Pibb, from the folks at JanRain up in Portland, Oregon is a hard app to pin down. Is it IM? Is it forums? Is it IRC over the web? Actually, it’s probably all of these and more.
Bearing more than a passing resemblance to the previously covered Tangler, Pibb is a great way to aggregate some of the noise you have going on in your online life. It’s early days yet for the folks at Pibb, and so far they have some interesting stuff going on. Let’s take a look.
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Here’s one for the coders among us – particularly those of us who design, and code web pages and web apps. XRAY, from the folks at WestCiv (makers of Style Master) is a new in-browser tool for deep examination of the box model in action on any web page.
Released as a browser bookmarklet, XRAY is cross platform and works with any browser supporting the canvas element – currently Firefox on OS X and Windows, Safari on OS X and any WebKit-based browser. I see it as a useful tool for browser render debugging, working alongside critical plugins for web developers such as Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar and the excellent FireBug. One benefit of XRAY is that as a bookmarklet, it’s a lot more lightweight than a browser add-on, and less prone to memory issues such as some people have with other Firefox add-ons.
Let’s take a look at it in action!
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If you’re anything like me, you’re deeply interested in social computing and join pretty much every social network you can snag an invitation for – even if only to check out features and functionality. At the end of the day even with all these memberships, I probably use less than 10 social computing applications with any regularity. Problem is, even with this relatively small number of frequently used applications, I struggle to keep them all coordinated.
In terms of social coordination, there are two core issues:
- keeping your profile current and the same on each network
- making sure that a contact on one network is matched on other networks
I’ve come up with a few coping strategies to deal with social network coordination. They apply equally to both the problems noted above. Let’s take a look at them.
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Alongside the sorry tales of iPhones not being activated due to AT&T being overwhelmed by demand, the web worker world has been aflutter this past weekend with news of Pownce, the new social attention app from Megatechtronium (Digg’s Kevin Rose and some of his pals). There’s been a storm of activity as the blog- and Twittersphere came alive with the launch news and people sought invites to the beta.
I’ve checked out Pownce, and while it seems to offer benefits over Twitter and it’s snail’s-pace release cycle, it may not live up to the buzz in the long term. Let’s take a look at a few features.
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Just as in real estate, location is big news in web apps these days. Today, we’re going to take a quick look at three applications that leverage the power of presence — Upcoming, Plazes, and Dopplr — and see how you might best be able to use them in your daily web worker life.
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Former Netscape CEO and now Ning overlord, Marc Andreessen recently posted something of a manifesto with respect to personal productivity. Given productivity is an issue dear to the hearts of WWD readers, I thought we’d take a look at some of Marc’s ideas and see if we couldn’t draw some inspiration from them.
Marc’s first suggestion is to do away with your schedule. While this is a tempting idea, and certainly one we’d all benefit from at times, it’s probably only useful for people with more than a little power in their hands, as demonstrated by Marc’s example of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Marc admits as much in his post.
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Still in beta, Dopplr is a very interesting take on connecting travelers through the power of social networking.
How often have you thought to yourself, “I’m going to <insert random conference/city/event here> next week. I wonder who else I know is going.” At this point, there’s invariably a chain of ill-timed emails, inevitably missing someone who is actually going to be in the same place as you at the same time. Dopplr aims to resolve this issue through providing a way for those serendipitous moments to be under your control, rather than left to random chance.
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Ever felt that forums just didn’t do it for you? That IM didn’t have the permanence? Problem solved! Aussie startup Tangler, which has recently gone into public beta is, in the words of its CEO, Martin Wells:
…[blurring] the lines between what you might think of as traditional instant messaging, chat, mailing lists and forums. We’re web-based and topically structured like a forum, but interaction is real-time, like instant messaging.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
