Muse Wedding has recently changed almost everything about its format, and it is for the better. The formerly ho-hum wedding to-do list program is now a full-fledged information and community site full of good stuff. All of the new features will be live today for new users.
Muse Wedding is basically one of those big, thick wedding planning binders on the web. You can enter whatever you need to get done into your task list and check it off as it gets done. You can create a budget and add what you have spent. You can even see it in a pie chart!
You can visit the Idea Book to see what other users have posted or post your own ideas for others to see. You can create a profile so like-minded users can find you for brainstorming sessions or idea swapping.
I used Muse Wedding for some of my own wedding planning before the redesign and community features were available. What I liked the most is that I made my own task list and wasn't tied to the traditional ideas of what needed to be done 6 months before the wedding, 5 months before the wedding and on and on.
Muse still offers that flexibility, now with a nice looking site design, and plenty of planning and community features. And even if the person planning the wedding isn't quite as web savvy as you, our DLS readers, each page has clear explanations of what you can do with each command.
The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is announcing a new version at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today, and the big news is that the whole thing is being rewritten from the ground up. M2, as it's being called, will include all of the features of the current Ma.gnolia, but it's going to be entirely Open Source. A first look at M2 should be available by September.
So, why Open Source, and what does it mean to Ma.gnolia users? Well, you'll be able to download Ma.gnolia and run your own version of it, and that version will be able to interoperate with Ma.gnolia.com and other web services. Standards like OpenID and OAuth will be supported, allowing for maximum portability of your data -- which, in the case of Ma.gnolia, mostly means your bookmarks and tags --- between sites. If you're already thinking of creative uses for an Open Source Ma.gnolia, good! They're looking to make user feedback a big part of building M2, so keep an eye on their blog if you've got input.
Look out Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Pownce, there's a new social network on the interwebs soon to take over all chatter channels - it's Fuelly, the social network devoted to tracking, sharing and comparing gas mileage.
If you engage in small talk at the water cooler about the rising cost of gas prices, and enjoy comparing odometer readings with your friends, Fuelly could be your next favorite social network.
Built over a 2 week period in July, Fuelly was designed so users can track their mileage between fill-ups and compare notes with one another. For added convenience, Fuelly has a mobile version.
Recent activity from the site shows various users either adding a car to their garage, filling up their car, reporting on their best tank ever, or newly joining. You can befriend people based on their car type, gas mileage and odometer checks. Man, this is fun!
Hot tips such as use cruise control often and keep your tires properly inflated are among the many not so obvious suggestions to keep you more gas efficient.
As of this writing, 5,389 Fuelly users have tracked 17,203 fuel-ups in 6,006 vehicles over 4,375,464 miles of driving.
Image sharing site Flickr has allowed users to view attractive slideshows of search results or image sets for a while now. But for some reason, up until now you had to rely on a third party service if you wanted to embed that slideshow on your own web page. Or you could create an iFrame and figure out how to create the code yourself. But who wants to go through the trouble?
This week, Flickr finally added the ability to share a slideshow with other users. Just click the Share link when viewing any slideshow on Flickr. You get two options: a URL that links to the slideshow you're viewing or HTML code that will let you embed a smaller version on your web page.
The slideshow embedded at the top of this post shows search results for the word "compiz."
Zoho officially has more online office applications than most people could ever possibly need. But the latest addition makes a lot of sense. Zoho Share lets users upload documents (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc) and share them with other users either via the Zoho web site or by embedding docs on another page. In other words, Zoho Share doesn't do much of anythin gthat Scribd and DocStoc don't already do. But Zoho will also let you import documents from Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer and other online office docs, which means you can easily create and share your files using the same service.
Zoho Share is available as a public preview, and is still pretty rough around the edges. For example, I was unable to upload any documents, and thanks to the lack of a FAQ, it took me a while to figure out how to import docuements from other Zoho services. Eventually I figured out that by marking a Zoho Writer/Sheet or other document as public, it would show up in a Zoho Share search.
If you're looking for PowerPoint style presentations with pictures of cute kitens, or sample resumes, you can find them at Zoho Share. But like any YouTube-for-documents style service, Zoho Share will only really be useful if the company can build a strong enough user base to ensure that you'll always find what you're looking for -- or if Zoho decides not to emphasize the search and find functionality of the site as much as the fact that you can use Zoho Share to embed documents you upload yourself on your own web site. You know, if the company ever fixes the upload feature.
Thinking about switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer to the Opera web browser, but can't imagine life without the StumbleUpon toolbar? StumbleUpon has yet to release an official toolbar or plugin for Opera. And while there is certainly a way to rank web pages and discover new pages without a toolbar, it's rather inelegant.
Opera Stumbler is a third party plugin that gives you all the same features you'd expect from the toolbar, sans the toolbar. There are several different ways to use Opera Stumbler. You can install the menu button, which adds a StumbleUpon menu to Opera.
If you'd rather have toolbar buttons, you can install a series of buttons for common tasks like giving a page a thumbs up or thumbs down. These buttons can be dragged and dropped onto any Opera toolbar. You can also add a Stumble option to your Opera Speed Dial bookmarks.
If you think you're too old to do something like go back to college, learn how to scuba dive, or be social on the interwebs, you can either think again or stay beholden to your self imposed rigid beliefs. One person who throws such nonsense to the wind, is Ivy Bean, a 102 year old former mill worker, who has the distinction of being the oldest person on Facebook.
