Thank God for these stubborn farmers back in the 14th century, who no longer wanted to be ruled over by some decadent Austrian Lords. Today they constitute Switzerland, and their Latin name, Confoederatio Helvetica, not only makes for a nice international license plate code (CH), but also for a nice top level domain (.ch).
To this stroke of luck we owe Krun.ch:
We don’t of course owe Krun.ch to the fact that Switzerland exists, but there’s a good chance that the service would have had another name, were it not for the great .ch TLD of Switzerland. Which is my cue to actually start telling you what the service is about, and quit talking crap about my dear neighbours.
Well, Krun.ch is all about compressing and uncompressing files. Which until now always was a service strictly confined to the desktop. Krun.ch lets you upload a compressed archive and the uncompress it, or upload a few files and then compress them into an archive.
But, and if you may please excuse my use of this buzz-word, the killer-feature is Krun.ch’s compressing and uncompressing of files found on the Internet. Yes, that’s right, just locate a compressed archive of files, or files you’d like to compress, point Krun.ch to them, and voila, it’s all compressed or uncompressed, right there in your browser.
There’s a 10MB and 10 file limit on archives, the supported compressions are .zip, .rar and .tar.gz, the compressed or uncompressed files will be available for 24 hours after you’ve done the krunching, and, when signed-up and logged-in, you can actually have them mail you your krunched files.
All in all it’s a really solid affair, as it’s not only hugely helpful for some quick compression work (especially of stuff online), but also simple enough so everybody and their grandma will know how to use it.
This service really should be included in ITRedux’ Office 2.0 list. Krun.ch is exactly what Office 2.0 apps should be like. Lean, mean and immediately usable.
Commentful
Basically the website helps you keep track of the countless threads, blog comments, Flickr comments and all those other droppings we tend to leave on the web. In contrast to CoComment, which only tracks the conversations you’re actually taking part in, Commentful lets you add anything. Whatever you’re interested in, just use the extension that comes with it (the extension holds your password and username, and is specially made for each user).
You can choose how long you want to keep tracking the conversations when adding them to your account, but you can edit that later on as well. Now, if it weren’t for different ways of invoking the service (right-click menu vs. bookmarklet), Commentful and Co.mments provide virtually the same service.
Commentful has a very similar design to Krun.ch (unsurprisingly), meaning it’s intuitively designed and rather simplistic. The Firefox extension not only adds the right-click functionality, it also adds a “blinker” to the browser, which supposedly tells you once there has been any movement in your conversations (this makes it stand out from Co.mment, so hey, I’ve found a difference). By the way, when clicking the blinker, you’re sent to your tracked conversations on commentful, and I really like the fact that Kailash has been so considerate to actually have the blinker open up the site in a new tab automatically…I can’t tell you how often I’ve cursed myself for opening up pages in my current tab. So, good job.
I don’t know if there’s space for that many comment-tracking services, as it seems to be more of a niche group (RSS seems to cover tracking of just about everything quite well), but Commentful is nicely implemented and works well. Maybe, once there are a few more features added, it could replace Bloglines when it comes to keeping track of my roaming ways.
Another thing about Commentful: apart from the other two comment-tracking services, there seems to be no focus on anything even remotely social. No sharing of conversations, no widgets to add to the sidebar of your blog. I think that’s quite refreshing.