Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

Yesterday was a big day for Facebook after they launched Facebook Platform. Ever since the details were announced, it’s been getting quite the attention and buzz around the Internet. With 70 different partners signing on to be part of this, Facebook is showing that they’re embracing third party applications which is a much different take than we’ve seen from their biggest competitor, MySpace.

They’ve been able to secure partnerships with major companies like Microsoft and Amazon, and developers will now have more access than previously before. For users, this means a slew of new tools and applications that can be used to spice-up profiles. 

Founder Mark Zuckerberg (who’s only 23) says that he wants his site to be a “social operating system” for the Internet, and from the looks and sounds of it, he’s on the right track.  Think of the significance that your operating system has – you rely on it on a daily basis.  Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the center of everything that users do on the Internet, much like how your computer’s operating system is at the center of everything you do.

The companies that have partnered up have nothing to lose.  They’ll have exposure to the millions of active users on Facebook, and they’ll be able to make money while they’re doing it because Facebook is not taking any of the advertising dollars that the companies will make from within the application on Facebook. They’ll also be permitted to complete transactions right from the application.

Facebook has always been known as the “clean” rather plain social network in comparison to MySpace which can sometimes look messy and cluttered.  Now Facebook profiles won’t be all uniform as users will have so many options to choose from to make their profile truly customized.  This could be seen as one potential drawback for some, but for others, a great advantage.

The following video from SplashCast (via CenterNetworks) will go through some of the companies involved:

To take a look at the applications available, click here. 

Facebook is growing, there’s no doubt about that, and clearly a lot of work has gone into the Facebook Platform. It appears to be a smart move, but we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes over with the community.  As of now, Facebook hasn’t made any grand announcements or posted anything that would direct people to check out the new applications from the site. Once they do, the feedback will come pouring in.  It will all be very new to the Facebook crowd who have been known to not adjust to change very well. Given the variety of services available, and the fact that they are all optional, I don’t think there will be much room to complain.

With all the buzz around the Internet regarding this, I still find it funny that Facebook has said nothing on their actual site about this. For all the millions of people who don’t follow tech news, they have not a clue what’s been going on!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

The first I had heard of Gender Genie was in our Forum when Max posted about it. Gender Genie is supposed to be able to determine the gender of an author by analyzing text using an algorithm. All you have to do is copy in a sample of the text, and it will give a male score, and a female score. If the female score is higher, then they presume the passage was written by a female, and visa versa.

Max tried it out with a post that Ryan wrote, and a post that I wrote, and it correctly determined that Ryan’s post was written by a male, and that my post was written by a female. Interesting, isn’t it? However a few of the people that tried it after didn’t have quite as much success. I thought I’d give it a try with tech bloggers around the web to see how well it could determine who wrote it:

1. Go2Web2 by Orli Yakuel (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
2. Techsploitation by Annalee Newitz (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
3. TechCrunch by Michael Arrington (male)– Gender Genie thinks this author is female.
4. GigaOm by Om Malik (male)– Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
5. GigaOm by Katie Fehrenbacher (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
6. Digg Blog by Kevin Rose (male) – Gender Genie thinks this author is female.
7. Lifehacker by Gina Trapani (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is female.
8. Lifehacker by Adam Pash (male) – Gender Genie thinks this author is female.

After my eight different trials with four female writers, and four male writers, the results weren’t quite as good as I thought they would be. With female writers, it properly identified in one out of the four instances, and with males, it properly identified in one out of the four instances as well.

Gender Genie analyzes a passage by looking at words that it labels as masculine keywords and feminine keywords, however they all looked like common words that anybody would use.  For example, some of the masculine keywords that it looks for are: around, what, more, are, as , who, and below.  Examples of female keywords include: with, if, not, where, be, when, your, her we. All of those words seem like common words that anybody would use regularly, and not gender specific.

So maybe the Gender Genie is lacking with some of his magical powers? Regardless, it’s fun to try out.  Just find a passage that’s over 500 words (preferably) and copy and paste it into the Gender Genie to get your result.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Netvibes has been chuggin’ along well, introducing new features to prepare for their latest Coriander Release. Just a few weeks ago they trickled out new features for that release like the theme (rounded corners, shiny colors), and today they took the last big step by releasing Coriander in its entirety.

