Microsoft redefines the search interface...

Tafiti - Microsoft redefines the search interface with Silverlight

This ain't your grandad's Google. Microsoft is experimenting with a slick new search site that has a Silverlight interface. It's called Tafiti, which apparently means "do research" in Swahili. It's "designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results," according to Microsoft, as quoted on the independent LiveSide News blog. There's also a video demo at 10. In a typical screen, the controls are on the left, and there's a ring selector like something out of a video game so you can pick from options such as Web, images, books, news, RSS feeds and so on. The results are in the middle. On the right there's a sort of "shelf" where you can drag-and-drop results you want to keep. You can also click the little tree for a tree-view, which is like a tag-cloud with mouseovers (below right).

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Nokia S60 users can now download Windows Live

Nokia S60 mobile phone users in 11 countries can now download the new Windows Live suite from http://www.nokia.com/windowslive, which provides access to Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger,which provides access to Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger, Contacts and Spaces, says a Microsoft press release. S40 users will have to wait until next year. It says:

Initially the service will be available as a free trial, and then customers in select markets wanting to continue using the service may be asked to pay a monthly fee.

Microsoft's Nokia's Phil Holden has more details and nine screen shots on his Live Spaces blog.

The LiveSide News blog has also covered the story, and that's where I found the link to Phil Holden.

It's hard to guess whether or not this idea is going to get any traction: it could easily come to nothing. However, if the established phone companies see Apple and/or Google as a threat, this seems quite likely to encourage at least a few of them to get closer to Microsoft. (My enemy's enemy is my friend.)

Apple's sales of iPhones are tiny compared to Nokia's: Nokia has about a third of the world market, shipping 91.1 million phones in the first quarter of 2007, and it could ship 400 million this year. Getting on a small proportion of Nokia's next billion mobiles would help Microsoft in the phone business, and boost Windows Live. And it certainly needs a boost at the moment.

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Covert text into Mp3 file online...

This is a very simple little tool: Type in some text and it will be converted into an MP3 file.

They also provide some text for getting the file onto your website.

Vozme is web based tool that turns any snippet of text into an MP3 audio file that you can either listen online or download to your local hard drive.

You just have to copy the text from a web page or an email and paste it inside the Vozme text box.

While there are tons of solutions that convert text to spoken words, what I liked about Vozme is the clutter free interface and the fact that it runs inside the browser without requiring any downloads.

Bloggers can easily integrate the Vozme feature in the site so visitors can either listen to your full blog posts or they can select a portion of text and have Vozme narrate it like a speech.

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Add free video clips to your eBay auctions...

Add free video clips to your eBay auctions with Vzaar

While the Adobe AIR version of eBay is a wondrous experience on the eyes, regular auction pages tend to retain the same feel they've had since the late '90s. To spice them up there are a number of services, both software and Webware, several of which we've covered. Vzaar, which is based out of London, has been quietly serving up video for eBay listings since April of last year, and today is "relaunching" with a new coat of paint and some extra functionality. As luck would have it I have something on eBay this week, and had wanted to include a video to drive in some potential buyers. The good news is this product works flawlessly.

Vzaar acts just like any other Web video host and lets you upload videos from your digital camera in a couple of minutes. What's interesting is that any video that's been hosted on the service can be used on other auctions, meaning that your video of a pair of shoes, a computer, or iPod can be recycled by other users in their listings and promoted within the Vzaar community.

All you need to do to tack on a Vzaar video to a listing is give the service permission to access your eBay account just like you'd authorize any third party Flickr tool. This gives it read/write access, and the capability to attach whatever videos you find to listings you own. Adding a video I shot on my digital camera took just two clicks and showed up right underneath the item description with no need to mess with embed code or anything else. Once a video has been uploaded you can keep track of how many views it's gotten both on eBay and Vzaar. There's also embed code to add it to your auction listing manually, or on your blog or personal Web site. Vzaar offers three levels of service--a free one that lets you add up to 30 videos a month and two pro-level services that tack on more and larger videos that stay hosted on the service for up to a year, along with the option to add a single video to multiple listings. The premium services run at $10 and $20 a month respectively, and are aimed at eBay's PowerSellers.

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Easy Online storage...

Dropbox: Easy real-time folder sync, rollback

Dropbox is a promising new tool for online storage, file sync, and sharing. The cross-platform system plug-in gives you a shared drop box where you can dump files and access them from multiple computers just like you would on the home machine. It also keeps track of any changes to the files, which can be rolled back to previous versions that have been archived on the service's cloud storage.

I gave it a brief spin this afternoon on one computer and it works as advertised. I had no problem dumping a bunch of files, then accessing them through the Web interface. The photo album feature has been especially well implemented, as the system will automatically group together a folder of photos and categorize them into albums using the metadata. There are other nice touches too, such as visual notifiers to let you know when a file is syncing up with the server, as well as Growl system messages on the Mac version to let you know when a change is made to your drop box.

