SOMEWHAT FRANK

Google Getting Into Everything, NewsCorp To Buy LinkedIn?, FireFox 3 Beta, Death to E-mail, Popular Twitter Clients & Don't Text-N-Drive

Photo of the Week: With the Thanksgiving holiday this past week I ate entirely too much and encountered situation shown above several times. I am glad that Marc Levin captured it on film with this photo titled member of the clean plate club.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 11.25.2007

Polar Rose Puts A Name With A Face

Putting a name with a face can sometimes be a rather taunting task in public. However, online Polar Rose is looking to help solve this problem by leveraging facial recognition technology and the power of people online.

Are You A Shareaholic?

Shareaholic makes it easy to submit the web page you are currently viewing in a Firefox browser to Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Google bookmarks, Magnolia, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Twitter.

AdaptiveBlue Smart Browsing Experience

AdaptiveBlue, a company founded by Alex Iskold a contributor to Read/Write Web, offers a couple of different ways to create a smarter browsing and personalized experience by connecting users with an array of services.

By leveraging Mozilla's platform AdaptiveBlue has created BlueOrganizer, a Firefox extension that makes it easy to collect, manage, discover and share information matched it to real-world things like movies, wine or electronic gadgets. BlueOrganizer's wide spread utility makes it difficult to pinpoint a concise product category but it does offer users easy access to a number of content-based utilities. BlueOrganizer up by saying it is a bookmarking product that offers service related information based on what you are looking at (both past and present) on the Web. Users can use BlueOrganize to save, rate and organize the sites and items that they like. If you are too lazy to bookmark you can turn on an "Auto BlueMarking" feature that automatically saves pages a user has visited a set number of times. This feature could come in handy but can be turned off by the user if found to be cluttering their saved items.

AdaptiveBlue also offers SmartLinks as a way for publishers to surface links to relevant information. SmartLinks take advantage of affiliate programs to offers publishers a monetization option that is similar to putting sponsored links on a site. In similar way that Sphere's "Sphere It" widget adds related blogosphere content to an article, SmartLinks add value to an article by connecting users with other relevant information about a specific item. My only concern with SmartLinks is the time it would take a publisher to add them to their content, since it currently is a very manual process. AdaptiveBlue might address this in a similar fashion to "Auto BlueMarking" by integrating a simple rules system into existing publishing platform thus removing the extra work which could be considered a barrier of entry.

Finally, AdaptiveBlue offers something called a SmartLinks Badge. Publishers can use the badge to display items that they like and want to share or recommend with their readers. You can configure a SmartLinks Badge here. Of course, you can hook your badge with affiliate programs to potentially generate some revenue from your favorite items.

Bottom-line: AdaptiveBlue offers a couple of different ways of connecting you with relevant information about a particular item via an link on a page, a page badge or a web browser plug-in.

Do You Know Yoono Buzz It?

With the official public beta launch of Yoono Buzz It!, a free social Web clipping and annotation plug-in for FireFox you may want to get to know Yoono. Yoono is a socialized search community featuring a patent-pending recommendation engine. It aggregates bookmarks, RSS feeds and annotations/notes to rank over 70 million links in its database. I got a sneak peak of Buzz It! back in April and wrote about it - you can read more here.

With the public launch this video might help users to better understand the power of the feature rich extension.

 

Firefox 2 dot 0 Is Here

With the release of Firefox 1.5.1 still fresh as the morning dew, Mozilla has released Firefox 2.0 alpha. It is not even a beta product and could be very raw so I have opted to wait to try it out on my own computer. David Chartier did try it out though and found it to be a little bit zippier.

There's A New Feed Icon In Town?

I have seen this orange icon before in the bottom right corner of the Firefox browser. It does not solely represent RSS or XML or Atom but all of these different types of feeds at one time. As Jeff Jarvis mentions in his recent post:

"...there’s a movement rising to replace both XML and RSS icons with an acronym-free icon that has been adopted by both Firefox and Microsoft."

It appears Steve Rubel adopted the new icon on his redesigned MicroPersuasion blog. The Technology Evangelist also has a similar and equally effective implementation. Somewhat Frank offers a number of different options however I am considering switching to to something similar soon, since my can be sent to my FeedBurner feed page and select the type of reader they use via a dropdown anyway.