There are several new features like easy sharing of your customized Netvibes modules, a quick start feature where newbies can get their Netvibes set up easier, and a new search module that makes it easy to compare maps between Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Live Maps. That is useful in case a map service doesn’t have a satellite view for a particular area, you could try another.

While all of these new features are great additions to Netvibes and their Coriander release, I think by far the best change is with the RSS Reader. Now you’ll notice a “show website” button within your feed reader.  Clicking on it will take you from viewing the content in the feed to viewing the actual website all while remaining in your reader.

That means that it’s no longer a burden if you want to comment on an article because you don’t have to navigate away from the page you’re currently on.  Another huge plus for users is when sites only publish partial feeds.  This gives you quick easy access to the full articles.

Not only does this benefit the users with quick easy access to the full content, it also benefits the publishers because they’re going to be getting more views on their site because people wont’ be relying solely on the feed.

When you click on the “show website” button, you’re actually put into a “show website” mode, and you’ll stay in that mode until you click on the “Go back to the feed view”.  They’ve made it so that with one click, you can easily switch between the feed view, and the web site view.

One area that they might want to improve on is coming up with a way to manage a lot of feeds.  They could easily provide a link at the top of the reader so that you could click to go to the next un-read feed. By doing that it wouldn’t make it quite so difficult to navigate through a larger number of feeds.

Overall, Netvibes did a great job with Coriander, and with the improvements/additions, particularly the RSS Reader, they really stand out from the rest of the crowd. You can find the official release announcement here with further details on some of the other changes and improvements.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on September 15, 2006 by CyberNet.

Free For All Friday

When I think of Blogmusik.net, I can’t help but think of the original Napster. You know, back in the day when Napster was the free peer to peer music sharing service that loads of people used? The good old days of Napster didn’t last too long, and I imagine Blogmusik.net won’t either.  It is cool nonetheless and worth checking out.

They use an iPod like interface acting as your own personal jukebox to stream your selected songs over the Internet.  It has a search feature with a rather large variety of songs to choose from.  When you become a registered user, you’re able to save playlists with all of your favorites ready to go for the next time you’re wanting to listen to music. They even have some of those “one track wonders” you never thought you’d find or hear again!

The virtual iPod interface really couldn’t be any easier to use, and as for the quality of sound,  it’s decent.  Not great, but decent. Oh, and you can change the color of your “iPod” from black to white.  The idea is kinda cool, however as mentioned, the legal status remains unknown which gives a good indication that it may not be around for long!

Alright, so that’s the free route you can take for now.  There are alternative options that are legal and have similar features such as allowing you to save a playlist. One such option is brought to you by the ”new” (no longer free) Napster.  According to their website:

 ”As a registered member of Napster’s free music service you can listen to all 2,000,000 songs in the Napster catalog up to 3 times each. After the 3rd free play, you must purchase the track to listen to it again. As a Napster subscriber, you can listen to the same song an unlimited amount of times without having to worry about any limits. You can also download your favorite music to your PC and listen to it when you are not connected to the Internet.”

To recap: Blogmusik.net is a pretty cool free service with the virtual iPod interface but probably won’t be around for long! Once/if they’re shut down, a good alternative paying option for $15.00 per month would be Napster.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on February 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the reasons that I love Gmail the most is the remarkably powerful filter system that is integrated into it. With the filtering system you can analyze emails as they hit your Inbox, and then perform certain actions on them. If you spend the time to setup quality filters it can almost be like having your own personal secretary to sift through emails, but it’s a lot cheaper.

Google doesn’t limit the amount of filters that you can create in Gmail (although just 20 of your filters can forward emails to another address) so you can go as crazy as you would like. Today we’re going to take a look at some of the various ways that you can put the filters to work for you.

