Webware

Snackr sits on one of the four sides of your screen and scrolls through recent posts from sites which are input either by hand or by loading an OPML file. A nice added touch is that if there is an image in the post, it is included in the scrolling entry. There is a quick shortcut for minimizing the ticker in case it gets in the way and you can literally throw it around the screen. If you just grab Snackr and fling it in the direction of an edge of the screen, it will transform and stick there. Just try it to see what I mean.

Clicking on an entry brings up the full version of the post, readable and scrollable in the slide out window. This application becomes really useful when you narrow your feeds down to your mid to high priority ones and limit the items that it displays to a maximum of somewhere between 2 and 5 days old. If you have anything older than that, the posts start to become stale and irrelevant.

Snackr may be a distraction for some and overwhelming for others, but I really like having this extremely relevant river of news glide by on my screen. As Marshall mentioned, it's a pain to remove feeds if you have a lot of them that you need to unsubscribe from after importing an OPML file, so a batch remove feature would be a great addition in the future. Additional features, such as indicating new items in the river and the ability to change themes, are things that would make sense for future releases, but Snackr runs really well and is very functional, especially for a first release.

Snackr is was written by Narciso Jaramillo, who is a product designer for Adobe Flex and previously worked on version one of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

I do appreciate the Google-simple start page.

Of all the meeting time brokers I've seen, Presdo is the most peculiar. Which means it's worth checking out. Unlike other apps I've covered (Timebridge, Jiffle, Tungle, Timedriver, etc.) Presdo's strength is not that it automates the selection of meeting times that work out for attendees (it doesn't), but rather that it helps script the dialogue that's usually a part of the back-and-forth in setting up a meeting.

What makes this service peculiar is that it does very little that you can't otherwise do through e-mail and Web surfing. However, it packages everything up so nicely you might not notice.

You kick off a meeting by typing into a plain English description of what you want to do, such as, "Get lunch on Monday with Joe," or, "Set up book club meeting with Jack, John, and Claire at Sparky's Diner." Then you get a screen showing what the system thinks you mean. It guesses at the times and dates, and you enter in missing information like e-mail addresses. It also helps you find and map locations for meetings.

Presdo is smart, but not brilliant. You have to hold its hand after you first tell it what you want.

Once your meeting is set up, the system e-mails the other attendees with your plans. They can propose new times and places. The whole back-and-forth is captured on your event's dedicated page. Once everyone buys in to the plans, attendees can pop the meeting into their calendar (Outlook, iCal, Yahoo, or Google).

I found setting up test meetings in Presdo quite easy and almost fun. But I'm also left scratching my head. Presdo, at the moment, doesn't give you any real insight into when it would be good for you or anyone else to meet, meaning the thorniest part of setting up a meeting--choosing a time--is still completely manual. Nor does the clever location finder link in to a service like OpenTable for restaurants or Fandango for movie tickets. And the natural-language starting gate for Presdo is cute, but it's not smart enough to obviate the need for you to carefully check its work on the event page that it creates once you type your plain text.

I like the idea of new, pure interface for scheduling meetings. And Presdo does do a nice job of keeping your e-mail free of hard-to-follow messages about meetings. But I want much better integration into other calendar-related services before I start to use it.

See also: IWantSandy and ReQall (review)

I've heard of death by a thousand cuts, but never cursors--that was until Firefly, a less-than-practical approach to letting your site visitors communicate with one another in real time. The service lets everyone see each other's cursors live as they zip around the page and lets them chat with one another via text. To strike up conversation, just start typing and a chat bubble will form above your cursor. Everyone's public chats are stored in a little queue, and frequent users can register to have their information and chat history saved to view at a later date.

One of the service's greatest assets is that it's highly engaging when you've got a good small crowd together. However, I can see it getting totally out of control when more than about 10 people are on the screen at once. The little bubbles dissolve after just a few moments, and you're left with whatever the chat history catches--not exactly user friendly if you're trying to keep up with several chats at once.

Like some of the distributed commenting systems that have popped up over the past year (see Disqus and Intense Debate) Firefly requires the site administrator to install it. The service is in private beta for now, but you can sign up to get it on your site here. Tech personality Leo Laporte has it installed on his Twitlive page, where there were about 70 people using it when I came by about a half an hour ago. Many just had the page open and were not chatting. To see it pitched by creator Billy Chasen (without a working demo) you can also check out Centernetworks' video of it from the NY Tech Meetup this past Tuesday night.

