Browsers and extensions

After the Always On conference program closed on Wednesday, I headed over to the Lunch 2.0 event (it started at 5 p.m., but who's counting?) at Facebook HQ. When I got there, the room was packed with Facebook employees and builders. (See the video for a peek at the crowd; yes, that's Scoble.) I thought it would be a good opportunity to get the skinny on good Facebook applications. Beyond the statistically popular applications, and the applications you see that your friends are using, I wanted to know what applications Facebook insiders use and like.

Here'… Read more

At the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit 07, the virtual world was under scrutiny. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier led a panel with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs (Second Life); Irving Wladawksy-Berger of IBM; Chris Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online and Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun.

The big question was whether virtual worlds would be a real business. "Meetings, learning and training may be killer apps of virtual world. Don't underestimate any technologies that help us do that in a more human way," said Wladawsky-Berger.

See the full report over at ZDNet.

Patiently waiting for somebody to write that killer Thunderbird extension that does everything from sending spammers a DOS attack to washing your dishes won't get you much beyond a head of gray hair and a trip to Cuba for cheap meds to treat your high blood pressure.

No, there are no panaceas here, but we do have a platter of some newish extensions that not only make you slimmer and sexier, they also make Thunderbird better and easier to use with preview pane browsing, e-mail stickies, toolbar tweaks, and more.

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Here's the video demo I promised earlier on Startforce, a Web OS that's not yet in open beta in the United States. While not a new idea, this implementation is especially clean. It apes the Windows look and feel, which may not be a great thing from an aesthetic perspective, but it does mean that the system is very easy for new people to get in to.

I find products like this technically stunning, yet it's still an open question as to whether we actually need them. Developers won't build apps for platforms that don't … Read more

Do you find the Edge network a little too sluggish for your news reading needs? Mobile Home for iPhone gives you all the headlines in text format for quick loading and viewing of stories. Google News, Slashdot, and more are available for quick reading.

iPhone link: http://m.dom.net/

Web site link: http://dom.net/

I eatd mini cheezburger at the TechCrunch party at August Capital on Friday, as LOLCats would say. There were other morsels there too, some tastier than others.

Remember before the Internet came along, when you could call a 900 telephone number to talk to "Santa Claus?" Dial Directions feels nostalgic like that. Being directionally challenged, I consider it a gift. You literally dial "DIRECTIONS" on your cell phone and get a turn-by-turn text message. The service is available in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles during beta testing. It did a pretty good job … Read more

Fichey is a new approach to serving up content that's been popularized by social bookmarking services like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit among others. Similar to DuggTrends, and other sites that cache Web pages that have gone down or become incredibly sluggish due to a high traffic, Fichey's solution is to take a snapshot of the page, sans links, and serve it up in a slick Flash viewer. Pages can be viewed one at a time, and have a slick rotation animation similar to Apple's Front Row. All you have to do is go back and … Read more

Today, MXPlay--the digital-music player that focuses on customizing and enhancing your playback sound, while also letting you mash up streaming audio with Web videos (covered previously)--launched a Windows-only add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Called MXPlay Web, the Firefox add-on part is a simple orange MXPlay button that sits in your toolbar. Whenever you navigate to a Web page that includes MP3 files, the button transforms into a musical note. Click that note, and you can "play" that Web page in a pop-up music player.

After you select "Play this page," MXPlay Web will list all of the available MP3 songs on that Web page. You can then mark any of your favorites and save them to a personal playlist. Unfortunately, once you create that playlist, MXPlay Web somewhat randomly puts them into an order that you cannot change manually.

Just like the full app, MXPlay Web lets you customize the sound of the music using the same unique graphic interface. Drag and drop the head icon (the listener) and each of your available speakers to a specific location on the screen, which affects sound levels and direction. A blue circle in the upper left lets you control the size of your virtual room, and the bars in the upper right offer three levels of reverb.… Read more

You may have thought that there were already enough customizable homepages to choose from. Well, Bubbletop thinks that you're wrong. They are the latest entrant into the customizable homepage market and looking to take a piece of the pie for themselves.

Bubbletop looks a lot like every other customizable homepage that you have seen. Yes, the modules that hold feeds and widgets are bubble shaped, but that's about as far as the differences go. One feature that Bubbletop has which has some potential is its social networking feature. You can be friends with other Bubbletop users and see … Read more