Swurl

I’m playing with a site called swurl. Signing up is free, so I made my own site. So far, it smacks a lot like Tumblr, but it seems to handle aggregation of high-volume sites better, but the tradeoff is that there is little in the way of customization of the theme. You can specify a logo image, logo text, background image.. and that’s about it. But the theme does allow the content you re-syndicate to speak for itself, and has a very clever commenting system built-in.

Also, it doesn’t have a way to enter in new articles directly. It is more of a new, unique take on a content aggregator/lifestream app than Tumblr.

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Image via Wikipedia

This has been brought up in the past, but recently I’ve noticed that my Internet Service Provider (ISP), Road Runner from Time Warner Cable, has decided that when I typo on the location bar, it’s perfectly acceptable to send me to a not-so-helpful search result page.

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A few days ago (May 30th) I got my usual twice-monthly  Microsoft Technet Flash newsletter.  Usually I just skim and toss, not finding that much of interest.  But in this one I found not one, but three interesting links!  It sort of jolted me, in a way.. I really didn’t think Microsoft was doing anything really breakthrough in the social media space, I mean Live Spaces has been covered to death, and let’s not even bring up MSN.

Social Bookmarks

The big social app news from them is a social bookmarking service cleverly called TechNet Social Bookmarks.  Currently a preview (beta?), and confusingly referred to in the FAQ as MSDN Social Bookmarks, it seems to be very similar to del.icio.us.  Although they only support Internet Explorer explicitly, they say that other browsers will work if they support javascript.

They support bookmarking in the form of a javascript bookmarklet.  They have specific support for Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it has been my experience that most bookmarklets written for Firefox also work in Safari.

I am guessing that this is one of Microsoft’s first pushes to open MSDN to a wider social networking community.  How do I know?  They happen to have published an introductory video as well, linked below.

In the video, Microsoft Evangelist John Barton gives some details about this new direction and also gives two links to the Social Bookmarks application:

• technetbookmarks.com
• msdnbookmarks.com

Except for the color of the banner and the default homepage link, I’m not seeing a huge difference in these two URLs, and in fact my login works in both and my avatar appears the same.  So, I’m guessing that your private bookmarks will work in either and it’s mostly differentiated by what public bookmarks appear.

Updated Useful Microsoft Apps

Also in the newsletter were links to a couple of updated applications:

• Process Monitor 1.33 – this is a great utility for any Windows-savvy user to have in their toolkit.  It allows in-depth examination of any running processes, with a number of different sort and search options.
• Autoruns 9.2 – This has been a key tool of mine for many years.  Similar to msconfig, this will examine the registry and other places for any programs set to run on startup.  It is extremely thorough and allows you to directly disable or remove anything you might think is suspicious or useless from starting up when you log in to your PC.
  • A similar utility (but much smaller) is Mike Lin‘s Startup Control Panel.  This is a real gem and I definitely recommend it.

To be honest, the first time I found Autoruns, it was not from a Microsoft site.  So I was a little surprised to see that it came out of the MSDN labs.  In my eyes, that just gives it a big dose of legitimacy and trustworthiness that I hadn’t afforded it before!

And in fact, with a little more research, I learned that Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006!  How did I miss that!

I was just reading an article from Louis Gray about how to use the very cool and capable FriendFeed bookmarklet.

That got me thinking about just how many bookmarklets I have gathered in the past couple of months, and what they all do. You can see them in the screenshot over there.

Social Media Bookmarklets

Ok, be careful clicking on these.. the bold text (in most cases) is the actual bookmarklet. Just drag them into your bookmark toolbar or a folder to use them:

• Add to Mixx
• Share on Tumblr: A custom bookmarklet to clip pictures and quotes to a Tumblr tumblelog.
• gReader Comments: A fantastic bookmarklet from Paul Arterburn that lets you create/participate in a Disqus discussion on any web URL.
• Share on Facebook
• Share on FriendFeed
• Subscribe in Google Reader via Toluu: Use this bookmarklet instead of adding feeds manually to GR and you will also get them in Toluu, which will alert your friends on the service.
• Add to S|B: This is a bookmarklet for the lifestreaming app Second Brain
• Diigolet: Brings up a cool javascript Diigo bar, handy if you are using a browser that does not have support for the Diigo addon yet, like Safari.
• Twurl this!: Drop a link into Twurl.
• Note in Reader: The latest bookmarklet for Google Reader, highlight a section of an article and then click on this. Also allows you to add a personal note.
• Clip to Evernote: Handy way to save parts of the web to Evernote, a web-based image and html storage and search utility.
• Tweetshot: A special utility for making a consistently-perfect screenshot of a Twitter tweet.
• View in Google Earth: Highlight an address or some co-ordinates and use this to bring up the location in Google Earth.
• Clip it! on s|m: A Social|Median bookmarklet, used the same way as the Mixx one.

