Edgeio launches

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Edgeio has launched. I love that it has not launched without the beta symbol ;), am tired of looking so many the services coming on these days with a beta symbol that does not go away for months and years. But for now coming back to Edgeio. I love the interface and it's concept. What is edgeio? edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services. Our goal is to give publishers of all sizes the means to control how their content is published, discovered, and consumed. By doing so, edgeio provides everyone easy, up to date, access to content from the Internet's edge. Now instead of writing and repeating what other fantastic bloggers have done already, I will point to them so that you can read it for yourself. OM Malik Keath Teare TechCrunch Nik Cubrilovic Russell Beattie Edgeio's Blog As I see it is just the starting. I am sure there will be many other features that will follow in the coming months if not days. Will watch this closely.

Another Day, another Google Service

Heye, it's another day and another Google Service at the door step. This time it's Google Pages. Google pages for now allows it's user to create bunch of HTML pages and stick it together and host it on their web site. Now by the time I read this message, Google has temporarily stopped leting more users to signup on Google Pages, so will have to try it out later. But looking at their "about page" gives us some indication. It says that the editor is AJAX based. When you sign up your Google page would be http://yourgmailaddress.googlepages.com .You will be given 100 MB of space to store your contents on Google servers and although there is no mention of bandwidth I am sure it will be enough to serve the cause if used wisely (ya, see it as a problem if you are going to run it as a software and video sharing tool). So what's is Google's strategy behind this? It's not very clear yet. The general word out is they want to help non technical users to setup sites easily and create an online presence. They want to help people who find it expensive to host domain sites. Fair enough. But use of a service is what we make out of it. As with most of the Google services, we can try and extend our creative imagination as to in what all ways we can use the services. Here is what I think. 1. It can be used to create homepages for people 2. It can be used as online photo hosting service (it can be integrated with Picasa easily) 3. It can be used as a personal wiki (one can easily make changes and save the updates) 4. It can be used to create specialised pages (ooh, I am thinking of Squidoo now. What all reasons can you still think for still keep using it? . I am sure people will be able to make use of javascripts and add Google Ad words to it 5. People with low technical skills can easily create a web presence (ah, above point covers this already) 6. A personalised bookmarking page 7. What else? I will be posting some more screenshots once I get access to Google pages, till then let me what you think about this.

Del.icio.us adds new features

Just when I thought Diigo was coming out with some great features here I see some new additions to Del.icio.us. Not sure for how long these changes are around, but I just updated Del.icio.us extension in Firefox and they are some great additions. Among many other features the one that I like the most is "Highlighting notes". Now when you like something on a webpage and you want to bookmark that page and remind yourself later on as to what specific thing you wanted to check on that page, you can simply "Highlight notes" on Del.icio.us.
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OK, for most people this feature should work great, but I will mention about downsides of this feature compared to Diigo here. With Diigo, you can bookmark a single page and highlight multiple lines/paragraphs on the same page. You can add or remove more highlights with a single click. Whereas with Del.icio.us as far as I can see you can only highlight a single line or paragraph at a given time. If you want to high light another line on the same page after highlighting the first one you either have to manually add the note in the 'notes' section or delete that highlight and add another one. But unless people really get into habbit of highlighting things, I don't see this as a major problem with Del.icio.us. By the way, I still have invites for Diigo if somebody needs it. I was told that they are coming up with some great new features. Let's see what they come up with. They are competing with a already accepted competitor with a huge userbase and backed up by Yahoo, so they better do good to sustain themselves in the market.

Checkout BozPage

BozPage is cool. So what is BozPage? BozPages is a project to make small one off blogroll pages to keep track of a bunch of feeds on a single page. BozPages can be made into any combination of rss feeds * Search results from various RSS enabled search engines * Friends’ bookmarks on del.icio.us * Blog searches for your weblog * News * Friend’s blogroll * Blogs on a specific topic With BozPage we can see the Feeds in Cloud View Format, News River View format and in Dashboard format. This can come handy when we want to create different dashboards or homepages on different topics or just want to use as homepages in general. VIA:- Steve Rubel

