Filed under: Fun, Productivity, Social Software

Sleep.fm is a personalized alarm service for your computer, phone, or Internet-enabled alarm clock that lets you and your friends leave each other personalized wake-up messages. While I agree that waking up to the radio, the standard alarm clock beep, or some obnoxious fake birds is less than best, I’m not sure I’m 100% sold on the utility of Sleep.fm.

I started to get the picture a tiny more clearly after checking out a video on the Sleep.fm FAQ page. In this little demo, a woman who had missed her Japanese studies the day before wakes up to a teasing message from a friend, in Japanese. I think that says a lot about what Sleep.fm is trying to do: turn the wake-up alarm into another useful way to communicate. I wouldn’t object to waking up to a message that all of my meetings for the day were cancelled, for example, or finding out about a change of lunch plans with a friend.

Isn’t that what we’ve voicemail, email, text messages and Twitter for, though? I agree with the Sleep.fm theory that waking up is personal, but for me that means just wanting to be left alone. If you’re the kind of person who likes to jump right into the day with new information, someone who checks email and rss feeds before even getting out of bed, this might be a good new tool in your arsenal. The site is taking signups now for its upcoming relaunch.

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Filed under: Audio, Fun, Internet, Social Software, Search

Since I posted 35 Places To Download Free, Legal MP3s, I now fully understand just how much everyone on the damn world wide web wants free music. Well, here’s another place to feed your addiction.

I wandered over to Tagoo anticipating to find another piece of hastily assembled Google search garbage. Man, was I in for a surprise.

Tagoo finds direct links to MP3 files, and it lets you stream them or build playlists right on their site.

It’ll recommend while you type: “prote,” offered me Protest The Hero. Well done, Tagoo! When results appear, click the play button immediately to the right of the track to listen to it immediately. The track’s artist, title, genre, bitrate, filesize, and length are all displayed.

It’s even nice enough to warn you about potentially slow download sites, marking them with a red dot.

Continue reading Tagoo Finds MP3s for You to Stream or Download

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter lets you share short messages with the whole world. Yammer lets you share them with your coworkers (or anyone who has an email address on the same domain as yours).

The idea is to use social networking tools to enhance intra-office of intra-team communications. Users can post short messages to let members of their team know what they’re working on, ask questions, or talk about what they saw on Television last night. There doesn’t seem to be a hard 140 character limit on Yammer like there’s with Twitter, so you can post longer messages. But since you’re unlikely to be following thousands of users, it should be much easier to keep track of conversations on Yammer than Twitter.

In order to create a Yammer account you need to sign up with your company email account. Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail addresses won’t work. Once you’ve created an account for your company you can invite more users on the same domain or communicate with others who have already signed up.

Yammer’s basic service is free and includes a web client, a desktop client built on Adobe AIR and Blackberry app. An iPhone versions is coming soon. The company charges $1 a month (per user) for administrator accounts. So if you want to be able to monitor your workplace network you’ll have to pony up a few bucks. As Webware’s Rafe Needleman points out, this may be an unsustainable proposition. While I have the ability to see some small businesses using Yammer, more massive companies with a few dollars in the bank can easily spend some time building their own Twitter-like application if they want to. I’m not sure why anyone would need to pay for Yammer service.

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Filed under: World wide web, News, Productivity, Microsoft, Social Software

According to ZDNet, Microsoft plans to release the final version of Office Live Workspace by the end of 2008. The Google Docs competitor, which was launched as a beta in December of 2007, has been downloaded by over a million users.

Office Live Workspace is NOT a web-based version of Office. Instead, it is something of an Office-add-on (though you can use it on a personal that does not have Office installed). You can upload Office documents (Word, Excel and Powerpoint files) to Office Live Workspace and then access them from another computer (so it is a virtual flash drive of sorts) or allow permission for other users to access your documents. They can then edit and upload versions and share new documents with you.

Live documents can’t be edited directly in OLW, though you can create “web notes” which are similar to Google Docs documents and spreadsheets or “web lists” — that as of right now don’t do calculations. You can also comment on an Office file, so even if you don’t have access to Word to immediately edit a document, you can comment on what changes need to be made.

I have an Office Live Workspace account, but I’ve to admit, it has received tiny use. It isn’t so much that Google Docs is that much superior — the spreadsheet and forms options are, the word processing is about the same — it is just more ubiquitous and has become a more streamlined part of my workflow.

If you have a Windows Live ID (nee Passport), you can use that to sign-up or sing into the Office Live Workspace beta. It is aimed at Windows users, but works fine on a Mac running Safari (and works with Mac formatted Office documents).

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Filed under: World wide web, News, Blogging, Productivity, Google, Mozilla, Social Software, web 2.0

Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, massive or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems nearly, well, unproductive and wasteful.

Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.

1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Grants you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they’re simple enough to overlook especially if you’re truly in love.

3. Skitch - this is the ideal, swift image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead easy to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.

4. Gmail - I’ve done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.

5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which grants you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I’m playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.

Continue reading 10 essential web apps for bloggers

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Filed under: Blogging, Social Software

A lot of sites have a feature that lets registered users keep track of their comments, so you can follow whatever conversation, flame war or trolling expedition you might be part. BackType attempts to bring that feature to the whole World wide web, giving you a central reference point for your comments across multiple sites. Backtype uses the URL you attach to your comments to search for what you’ve written, and it has a handy feature to mark things as “fake” if someone else has been commenting using your site.