.. and that’s just my set of social media bookmarklets. The reason I don’t have bookmarklets for certain things (like del.icio.us, Iterasi, StumbleUpon etc.) is because they primarily use browser addons. However, especially in the case of Iterasi, I would love to see a bookmarklet version.

Web Development Bookmarklets

If you are using FireFox (or, to a lesser extent Opera or IE), there is another group of bookmarklets that are really handy that you must check out. They are called web development bookmarklets and they can do magic with CSS.

I would call these essential if you do any sort of web development or are interested in CSS at all.

If you have any bookmarklets you find essential or really useful, please link them up in the comments! Especially a good Digg bookmarklet, for some reason it doesn’t seem to exist.

  Image by Tom Raftery via Flickr

Today I noticed an interesting new multi-browser plugin called Zemanta. Having both Firefox installed and a WordPress blog, I decided I would give it a spin and see what it could dig up for me with itself as the topic. So far, it found a nice screenshot and a few good related articles.

Plus, it scans the articles for words it can make link-able with anchor tags, which saves time.  And it suggests tags too. Ok, that’s pretty cool.

It looks promising.

For me personally though, I use Windows Live Writer almost exclusively when creating content for my blog. Zemanta works through the browser and only activates when it notices you are on a write post page for WordPress, Blogger, etc. So, I don’t know how much I will use it. We’ll see.

Even though Twitter itself is a web site, don’t you occasionally want to have access to Twitter while you surf away in a different window, or at least be notified when someone sends a tweet your way?  In that case, what you may be looking for is a Firefox add-on for Twitter. Unfortunately, there are a dozen or more already out there. Recently, I installed two and I’d like to share with you my thoughts about them.

Tweetbar

First let’s look at Tweetbar. This a brand-new plugin from Mike Demers that makes use of that sadly-underutilized sidebar to give you an almost-fully-featured twitter client, in the style of TwitBin. What this plugin does right is capture the essentials of the Twitter site in a sidebar-friendly format.

The essentials are all there — tabs to follow everyone, people you follow, people who follow you, and the vaguely-entitled tab friend which shows you who you are following, and their last tweet. You can also change your refresh timeout and clear out any of the tabs.

The bad part is that’s where the good bits stop. There is no “reply” or “favorite” or “direct message” buttons anywhere, not around the user icons, nowhere. So you have to do your tweet maintenance the old-fashioned way, typing it all in the input window. Also, if someone posts a link in their tweet, Tweetbar helpfully makes it a link, but when you click the link it uses the current tab. There doesn’t seem to be a way of changing that behavior. Worse, it does not honor ctrl-clicks to open a link in a new tab! For me, that’s makes it worse than the original Twitter interface, in all honesty.

TwitterFox

TwitterFox, from Naan Studio, takes a different approach to integrating Twitter on Firefox. It places a small, unobtrusive Twitter icon in the bottom status bar. From there you can left-click on the icon to log in and get tabbed window that defaults on recent friends’ tweets. You can switch to replies you have sent and a direct message window. There doesn’t seem to be any support for viewing all tweets, and you probably wouldn’t want to — the window is only 345 pixels high, good for about 4-5 tweets at a time. Also, it is not re-sizeable, which is definitely a drawback.

Each tweet has an “arrow” button in the upper-right-hand corner, making it easy to quickly shoot off a reply to incoming tweets. Also, TwitterFox keeps a tally of how many new general and directed tweets you receive. Another nice touch is a subtle fading of tweets you have already read, which acts as a sort of “bookmark” to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Finally, if you right-click on the TwitterFox icon, you can turn off TwitterFox popups, force an update, change Twitter accounts or set your preferences. The Preferences Pane lets you add/change a password for a selected account, change your refresh time and popup timeout, and assign hot-keys to TwitterFox actions. You can also enable/disable a notification sound.

Some people will find the tiny un-resizeable window a definite showstopper. However for me, and the number of tweets that I get, it seems to work and it’s fast. I definitely like this addon more than Tweetbar.

Firefox Compatibility

A final note about compatibility. I found that TwitterFox installed on pretty much any version of Firefox I had installed, but Tweetbar definitely was limited to versions older than Firefox 3 Beta. This might not be a big deal for you, but if you live on the edge it might make a difference.