Chat with others using nothing more than your cursor on any site that's got the Firefly plug-in installed.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

WujWuj is a badly named, yet really simple to use group gifting service. The aim is to let you gift a single friend with one or more items from Amazon.com and spread out the payment over a group of friends. It's not a new idea--Fundable and FromEveryone do this. As do HomeSlyce and ChipIn, which manage to tack on general purpose fund raising as well.

What might be WujWuj's greatest asset is that it handles multiple gift giving with some basic intelligence. You can add as many presents to the list as you want, and it'll send out whatever it can based on what you and your buddies scrap together before the giving cutoff time. This means you don't need to raise your entire amount as long as it covers items on the top of the list.

Add items you want to gift into a big list. Others can pitch in to get the items, which are shipped out. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Creating a list and inviting people to contribute is a snap. You can add items by searching through the built-in Amazon search engine. It's not as fast as hunting for gifts on Amazon's site, but if you're looking for big name items you're likely to find what you're looking for on the first pass. When it comes time to invite others to get in on the purchase you can either knock out contacts one at a time or slurp them from your address book on a handful of popular e-mail services.

The invite to pay (and go to the party) goes out in the form of an event that has its own special landing page. As the creator you can add all sorts of content like photos, a video from your digital camera, along with related links. It also shows a progress bar with how much money you've raised, as well as which gifts have been met with enough cash to get them. If your cohorts want to pitch in there's a small fee which goes to pay for the transaction--unfortunately as a donor you can't pick which item/s you want your funds to go to, which I'd like to see amended.

Things I don't like about the service include the taxes and additional fees. In most states, buying electronics from Amazon means whatever you're buying is tax free. I added an iPod touch to my WujWuj gift list, which tacked on an extra $10 in tax to the purchase price. There was also a mystery $23 "service charge" despite WujWuj's claims that it's making money only in transaction fees and whatever love it gets back from Amazon for being an affiliate store. Not cool. For that I wouldn't recommend using WujWuj, despite its ease. You're better off simply using a money pooling tool like ChipIn (which links up to your Facebook buddies) and separate Web 2.0 event planning app like Socializr and MyPunchbowl.

Update: CEO of WujWuj Monti Majthoub contacted me to clear up the service fees. The good news is that both the taxes and the service fees will be a thing of the past starting next week. I've pasted his points below:

1- The service fee was tagged the last minute because Amazon refused to include us into their "affiliate program" because we would be buying and shipping the gifts, there for amazon would not agree to include us in the "affiliate program" It doesnt matter, the solution is:- we will REMOVE the service fee ASAP, no later than Monday. Please make a note of this.

2- Taxes is a bug, we will be "collecting" Taxes on 5 states where amazon collects, Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, New York or Washington are subject to tax.

3-We will instead charge 7.9% to people that donate, 3.9% will be going to paypal/Credit card fees.

[via SimpleSpark]

Google is hosting a media circus, or "Factory Tour," at its Mountain View campus on Monday morning. Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, will be speaking. At other events I've heard her speak at, she's given good overviews of the directions Google Search is going. The other scheduled speakers are:

Google's Marissa Mayer

(Credit: Dan Farber / CNET)

• Carter Maslan, from Google Maps
• R.J. Pittman, GM of Search Properties (formerly of Groxis)
• Johanna Wright, Google Search product manager

I'll be liveblogging my observations on the event, and we'll have follow-up and analysis afterwards. The talks are scheduled to start at 9:30 A.M. Pacific Time, but I may go live a few minutes early. Google will also be streaming video from the conference, and we'll post the link to it here. My advice: Pop the Google stream into a separate window if you want to hear the raw propoganda. But watch the liveblog for my jaded and cynical perspective on what they're saying and what it means.

Check back here Monday morning, or sign up for an e-mail reminder using this widget:

If you have questions you want me to put to the Googleheads, add them in this post's talkback, or e-mail me.

European telecom giant Vodafone announced Friday that its Vodafone Europe BV subsidiary has acquired ZYB, a Danish company that specializes in online contact and calendar management. The price, as stated by Vodafone, is 31.5 million euros, or $48.7 million.

"Using a Web portal as a link between the PC and the mobile device, ZYB provides an interactive way for people to nurture, contact, and develop their relationships with their most important friends and colleagues and builds links with those contacts' wider networks," Vodafone's Internet Services Director, Pieter Knook, said in a statement. "This is Web 2.0 in action."

ZYB is, in a broad sense, a lot like a more mobile-focused version of Plaxo, the contact management service that was acquired by cable giant Comcast earlier this week. It stores members' address books and calendar data online and also connects them with friends who are also using the service.