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Flickr Video: Does it...?

Flickr Video: Does it stand a chance?

The short answer is yes.
The long answer is that the success of the soon-to-be-released Flickr video depends largely on how much the company borrows from its photo hosting roots and innovations. While YouTube and various other video hosts I partake in are fantastic for content, the films many people capture on their digital cameras tend to have no editing or post-processing whatsoever. These same videos can be a hell of a lot more interesting when put into context, which is where discovering videos on blogs or people's personal sites can bring a little more to the table than simply plopping them in with the other mass of videos on other hosting sites. Flickr's popularity, in part is because of its community who are incredibly active and fill the site with a massive amount of content. However, the site's development has remained somewhat stagnant, which is where the inclusion of videos is the single biggest change since its inception. With that imminent change, there's a lot to talk about regarding how video will play into Flickr's current structure.

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China blocking YouTube...

China blocking YouTube to suppress Tibet rioting?

People all over China are reporting that YouTube access has been blocked, possibly in connection with a Chinese government crackdown on Tibet, according to a colleague of mine at CNET Asia.

"I can't access the site here, either, and a quick ping through my network utility does show 100 percent packet loss, indicating that a block is likely in effect," Rick Martin, who reports from China, writes on his blog. As evidence, he includes this screenshot taken from his computer:

"There were some videos uploaded to YouTube already about the demonstrations, but this block will definitely throw a wrench (into) anyone's plans to upload more," he writes. "That said, Chinese versions of YouTube, which have been told to censor this kind of sensitive content, are all still up and running as I write this." The Dalai Lama on Sunday called for an international investigation of the crackdown, as Tibetan rioting against Chinese rule spread to other provinces. More than 80 people are reported dead in the past few days. Access to YouTube from the United States was unimpeded, and a search of the site yielded dozens of what appear to be amateur videos recently added to the site chronicling the violence. YouTube has suffered regional roadblocks before. The Google-owned video-sharing site suffered a global outage last month, when the Pakistan government--apparently displeased by a video running on the site--ordered that access to the site by Pakistan residents be cut off. The service was eventually restored to most of the world, but it would be a few days until Pakistan allowed its residents to again access the site.

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Viewing Google Sky through a browser

Google unveiled a browser version of its Google Sky application on Thursday for people who don't want to download the Google Earth software. The browser version allows you to zoom in and out and pan around the celestial bodies, search for planets and galaxies and view the sky through infrared, x-ray, ultraviolet, and microwave views. There are also galleries of some of the best shots from the Hubble telescope and others. You can also listen to podcasts and look at historical maps of the sky. The backstory on the app is that it was done by staff engineers and Diego Gavinowich, from Buenos Aires, who was a finalist in Google's Latin America Code Jam and spent the past three months in an internship at the company, according to the official Google Blog. Several weeks ago Microsoft demonstrated its own virtual telescope software called Worldwide Telescope that will be available for free this spring. Last month, Google was sued by a former contractor who alleges that the idea for Google Sky was his.

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Joongel makes searching social sites simpler

Joongel (rate it!) is a new plug-in for Firefox and IE7 that lets you search through various social media and news sites using the same query. Unlike a search aggregator that mixes up all the results, you have to view them on each service's results page. It's simply emulating the same effect of having each site's custom search installed in your browser's built-in search bar. If you're a search junkie, this is a whole lot faster than having to navigate to each site and then use the search tool. Essentially it's saving you one click each time you want to look for something. At the same time it's taking away some of the business your browser's creators are getting by replacing the stock search engine modules with this one. The Joongel plug-in comes in two flavors: one for social media sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious, and a "standard" one that includes reference tools like Wikipedia, Technorati, and Yahoo Answers.

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Facebook IM service will debut soon

Facebook plans to launch an instant-messaging application for members to embed on their profiles as early as next week, TechCrunch reported Friday.

Details are sketchy, but it appears that this will be a Web-based IM service that would allow Facebook users to chat with other people on their friends lists without needing to go through a third-party program. Additionally, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington detailed, the service would likely be based on the Jabber open-source platform, which would mean that third-party "universal IM" clients like Pidgin, Trillian, and Adium would be able to implement it.

Facebook representatives were not immediately available for comment.

It goes without saying that instant messaging is a logical step for a social network--it's an activity in which millions of Web users partake, and it would keep those coveted "user engagement" rates high. Facebook's obviously not the first one to have this idea: A number of third-party Facebook Platform applications facilitate instant messaging between Facebook users, and Arrington notes that those developer programs would be effectively killed if Facebook launched an in-house rival.

That said, other major social networks have some kind of in-house instant-messaging functions now: MySpace operates MySpaceIM, for example, and AOL's recent acquisition of Bebo will integrate the social network closely with its AIM client. If anything, it's surprising that Facebook didn't build something like this months ago.

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