June 28, 2008

Summize is your Imaginary Friend

If anybody’s keeping score, I’m one of those folks who thinks that IM, SMS, email, Twitter, FriendFeed, and perhaps another two or three other services we haven’t seen yet each have their place and that no one service is likely to crush another, let alone all the others. I do find myself spending more and more time on FriendFeed, however, and for information flow that’s not time sensitive, FriendFeed and Feedly make up my dashboard.

One very handy but somewhat hidden feature of FriendFeed is the "Imaginary Friend".

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June 27, 2008

FriendFeed Target Window Script

Here’s a quick little Greasemonkey script that addresses one of the little quirks in my FriendFeed workflow. I’ve set FriendFeed as my home page and always have it open in a Firefox window. It updates automatically, with new items appearing at the top of the page. About 95% of the time I right-click on the links in items and open them in a new window so I still have the FriendFeed home page open.

After installing several of the FriendFeed Greasemonkey scripts over at Internet Duct Tape, I finally broke down and wrote my own. This script updates all the links in the body of the page so that they open in a “content” window, rather than window where the FriendFeed page appears.

Rather than duplicate a full tutorial on Greasemonkey and FriendFeed, I’d suggest you check out the tutorial on Internet Duct Tape. Once you’ve done that, you should be able to follow the link below to install the “Target Window” script.

[ FriendFeed Target Window Script ]

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November 4, 2007

OpenSocial First Impressions

opensocialThis weekend I spent some time experimenting with OpenSocial a bit and watching the flow of comments in Google’s opensocial developer forum. First of all, it’s not really of much use to me at the moment as they haven’t yet launched the “Data” part of their API, which will eventually allow RESTful access to profile data on OpenSocial containers. That means I’m left to watch from the sidelines as folks muddle through writing widgets. Bottom line: it seems like an early Beta at best, and there are lots of unanswered questions ranging from security concerns to how “open” the API revision process will be to how exactly new members can join the OpenSocial “club”. Unless you want to deal with early-adopter/beta tester issues, give it a month or so before you jump onboard.

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April 27, 2006

Free SketchUp

SketchUp is a neat, intuitive 3D drawing program from a company called @Last. Following Google’s general modus operandi these days, and in complete opposition to Microsoft’s general approach, Google bought the company a little while back and is “liberating” the software–or at least a version of it. Their objective is certainly to make it as easy as possible to populate Google Earth, but that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that the software’s just cool. Read the rest of this entry »

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April 26, 2006

Back to Plaxo

I’ve installed Plaxo more than once over the years, but in the end I was always guilted into dropping it. Enough folks I know use it now, however, that I’m back. Perhaps I’ll stay with it this time since they’re now "less evil"…

Well, Plaxo has finally announced that they’ve harassed enough people into joining and won’t be making it quite so easy to for users to spam their entire address book. The words they chose certainly tell us that, at least internally, they fully knew how miserable they were making all of us

– TechCrunch » Plaxo: Now With Less Evil

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