Thinking about switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer to the Opera web browser, but can't imagine life without the StumbleUpon toolbar? StumbleUpon has yet to release an official toolbar or plugin for Opera. And while there is certainly a way to rank web pages and discover new pages without a toolbar, it's rather inelegant.
Opera Stumbler is a third party plugin that gives you all the same features you'd expect from the toolbar, sans the toolbar. There are several different ways to use Opera Stumbler. You can install the menu button, which adds a StumbleUpon menu to Opera.
If you'd rather have toolbar buttons, you can install a series of buttons for common tasks like giving a page a thumbs up or thumbs down. These buttons can be dragged and dropped onto any Opera toolbar. You can also add a Stumble option to your Opera Speed Dial bookmarks.
If you think you're too old to do something like go back to college, learn how to scuba dive, or be social on the interwebs, you can either think again or stay beholden to your self imposed rigid beliefs. One person who throws such nonsense to the wind, is Ivy Bean, a 102 year old former mill worker, who has the distinction of being the oldest person on Facebook.
With 1,217 friends on Facebook (and climbing), Ivy's story has definitely resonated with people. She started with just 9 friends when her story was first published today. It just shows, even if you're late to the party, it's getting there that matters.
To find out more about Ivy and be her friend, check out the Oldest person on Facebook - Ivy Bean group.
About six years ago Mitch Kapor, the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, started a new open source project called Chandler. The goal was simple enough: Create an personal information management tool that would allow users to store, share, and collaborate. It would have things like a calendar, address book, and to do list.
In other words, Chandler is a lot like Microsoft Outlook. But there are a few major differences:
Chandler is open source
Chandler works with Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a web interface
You can sync your Chandler tasks with an online server and share them with others
Overall the interface of the desktop and web clients is pretty, but not necessarily intuitive. For example, there's a nice big text entry box at the top of the application that you would think would be for searching. But it's primary use is for entering new tasks. Type something into that box and a new task is created. If you want to use the text area as a search box, you need to type "/f" before entering your query. Is Chandler kind of useful? Sure. Is it an Outlook killer? Maybe. Was it worth a six year wait? Maybe not. But now that it's here, Kapor says it's up to the open source community to continue developing the project. And I've learned never to understimate the open source community. If there's a will, there's a way, and this application could be the future of collaborative task management. On the other hand, it's not entirely clear if there's a will at the moment.
What do you think? Is Chandler the wave of the future, or should Kapor have given up on it years ago?
Disqus offers web publishers the ability to spruce up their comments sections with advanced features including threaded comments, avatars, and ratings. Perhaps the most significant advantage Disqus offers over the default Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad or Moveable Type comments features is the fact that users can sign up for one Disqus account and leave comments on thousands of blogs and web sites.
There's just one problem (for web publishers): Up until now, user comments were stored on Disqus servers, not on your web page. That means search engines didn't notice any information left in comments on your site, which could hurt your page rank. Today, Disqus took the first step to address this shortcoming with a new Wordpress plugin.
The new plugin is much more tightly integrated with Wordpress than the old version. First up, the comments are now indexable by search engines since they are stored both on your site and on Disqus servers. Second, it's now easier to import and export comments. And third, you can now moderate comments using the Wordpress Admin interface. No need to login to a separate web page. Improved plugins for other blog platforms should be coming soon.
The Disqus web site has also been redesigned to make it easier to navigate through comments. It's also easier to follow comments left by a particular user.
Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There's just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog.
Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you've got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older PC with 1GB or less, there's no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.
A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn't go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.
The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There's also a new crash reporter.
Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn't recommend replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you've been frustrated with Digsby's high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.
Despite its seriously flawed name, Coccinella, the open source IM client, has some interesting features that might make you do a double take. The idea of chatting and having the ability to draw on a whiteboard, as well as play chess during a chat session sounds like fun, so I decided to give it a spin.
I learned from the process that Coccinella is the Latin name for ladybug. It is not, as I had thought originally, a bacteria found in pond scum. I continued my pursuit, preferring to focus on the cute little ladybug in the logo and ignore the unfortunate "ella" associations with the name.
Coccinella is a free download for Windows, Linux and Mac. After downloading the application, the set up assistant leads you to select from a list of servers to open a new account on. Although Coccinella can connect to any Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server including Google Talk, AOL, MSN and ICQ, you have to dig for information to find out how. The set up assistant leads you to select from various servers and so I created an account with Jabber.org. I was happy I did.
Holy hashtags Batman! Some Chinese Twitter fans want to make sure that even Twitter isn't safe from the deluge of Olympic tidbits you'll no doubt tire of in the next two weeks.
Steven Lin, one of the originators of the #080808 hashtag said it's "just for fun, a way to write down the day," according to the New York Times.
They even have a nifty buddy icon template you can download and personalize.
Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.
The basic idea's pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.
Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it'll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.
TripSay is hard to explain. It combines travel information, social networking, maps and reviews of places. As someone who enjoys traveling, I think it has potential.
Basically, you log in to TripSay and build your world by entering places you have traveled. Each place you enter can get a rating from a smiley face to a butt (really!) and a short tip or comment for which you can, thankfully use more than 140 characters. You can join groups with similar travel interests like a particular place or type of travel.
Based on your rating of places you will get recommendations on the map that match what you have indicated you enjoy. Most of my recent vacation have been to beaches, so the majority of my recommendations were for beachy places. Tripsay uses a recommendation engine to generate your results.