Later this year, ZYB will be expanding its social-networking operations through a new project called Phonebook, which sounds a lot like Yahoo's OneConnect. Members will be able to see their friends' locations on a map, pull in feeds from external social services like Flickr and Facebook, and share calendars.

Pixel art has held a special place in the the world of Web 2.0. Most recently it reared its head at Adobe Systems' Engage event earlier this year, where attendees received a poster with pixel art characters using various Adobe products. The poster was professionally designed, but that doesn't mean you've got to go out and buy some special software or take digital art classes to have some fun making your own.

Enter Cubescape, a simple app that gives you some easy-to-use tools to create 3D pixel art on a large canvas. You can drop blocks down one at a time, on top of one another, and even explode them. The app tracks your progress and lets you or others play it back to see what you did, much like some of the fantastic tutorials that come with PhotoShop to show you how people create their digital masterpieces.

See also: Smashing Magazine's roundup of cool pixel art.

[via Delicious]

Create your own tiny and old-school digital masterpieces with Cubescape.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Yahoo announced Friday that it has formed a partnership with three subsidiaries of advertising giant WPP: GroupM, 24/7 Real Media and WPP Digital. Through the deal, WPP agencies will have access to Yahoo-served ad space and work closely with the Right Media ad exchange, in which Yahoo was a major investor before it outright acquired the digital-ad platform in 2007.

No financial terms were disclosed.

"More and more, we see the need for agencies and media and technology companies to work together to create a new level of value," WPP Digital CEO Mark Read said in a statement Friday. "We are very pleased to have established this partnership with Yahoo which, enabled by our earlier acquisition of 24/7 Real Media, will turn this vision into a reality."

WPP acquired 24/7 Real Media a year ago for $649 million in cash. As part of the deal with Yahoo, WPP will use 24/7 to develop an ad platform that connects to Right Media so that WPP agencies can "seamlessly" connect to Yahoo's digital inventory.

Google Translate just got more useful for a Prague citizen visiting India.

The online translation function now can understand 10 more languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish. That brings the total to 23 languages, Google said in a blog posting Thursday.

In addition, Google added a language-detection feature that can guess the source language a user is trying to translate. It's more effective with longer amounts of text, Google said.

Detect Language means you only have to click the language you want to translate text into.

Last week NBC quietly released a learning tool called iCue in conjunction with MIT. (See coverage on CNET TV's Loaded.) It's been designed as a "learning environment" using a large collection of news clips taken from NBC's video archives to enable anyone to catch up on news coverage and current events. This archived footage is put into context, as long as viewers are willing to acknowledge that the content is coming only from one source (NBC), and for now only with the focus on the U.S. presidential elections.

To get going, users can simply wander around the site, viewing various footage that's been meticulously categorized and documented (complete with transcripts). They can also put their knowledge to the test with a smattering of editor-created mini games that require both a contextual understanding of what was going on at the time of the clip, along with whatever other bits of historical insight are found in the one- to two-minute segments. There's a whole lot going on, and I'm betting the casual user is going to get lost very easily.

That's not to say NBC hasn't created a very powerful tool. If you've got the time and patience to learn the system and sit through a bunch of old news clips, you're likely to pick up some knowledge, albeit slightly outdated. Some games are even easy, like the clone of concentration that has you matching pairs of presidential candidates with former U.S. presidents based on which state they're from--that's downright fun.

Concentration is one of iCue's more enjoyable excercises, having you match up presidential candidates from different eras based on what state they're from.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Another thing NBC has definitely gotten right is the video player. Each clip is housed in a tiny floating window that can be flipped over like widgets in OS X's Dashboard. This B-side contains the video's metadata, including an entire set of keywords that pull up a listing of related clips. Users can add their own keywords, in the form of tags, as well as color each video item one of six colors, which I think is superfluous, unless you're planning to color code your entire collection of videos--a nice touch for library science majors, but likely to be useless for most.

NBC's video playing widget is simple yet full of extra options on its 'B-side' that you can flip to.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The site is also a social network in the making. iCue users can befriend one another and send each other their small video collections (iCue calls them "stacks") that contain whatever notes, comments, and tags that have been added to each clip. I couldn't wrangle up anyone to swap stacks with me, but in practice you can chronicle an issue from beginning to end with a collection of clips and pass it on to someone else to watch in whatever order you want. That's pretty neat, albeit time-consuming to put together.

So to answer the question I asked earlier, NBC's iCue can definitely provide a whole lot content and context for current events if you're willing to jump through some hoops. There are a ton of clips on there, and parsing through them can be as easy or as difficult as you're willing to make it. NBC's greatest asset is in some of the pre-made sets of exercises and games, which put the grunt work on the editors instead of the users.