Performancing Firefox Extension Enables Browser Based Blogging

A Firefox extension for Performancing was released by Nick Wilson and his team yesterday (December 20, 2005) according to this post on the Performancing Blog. Performancing is a browser based product that allows you to post to an existing weblog via the browser. This is very similar to a feature that the "social browser" Flock had released however based on some of the comments and posts I have read in the blogosphere it appears that Performancing offers more ease of use then the Flock feature. So basically, you download and install the Firefox extension to your Firefox browser. Next you can configure your existing weblog. Finally, any time you see something on the web while surfing using Firefox you can right click your mouse anywhere within the browser to open a blogging text editor and beginning posting to your blog instantly. I had to update my Firefox browser first before installing the new extension. Also I had to uninstall a few other extensions due to some issues I encountered.

You can download the extension here. Additionally, Steve Rubel and Darren Rowse give their review and perspective on the new extension.

Mozilla Releases 1.07 Firefox Browser

I just downloaded the last version of Mozilla's Firefox browser, 1.07, here which addresses several security problems that were recently uncovered. The flaws which were addressed were rated as “highly critical” by many security alert aggregators dealt with the buffer overflow as I mentioned in this post on Somewhat Frank. A number of other security issues were reported in this recent eWeek article.  Also check out this mozillaZine article for further details.

Opera Web Browser Is Now Free

To compete with the free web browser offerings of Firefox, IE and the soon to be released social browser Flock, Opera has decided to start offering all version of it's Opera browser free of charge. Previously, they offered two versions, a free version with advertisements and a pay version without ads. Now they have just one version and you can get it for free by going here. I wonder how they are going to compensate their current paying customers? Also check out this wonderful browser comparison chart on Wikipedia.

Will Users Flock To New Social Browser?

Flock is a new web browser that is creating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere. It is set to debut to the general public sometime in October according to the recent post on Flock's blog. Flock is built on the Mozilla Firefox framework but has added a number of new features that allow it to be somewhat interactive and offers social related items to take on the Web 2.0 mindset. It sounds like a souped up Firefox with a social twist but beta testers are saying it is more. 

The two key features that Flock seems to have incorporated into the Firefox base browser are as follows:

• Social Bookmarking - very much like de.licio.us you are able to click a "+" sign within the browser to add a quick bookmark of a webpage or blog post.

• Blogging tools - integrates with blog platforms to allow users to post Flickr images to blogs, create new content, and even update content via the browser.

What does all this buzz about Flock really mean? In short it means this browser has lots of bells and whistles with it's main role no longer just navigating through the web. I was not fortunate enough to be in the beta group however my friend Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch was and has this to offer about the new integration of blogging software into the new Flock browser:

"...it rocks. Setup was very easy (I tested it with my personal blog). It has functionality for editing posts (even posts not created with Flock), quick toggle between preview and viewing the actual code, and, the best feature in my opinion, the ability to simply drag flickr photos directly into the post and manipulate them. They also allow quick and easy technorati tagging. Wow. I mean, really, wow. This stuff is not trivial to build. The ajax functionality is stunning."

I definitely will give this browser a test drive when it is released to the public. It sounds like I will find the blogging tools to be extremely helpful in streamlining the blogging process (i.e. adding tags, images, links).

Wired News recently published this article on Flock.  Lee Odden has a good blog post on Flock here.  TechCrunch has an update post on Flock here. Additionally, sign-up for Flock email updates on Flock's website here.

Splog Reporter Improves Features and Reporting Flow

I am happy to announce that Splog Reporter had added yet another way for users to report splog by adding a bulk import list feature. In response to several users requests we added the feature to allow users the ability to upload a comma-delimited file of splog URLs to Splog Reporter. This added feature should make splog reporting easier for splog fighters that have lists of splogs they want to report.

Additionally, Splog Reporter’s reporting flow has been changed a bit to make it a true one-click process by removing the required supplemental information fields from the Splog Reporter form. Users that use the bookmarklet or Firefox extension will now be able to simply click on those toolbar items and report the current page as splog. Just to clarify, not every URL that is reported is ultimately tagged as splog because of our back-end verification system we have in place.

It is our hope that these changes will help to make reporting splog even easier in an ultimate effort to rid them from our blogosphere. To find out more about the latest feature read our more recent news release.

New Firefox Beta Available In Wake Of Security Flaw Fix

I am a big Firefox supporter and use it over Internet Explorer whenever I can. Mozilla has posted the latest Firefox browser version 1.5 Beta 1 (Deer Park). It can be downloaded by visiting the Mozilla Firefox Project here.

The release comes on the eve of Tom Ferris of Security Protocols uncovering and exposing a security flaw (IDN buffer overflow security issue) that affects all versions of Firefox. Mozilla has addressed the problem with a patch that can be found here.