Propeller 2.0 Is Out

Long awaited upgrade to Propeller, a social news site, was released today. Propeller incorporated a new design, new technology powering the site, and new features.

This new design has a deeper integration with AOL News and AOL.com (where Propeller posts have begun popping up in the top box). The new design is likely to be noticed first. The logo has changed which shows it’s community and stories as moons orbiting the Propeller planet. Also they redesign the propeller engine to improve the performance.

Here are some other changes you will notice:

• New Ranking Scale: Instead of seeing an absolute count of votes next to a story, you will now see a Popularity Rating from 1-10. The scale is based on a new set of ranking algorithms, which take into account many more aspects of participation when determining popularity.
• Prop It!: "Vote It" is changed to "Prop It" as they find that "Vote" seemed too serious, especially with the elections coming up.
• Groups: Users now have the ability to join groups and form groups of their own. Groups can be open to the public, or membership can be limited. Once you have joined a group, you can share stories and start conversations on topics of interest.
• Help!: There is a new Help Central area, where it consolidates Frequently Asked Questions and explain a bit more about Propeller.
• New and Improved Search: Not only has searching for stories returned, but new features allow for searching members and groups. Looking for that long-lost Propeller friend, or for some esoteric group? Now you can find them!
• Featured Groups and Members: To reward the movers and shakers in the community, members and groups will be featured on the homepage. This is an improvement on the old Top Propeller Contributors, since the featured member will have his or her avatar and biographical info displayed front and center!
• This Just In: The Propeller Tracker has a new name, This Just In.
• No More On Shift Icons for Editors and Scouts
• Category Consolidation: Categories are now Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style.

Read more...

Twitter Applications (Part – 13)

More twitter applications…

97. EasyTweets : EasyTweets is a set of tools that can help online marketers leverage the power of microblogging. You can use it to post to and switch between multiple Twitter accounts in seconds, check replies, and track new followers. It also helps to schedule Tweets whenever you want even if Twitter is down.

98. TweetWhatYouEat : Tweetwhatyoueat (TWYE for short) is a Twitter-based food diary. Use Twitter to track what you eat, and now your weight, by ‘tweeting’ food items to your personal food diary on Tweetwhatyoueat.com from your mobile phone, IM or through Twitter.

99. TwitterCritic : TwitterCritic is a site that provides the movie review. As name suggest, it uses twitter APIs. It monitors the twitter public timeline and compiles the movie review posted by twitter users. As per the inquisitr service automatically pulls movie reviews based on a list of movies in the system, so it doesn’t pull every movie review, only ones Merchant points the site at. As well as listing the relevant tweets, the system also categorizes the review into positive or negative based on words with the tweet, or gives it no rating when none of the conditions are met.

100. Twitter StreamGraphs : A Twitter StreamGraph is shown for the latest 200 tweets which contain the search word. The default search word is 'interesting' but a new one can be typed into the text box at the top of the application. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the '@' symbol to see the latest tweets from that user. The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word.

101. TweetPaste : TweetPaste is a teeny little app written in ASP.NET, to allow you to embed status updates from Twitter into their blog posts or pages. Just paste the URL of a tweet and hit the Gimme button. You can grab this by looking for the tweet time link, at the end of the status update that looks something like “30 minutes ago from...”. Right-click the time and choose Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut and paste it on this site and hit Gimme. It will give you the code, that you have to embedded to your site or blog.

102. TwitterCard : A TwitterCard is a compact twitter widget that acts as your Twitter business card on your website. Your TwitterCard introduces you by showing your recent status, your picture and your bio. Just give your twitter user id and site will give you a javascript code that your can paste on your blog or website.

103. TweetAhead : Site helps you to schedule your tweets for future. Once you log-in with your twitter id and password, you can write your tweet ands set the time at when you want to post your tweet. For now, you must enter the time in GMT 24 hour time. The current time is displayed in the boxes by default. You can change this time to be in the future, or your tweet will be tweeted tomorrow.