–Using Gmail Filters–

Setting up Gmail filters can be as easy or as hard as you would like. Some filters that I’ve setup are rather simple and are just based upon the from address, while others took a little more thought. Lets start with an overview of how you would setup a filter:

1. Click Create a filter (next to the Search the Web button at the top of any Gmail page).
   
2. Enter your filter criteria in the appropriate field(s).
   
3. Click Test Search to see which messages currently in your account match your filter terms. You can update your criteria and run another test search, or click Next Step.
4. Select one or more actions from the list. These actions will be applied to messages matching your filter criteria in the order in which the actions are listed — for example, you could choose to Forward matching messages to a specific email address, then Delete the messages.
   
5. If you’d like to apply this filter to messages already in your account, select the Also apply filter to x conversations below checkbox.
6. Click Create Filter.

–Tips & Tricks–

Using the filters can be pretty easy, but here are some things that might help you out along your quest for a cleaner Inbox:

• When blocking email addresses in the From field you can keep things a bit more general if you would like by specifying just the domain. For example, if you receive a bunch of messages from Orkut users instead of blocking each individual address just enter *@orkut.com in the From field.
• I’m able to use only one filter for blocking dozens of spam addresses thanks to the OR operator. For example, entering in spamaddress1@junk1.com OR spamaddress2@junk2.com will block emails coming from either of those addresses. There’s no need to create separate filters for each address.
• If you use Google Talk’s chat history feature you’ll soon realize that your conversations are also analyzed against your filters. To exclude chats from a particular filter enter is:chat into the Doesn’t have field. This will ignore all of your Google Talk conversations in the filters.
• You can scan filetypes in an email by putting filename:type in the Has the words field. Just replace “type” with the extension of the file that you want to filter. For example, to filter for Windows Media Player videos you would enter filename:.wmv into the field.
• Gmail supports what’s called “plus addressing” meaning the email address username+blah@gmail.com is still sent to the username@gmail.com email address. When signing up for services use this method so that filtering is even easier. For example, you could use an address username+amazon@gmail.com for all of your Amazon purchases. Then in the To field use the username+amazon@gmail.com to filter the emails sent from them.

–Useful Filters–

To get the ball rolling I thought I would list out some of the ways that I’ve put the filters to work:

• Anti-phishing – I use the plus addressing technique that I mentioned above for all of my financial accounts. Then when the emails come in I check the To address to see if it is from someone like eBay. If it is I’ll apply a “Financial” label to it. This coincidentally happens to serve as an anti-phishing mechanism as well, because if you think about it almost no scam artists are going to guess the “plus addresses” that I’ve created. When I see an email from eBay that didn’t get my label I know something fishy (no pun intended) is going on.

  Note: It’s not enough just to analyze the “from” address of an email when dealing with financial companies because those are often spoofed by the scam artists.

• Bacn – Remember Bacn? We talked about it last year when it was introduced as the “almost spam” emails we often receive on a daily basis. They refer to things like notifications from Facebook or newsletters that you’ve subscribed to. These are emails that you want to read, but don’t want cluttering up your Inbox. I have a ton of various filters set up for things like this, but my main one just applies a “Notifications” label to the email messages and then they skip the Inbox.
• Forwards – I receive quite a few forwards on a daily basis, and I normally never even open them up. Unfortunately the text “FWD” doesn’t show up in the subject line for most of the ones that people send, so I had to take a additional steps to block them all. Here are the two methods that work well for me:
• If you can see every person that they send the forward to go ahead and pick one of the email addresses that you’re not familiar with. Then just create a filter blocking all emails being sent To that address. That way you should still receive any of the personal emails that are directly sent to you while removing all of the ones that are mass-emailed.
• If the BCC (blind carbon copy) was used the previous method won’t work since you can’t see anyone else’s email address. But you likely won’t see you’re email address in the To field either. To get around this create a filter using the sender’s address in the From field, and then enter -youraddress@gmail.com into the To field. The minus sign before your address is crucial because this filter will check for any messages from the sender that aren’t addressed to you.

–Overview–

There’s a lot more that you can do with the filters, and the advanced operators guide by Google will definitely help you out on setting up extensive filters. I’m sure there are a lot of advanced Gmail users out there, and so we want to turn the stage over to you now. Let us know in the comments how you use Gmail filters to cleanup your emails.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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