If you want to look for something different, you can click on different icons on the main map to see mountains, shopping, cities, etc. that have been rated by other users.
TripSay calls itself an intelligent social network (that) delivers highly targeted travel information, recommendations and tips based on one's unique preferences and social network.
I think if TripSay gains a large user base and lots of information it could be really useful to find interesting restaurants and out of the way places that guidebooks don't cover. But, it will really depend on the amount of users the site attracts.
Mozilla released a plugin for Firefox called Snowl yesterday that has the potential to completely change the way you use your web browser. Or it could just frustrate the heck out of you. Here's what it does: it brings messages from various sources (Twitter, RSS feeds, and eventually instant messaging services) to your browser.
The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.
But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you've got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you've got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There's an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a "river of news" style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.
Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?
If you're a good, upstanding netizen, odds are you have accounts with half a dozen social networking service or more. You may only use one or two services, but if your friends or colleagues pressured you into signing up for LinkedIn, Plurk, or Pownce, you probably filled out an online profile before promptly forgetting about it. And now that you've moved, changed jobs, or gotten married, the profile is woefully out of date. Atomkeep can help.
Atomkeep lets you synchronize your profile information across more than 20 different services including Digg, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress, Jobster, Facebook, and Twitter. You can choose from a huge list of category elements to fill out and when you hit the sync button Atomkeep will send that information to your social networks. You can sync with all of your networks at once or just select the ones you want to update from a list.
The coolest part of the service is the fact that you don't need to fill out your Atomkeep profile at all if you don't want to. It can import your profile from another service and merge it with your profile from other locations. So if your Facebook profile is already pretty complete but your Last.fm profile could use some work, Atomkeep can import the former and use the information to fill in the blanks on the latter.
I've been hanging around Download Squad HQ enough to know that our readers love hearing about Twitter ad nauseam, and that none of those readers fear being RickRolled or ever click on links originating from profiles they wouldn't trust. But just in case you should happen upon this post from an outside source, and you aren't a regular DLS reader (gasp), there's something you need to know.
The BBC reported today that the first Twitter-specific attack has been discovered by the fine folks at Kaspersky. The fake profile uses the name "Pretty Rabbit" in Portuguese -- and it's frustrating me to all ends that I can't seem to find a reference or semi-accurate translation of what that user name might actually be -- and claims that clicking the tweeted link will take the viewer to YouTube for some adult video action.
But because there is so much wrong in this world, errant clickers don't get to see the adult video -- at least, not without paying the price. Instead, a fake version of Flash is downloaded, which has the hidden skill of harvesting all sorts of data and transforming your beloved Twittering machine into a zombie node, allowing bad men, women and rabbits to wreak criminal havoc all over the web.
Similar worms have been discovered on MySpace and Facebook, so please, choose your friends wisely.
The offending malicious applications only affect Windows-based systems. No word on whether the faux-Flash works with Linux or Mac, so while those users (who are over 18, of course) are safe from the malware, they will probably not get to see the exciting video Pretty Rabbit in Portuguese was referring to.
UPDATE: On behalf of everyone at DLS, I'd like to give a big thanks to Ed Mercer for the heads up that though the Portuguese username literally translates "Pretty Rabbit," the word "coelhinha" is often associated with Playboy Playmates/Bunnies. "Pretty Playmate" may be a more accurate translation in this case.
We haven't written much about Dopplr, a social network for travelers, since we talked about its launch last year. If you're a jetsetter, or even someone who travels a couple of times a year and has a lot of friends, we'd like to direct your attention to the new features in Dopplr's "Copenhagen" release, which has been out for less than a month. The key improvements include the ability to add trips by e-mail, Twitter and SMS, and the introduction of public profiles.
These new methods of adding trips are a followup to the iCal and Google Calendar support that Dopplr added earlier this year. Now you can either automatically update your Dopplr by updating your calendar, or you can send in your trips in almost any way you could wish for, short of mental telepathy. Public profiles mean you can show your trips to anybody, not just your Dopplr contacts, and choose how much information you want to share. At this point, we're basically looking for excuses to travel, just so we can use Dopplr.
Adobe AIR-based microblogging client Twhirl already supported Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic, and now its coverage of the world of mini-updates gets even broader with the addition of Identi.ca. Identi.ca is something like a less-popular open-source version of Twitter. This is a big deal for the Identi.ca folks, because Twhirl may actually be better-known than their service.
Along with potentially pumping up the userbase of a fledgling microblogging site, Twhirl has also position itself to be to these micropost what Trillian and Adium are to IM. Keeping several services readily accessible from the same app is a proven winner when it's done right, and Twhirl delivers on the usability and appearance side of things. It was already one of the most popular clients back when it could only handle Twitter, and its main competition is going to come from some of the better Twitter-specific clients that attract people who don't use the other sites Twhirl handles.
At some point you've probably used evite, either by receiving or sending an invitation. In the past the online application was great for sending invitations but it was a one shot deal - create and send an evite and when the event is over, the evite is dead.
Last year evite went mobile in an effort to keep up with all of us and on Friday, evite went 2.0. Users can now integrate photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and playlists from Imeem. The changes should make it easier to integrate content you already have on the web into your evite options instead of requiring separate uploads of information.
The redesign also attempts to make evite easier to navigate, introducing more tabs for organizing different sections of the site. Developers have also added some custom options for the way hosts and attendees can interact with each other.
At some point you've probably used 