104. Autopostr : Autopostr.com let your twitter friends automatically know you posted a new photo on flickr, by just by adding a # to your photo title! Provide your flickr and twitter id. @autopostr will send automatically a tweet with your new post to all your Twitter friends.

You can find previous all parts of twitter applications at:

• Part-1

• Part-2

• Part-3

• Part-4

• Part-5

• Part-6

• Part-7

• Part-8

• Part-9

• Part-10

• Part-11

• Part-12

OR

you can see all twitter related stuff here.

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Templates For Google Docs

The Google Docs Team has launched a new template gallery for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Now, whether you need business cards, letterhead, or employee time sheets, you don't have to start from a blank slate. Find the template that's right for you and start customizing it with your information – you'll save time on formatting and formulas.

To access the template gallery:

1. Log in to your Google Apps account at  http://docs.google.com/a/example.com (Be sure to replace 'example.com' with your actual domain name.)

2. Click 'New'

3. Select 'From template...'

The gallery includes hundreds of templates – some designed by Google and others developed by Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business. So before you get started on your next project, take a look at what's available in the Google Docs template gallery!

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Opera Mobile 9.5 beta is released

Opera Software today released the much-anticipated, first public version of Opera Mobile 9.5 beta. A powerful foreshadowing of what is to come, this beta takes mobile browsing speed and features to a new level, complete with visual effects and a new look. Download the new beta from http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/.

Opera has changed the face of its mobile browser in this beta release. As with the latest version of Opera Mini, Opera Mobile 9.5 beta now defaults to page overview mode, allowing the user to view the entire Web page and instantly recognize the Web site. With panning and zooming options, the user is able to focus on specific page content. Opera also introduces a sleek, new user interface for easier navigation.

“Our fans have been eager for the release of Opera Mobile 9.5 since it first appeared at the Mobile World Congress this year,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “We are now answering the call of the people and delivering what we proudly proclaim to be our best Opera Mobile browser to date. It is a totally new user experience.”

Developers go cross-platform

With developer needs at the heart of this first beta release, Opera Mobile 9.5 includes several features to enable easier development on the mobile platform.

Opera Dragonfly, Opera’s developer tools, officially goes cross-platform with this release. It allows developers to debug JavaScript, inspect Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Document Object Model (DOM), and view any errors, making development for the mobile phone even easier.

Your quick reference guide to new Opera Mobile 9.5 beta features

Faster — Opera has always been among the fastest browsers — if not the fastest — available. Opera Mobile 9.5 beta continues this fine tradition with improved performance over Opera Mobile 8.65.

Pan and zoom — Just like Opera Mini, Opera Mobile 9.5 beta defaults to full Web page viewing and allows users to pan and zoom into their desired content easily.

Improved user interface — Opera has completely renovated its mobile UI. Cleaner and more intuitive, the new UI is designed for quick and easy navigation.

Opera Dragonfly — Use your Opera desktop browser to debug sites on your mobile phone through the Opera Mobile 9.5 debug menu.

Improved standards support — Opera Mobile 9.5 is the most standards compliant browser available, and the company remains steadfast in its commitment to make the Web accessible for all.

Save pages and/or images — With a click, simply save pages to your phone.

Review Opera Mobile 9.5 beta 1

A comprehensive reviewer’s guide to Opera Mobile 9.5 is available at :

http://www.opera.com/press/reviews/mobile/.

Related Article :

Firefox Is About to Set A World Record, Opera Did It. 4.5 Million Opera 9.5 Downloads Within 5 Days.

Read more...

Twitter Applications (Part – 12)

More twitter applications…

89. twii.it : If you love to share bookmark on twitter, then twii.it is for you. twii.it is a free service to allow people to bookmark the web pages or blogs. When readers see a (twii.it) botton, they can click the button to send the title and URL to Twitter as bookmarks. twii.it sends post on behalf of you to shorten the time to copy title and link while posting.

90. twitterfeed : twitterfeed, as name suggests, is a service that  helps you to feed your blog to twitter. twitterfeed will check your blog's feed at the specified interval and post any new items to your twitter account.

