Google's new design

I was browsing the web, and needed to search something so I clicked the 'Home' button to take me to google, but the page I saw wasn't the same one I've seen billions of times.

Note the differences in the logo colors, the lack of underlines on the links, and the missing 'Language Tools' link. It appeared only once, and clicking on the 'Images' link took me back to the bring old version again. Perhaps this is a 'beta' redesign of the Google homepage. I've seen other versions of it pop up occasionally as well, like the one with green bars.

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Flickr+Youtube+mySpace=Flukiest

Flukiest is a fast growing interactive community for sharing and managing digital media by artists, photographers, designers, musicians, writers, directors, producers, and technologists. Flukiest also provides the technology to launch fast growing interactive communities for members to make new friends or keep in touch with old ones, in addition to providing facilities to store and manage digital media content such as photos and movies.

In general its a social networking site, that focuses mainly on sharing digital media such as photos and videos. You can also write and manage reviews on a variety of topics ranging from books, to websites to even restaurants. Or just express your opinions and musings in your own blog. Everything is tied in together nicely making your profile easy to manage.


Although Flukiest is well designed and has decent features, it tries to do too much. After all "artists, photographers, designers, musicians, writers, directors, producers, and technologists" don't have a lot in common. The reason, sites like Flickr and Youtube gained in popularity is because it focused on one key target audience, and continually evolved to serve that particular audience better.

That doesn't mean that Flukiest is doomed.It has all the right features intregrated together logically to become a great social networking platform. By removing the spotlight away from photo and video sharing and one large community, to smaller communities of 'friends' could help them grow in the social networking industry and become a viable mySpace competitor, which so far hasn't embraced Web 2.0

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Spymac gets less Mac-centric, aims for mainstream

My first run-in with Spymac was a completely accidental encounter a few years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a site that had its own visual style and appeal. It pulled in some design cues from Apple but kept its own sense of personality. This week Spymac has relaunched itself as Leapfrog, a portal for user-generated media.

The old Spymac featured a variety of user services, including e-mail, blogs, and user forums. It was a community-driven site. The new Spymac Leapfrog is all about media. Think YouTube with Google's pastel color palete. Users can browse popular videos, pictures, and music, all through a Flash-based player. Like Viddler, which we covered last month, Spymac lets you plug in your Webcam to record and share your own videos. There's even a revenue-sharing model for user-generated content, similar to Revver.

What's strange to see is that a few of the old Spymac features haven't weathered the transition. The older version of Spymac is now referred to as "Spymac Classic." Services like e-mail, forums, and blogs take you back to the classic version. Likewise, clicking on "galleries" in the classic Spymac pages transports you to the new front page. The two sections feel like completely different sites.

When I look at the evolution of Spymac, I wonder about the rationale. In many ways, it appears they're trying to compete with YouTube and other Flash-video hosting services on a design level. What puzzles me is why they'd completely revamp Spymac to be such a non-Mac site. If anything, I would like to see them focus on integrating the rest of their niche Mac community services to give the site a more cohesive feel in a manner that competitors like YouTube and MySpace haven't been able to accomplish.

[Source]

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Perceptive Pixel's futuristic UI

The iPhone's new touch interface might be nice, but it's nowhere near as involved as the future UI envisioned in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise could drag objects across the screen and manipulate them in all kinds of ways, or "push" them aside to bring up something new. Jeff Han, a research scientist at NYU's Courant Institute, has come up with such an interface, which responds not only to touch and gestures, but to varying degrees of pressure. He flips photos across the screen, zooms in, throws them away, and calls up new ones, among a variety of other cool uses of the interface. It looks startlingly responsive and natural, far more so than a standard PC setup. It's hard to describe here how intense and possibly revolutionary the setup is, so you really need to check out the video and article for yourself. With any luck, his new company Perceptive Pixel will be bringing it to our eager fingertips before too long.

Video [Fast Company's FastTV]
Can't Touch This[Fast Company]

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Nokia Aeon

The Aeon is a phone that reminds us why the word sleek was coined in the first place. Nokia’s device has a fully touch-screen display, if the images on the company’s research and development site are to be trusted. The number pad appears when the touch screen is activated and the traditional joystick is nowhere to be seen.

