Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Google Reader adds Notes

Published
by
richard
6 months, 2 weeks ago
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Google Reader, by all accounts the most superior feed-reader on the web, has just become even more useful.

What’s the addition that’s making me all excited? It is, of course, notes! Now, this may not sound like a big deal, but in a little way, it is!

See, Google Reader not only provides a nice interface for you to enjoy your daily aggregator-run, it also lets you share certain items with friends or the world (which, if you’re Scoble, is the same thing). Up until now, you needed to be subscribed to the whole feed in order to share single items. But with the notes bookmarklet, whenever you add any posting or website you stumble upon by appending a note, you can also share that item.

For people like me, who not only use the sharing function, but also add their shared items via the feed to their tumblelog, this is a fantastic way to consolidate something I would usually have to either add manually or facilitate via the usage of yet another imported feed. If you know what I’m talking about.

In addition to the notes function, the GReader team has also added three additional themes to style the page that displays your public shared item. The offered themes are a bit, well, off, so I guess they are more a proof of concept than anything else. But see for yourself, in this announcement on the official Google Reader blog (which is the easy way out for someone who just can’t be bothered to actually take screenshots).

Box.net adds GMail as 3rd party app

Published
by
richard
6 months, 3 weeks ago
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

As time goes by, my titles become more and more descriptive. By reading only the headline, you actually already know the gist of it, so you might as well move on.

Unless of course you don’t have a clue what box.net is, what GMail does and what the hell a 3rd party app constitutes. In which case I’ll gladly clear that up for you.

Box.net is an online storage service (meaning you upload stuff to their servers, so you can access it from wherever you are). They’ve been around for ages (meaning around two years, which in web2.0 terms is more than just ages, it’s eons). They provide a stable service, and over time have added new features like the ability to share your files with others, hence creating a social-network based on the sharing of your files. And a short while back they opened up their platform, allowing other applications to be used with the files uploaded to box.net. One such example is the integration of picnik.com, a webbased image editor (also the official editing tool for Flickr).

And today they announced support for not only Outlook (which hopefully will perish sometime in the next five years) but also GMail (which hopefully will take over the world within the next five years).

What does that mean for you, the user? It means you’ll now be able to upload files to box.net and then send them to other people via GMail (or Outlook). Which is not exactly how it works, as box.net doesn’t exactly make GMail send the file, it just automates the process of publishing the file and then sending the link to the file to someone else. Fair enough.

So while that doesn’t sound like a revolutionary new service, it makes life a bit easier, which, in the end, is the only thing we expect from the web.

Google Browser Sync

Published
by
richard
2 years, 5 months ago
in Browsers and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Once in a while, Google issues things that are really quite surprising. A couple of weeks back, that little surprise was the Google Browser Sync, an extension for popular open source browser Mozilla Firefox.

Google Browser Sync

While there are extensions like Foxclouds’ Foxmarks that let you synchronise your locally stored bookmarks to various other installations of a browser, Google attempts to go all the way and lets you sync not only your bookmarks, but also your cookies, saved passwords, open tabs and history.

Now, this is a rather complete approach. And it’s a bit problematic as well. Why? Well, it took years and years to lecture people about the necessity of securing a computer when accessing the web. And suddenly there’s a company like Google issuing a tool that not only sends your settings all through the web whenever you open up your browser, it also stores all that information online.

While I’m sure that Google does their damnest to secure user accounts, I’m also well aware of the fact that people will always be people. In an age when phishing has become a common threat to people’s security, giving out a Google account password to a malicious stranger is something that can and will happen to loads of people. Once that password is out, in a worst case scenario, the victim is now confronted with a compromised account including an e-mail account, search histories, bookmarks, saved passwords, cookies, adsense details, etc.

That threat of a compromised online identity has of course existed before the advent of Google’s syncing extension, but to pick up one of the Freaconomics themes, the incentive for the bad guys has just become a lot stronger.

I wouldn’t be me, had I not a thing about interoperability to add.
Firefox is a cross-OS browser, meaning I can use it on Linux and Windows. This is great, and Google’s synchronisation extension is a nice tool to keep all my stuff together. It is a bad tool if it doesn’t properly work with Linux. And well, that’s the case here.

Using Firefox 1.5 in a KDE environment, Google sync is unable to sync and dies after trying to upload my stuff. I tried syncing just my bookmarks, or cookies, or history, none worked. Considering Google’s vast infrastructure, being unable to cope with my preferences seems a tad baffling.

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