Related: PopJax turns YouTube videos into trivia games

There is no business model behind it, but mesh Wi-Fi company Meraki is offering free Wi-Fi access to San Francisco, one neighborhood at a time, as I discovered when I passed by the company's folksy demo table at my local farmers' market last month (see report from local newspaper). But Meraki is not in the business of just blasting money out the door, which it appears to be doing in San Francisco, and there is a method to this program.

Meraki's business is actually quite straightforward: it sells wide-area Wi-Fi network hardware, and provides the management consoles to go with it. If you want to give a building, a street, a town, or a city access to Wi-Fi, you buy some Meraki Wi-Fi boxes, plug a few of them in to broadband connections, and they configure themselves to wirelessly share the connection among each other and among users.

Stick this free gizmo in your window in San Francisco to boost the Meraki signal, for yourself and others.

(Credit: Meraki)

Unlike other creative Wi-Fi mesh companies Fon and Whisher, Meraki is not aiming to build a global free Wi-Fi network. Rather, it's simply a Wi-Fi hardware company. If you run a mall and want to provide Wi-Fi access to everyone in it, get Meraki equipment (or spend more for competing products from Cisco, Tropos, Skypilot, or Nortel). If you want to change the world by connecting existing broadband connections together into a giant mesh that anyone can use for free (and break ISP terms of service in the process), sign up for Fon.

That's not to say that Meraki isn't out to change the world. Its technology of relatively inexpensive Wi-Fi access points coupled with its hosted management console can make it cost-effective for a community to light up wireless access for everyone. It's like the OLPC of Wifi (and to be clear, OLPC devices have their own mesh Wi-Fi routers built in).

User access to Meraki services can be free or paid. Meraki has the software for both, and doesn't really care how its devices are configured, since it's basically a hardware company. The hardware costs $150 for an indoor repeater and $250 for an outdoor-hardened router. You can also set up an ad-supported Meraki network, and get a discount on hardware.

Meraki co-founder Sanjit Biswas told me that one hardwire connection can be distributed to about 10 repeaters, and that each repeater can handle about 10 users at a time. And, of course, Meraki networks can multiplex multiple broadband connections together and share all their bandwidth with all their users. Most users will get about 2 megabytes a second of throughput.

Free Meraki nodes in San Francisco.

Which brings us back to San Francisco and the loss-leader network it's building here. San Francisco is Meraki's test kitchen. If you're in one of the covered neighborhoods, you can just hop on the network for free. If you can see the signal but want a stronger connection in your house, the company will send you a repeater you can set up in a window (thereby expanding the network's footprint). If you're in an expansion area for the San Francisco project but have no signal, you might be able to get Meraki to bolt an outdoor repeater on to your house; the company may connect it to a DSL connection that it installs and pays for (you'll only have access to the Meraki signal, though, not the raw DSL link). Coming soon will be solar-powered repeaters, which will make Meraki's build-out even easier.

Another thing Meraki is testing in San Francisco is how to work with municipalities. Meraki may just provide San Francisco the city-wide free Wi-Fi access that the mayor, Google, and EarthLink together couldn't maneuver into being. But this project is a one-off. Biswas says Meraki does not want to be the primary driver of a muni Wi-Fi project. Rather, the company will sell its technology to whatever agency or company wants to sponsor the installation. Arguing the politics of public versus private wide-area Wi-Fi is not what a hardware provider needs to do. It wins no matter which way the wind blows.

This post was updated at 3:17 PM with comment from Google's David Glazer.

A post Thursday on Facebook's developer blog explains that the social network has suspended participation in Google's "Friend Connect" project, citing a violation of its internal terms of service.

"Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we've had a chance to evaluate the technology," the post by Facebook employee Charlie Cheever read. "We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service."

In other words, while Facebook users would manually opt in to Friend Connect, they would not have control over the third-party sites that would then use Friend Connect through Google's API. "Our terms of service, for privacy reasons, have always forbidden redistribution of other Facebook information that an application takes," Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said in an interview with CNET News.com Thursday. For example, "where applications have tried to use Facebook data and pass it to third-party ad targeting networks to target their ads, we've shut down those applications."

According to Kelly, the social network never actually had a formal partnership with Google in Friend Connect, which allows owners of Web sites to add social features using the existing APIs from sites like Hi5, Plaxo, and Facebook. "There wasn't participation to start with. That was sort of a mis-impression that may have been formed by their release," he said. "We weren't briefed on how the Friend Connect product was going to work."