So far, BackType seems to mostly track major tech and “social media” blogs, by guys like O’Reilly, Owyang, Winer and Arrington, but it has the potential to grow across all types of sites and become very useful. The ability to follow people’s comments is a nice feature, as it lets you see what others (even those famous guys!) are reading and responding to. If you have an interest in the social aspects of the internet, it’s worth a look — at the very least, to dig up some comments you might have forgotten you left.

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Filed under: Social Software, BlackBerry

The BlackBerry application marketplace might not be as easy to navigate at Apple’s App Store and Java might not be as much fun as Cocoa Touch for developers, but there are still some great BlackBerry applications out there.

10 of my favorites:

1. Opera Mini — BlackBerry 4.5 is supposed to have a much-improved built-in browser (my carrier hasn’t officially upgraded yet, so I’m unsure), but Opera Mini is a great substitute. It isn’t as fast as the built-in browser and functionality like copy/paste isn’t as nicely integrated, but you can actually view pages the way they look on a regular personal (more or less) and zoom in on parts of the screen for simple access. If you ever want to post a comment to a blog or fill out another massive text field, Opera Mini is the way to go.

2. Flickr — This official BlackBerry client was released in June and beats the pants off of uploading via e-mail. You can go straight to the camera from the Flick app or choose a photo from your media card or one of your media directories.

3. Facebook — Update your status, read your messages, post messages to your friends walls and send pictures directly to your photo page. It’s pretty slick.

4. NewsGator Go! Some people just love Google Reader. I’m not one of these people. On the desktop, I use NetNewsWire, on my BlackBerry, I use NewsGator Go!. Like all the NewsGator products, its free. Sign up for a free NewsGator Online account or link it with your existing account. What’s so nice about the NewsGator family of products is that they all sync together. So if you use FeedDemon on a Personal computer or NetNewsWire on the Mac, you can access all of your feeds from any other personal just using NewsGator’s web reader (which I think is 100x better than Google Reader). That also means that you can access all your feeds on your BlackBerry. And anything you mark as read on one device, shows up as read on the others.

5. Blackbird – I used to use Twitterberry to update my Twitter status from my phone, but now I’ve switched to Blackbird. The interface is cleaner and it feels faster. I miss the user icon pictures from Twitterberry, this is still my favorite way of using Twitter.

6. BBMetaBlog — iPhone users have access to official WordPress and TypePad blog clients and more than one unofficial Tumblr clients, but BlackBerry users, we’ve been all but forgotten in the world of moblogging software. TypePad users can use TypePad Mobile BlackBerry and Blogger users can use Blogger for BlackBerry, but what about people who use XML-RPC based blogs? BBMetaBlog isn’t perfect — it was designed to interface with a custom blog-engine for Lotus Domino, not for WordPress or Movable Type or any other system that uses the MetaWeblog API implementation of XML-RPC — but it works. Just set your access URL to your XMLRPC URI and you’re set! Categories and tagging doesn’t work, but it’s a superior substitute to e-mail and it can be faster than trying to post with Opera Mini.

7. Google Suite — Google’s Mobile tools for BlackBerry are awesome. The Gmail app is fast, the Google News page is easy to navigate and Google’s mobile mapping tool is the ideal! Even if you don’t have GPS, you can have GPS-like functionality on your phone. Google Sync for BlackBerry keeps your BlackBerry calendar synced up with Google Calendar, and it’s a two way sync — which is always great.

8. Sudoku — The unregistered version won’t let you download daily new puzzles, but still comes with a couple of hundred at three difficulty levels. If you’ve mastered Brick Breaker (or Brick Breaker has mastered you), it’s a great way to kill some time.

9. Mobile Quotes and Analysis for BlackBerry — Even though the quotes are time-delayed (I want a Google Finance BlackBerry app — not just a web page, an app!), this is a fast, free way to keep track of the market.

10. TV Guide Mobile — An oldie, but a goodie! Local TV-listings in your pocket.

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Filed under: World wide web, Social Software, web 2.0

ShoZu is a mobile download which allows you to connect and publish media to most of your favorite social networks in one convenient place. With official support for Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Twitter and a ton more, this might be the mobile lifestream manager you’ve been looking for.

After downloading and installing ShoZu on your phone (supported on over 300 handhelds), the easiest way to add applications is via your personal. I added Facebook, Twitter, and TwitPic apps quickly by inputting the required user names and passwords and then checked for updates on my handset. Success!

A nice feature is called one click pic destination. This is the setting you choose for where you will be sending your photos and videos the most. It will appear as a send-to prompt right after you take a photo or video. There’s also the convenience of sending to multiple sites at once via a feature called CC sites.

If you don’t want to be prompted about where to send your pic each time, you can also choose the Zero-click upload setting which will automatically upload every photo and video to your primary destination. You’ve the option of adding tags and descriptions to your uploaded pics and if you have a GPS-enabled phone, when you select GPS settings, ShoZu will geotag your photos for you.

If you’ve a Flickr account you can download your friends’ photostreams and upload to your own, as well as read and reply to comments in your posts. ShoZu also has a convenient feature where you can send multiple pics at once. To do this, press menu and select mark/unmark which will check the pics you wish to send. The bad news is this feature didn’t work for me and I ended up sending all my files on my phone individually.

There’s a RSS feed of all your uploaded media on your My ShoZu page which you can access when you log in to the service.

ShoZu is a free service however carrier charges might apply depending on your service plan.

(Yes, there’s a new iPhone app too).

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Filed under: Productivity, Social Software

Muse Wedding has recently changed nearly everything about its format, and it is for the superior. 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 huge, thick wedding planning binders on the internet. 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’ve 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.

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Filed under: Developer, World wide web, Social Software

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is announcing a new version at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today, and the large 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 huge part of building M2, so keep an eye on their blog if you’ve got input.

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