91. Matt : Matt makes it easy to post to multiple Twitter accounts without having to log into each one every time. It allows you to post the same message to one or many accounts at the same time. For instance, you may want to Tweet that you're in town for the weekend - but you may not want everyone to know!

92. DivVoted : Divvoted lets you vote for your favourite sites with Twitter. Great for showing off your latest designs, or checking out other peoples votes for inspiration. It helps you to know what today’s hot sites are. You can also check out todays chart, this weeks chart, or the all time Top 10 sites!

93. Spamlets : Spamlets is a funny way to share spams on twitter. Any  funny or strange bit of content from any spam email you receive is particularly known here as a spamlet. You can tweet such spams starting your tweet with #spamlet tag. Site tracks the twitter public tweets and shows up any message on Twitter begin with #spamlet.

94. Feedtweeter : Feedtweeter is a little service that allows you to link Twitter and Plurk to your other activities. It focuses non getting your Plurks to Twitter and the other way around in a sane way, but it (should) work with any RSS feed. It has recently added support for identi.ca. Post something in Identi.ca, and it will appear in Plurk and/or Twitter too.

95. TweetSnap : TweetSnap allows you to generate image of your latest tweet. Just enter your twitter username and it will displays the image of your latest tweet. It also gives you the code to put it on your blog, website, forum signature, MySpace, whatever!

96. Tweetmarks : Tweetmarks is a bookmarks tool for Twitter. Do you ever find yourself looking for some link you shared on Twitter? Tweetmarks can keep track of all all links you share, or just those you use a hash tag with (like #apple). If you use del.icio.us for organizing your bookmarks, Tweetmarks can automatically add your links to del.icio.us too!

You can find previous all parts of twitter applications at:

• Part-1

• Part-2

• Part-3

• Part-4

• Part-5

• Part-6

• Part-7

• Part-8

• Part-9

• Part-10

• Part-11

OR

you can see all twitter related stuff here.

Read more...

bit.ly : Amazing URL-Shortener

URL Shorteners are not new and there are already many websites that provides such service. However http://bit.ly/ is a new service that makes difference among all others. It’s a URL-shortener with lots of new stuff designed for an app developer who needs everything and more!

List of major features are as below:

1. History - It remembers the last 15 shortened URLs you’ve created. They’re displayed on the home page next time you go back. Cookie-based.

2. Click/Referrer tracking - Every time someone clicks on a short URL, it will add 1 to the count of clicks for that page and for the referring page.

3. There’s a simple API for creating short URLs from your web apps.

4. It automatically creates three thumbnail images for each page you link through bit.ly, small, medium and large size. You can use these in presenting choices to your users.

5. It automatically mirrors each page, never know when you might need a backup.

6. Most important for professional applications, you can access all the data about each page through a simple XML or JSON interface. Example.

More over it supports all the standard features you expect from serious url-shorteners.

As this is just the beginning, you can expect more features soon.

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Getty Images and Flickr Announce Exclusive Partnership to Offer New Collection of Creative Imagery

Getty Images, the world's leading creator and distributor of visual content and other digital media, and Flickr(TM), a division of Yahoo! Inc. and one of the world's largest photo sharing communities, today announce a collaboration that unites the authenticity of images from the Flickr community with Getty Images' imagery collections, photographic expertise and unrivalled experience in licensing digital media.

The exclusive partnership allows Getty Images to invite Flickr members to participate in a Flickr branded collection on www.gettyimages.com that will be available for licensing to Getty Images' creative, commercial and editorial customers in the coming months.

"We are excited and proud to be partnering with Flickr to offer our customers even more choice for their projects. Our customers will be able to select and use the best imagery from a fresh collection of high-quality images chosen by us from Flickr's diverse and prolific community," said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images. "Flickr is the ideal partner as we continue to move the imagery industry forward by offering the broadest range of high quality digital content to our customers."

