Just heard through Twitter that Twhirl, my (and most everyone's) favorite Twitter client, has added support for identi.ca in a still unreleased beta version. identi.ca, for those who haven't heard about it, is a Twitter clone that is based on the Laconica open source microblogging platform, which allows anyone with access to a web server to host their own microblogging platform à la Twitter. Even though the release is still marked as beta, you can get it over here. You must also register your IM address with identi.ca and add the identi.ca user as your IM buddy in order to ...
Polar Rose, a facial recognition based search engine that allows you to find photos of people by their name, is getting ready to enter public beta. Yesterday I received an e-mail from them with my invite (at last, I was subscribed since around November 2006!), and their blog states that they have a "public beta coming up".
Polar Rose works by having people tag images through a browser plugin (see picture to the right), and then building a model of that person using some sophisticated technology that came out of EU-backed research projects at the universities of Malmö and Lund in ...
Read it at Andrew Dobrow's blog: as a protest against Twitter's continuing availability issues, he sugests people take o while day off Twitter. I'm all for it, definitely. Even if I'm not one of the biggest Twitter users out there, I do really enjoy it - it's just a pity that I live so far from civilization... And as Andrew himself said it, this is happening precisely because people like Twitter so much, and it's not just about being ungrateful. And I would add the following sugestion to the discussion: not only spend a day without Twitter, but switch over ...
News from Seesmic! Now there is a Wordpress plugin for video posting and commenting, check it out:
{seesmic_video:{"url_thumbnail":{"value":"http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/6D8EqAyEzd_th1.jpg"}"title":{"value":"New Seesmic plugin activated! "}"videoUri":{"value":"http://www.seesmic.com/video/rOfbOCncq7"}}}
Seesmic just gets better every day.
Saw this one over at FriendFeed Watch: the first desktop client for FriendFeed was released! I was looking forward to this, as FriendFeed is such a nice and well implemented idea that justs begs to become a permanent resident of my system tray, rather than having to keep a browser tab permanently open to check on it. The client is called bTittleTattle (yea, don't ask), and it was made by the guys at Sobees. It is based on the Windows Presentation Foundation so, unfortunately, Windows only forever :( Check out the video below to see what it looks like.
I basically ...
Loïc has just told Seesmic users that a new user interface is up at http://api.seesmic.com/home. Just tried it out, and it is looking very nice. It is much lighter than the current interface (both visually and in terms of performance), and while it is not quite finished yet (Loïc said this himself in his post), I think it is a step in the right direction. The current interface is a little dark and heavy in my opinion, and until the SeesmicAir client (the link seems to be broken right now) gets recording capabilities, it's the only way to ...
I had two very different experiences in the last few weeks which showed how valuable web conferences can be when working with distributed teams in projects, or for that matter for any technical issue that you need to work on over a distance. The good experience: I had an issue with a portfolio management tool that we are deploying, and after setting up a web conference with the software provider's support team, I was able to show the actual problem happening, my logs, talk to their support people... Overall, just about the best we could get without the ...
Comapping has released some new features to their excellent online mind-mapping tool, and they asked me to take a look and write a few words about it. Took me a while to do it (seems like everything does lately), but finally I managed to give this the attention it needed to come up with a decent (I hope!) review.
Comapping is one of the better online mind mapping tools, and I first heard of it while researching for the first series of mind mapping tool reviews here at Daily Iteration. The newly added features were really important things that ...
Google has launched this week a technology (I'll call it technology, as I think "browser extension" doesn't quite fit here) that allows you to use web applications offline. This is pretty cool stuff - imagine writing all your emails on the way to work, on a bus or train or whatever, using your webmail client, and sending them off once you get to your workplace's wireless network - much in the same way that you would do today with your email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook. This feature is actually slated to appear on Firefox 3, due ...
I'm returning to the topic of mind-mapping tools motivated by some comments in my previous post on the subject. Two web-based tools were recommended to me, and since they have atually changed my choice of solution, I thought I'd share this with everyone. The new tools are Mindomo and Commaping.
Comapping
Comapping was recommended at Web Worker Daily (they had a link to me, I've been linked to by one of my favourite blogs, yay!), and I must say it is impressive. Lots and lots of features: importing and exporting map files, collapsing lists, the ability to create ...