Add Yahoo Action Buttons to your site

Yahoo has made available simple tools that can be added to Blogs, sites to make their tools available to the vast public. Using these tools you will have the functionality to offer "Add To Del.icio.us", "Send Via Email,"Blog with 360" and "Print". You can even customise these tools upto certain extent.
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This feature comes very handy and this will mean that bloggers and site owners won't have to hack into too much or look for hacks based on their blogging system. Via:- Matt McAlistor

Technorati Add A New Feature - Add your Favorites

Technorati has added a new fantastic feature today called Favorites. The idea seems that people can add their favorite feeds and they will be aggregated there. It seems that the maximum favorites one can add is 50 (which makes sense, one has to now prioritise between which bloggers are his favorites!). Also there is a RSS of the Favorites as well (mine is here). This feature can again used to increase the credibility of bloggers and blogs/sites. I am sure there will be feature later down the track which will show that which blog has to added to Favorites how many times. So from adding the favorite bloggers, what else would you use this feature for? Well you can use this feature if you are really short on time and just want to read the main blogs and their headlines. Favorites page and it's RSS is a partial feed only,so it would not really interest me a lot. This reminds me that I should add a new Label in Google Reader for all the blogs which are my Favorites and call it "Favorites" and it will can solve one purpose for me. By the way I think it can be really handy if readers have the power of exporting a readers Favorites as an OPML file. Add Software And Tools to your favorites.
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Add IT Digest to your favorites.
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Meebo Adds Single Sign On Feature

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I first wrote about Meebo on my IT Digest Blog. The serviced has catched up strongly since then. I personally know many people who now use Meebo and stay in touch with their friends while they are in their office (read it as : their office does not allow IM software). Meebo started with a very basic service but since then have included many other services into their infrastructure. Now recently they have introduced the feature of single sign on. Before, people had to punch in their user id's and password for each IM service everytime they wanted to log on using Meebo, but not any more. People now have the option of creating their ID on Meebo and configuring their user ID's and password of different IM's within their profile. So they just have to log on once and they will be logged onto all IM services. Really a feature that is more welcome. I am worried that admins of the companies might soon start blocking this site as well!

Diigo.com - Public and private bookmarking service

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Update: SORRY for the bad formatting. Wrote the post in another tool and pasted it here, sorry about that again. If you are seeing this on the home page of the blog then a better formatted version can be found here.

I got an invitation to Diigo service. On a broader basis, it is a bookmarking service, but it has many more things to offer. So lets see a question and answer review of this service.

1) What is Diigo?

Diigo stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”. It is an online bookmarking service where you can not only bookmark links, but make them available either publicly or privately (this is what was missing inDel.icio.us).

It is a free online social bookmarking and annotation service. It offers an integrated, simple-to-use platform to let you easily annotate, bookmark, share and discover online contents.

2) What all can I do with Diigo?

With Diigo, you can bookmarks, annotate, create stickies, share and discover your bookmarks with others. I think in the future we will see more than this from Diigo.

Bookmark: – You an bookmark links as you do with any other social networking site like Del.icio.us. But the difference is you can do it publicly and privately. So now one has an option of bookmarking all the links that he does not want the world to know about. You can make the bookmarks public and private at any time.

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You can even add comments to the bookmarks you add to Diigo. If the link is public, others will be able to see your comments and they will be able to comment on that link as well. (Neat feature I think, but this can be misused I think ).

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Ofcourse you can tag all your bookmarks. And whatever you link to Diigo is all searchable e.g. comments, links, tags, stickies, highlights etc.

You also have the facility where you can bookmark a link as ‘unread’ and then go and read it later on (it will be marked in bold characters on the site).

Annotate and Stickies: – This is one feature that I like, especially the sticky one. Although  sticky notes can be made in much more better way then it is currently done I like this feature. You can highlight a sentence, a paragraph and annotate. Again this can be both public and private. There are few other things that can be done with highlighting.

You can create sticky notes for yourself and for public. There are so many times that we go to a site, like the site or some idea clicks our mind. We bookmark it and when we go to that site a week later, we find it hard to remember why in the first place we bookmarked that site. So with stickies it is easier to do so. You can both place private and public stickies (some restrictions apply). So I will call this more of “Social Annotation”.

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Share: – You can share your bookmarks with others via Email (directly from within the tool or website), through RSS and allow access via the website directly. You can highlight something even email that to your friend. You can not only share bookmarks but also highlights, sticky notes and comments with others.

