Issue 1,000! Social networking becomes the Web

10/15/08

Welcome to the 1,000th issue of the Web Applications Alert newsletter! It's amazing to think how far we've come with Web stuff in the almost 10 years that have elapsed since this newsletter started.

Greasemonkey and meta-analysis

10/13/08

If you've not come across Greasemonkey before and you're at all geeky you need to check it out. Greasemonkey is a Firefox browser add-on that allows you to use scripting in JavaScript to modify and manipulate the contents of Web pages.

Surf Canyon improves search...really

10/08/08

Just when you might have foolishly thought that the world of online searching couldn't produce yet another enhancement along comes Surf Canyon. Need I mention that that this software is in [drum roll please], beta?

Invite with Phonevite

10/06/08

The idea that most people are on e-mail and that they actually read their e-mail and, given those predicates, are organized enough to schedule something based on a message is still, sadly, fiction.

IE under other browsers!

10/01/08

Very often when you're testing Web content you'll want to test what a page looks like and how it works under multiple browsers. If you, like me, prefer Firefox, then launching and switching to Internet Explorer is a total pain.

TripIt: Your personal travel assistant

09/29/08

I am not a happy traveler. I have friends who treat travel as a great adventure and love every minute of their experiences, but not I. For me travel is a means to an end, something to be endured. There was a time - back in the 1980's - when travel was still reasonably civilized but now we have to tolerate endless queues, get crappy in-flight service (certain airlines now plan to even charge for pillows!), and if we're really lucky, have the TSA treat us like criminals, confiscate our laptops on a whim, and demand that we surrender our shampoo.

Crowdsourcing spin detection

09/24/08

Over the course of this seemingly endless, Bataan Death March-esque, election season even the most innocent and trusting members of the public have come to notice the deliberate and outrageous spin doctoring both parties are engaged in (though from my viewpoint the Republicans seem to be doing more of it and better than the Democrats).

Protecting content: Why?

09/22/08

Why do you protect your Web site content? If you are in journalism it might well be because you believe that the content value is very high. That then justifies limiting access through subscriptions whether they are free of for a fee. In the former case you see the content as directly revenue generating while the latter provides you with a mailing list that you most likely intend to leverage into a revenue stream.

Building low cost mobile content

09/17/08

Building a Web site for mobile users is - let's face it - a total pain in the $%^*. It won't look much like your regular Web site and it gives you another load of content to manage.

A new take on virtual worlds

09/15/08

Perhaps it is just because I'm old...well, old-ish...but most computer games have never really appealed to me much. It doesn't matter whether it's Tetris or BioShock, they mostly seem overly complex in comparison to the amount of "fun" they deliver, require the reaction time of a cheetah if you are to be successful, demand that you remember a load of otherwise useless information or develop unnatural motor skills, and they always leave me with the feeling that I'm just wasting time.

Roohit highlights and saves Web site clippings

09/10/08

Like you I'm constantly finding interesting and useful stuff on the Web. Sometimes it is just a single sentence, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a whole page. The problem is how to save and share these clips. Today's focus, Roohit Instant Web Highlighter is potentially one of the more interesting clipping and sharing solutions I've come across.

Get your complaints answered - Here's one satisfied customer

09/08/08

Up until the Internet came along it was fairly easy to keep your customers under control. Unless you were outed by the newspapers or television, the failings and deficiencies of your company were only transmitted by word-of-mouth which limited the spread and level of detail of any complaints or problems. Not so now. Now the slightest rumor about what your company isn't doing right can go viral on the 'Net and before you know it you're fighting raging PR fires and trying to repair the damage.

File transfer for Twitter

09/03/08

The world of Twitter is a subject I have written about several times in this newsletter and in my Network World Gearhead column. The reason for this mini-obsession of mine is that despite all of the service problems and outages that Twitter has experienced over the last few months it remains one of the most addictive social media ever created. Moreover as Twitter also offers a completely functional API that allows third parties to create clients and mashup services that extend and enhance the Twitterverse it has continued to grow in importance as a keystone of social networking.

Yoowalk around the Web

09/01/08

In the last few issues of this newsletter I've discussed graphics-based Web services that use visual techniques and metaphors to present complex data in ways that improves its accessibility and comprehension. There's been a recent surge of companies trying out new representations of the Web and in this issue I have a very new player in this market, Yoowalk.

Visual search makes sense

08/27/08

Just when you thought no one could possibly launch yet another search engine along comes Viewzi. Viewzi, like several other new search engines, is actually a meta-search engine aggregating the results of searches from a number of primary search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and other resources. However, Viewzi doesn't just present a big list of search results, it categorizes them. Where Viewzi is unique is its presentation technique called "views."

Polished Webcasting

08/25/08

If you want to do a professional quality hosted Webcast you might expect to pay $1,000 or more. At least you might expect that kind of pricing if you don't know about BrightTalk a service due to be launched on Sept. 8 (the company, BrightTalk, currently offers a number of other services but its new, eponymous service isn't, as of this writing, visible on the site).

More visual stuff

08/20/08

A couple of issues ago I wrote about image browsing using the browser add-on called PicLens (which I mistakenly wrote as "Piclens"). I commented that the product needs "additional features such as being able to build collections, post images to blogs, and annotate images."

DNSstuff, diagnoses DNS, er, stuff

08/18/08

Have you ever had your Web site just drop off the face of the 'Net even though you know that the server was running? One of the most common causes of this problem is a misconfigured or damaged DNS set up and if you've ever tried to get seriously under the hood with DNS you'll know just how complicated this can be.

Image browsing gets really cool

08/13/08

Hundreds if not thousands of applications have been turned loose that attempted to wrap complex or simply large data sets in some kind of sophisticated visual interface. The majority of these have been failures either because they were simplistic and didn't add much value or they required far more resources to render their presentations than the average user had.

Cuil: Terminally uncool

08/11/08

Building Web applications that are robust and perform well is hard, but trying to promote them, build a market for them, and then make money from them is far harder. And harder still is when you're launching a Web service that competes with an established brand in the same market.

Very Recent & Addict-o-matic: Recency search aggregation

08/06/08

Search aggregation is hot. If you haven't come across the term before it is a service that takes a search string and runs that search on a selection of sources such as search engines and archives and returns a single page of relevant results. Make no mistake, search aggregation is quite a complex thing to do and its potential, given the myriad sources on the Internet that can be searched, is huge.

A social networking post aggregator

08/04/08

The problem with social networking is that it is so social. As you get more deeply involved with the various social networking services you'll find (or have found) that it expands your online things to-do list remarkably quickly. This is because social networking has developed so many separate and effectively isolated 'channels.' There's Twitter, Identi.ca, Friedfeed, Seesmic, Plurk, Facebook, Brightkite, Pownce, ...it's a long list that will most likely get longer.

Will Google's Knol be a force for evil?

07/30/08

If you missed the recent news it appears that Google has gone, in effect, head to head with Wikipedia, but with differences.

Scheduling and more with Moreganize

07/28/08

In a couple of recent editions of this newsletter I discussed free services that allow you to schedule meetings for groups of people so that their different availabilities could be accommodated.

A more memorable Web

07/23/08

Humans are extremely visual animals and phenomenally good at matching patterns. Therefore it follows that if you want to engage your audience, get your message across quickly, or make something memorable, using a graphical technique is going to be far more effective than text or sound.

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Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.