With 1,217 friends on Facebook (and climbing), Ivy's story has definitely resonated with people. She started with just 9 friends when her story was first published today. It just shows, even if you're late to the party, it's getting there that matters.
To find out more about Ivy and be her friend, check out the Oldest person on Facebook - Ivy Bean group.
About six years ago Mitch Kapor, the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, started a new open source project called Chandler. The goal was simple enough: Create an personal information management tool that would allow users to store, share, and collaborate. It would have things like a calendar, address book, and to do list.
In other words, Chandler is a lot like Microsoft Outlook. But there are a few major differences:
Chandler is open source
Chandler works with Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a web interface
You can sync your Chandler tasks with an online server and share them with others
Overall the interface of the desktop and web clients is pretty, but not necessarily intuitive. For example, there's a nice big text entry box at the top of the application that you would think would be for searching. But it's primary use is for entering new tasks. Type something into that box and a new task is created. If you want to use the text area as a search box, you need to type "/f" before entering your query. Is Chandler kind of useful? Sure. Is it an Outlook killer? Maybe. Was it worth a six year wait? Maybe not. But now that it's here, Kapor says it's up to the open source community to continue developing the project. And I've learned never to understimate the open source community. If there's a will, there's a way, and this application could be the future of collaborative task management. On the other hand, it's not entirely clear if there's a will at the moment.
What do you think? Is Chandler the wave of the future, or should Kapor have given up on it years ago?
Disqus offers web publishers the ability to spruce up their comments sections with advanced features including threaded comments, avatars, and ratings. Perhaps the most significant advantage Disqus offers over the default Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad or Moveable Type comments features is the fact that users can sign up for one Disqus account and leave comments on thousands of blogs and web sites.
There's just one problem (for web publishers): Up until now, user comments were stored on Disqus servers, not on your web page. That means search engines didn't notice any information left in comments on your site, which could hurt your page rank. Today, Disqus took the first step to address this shortcoming with a new Wordpress plugin.
The new plugin is much more tightly integrated with Wordpress than the old version. First up, the comments are now indexable by search engines since they are stored both on your site and on Disqus servers. Second, it's now easier to import and export comments. And third, you can now moderate comments using the Wordpress Admin interface. No need to login to a separate web page. Improved plugins for other blog platforms should be coming soon.
The Disqus web site has also been redesigned to make it easier to navigate through comments. It's also easier to follow comments left by a particular user.
Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There's just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog.
Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you've got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older PC with 1GB or less, there's no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.
A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn't go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.
The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There's also a new crash reporter.
Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn't recommend replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you've been frustrated with Digsby's high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.
Despite its seriously flawed name, Coccinella, the open source IM client, has some interesting features that might make you do a double take. The idea of chatting and having the ability to draw on a whiteboard, as well as play chess during a chat session sounds like fun, so I decided to give it a spin.
I learned from the process that Coccinella is the Latin name for ladybug. It is not, as I had thought originally, a bacteria found in pond scum. I continued my pursuit, preferring to focus on the cute little ladybug in the logo and ignore the unfortunate "ella" associations with the name.
Coccinella is a free download for Windows, Linux and Mac. After downloading the application, the set up assistant leads you to select from a list of servers to open a new account on. Although Coccinella can connect to any Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server including Google Talk, AOL, MSN and ICQ, you have to dig for information to find out how. The set up assistant leads you to select from various servers and so I created an account with Jabber.org. I was happy I did.
Holy hashtags Batman! Some Chinese Twitter fans want to make sure that even Twitter isn't safe from the deluge of Olympic tidbits you'll no doubt tire of in the next two weeks.
Steven Lin, one of the originators of the #080808 hashtag said it's "just for fun, a way to write down the day," according to the New York Times.
They even have a nifty buddy icon template you can download and personalize.
Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.
The basic idea's pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.
Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it'll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.
TripSay is hard to explain. It combines travel information, social networking, maps and reviews of places. As someone who enjoys traveling, I think it has potential.
Basically, you log in to TripSay and build your world by entering places you have traveled. Each place you enter can get a rating from a smiley face to a butt (really!) and a short tip or comment for which you can, thankfully use more than 140 characters. You can join groups with similar travel interests like a particular place or type of travel.
Based on your rating of places you will get recommendations on the map that match what you have indicated you enjoy. Most of my recent vacation have been to beaches, so the majority of my recommendations were for beachy places. Tripsay uses a recommendation engine to generate your results.
If you want to look for something different, you can click on different icons on the main map to see mountains, shopping, cities, etc. that have been rated by other users.
TripSay calls itself an intelligent social network (that) delivers highly targeted travel information, recommendations and tips based on one's unique preferences and social network.
I think if TripSay gains a large user base and lots of information it could be really useful to find interesting restaurants and out of the way places that guidebooks don't cover. But, it will really depend on the amount of users the site attracts.
Mozilla released a plugin for Firefox called Snowl yesterday that has the potential to completely change the way you use your web browser. Or it could just frustrate the heck out of you. Here's what it does: it brings messages from various sources (Twitter, RSS feeds, and eventually instant messaging services) to your browser.
The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.
But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you've got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you've got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There's an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a "river of news" style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.
Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?