"This partnership is testimony to the Flickr community of photographers who have influenced the aesthetics of photography with authentic, creative and cutting-edge images which will now be available to Getty Images' customers around the world," said Kakul Srivastava, General Manager, Flickr. "We share Getty Images' commitment to the power of imagery and are thrilled to be working with the unrivaled leader in image licensing. Getty Images offers an unbeatable platform, licensing expertise, and a premier brand for Flickr members who want to bring their imagery to a worldwide customer base."

Getty Images and Flickr are working together to establish the first commercial licensing opportunity for photo-enthusiasts in the Flickr community. The Flickr collection will feature photography selected by Getty Images editors based on their expertise in licensing digital content and insights into customers' needs. In the next several months, Getty Images will begin inviting selected Flickr members who will have the choice to participate in the collection. The two companies are collaborating to build online tools to help editors contact Flickr members, and to add images to the new collection. Over the next several months, thousands of high-quality images will be available for licensing on www.gettyimages.com with a goal of making many more available over time.

"Through this partnership, we will be offering an expanded choice of imagery with more regionally relevant content and a wider range in the style of photography available," said Andy Saunders, Vice President of Creative Imagery at Getty Images. "Flickr's philosophy of personal sharing and immediacy has already impacted commercial photography. The new Flickr collection will expand the definition of stock photography by making it even easier for our customers to find and license imagery that works in the full range of traditional and digital media."

Getty Images will be the exclusive commercial rights manager of the photos selected to become part of the collection. Flickr members will benefit from Getty Images' global sales and distribution teams helping to market their images and from Getty Images' expertise and experience in rights and clearances of visual content. Getty Images' customers will benefit from the fresh, unique and individualistic perspectives of members within Flickr's global community.

More information on the different ways imagery can be licensed on www.gettyimages.com can be found at:

http://www.gettyimages.com/Corporate/LicenseInfo.aspx.

Via PR

Read more...

Lively - 3D Virtual Experience By Google

Google today released it’s new service called “Lively” - a 3D virtual experience. Lively is a new product available in Google Labs. It helps you to create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design. The Lively aims to experience you a new dimension of the web.

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. You can also chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions.

What can you do with Lively ?

Socialize in 3D places on the web: Lively by Google has interactive 3D places on web pages where visitors can see each other's avatars and chat. Customize your avatar and decorate rooms to add another dimension to social networking!

Express yourself: Your avatar represents you. Pick a character that suits your personality or mood and customize it to make it unique. Dress your avatar to express your style. Use your avatar's animations to add some body language to chats!

Create and share your own places: Anybody can create and publish their own room. Pick a room shell that provides a good foundation and decorate it any way that you can imagine. Invite people to visit your room -- they can decorate it too!

 

For more details, check out this lively help page.

Read more...

Twitter Applications (Part – 11)

Few more twitter applications on your way

81. TweetDeck : TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that  is currently in private beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

82. Hashtags : Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. Hashtags were developed as a means to create "groupings" on Twitter, without having to change the basic service.

83. innertwitter : Inner Twitter asks what is in front of you? In answering you reconnect to your original happiness because to answer you must stop during your ordinary activities and turn your attention to immediate reality. Stopping releases the tension that builds up as you rush through the day. The effect of simply stopping can be profound.

84. twisky : Twisky brings you portable "who-what" searches via Summize.com's API and pack them into Twisky Short URL's. Anyone can be a Super Star, pin yourself or any other twitter up for the next 36 hours, as long as there are still empty slots.

85. twitterlights : twitterlights is a FREE web-based service to highlight internet snippets and twit. You can see it as a combination of i-Lighter and Twitter. Everything you i-Light is stored in your web-based i-Lighter account for easy retrieval.

86. TwitterMail : TwitterMail is a service that helps you to post your tweets just by sending an email to your twittermail email address (e.g. abcdef1234@twittermail.com). The body of the message will be published in your Twitter Profile. For a normal message, you should always leave the subject-line empty. If a friend send you a post on twitter (by using @yourusername) you will get the tweets to your emailaddress. It breaks the 140 characters limit of twitter. It also enables you to tweet for future.

