Flock has landed.

I got a link to flock from http://ponderer.org/flock. Interesting concept and will love to see this in action. Hey Flock developers, will love to try it first hand, if you can than send me an invite. I am loving all these fantastic developers who are making my computing experience better.

Ajax Office

An Online Office suite! Yes this can be very handy when we think about it!

gotoAndLearn.com

Good site for learning Flash and how to integrate it under different scenarios.

While I was talking to Munjal Shah the other day, he gave me link to Slide.  “Slide is a free Windows application for finding, playing, and instantly sharing photos, videos, and other media. Slide will help you group digital photos into channels to share with friends and family. It might even help you find pictures that you forgot you had. “ Ha ha, I quite don’t agree with that yet!

I like the interface. Hey Guys at Slide, I know this is in beta, but there are lot many things that are missing or if not missing than they are just not too obvious. How can I log out of the application? Even finding how to delete file from a channel was not too obvious.

After using the application and thinking over it, I think may be it has some use but not too sure if I will keep on using it. Ofcourse I would not want to have a ticker taking up nearly 10% of my screen face and I find it distracting when the pictures keep on moving ( I do realise that we can turn it off, but then why should I primarily use this application?)

I can see a potential use of this application as a file sharing application. I could share my power point slides along with applications files. The good thing is you upload it once, turn off your computer and your friends to whom you have invited can still download the applications and documents from the server. One thing I liked is I can download the pictures in the original resolution (that is what I found out when I was trialing it out) which is quite good. Second good thing is we can add feeds as well. So if I knew of some really good photo feeds, I could create a channel out of them and share them in public. But again the pictures in this channel are only viewable by installing the application and let it running as the side bar and we cannot see the pictures online on the website (I could not find away for that)! Ah, so will these guys be running picture adverts into the side bar in the coming time?

Overall, nice concept and nice app. I am sure people will find good use of it. I don’t know about myself whether if I have the need of another application running on my system, distracting me from my work. By the way on resource end, it takes around 30 MB of  RAM and 1–2% processing power.

A funny thing, when we install the application on the system, the application automatically subscribes us to a channel, I tried it twice and I was always subscribed to “Hotties…” channel. So does the application know that I like to watch pretty girls?

 

Linspire – The World’s Easiest Desktop Linux

Guys, who are enthusiast about trying something new, go and click on the link above and download Linspire 5.0 for free for next couple of days.

Skype Portal – Jyve

I just love smart developers and all the fantastic software they are coming out with. I just tried Jyve and it’s amazing. I added the ‘online presence’ button to the blog (on the left hand side). From the tool, the feature I liked the most is Call forwarding. Not only can you forward calls to mobile but also to another Skype user. Great. Now I can forward a abusive friend to another abusive friend

. Call notifications are great too.

I went ahead and registered myself with Jyve communities. So guys, what’s the next “Tool of the week” ?

Robs Blog: Gmail Tools & Plugins

This is cool, there are so many Gmail tools that I did not know about. Thanks to Umesh for sending me the link. Now just as I thought I knew everything about Gmail, Umesh (thanks) forwarded me a link to Gmail Drive. Wow, simple and easy. So I can easily upload and download files now. So when I upload the file, I even get a email from myself along with the attached file that I have uploaded.

So is this considered a legal tool and not against the terms of use as far as Gmail is concerned? But again it’s cool, cool & cool.

Network Mirror

What is Foxie?

Now you can surf the web with ease and comfort. Foxie (fox + ie; pronounced /Foxy/) is a collection of free security, privacy and productivity tools developed by the Foxie Team. It was originally designed to bridge the gap between Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox (an open source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation) but soon grew in scope and size to offer additional unique features not found on any stand alone browser.

Foxie empowers you to browse faster, more safely and more efficiently than with any other browser by blending tabbed browsing, ads & pop-up blocking, Malware cleansing and privacy & security protection with our smart search capabilities to enhance your browsing experience. Foxie is not a web browser and fits seamlessly into your IE browser.

After having read  Plugin Lets Users Turn IE into Firefox  , I went to check out Foxie on http://www.getfoxie.com/, the site was not responding so went to Mirror site to test this tool. The tool is cool and gives some of the capabilities of Firefox. If you are still using IE as your main browser than you might want to give this a try. For me I will still stick to Firefox

.