But before you start asking about price and mobile phone supplier, it might pain you to hear that these are just concept shots at the moment. As concept material goes, we don’t know if it’s art, but we know what we like.

Two more pictures after the jump.

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Expect WinFS in three years time

During his last visit to Moscow Bill Gates told to the press and the audience of the conference that WinFS is back. The conference was in the National Hotel in the historical center of Moscow, nearby Kremlin. Bill Gates was on this conference with Craige Mundy (CTO, VP of Microsoft), and Olga Dergunova (Chairwoman, Russian & CIS Market, Microsoft) with her directors, Vladimir Pavlov (Director of DPE, Microsoft Russia) and Igor Agamirzyan (Director of Strategy and Science, Microsoft Russia). From his words the WinFS conception is still live and as far Microsoft made WinFS so successful in Beta 1 milestone they slated WinFS back into Windows and currently plan to slate WinFS into all other data driven applications such as Windows Mail in Windows Vista, Windows Calendar, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Media Player, and Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook. Bill also said that Microsoft plans to release all of these products with WinFS as the data storage sub-system in the next 3 years.

Listen to Bill Gates' speech.

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Ten web 2.0 services you shouldn't live without

GMail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes almost 3 GB of storage. The backbone of GMail is a powerful Google search engine that quickly finds any message an account owner has ever sent or received. That means there's no need to file messages in order to find them again. GMail also allows users to categorize and sort their messages with tags (called labels) that users can apply to their emails.

Perhaps the most unique features for GMail is the conversation view. GMail recognizes related messages, and groups them into 'conversations', where associated messages are listed one after another, with the newest messages at the top. If a conversation has more than approximately 100 messages, it splits it into separate sections. Other prominent features include options to forward emails to another address, POP3 access to other email addresses, and tight integration with Google Talk which allows you to chat right from your inbox.

Despite the myriad of features GMail retains a clean, fast, simple and intuitive interface. And although its still in beta (for the last three years) its easy to sign-up, all you need is an invite from an existing user (which is almost everyone).

Alternatives: Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail (beta)

Flickr is a free photo-sharing website, owned by Yahoo!. Flickr gives you unlimited space to store your photos but with a 100MB upload limit. Flickr allows photo submitters to categorize their images by using 'tags', which allows searchers to easily find images concerning a certain topic. Flickr also allows users to categorize their photos into 'sets', or groups of photos that fall into the same topic.

Organizing photos in Flickr can be done using Organizr, a web-application that allows efficient editing for a large number of photos. Flickr allows you to select whether you want you photo to be public or private. Private photos cannot be viewed by anyone except those you allow, you could also share private photos with non-Flickr users by emailing them a guest pass.

Flickr is home to some of the most experience professional photographers and some of the most creative amateurs, and you can spend hours browsing through all kinds of amazing photos. Flickr showcases some of these great photos in what they like to call 'interestingness'. There are also lots of group photo pools where amazing photographs pertaining to a certain category are showcased. Limitations for free accounts include a 100MB upload limit, and the ability to edit photos you uploaded only extends to the most recent 200 photos. Older photos can be still accessed. These limitations can be removed by upgrading to a Pro account.

Alternatives: Zooomr, Smugmug

Wikipedia is a community-collaborated web-based free-content encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, its articles can be edited by almost anyone with access to the Web site. Wikipedia has articles on almost any conceivable topic and has over 250 language editions of Wikipedia, 19 of which has more than 50,000 articles, with the English version having over 1.5 million articles.

Wikipedia has seen exponential growth over the past few years and has been the target of criticism over its reliability and accuracy. Some take advantage of Wikipedia's openness to add nonsense to the encyclopedia, which is called 'vandalism'. Genuine contribution are also sometimes deemed as biased, unconfirmed and questionable. Most articles however cite sources, and have a good standing.

Despite its flaws, Wikipedia, with its group of editors and dedicated users, strives to maintain its high-quality, accuracy, making it a reliable source of knowledge.

Alternative: None!