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Discover: – You can discover what your friends are linking to by subscribing to them. You can also search and discover links and comments that might be helpful to you. Similarly you can subsribe to the tags and as a result whenever somebody else tags a links (assuming it’s public) using the “tag” word, you will see that link in your inbox (This feature is there in Del.icio.us as well).

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Other Features:-

# Now you can highlight & jot down your comments directly on a webpage, and scan through all your research findings quickly.
# Easily extract and compile all your highlights across multiple pages for a given subject.
# Exchange viewpoints on any specific area of a webpage - great for collaboration or debating an issue.

Diigo is also proud of their tool and how they have integrated many search engine links within the tool. You can configure your own search engine links as well if you wish. So for example, you can search for “Tejas Patel” and click on “Bookmark” search engines and it will look for “Tejas Patel” on all the search engines configured within “Bookmark” search engine list and open the links in separate windows.

3) Right, so why should I stop using a social bookmarking site that I am already happy with?

This question comes to the mind everytime a new service comes to the market which might be offering few extra features. I had the same question until I saw the answer for myself. With Diigo, while you link

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So now while you can use Diigo, you can configure the toolbar to bookmark the same link to your favourite bookmarking site as well. Now this is quite good philosoply. Now I can use this new tool without really forgetting to bookmark the same links to my old bookmarking site as well. For my I do them at Del.icio.us and my bookmarks will be registered there while I am using Diigo. So if you want to give this service a try without loosing anything, this is the way to go. Configuration is simple as well!

4) Tell me more about stickies?

I really like the idea of sticky notes, I am really big on that. I started using Mystickies couple of weeks back. Great site but as it is one or two developers working on the site, it might really take a long time before they churn out new and advanced features. Stickies allows you to make a note of why you bookmarked something or what action you want to take on that particular paragraph you have highlighted or on that particular website. You can either have private notes for yourself and your friends or you can have public sticky notes. I like the simple implementation of way stickies are created on Mystickies.com site. I like the way it’s done on Diigo as well, but I think much better can be done to simplify the process of creating stickies. To check out stickies you just have to hover over the highlighted text and you will see sticky notes there (some colorful sticky notes can definately help).

 

5) So how do I get started?

You will need an invite now to get started. Comment here I have few invites that I can send out to people. It’s in closed beta at this stage. Once you get the invitation and you create your user account on the site, you can download the toolbars for both IE, Firefox and Flock and you are on your way to start bookmarking. I hear that they are going to add many more interesting features to the site. Personally I think it is a great site with great potentials. If you are deep into bookmarking and heavily rely on it, then some of the features offered are definately of help and you can try this while still using other services.

6) What are the features you will like to see?

Here I can go on for ever, but here is a list of features I will like to see in no particular order.

  • There is no provisioning of editing the links directly either in the toolbar nor on the website. So a feature where we can interact with the links directly would be great (OK, del.icio.us has this and it comes quite handy)
  • I would really like to see a feature where we can directly create sticky notes instead of first making annotations and then creating stickies ( I can sure think of 5 good reasons to do this).
  • I should be able to import existing bookmarks from other services like Del.icio.us etc.
  • There should be a feature where I can delete my profile completely when I need to (this is really important with social networking sites I think)
  • The product has many good features, make the UI in a way that they become more intuitive so people get the most out of it.

Overall I am impressed with the product and hope that it gets better soon. One thing that I keep thinking on while trying new products is that there are so many products coming out that it’s difficult to keep up with them. It’s also hard to migrate to new service every now and then. But you got to stop when you think your purpose is fulfilled in whatever service you are using. Move on and bother yourself if you think that you got two good reasons to move to another service.

Good luck to people involved with Diigo as well. Looks like a great product.

 

Diigo invites available

There is a new service in the market, called "Diigo". It's impressive. It is a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us and many others like that but this has many more features then that. I will be writing a review of Diigo service shortly, but for now I have invites available to give out for Diigo. So if you are interested then put down a comment here along with your email address (anybody with a blog is preferred).

Diigo invites available

There is a new service in the market, called "Diigo". It's impressive. It is a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us and many others like that but this has many more features then that. I will be writing a review of Diigo service shortly, but for now I have invites available to give out for Diigo. So if you are interested then put down a comment here along with your email address (anybody with a blog is preferred).