Recognizing Deven: Show me the Clicks…

Robert Scoble does another great job of linking me to Munjal Shah. Now I had never heard of Munjal before. Nor personally nor from his previous company Andale. Also I did not see any chances as to how it would have happen without Blogs (atleast I could not see it happening in the foreseeable future). This connection is just one more good example of “Power of Blogs”.  Now coming back to Munjal’s post, he writes My thesis is: it is just too hard to translate ads you see in print to registrations online. A reader has to read the article, remember the name, find the URL, and next time they are in front of a computer – remember to go there. In an online article, you click and you are there “. I agree and I am a good example of this. I see so many good deals on the road (Banners), I see printed banners on the car advertising about their products and services. Recently there was a Nice looking small black Mini that had some really good deal for Home Loans. I did try to remember the website name while I was driving the car and the intention was to check the website when I get home, but that never happened and now I can’t even remember the website name. The only thing I remember is it was a good way of marketing the product on Black Mini! Now can’t write the URl’s while driving can I? So that business might have lost a prospective customer and I might have lost a good home loan deal.

I guess similar things must be happening to other printed media as well. Personally it’s been a really long time since I touched a news paper or even a printed magazine. As far as I remember, the only time I have to forcefully go through the magazines is when I go for a hair cut. There is nothing else to do there while I am in the que there. So rather than starring at strangers, I think it might be better even if I just look at pictures in the magazines! Where as with online media, if I find something interesting, I take an action there and there. Either I visit the site, or if it looks interesting than I will put it under Del.icio.us or I will link to it. And ofcourse if I am onto it and if I like the service/article/product than I will verbally tell it to my friends, email them about it or blog about it. And as we all know, if somebody recommends it to us, the chances are more that we will atleast try that service or product once.

Secondly I think online mention of a service is more valuable than a print media is because of ageing of the media. If my name was mentioned in today’s newspaper along with a URL address of my blog, people will only be reading that newspaper today or at the most tommorrow. Than I don’t see many people going through the old newspaper to read the news!. Whereas with online media, if the article was interesting and useful, people will search for it and when they find it they might click on the link mentioned in there. So the life of the online article is virtually for ever and is easilly accessible as well compared to print media’s.

Thirdly, getting coverage in online media is cheap and easy where as getting coverage/press in print media is not cheap.

Fourth benefit is people can give feedback to what’s written onlne easily, which I don’t is possible with print media. Now listening to feedbacks (and responding to them) and improving the products is very important to any company these days.

So coming back to Munjal Shah, I had a chat with him on Skype (having your IM id’s on your blog is another good way to connect to your customers). As always I was feeling very comfortable talking to a complete stranger and was talking to him like I have known him for ages. We shared some thoughts and he showed me a tool which I will blog bout later. Now Munjal’s group is doing some new and innovative work and we hope to see their product soon. It is related to digital photographs and he said his product does not have any competition as of yet. So good luck to Munjal and his group for this product. Munjal I can give you a hand if you want beta developers who are there just to find bugs and complain about them

. Although I don’t have 30,000 photographs, I atleast have nearly 2 GB of photos on my hard disk now. So apart from the fact that he’s a techie and working on a innovative product, why is connecting with Munjal important to me? One because he is another India (or atleast he has roots from India ( I can tell that by his name and last name), secondly he is a gujarati (people coming from the state of Gujarat n India) and so am I and probably he speaks gujarati too. And it’s a good feeling to see one of your kinds moving ahead and doing something big and innovative. So all this happened because of Blogs and thanks to Scoble for doing another great job, one that he is best at, linking people together.

 

OK, before I start complaining about Google Desktop Search and why I am over it, let me tell you a bit about my computer scenario.

I have a P4 computer with 2 GB of RAM on it. A hard disk which is 120 GB big. One Outlook where my gmail emails are being downloaded. Nearly 1 GB of photos and all other normal desktop search. I downloaded and installed Google Desktop Search. It was nearly 2 days and it still was only 30% indexed. I just found my machine’s hard disk light was flashing on a constant basis ( I understand that GD was indexing my files).The software was nearly eating 60 MB of memory resources. Although I really liked it’s capabilites, I don’t think it was worth all the load that was being dumped on my system.

I had uninstalled MSN Search, I think I might go back to it. I have also tried Exalead Beta desktop tool and I really like some of it’s capabilities, the only fact that the version I have, it is not as responsive during load up as I might want. I will see if the latest version is any good. Is there anything else that is worth trying and also gentle on the system resources. Till than I will just rely on Windows Search capabilities.

By the way, I just love Google tools, I used Google Talk for voice chatting today and have to tell you that it was as good as local phone. Although the UI is plain vanilla without any features, people still like it and use it, hoping next versin will be much better.