2007 Tech Wishes

2006 was a good year for technology — web 2.0 is practically a household name and "blog" certainly is. However, there are some things I’m hoping to see in 2007.

1. Free online storage. I don’t mean the introductory gig or two or five. I mean storage. C’mon, storage is cheap! Show me some ads, I don’t care. Gdrive? Google, get on this!

2. TV on iTunes: Why can’t I download the show onto my iPod at the same time as it goes on the air? Or an hour later? Why do I have to wait until the next morning for it to show up, just in time for me to leave for work? Also, note to all the networks: to those of you that haven’t got on board or haven’t put your top shows on iTunes (ABC - Ugly Betty? Fox - House?) or have only released the first season when you’re on season 3 (Showtime - Weeds?) or haven’t bothered to put all your seasons online (Bravo - Project Runway Season 1?), COULD YOU PLEASE GET WITH IT? I’ll pay you. Seriously.

3. An online calendar that is easy to use, automatically syncs with anyone else’s (anyone who gives you permission, of course), automatically adds holidays by default, and…here’s the kicker…lets you add your own, customized layers you can turn on or off, too. I want to layer my to-do list over my calendar; turn on and off my "meevee" layer, so I can see when my favorite TV shows are on; turn on or off my theaters’ movie listings; turn on or off the weather forecasts, etc.

4.  I want to send text messages on my phone that post to others’ MySpace comments page.

5. More mobile apps…a lot more.

6. Less DRM…a lot less.

7. Job boards - what’s with the text resumes? Why do I spend so much time working on a beautifully formatted Word version when you just want me to copy & paste a plain text version? Don’t we have the technology to do better by now?

8. del.icio.us 2.0 — okay, I’ve been tagging and saving and sharing, and now I’m on bookmark overload! I need to be able to "google" them, not just type the tag I want. How about my own, customized piece of the net via a del.ico.us search feature. Once the results display, I could narrow down the list by clicking on another tag (maybe a "related" list on the left?) to narrow and filter my selection.

9. Google docs & spreadsheets - integrate yourself with desktop search and automatically sync and upload my docs & spreadsheets on any computer I have desktop search installed on. Oh, is this Gdrive again? Well, heck, integrate with Picassa while you’re at it.

10. Surprise me. There was a time before Gmail. I didn’t even know what I was missing, but now I can’t live without it. I haven’t been amazed by something like that for a while; I want to be blown away by something I haven’t even thought of yet!

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Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently announced that he’s building a new search engine to compete with Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The search engine, code-named Wikiasari, will use open-source technology combined with human intervention, instead of mathematical computer algorithms like the current engines use. "Human intelligence is the best thing we have," Wales says. He hopes to launch in a couple of years, but don’t hold your breath — "We really haven’t determined how all of this is going to work," he stated.

source: information week

There is a great website for mobile phones that was brought to my attention when I posted about Amazon mobile services recently. The website is http://wampad.com and it should definitely be added to your mobile browser’s favorites. In addition to doing traditional searches, Wampad also lets you search the following websites and categories using a drop-down menu: del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Flights, Games, Horoscope, Images, IMDB, Lottery, Maps, Movies, MSN Spaces, Myspace, News, NowPublic, Patents, RSS, Shazam, Shopping, Sports, Stocks, Technorati, Topix.net, Upcoming.org, URL, Videos, Weather, Website, Wikipedia, & Wiktionary. Even better, if you have no use for some of those items, you can pick which items display in the drop-down box by clicking the "Customize" link. If you’re not sure what a particular option does, there’s a "Help" link that takes you to a page where you can click on any of the listed options for an explanation. There’s also a "try it" box on that page, so you don’t have to waste time clicking back to the homepage once you understand how it works.

I can certainly attest that this is one of those things where once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it! A great site!