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering bookmarks. del.icio.us allows users to 'tag' their bookmarks, which is then used for search or sorting bookmarks. Bookmarks can be made private, although it is discouraged, since sharing is an important part of the service.

del.icio.us can be used with bookmarklets for IE or with an extension for Firefox. Clicking the 'Bookmark This Page!'button brings a up a windows where you can edit the page's title and URL, add a description, and add tags (Recommended tags are provided). All public bookmarks can be viewed by anyone, with the most popular (currently) and the most recent bookmarks being featured on the front page.

Bookmarks can also be searched, or sorted by tags and/or users.del.icio.us allows you to store and manage large volumes of bookmarks, but you'll probably spend most of the time discovering cool new articles, services, and websites that others bookmarked.

Alternatives: Blinklist, Ma.gnolia, Simpy, Furl, Spurl, Blue Dot

Netvibes is a AJAX-based start page, It can be organized into tabs, with each tab containing user-defined modules, such as RSS/Atom feeds, iCal calendars, Notes, Web Search, Weather Forecasts, and other specific service oriented ones.

Netvibes search modules are the most useful features, you have separate modules for Web, Images, Video, Podcasts, and Blogs, and have the options to select which search service to use, like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Windows Live, Flickr, Zooomr, Youtube, Dailymotion, Technorati, and lots more. Not only are the search results displayed within the modules, you can search in all modules at once using the search box at the top. You also have the option to check your POP3 Email account (including Hotmail, GMail, and Yahoo! accounts) and you can chat with your friends using the Meebo module.

Netvibes has, what they call the Netvibes EcoSystem, which is a directory of mostly user-created modules, tabs and pages, this gives the users a large option to choose from. Netvibes is also a rapidly evolving product that introducing new features frequently and makes a great homepage.

Alternatives: Plageflakes, Google Personalized Homepage, Windows Live, Protopage

Last.fm is a social music recommendation service and internet radio. Last.fm can be used to look up information about an artist or band, album, or songs, and similar songs and artists are listened as well. You can also see which songs are the most popular for a certain band or album.

Personalized recommendation are given based on the songs you like. You can add your favorite songs manually, or use their audioscrobbler plugin to automatically build up your profile as you listen to music. Based on your musical preference you can listen to their online radio.

Alternatives: Pandora

Digg is a community-based website that combines social bookmarking, and news syndication with a democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, others who find the story interesting 'Digg' it. When a story receives enough 'Diggs' it is promoted to the frontpage.

Users can report duplicate or spam submissions, which when reported by enough users are deleted.Users also comment on the stories, with popular or controversial stories ending up having a long and heated debate. All-in-all Digg can be a great place to find out about recent events.

Alternatives: Shoutwire, Slashdot, Netscape

YouTube is a popular video-sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. YouTube's official policy prohibits submission of copyrighted material, however various companies such as NBC and CBS allows videoclips from their shows to gain publicity. YouTube also has made deals with Warner Music Group and EMI to host music videos produced by them.

A large number of videos on YouTube are homemade ones, some of whom have also grown to prominence on the basis of their appearance in YouTube videos. You can spend hours going through some of the funniest videos, and find a lot of undiscovered talent on YouTube.

Alternatives: Dailymotion, Google Videos, MSN Soapbox

Meebo is a browser-based instant messaging program that allows you to sign into multiple multiple IM services including Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM and ICQ. Meebo makes instant messaging services more accessible to users who are unable or unwilling to download the appropriate software.

Users can also create a Meebo account and use it to login to all their IM accounts, as well as gain the ability to save chat logs. Users also have the ability to log in as invisible.

Alternatives: eBuddy, Mabber

Zoho Writer is a web-based word processing application. It has a great WYSIWYG editing interface with excellent image import and manipulation features. It can import Microsoft Word (DOC), OpenOffice text (ODT and SXW), HTML, RTF, JPG, GIF and PNG files and can save as PDF, DOC, ODT, SXW, RTF, HTML and text files. Multiple versions of any document can be saved.

Zoho Writer also allows a group of editors to collaboratively edit a document in real-time, and also allows you to publicly or privately share documents. Blogger can also post to Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal, and Blogger blogs directly from Zoho Writer.

Alternatives: ThinkFree Office, Google Docs and Spreadsheets

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