Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It’s a nice theory, that we have the ability to crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video.

For example, someone asked “is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to cease it from killing five people?” The responses ranged from “Right: he’s fat” to “Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore.” This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful — because hey, they’re at zero now, and it can only get superior.

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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Social Software, Browsers

Flock has released a second public beta of Flock 2, a web browser based on Firefox 3. What sets Flock apart from Firefox is the integration with a ton of social networking services including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, PhotoBucket, and more. There’s a blog editor for updating your web site from the browser, and a media bar for viewing images and videos shared by your friends without navigating away from your current web page.

Flock has always been based on Firefox, but what sets Flock 2 beta apart from Flock 1.x is that the beta version is built on Firefox 3. That means you get a redesigned location bar, a new bookmark manager, and a new rendering engine that helps most web pages load faster.

The Flock team has addressed over 175 bugs that were found in the first beta of Flock 2. Aside from bug fixes, there aren’t many new features in Flock 2 beta 2. But the browser is based on Firefox 3.01, which means it also includes some important security updates. So if you’re using Flock 2 beta 1, we’d suggest upgrading.

[via Mozilla Links]

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Filed under: Productivity, P2P, Social Software, Search

Attention, law-abiding citizens! If you believe in BitTorrent as a means of distribution for large files, but you’re concerned about the claims of piracy that are often associated with it, you should take a look at YouTorrent. Despite having to close down for a while because of legal issues, YouTorrent is back in operation, with a reported 67,170 torrents that are all legal to share.

YouTorrent is a meta-search that can find verified torrents across a number of popular torrent sites, including Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova’s featured torrents section. With all those sites combined, you can use YouTorrent to search over 6TB of data. This is a very good thing for the torrent community in general, as it shows how widely BitTorrent is used for non-piracy purposes.

[via TorrentFreak]

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Filed under: Fun, World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Open Source, Social Software, Beta

The newest version of the VLC media player isn’t ready for the streets yet, but if you’re they type who doesn’t mind risking your precious personal for the sake of satisfying a primal curiosity for experimental software, the pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 is now available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, anybody with a Windows 98/ME or OS X 10.3.9 machine is out luck since such technology is no longer socially acceptable as those operating systems are no longer supported.

It now supports Last.fm (AKA Audioscrobbler) straight out of the box disk image, so it’ll update your Last.fm account as you play music through VLC. To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber, but don’t forget to visit Control interfaces to check the box labeled “Submission of played songs to Last.fm.”

Other changes also include superior tag support, more subtitle support, improved mouse gestures, album art support, Shoutcast Television listings, and a lot more that we don’t want to bore you with, but you’re more than welcome to check out the whole list on the VLC forums.

[via CyberNet]

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Filed under: Internet, Features, News, Social Software

We’re huge fans of FriendFeed, the social network aggregator that helps you keep track of your friends’ activities across different platforms like Twitter, LastFM, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and about 1,000 36 others. If you’re a fan or if you’re just getting started, below are 10 tools to help you experience it just the way you like, after the jump.

Continue reading 10 + tools to pimp out your Friendfeed

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Filed under: Features, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Only a few months after its last major release, the WordPress crew has just unleashed WordPress 2.6 into the wild. While the changes with this update aren’t as visually sweeping as those ushered in with 2.5, but they do add some great new options and optimizations. WordPress encourages users to upgrade, as the old 2.5 branch will no-longer be maintained, and they have outlined the upgrade process here or you can use the fantastic automatic-update plugin.

We’ve been playing around with 2.6 on our local installs since the first beta was released, and we think this is a very, very solid release.

The WordPress team posted video showing off some of the new features:

Read on for our take on the new WordPress!

Continue reading WordPress 2.6 released

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

As expected, Twitter has purchased Summize, a search engine designed for the micro-blogging service. The pairing seems pretty obvious. While Twitter may have started as a means of individual expression, the service has quickly grown into a repository of news and opinions.

Want to know what people think of the latest blockbuster motion picture? Just enter the title into Summize and you’ll get a whole slew of results. Want to see what people are saying about a politician? Summize can help. The search engine can also help you find other Twitter users who share your interests, making it simple to expand your own social network.

Twitter has launched a new site that looks and works pretty much exactly like Summize, at search.twitter.com. The only difference is that the new site states Twitter and not Summize. If you visit Summize.com, you’ll automatically be taken to the new site.

Terms of the deal haven’t been made public, but Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter paid $15 million for Summize. It might have made more sense for the company to develop its own search engine in-house. But since somebody’s already done the work, and since Twitter is sitting on a pile of venture capital, an acquisition was probably the easiest way to go.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Facebook will soon be rolling out a new site design that, among other things, will change the way your profile looks. But you can check it out this day by logging into your account and then visiting www.new.facebook.com.

One of the most prominent new features will be an emphasis on the mini-feed. In fact, it might be safer to start calling it a news feed, since it’s not so mini-anymore. When you first view a profile, what you’ll see is a list of current activity on that account.

You can also click on tabs for Info, Photos, or Boxes. Info brings up your contact information, group membership, and other info. Boxes shows all the Facebook apps that are currently littering your main profile page. And we’re going to let you figure out for yourself what shows up in the Photos tab.

[via Mashable]

Update: Facebook seems to have disabled the www.new.facebook.com page sometime in the last few hours. But trust us, it looks something like the image above!

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Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Social Software, web 2.0

There’s no shortage of desktop clients for Twitter and FriendFeed. But Posty goes a few steps beyond popular clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy by adding support for Jaiku and Tumblr as well as Pownce.

Posty’s main window features a list of supported services with check boxes next to each. Just enter a status update and select the networks you want to send the update out to, and you can post simultaneously to all 5 places. You can also choose the individual tab for each service to see current updates from your contacts or from the public timelines if they’re available. You can also respond to comments or send direct messages directly from Posty.

One of the only complaints we’d with Posty is that while the window is resizable, it starts out at 550 pixels wide and there’s no way to make it smaller. Larger, yes. But smaller? Not so much. So it takes up a fair bit of screne real estate.

Like most applications built on Adobe AIR, Posty is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[via Sarah in Tampa]

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Filed under: Social Software, AOL, iPhone

One of the most striking things about the first crop of iPhone apps is the divide between those that work with the phone’s user interface, and those that either don’t take advantage of the phone or ignore the design specs altogether. The AOL Instant Messenger app for iPhone scores points in some UI areas, but could be more intuitive and feel more like an iPhone app in others.

We’ve got no complaints about the look of AIM, but there are some places where it doesn’t feel right. For example, we were really hoping for a horizontal mode in this app, to take advantage of the wider keyboard. Groups are supported, but you can only view them one at a time, which makes them much less useful than on desktop versions of AIM. While a mobile AIM app like this is a dream we’ve had since high school, we favor the more intuitive Meebo mobile web app. It supports mutliple chat clients, too … can we get an app store version of that?

Oh, and here’s a tip, because we’ve seen a lot of people confused by this: to change your screenname, you’ve to go to your iPhone Settings. It’s not in the AIM app itself.

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