87. Twitter Spy : Twitter Spy uses the similar concept that Digg Spy is using. It fetches the tweets from twitter public timeline and displays them in real-time using ajax interface. It also displays tweets on Google map so you can know the location of people who are currently tweeting.

88. Twellow : Twellow is currently grabbing publicly available messages from the Twitter. It then analyzes and categorizes each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found at Twellow.com. By adding these people to specific categories it helps you narrow your searching into specific niches where you can find who you are looking for.

You can find previous all parts of twitter applications at:

• Part-1
• Part-2
• Part-3
• Part-4
• Part-5
• Part-6
• Part-7
• Part-8
• Part-9
• Part-10

OR

you can see all twitter related stuff here.

Read more...

TweetDeck Enables Users to Split Their Tweets Into Topic Or Group Specific Columns

TweetDeck is a new service build for twitter. It is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in private beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. To do this TweetDeck saves all tweets to a local database. The far left column will always contain All Tweets. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the database. Once created these additional columns will automatically update allowing the user to keep track of a twitter threads far easier.

Being database driven TweetDeck allows the user to continue twittering even when offline. Tweets and direct messages are queued and then sent automatically when back online. This offline functionality also applies if Twitter is down.

Additional Features

• Catch up with overnight global twitterings as TweetDeck stores all updates whilst running
• Continual status updates of TweetDeck and Twitter
• Resize TweetDeck as either an unobtrusive column, full screen or anything in between
• Especially useful running full screen on a separate monitor
• Filter tweets from up to 1 hour to the last 7 days using the Timeframe bar
• Auto updates from the Twitter API

Read more...

Another Micro-blogging Service : Identi.ca

Identi.ca is a microblogging service brought to you by Control Yourself, Inc.. It runs the Laconica microblogging software, version 0.4.1, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.

Identi.ca is based on the Free Software Laconica tool. If you register for an account, you can post small (140 chars or less) text notices about yourself, where you are, what you're doing, or practically anything you want. You can also subscribe to the notices of your friends, or other people you're interested in, and follow them on the Web or in an RSS feed.

To use this service first register a new account, then on the public timeline, enter your message into the textbox at the top of the page, and click "Send". It will go out on the public timeline and to anyone who is subscribed to your notices (probably nobody, at first).

To subscribe to other people's notifications, go to their profile page
and click the "subscribe" button. They'll get a notice that you're now
subscribed to their notifications.

It also supports IM. You can post messages to Identi.ca using a Jabber client on your computer, mobile phone, or other platform. (GTalk,
Google's Jabber program, will also work.) This can be a convenient way to keep up with your friends on Identi.ca. If you don't already have a Jabber account, you can use GTalk or one of the other public Jabber services. You'll probably also need an IM client like Pidgin.

There will be an obvious question that how is this site different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others ?

Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Goal of the Identi.ca is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users' autonomy. In particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services
that can receive your notices.

The goal here is autonomy -- you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don't like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

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Favicon Browsing With ‘FaviconizeTab’ Firefox Add-On

FaviconizeTab is a great firefox add-on that let you browse multiple websites through favicon tab.

This extension adds a new "FaviconizeTab" option to the context  menu of the tab. When it is clicked, The width of the tab becomes small up to the size of favicon. It returns to the former size when "FaviconizeTab" is clicked again.

This will save some tab spacing. The new tab looks as below:

Width of the tab shrinks to website favicon size. There is an option for Quick Faviconize. Go to the option menu :

You can choose options such as [Ctrl,Shift,Alt] + Click or Double click on the tab.

Auto Faviconize option will automatic faviconize the website tab (URL that you specified). Faviconize is not released even if it moves from URL specified here to another page. Please return it by manual faviconize.

You can also save faviconize status when closing firefox. This is only for FF2.0, and you must set to [Show my windows and tabs from the last time].

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Google Talk Goes To iPhone

Attention iPhone owners! You can now chat with all your Google Talk buddies while on the go. Google Talk team has just released in the US a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch browsers. In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone,