tracking files and auto-publishing them to web services. Of course, with only one source so far (flickr), that option may only hold limited appeal at the moment. If in the future, PutPlace added more services (and there really are so many today - just think of all the ones you can add to FriendFeed!), then it could become more useful.

There's also the possibility that PutPlace may have to, one day, compete with Windows Live Mesh. Currently only in a "technical preview" itself, this service is really a platform built with standard protocols like HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON . While at the moment, Mesh only does sync, storage, web access to files, and remote access to meshed machines, there's no reason why, further down the line, it could not also compete with the type of service that PutPlace offers.

However, all that being said, PutPlace may still be worth a look. Since it is providing free online backup and storage, frugal folks like myself will probably utilize PutPlace's free service for a while to back up some files in addition to all those we already have spread out across the web on other free storage services. Also, for photographers especially, the tool which auto-syncs files to flickr could make the service beneficial. (That is...if they're running Windows. )

If you see a picture or hear some music you like, you can add it to your "moodboard" and get additional information on purchasing it from Getty's library. That's a smart move that ties some brand and product marketing into an otherwise fun mashup.

Sheila Lennon of the Providence Journal writes that Moodstream might be "even better if you can port it to your big TV." She might not be far off the type of use case that the app's creators had it mind. From Rick Webb, of the Barbarian Group, who created Moodstream for Getty:

What is Moodstream? It's a concepting tool. The modern version of the fireplace. An interactive art piece. TV for the future. It's a website we created for and with Getty Images to showcase all of their offerings - still, video and sound - and inspire interactive creatives. And it's really, really fun to use.

He's certainly right about the last part. I've had Moodstream running in the background all morning as I've been reading blogs and catching up with last night's news, and I keep finding myself switching back to it to check what sort of visual and auditory treats it has for me. It is easy to see how designers could find inspiration while staring at Moodstream's interactive slideshow.

Getting Started

Using the Last.fm API, Andrew Godwin writes and runs LastGraph, a great Last.fm visual history tool. To start, just enter your username to hit enter to get a queue ticket. LastGraph is a beta web app so there are some kinks and issues. A queue happens to be one of them. Fortunately you shouldn't have to wait more than 30 seconds for the page to refresh with a nice selection of visual goodies.

LastGraph grabs the last 20 weeks of data, which is a lot if you happen to use Last.fm on a regular basis like I do. The following stats are available for visual displaying:

• Artist Histories
• Quick Timeline
• Timeline Posters

Artist Histories

Artist histories allows you to see your latest artists sorted by the most played artists at the top. Clicking on a name will display a visual graph showing how many times an artist was played over the past several months. Take a look at my chart for Linkin Park:

If you click on the image to enlarge the graph, you'll notice that that there are some really big gaps in the graph. While Linkin Park is one of my top 5 most played artists, I don't listen to them very often and the gaps in the graph show this. l just recently picked them up again and now they're dropping back off. The great thing about having listening habits displayed in this manner is that you can find out what a user's current listening tastes are. While Last.fm will tell you they're one of my favorites (which they are), LastGraph will tell you that I'm currently exploring other artists at the moment.

Quick Timeline

Quick Timeline is another visual graph that gives you a view of your overall listening habits. Last.FM may record your listening habits, but doesn't provide a way to keep track of how many songs you've listened to within a specified length of time beyond a week. You have no way of comparing how many songs you've listened to in the past month versus this month. LastGraph's 'Quick Timeline' view give a great resolution.

Timeline Posters

LastGraph provides posters of your viewing history. The result is a complicated but useful representation of your listening habits. You can specify a period of time you'd like to have a poster generated for, the color of the poster, and the amount of details you'd like the poster to have ranging from terrible to super. There's another queue for the posters which could take several minutes to render depending on the length of time specified, the detail level, and the number of user requests. The posters are available for download in PDF and SVGZ format. Here's a look my poster for the month of May, rainbow style, with super detail!

Last.FM Should Incorporate LastGraph

All of the data provided by LastGraph is available for exporting in Excel, CVS, and JSON formats. You can even get individual artist data from the 'Artist Histories' page. What I'd like to see next is an expansion from artists to songs. It would be cool to see how often I've played certain songs like Misery Business By Paramore throughout several months or days.

If Last.fm could incorporate all their data in the same manner, you could get an alternative way of seeing your compatibility with other users. The data could be used not only for finding users that match our music tastes overall, but also our current tastes, which could be a more relevant match for users that constantly change their listening habits and music styles.

The new funding round takes Skyfire's total raise to date up to $17.8m. Currently in private beta for Windows Mobile, Skyfire will use the funding to expand their  browser to even more people on more platforms. The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and included previous investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. The funds will be used towards further rollout and distribution of the mobile browser and will add Jake Seid, Managing Director of Lightspeed, to its Board of Directors.

A Hands-on Look at Skyfire

Skyfire offers users a web experience akin to a PC with fast speeds and support for web technologies that most mobile handsets lacks. With Skyfire you can visit sites such as ReadWriteWeb, Youtube, Last.fm, CNN, and more just like you would on your PC. Skyfire loaded every website I threw at it without a hitch. I was even able to read my feeds in Google Reader and use features such as sharing an item and staring an item just like I would on my PC.

Usability

Navigating Skyfire is easy and intuitive. The homepage features three tabs that puts everything you need at your fingertips such as featured sites and sections, bookmarks, search, and your browsing history. The integrated search bar provides results from Yahoo and Google with links to view images, videos, and maps of your search results. Best of all, switching between each search engine was quick. All of these features were easy to use.

The zoom feature was a breath of fresh air from Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE). When you first head to a site, you'll see a full view of the with the option to zoom in with your keypad. A small cursor box will appear as you move the keypad around. Once you've selected a spot to zoom in on, Skyfire immediately renders a better view of your selection. From this view, you can interact with the page by selecting links, playing videos and more. When moving the mouse to scroll around the page, Skyfire automatically optimizes the other portions of the site for maximum viewing experience. Zooming out to fullview was as simple as pressing my keypad down again.

Audio and Video

Audio and video streams worked flawlessly on the browser. After testing the application against Youtube, I tried a bigger service: Hulu (Hulu coverage). Video playback was a little choppy which was expected. However, the performance far surpassed my expectations of the browser possibly choking and crashing.

Skyfire Supported Technologies

Skyfire is a free downloadable browser that aims to be the Safari of Windows Mobile among other mobile platforms.Right now, the application only supports Windows Mobile 5 and 6 handsets, both touchscreen and non-touchscreen. Skyfire supports web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, Ajax, QuickTime, Java, Windows Media, and plans to expand with each new release of the application.

One Big Problem

One problem that many users may be concerned with is how Skyfire renders web pages to effectively deliver them to your handset for the best browsing experience. Its proprietary technology is server assisted and moves the heavy work to a server to keep the client's performance high. Essentially, this amounts to your data being stored in the hands of Skyfire. While I've had nothing short of a great experience with Skyfire, I recommend you choose carefully what sites and data you enter into the browser.

What Skyfire Lacks

The biggest drawback I experienced with Skyfire was its limited customization options. There's no way to change what's listed in the 'Featured' tab. We'd appreciate a way to add a list of a user's most visited sites instead of always heading to our bookmarks to grab them. For bookmarks, PIE allows for users to categorize their favorite sites into folders.Skyfire doesn't support this option.

When comparing Skyfire to Opera Mobile there were four things that I could not do with Skyfire:

• Save images


• Copy Text


• Forward A Link


• Import Bookmarks from PIE

While the first three may not be necessary for some, importing bookmarks from PIE should be a top priority for Skyfire.

With the new funding round, Skyfire should now be able to open up its beta a little more. Users that signed up before March 1st can look forward to an invite very soon. If you registered after March 1st you'll have to wait until later this summer. Future plans for the mobile browser also include launching on the Symbian S60 mobile platform. Blackberry and Palm support are not in their immediate future plans. As for the iPhone, they're waiting on a call from Steve. Welcome to the waiting list on that one.

FontStruct is a simple to use Flash tool that uses pre-made shapes to allow people to assemble simple fonts. While it can't create the most sophisticated fonts, it can create some pretty cool ones. All fonts created using the FontStruct app must be licensed using a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can download and use the fonts for free -- though only fonts licensed without the "No Derivatives" clause can be cloned and used as the basis of new FontStruct creations.

Below is a font created using FontStruct and embedded using their sharing widget that lets users spread fonts they've made via social networking sites and blogs.

FontStruct automatically packages fonts as TTF files and makes them available for download on a special font page where other users can vote on that font and leave comments. Of course, FontStruct also serves as a marketing tool for the professionally made, paid fonts that FontShop sells -- one of which is advertised on almost every page of the FontStruct site. Even so, FontStruct is a really neat web application that makes it easy for anyone to create a TrueType font for free.