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, told CNET News.com that Google was "disappointed" with Facebook's decision. "(It's) a very simple issue. We think that users should be in control of their data," Glazer said. "We think that Friend Connect at all steps puts users in control of their own data, at every step of the way, and we're disappointed that Facebook disabled their users' ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends. It's that simple."

Facebook got into a privacy snafu of its own when it launched an advertising program, called "Beacon," that sent users' third-party activity on partnering retail and social-media sites to their Facebook profiles. The Facebook user base as a whole didn't seem to care much, but a few vocal privacy advocates said that there weren't adequate controls in place. Facebook eventually modified the application after a series of PR skirmishes that the company likely doesn't want to repeat.

Last week, Facebook announced that it would be extending its API to make data portable to external sites through Facebook Connect. According to Google's David Glazer, the concept sounds promising but Facebook hasn't said much about the technicalities yet. "I'd like to see it when they launch it," Glazer said. "We have not seen any information about Facebook Connect other than a press release. We like the intent stated in the press release, we think it's the same intent they've stated all along. We liked it earlier and we still like it."

As for the overall industry response to Google's Friend Connect, Glazer said, "I've been thrilled with the reception."

Representatives from Facebook told CNET News.com that the specific sections of the terms of service in question are the ones in which Facebook stipulates that developers using Facebook's API "may not store any Facebook Properties in any Data Repository which enables any third party (other than the Applicable Facebook User for such Facebook Properties) to access or share the Facebook Properties without our prior written consent" and "may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein."

I've been looking at quite a few good desktop applications built on Adobe AIR (such as eBay Desktop and Twhirl), and am pleased to report that ReadAir, a spin-off of Google Reader that was released on Thursday and is coded to run on Adobe's cross-platform solution, ranks among them.

ReadAir synchronizes with your account to deliver news with a Mac feel.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

ReadAir mirrors Google Reader's functionality with a cleaner interface and the deliberate adoption of the Mac OS X look. The left sidebar sorts items by the total harvest, starred favorites, and shared stories, with your tags directly below. In the top-right pane, elements such as story titles, sources, and dates are displayed. The selected story fills the lower panel, with gleaming blue scroll bars to guide you to the conclusion.

Readers can interact with content much the same way that they can online. A plus sign in the bottom left allows for adding and removing feeds and tags, and a search bar up top lets you skip the scrolling to find articles of interest by keyword. There are also links at the story's end for permalinking, e-mailing, and leaving comments that transport you to the source URL. Trend analysis is absent on ReadAir, but so far that's not preoccupying early users as much as the reader's inability to minimize the window to the task tray. Note that the app is in early alpha and will change often, making it a good idea for users to enable autoupdates.

NNDB, a directory of important people and celebrities (the two are not exclusive) standing for Notable Names Database, has put together a mapping tool that lets you connect the dots to see how people are intertwined.

One example, featured in this demo video, shows the overlap of board members for large tech companies, including Apple, Intel, Yahoo, and Microsoft. You can use the tool to figure out who's worked where, then drill down to their personal histories--both work and play, with very little effort.

The backgrounds of each individual are maintained by the NNDB community and its editors. You can also go in to create your own charts, though you're limited to NNDB's directory of people and companies.

I was going to do one for CBS and CNET, but alas we're not there. You can, however, compare CBS to NBC, ABC, and even Fox Broadcasting. There's not a lot of overlap, but you can easily see people's positions at the company and where else they've worked.

This reminds me a lot of Cogmap, a service that lets you map out the hierarchy of your workplace. It's got a little more flash, though, and is similar to They Rule, a site outdated about four years that chronicles the "ruling class" of corporations around the world.

For those who are less corporate-inclined, some of the celebrity "maps" are pretty amusing, including charts of who's been romantically involved with whom.

Thanks Harrison.

Wondering how companies fit together, and where there's overlap? Check out NNDB's mapper tool.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Brijit.com, an aggregation site that summed online news stories and other content up in 100 words or fewer for quick consumption, has shut its doors.

The shutdown is ideally temporary, the site's management said Thursday, but a placeholder on the front page admitted that Brijit "is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words."

A post on Brijit's blog by CEO and Editor In Chief Jeremy Brosowsky explained further. "As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don't."

Brijit, founded less than a year ago, had been funded solely by angel investments.

Currently, the site has kept its archive of about 16,000 abstracts live but is not accepting new ones. Brijit also compensated its abstract writers with a cut of ad revenue, and said payments for abstracts written up until the site's shutdown would be sent to writers next week.