Finally! FrontPage is dead! Microsoft released a new product earlier this month called Expression Web, and it should leave FrontPage in the dust. If you know a little HTML and CSS, you can create dynamic web pages with this new software. With Expression Web, you can also automatically build and import other current standards including XML, XHTML, and style-sheet standards such as XSLT. There is also a built-in auditing panel in the program that tests webpages for compliance with CSS, HTML, and federal accessibility standards. Unlike FrontPage, or Dreamweaver for that matter, Expression Web creates CSS-based pages automatically, instead of treating CSS as an add-on to HTML. With tons of other features that are sure to get web designers excited, this WYSIWYG editor may be the one to beat in 2007. (Full Review here). Expression Web is just one of the many products in Microsoft’s Expression Suite of web design tools and is a free download (60-day trial).

Nayio Media, Inc. has just launched the first and only search tool of its kind. Nayio’s humming search tool guides you to songs even when you don’t remember the words — on Nayio.com, if you can hum a few bars, you can find it! This service can identify songs you hum into your computer’s microphone and then, through a partnership with Napster, the service cross-references the hummed melody with Napster’s library of 3 million+ songs, delivering a list of possible matches. Each match includes "NapsterLink", which links you to the song on the Napster website where you can listen to the song for free or purchase it for downloading.

Jay Bose, chief operating officer and general manager of Nayio Media, Inc. said "To date, digital music technology development has focused on compression and sound quality. Our patented muGene(TM) technology focuses instead on ascertaining the unique ‘genetic’ structure of any given piece of music. Napster’s enormous collection of music is the perfect platform to allow us to show off this technology."

Computers are getting pretty smart, aren’t they? I can’t even believe something like this exists! Since I can’t carry a tune to save my life, I can’t tell how well the search engine really works, so report back with your results! To do some humming searches yourself, visit this page of Nayio’s website. You’ll need Internet Explorer for this to work and you’ll need to install the humming search client.

Google Blogoscoped reports that Google has released a new version of their toolbar for Firefox users, Google Toolbar 3. Like them, I’m worried about installing it, since I also had problems with Toolbar 2 crashing Firefox. I’m waiting to hear more from the community as to whether this version is more stable. Anyone tried it yet?

Are you an Amazon addict? Do you love browsing products, reading reviews, checking the star ratings, getting recommendations, and everything else that makes Amazon so much fun? You’re going to love this, then. I was reading an interesting article on mobile shopping search tools and I found that there are several Amazon shopping & search tools for mobile phones.

First, there are the official Amazon mobile web pages at http://www.amazon.com/access or http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/h.html. The first one has icons to click on to browse certain areas of the Amazon site; the second one uses links. There is also a service from a company called Tic Tap Mobile that lets you browse Amazon at their URL http://m.tictap.com. They also let you send SMS text messages to 763-807-3927 with the ISBN, UPC or keywords that describe the product. They will text back with prices and customer ratings. Even better, they’ll save your search history so you can pull it up at the Tic Tap website. UK Amazon addicts can use txtbux (http://www.txtbux.co.uk)to get Amazon UK pricing info via SMS text message.

However, what I really love is the downloadable app, Amazon-OnTheGo. With Amazon-OnTheGo, you can find products by UPC code, ASIN, or ISBN number, or by keyword searching. You can browse new releases, browse top sellers by category, pull up wishlists by email address, and read customer reviews. You can even add items you find to your shopping cart. When you’re finished, one click will save the cart at Amazon, and you will be sent a link that you can access for up to 60 days. (Remember to type in your email address under the "Settings" area!) The app is well-designed, attractive, and easy to use - a great add-on to any mobile phone. You can download the app to your phone by visiting this link from your’s phone’s browser: http://m.mywebonthego.com.

Gmail announced this weekend the release of a new feature. From their help site: Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized ‘From:’ address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled.

Nice! Now I can pull in my other, old webmail accounts into my Gmail. This is also a great feature for anyone looking to switch to Gmail, whose webmail accounts don’t allow forwarding. The best part is that this makes Gmail essentially a mail client — just a service you use to check your email, no matter what comes after the "@".

Unfortunately, this feature is only currently available for a limited number of users at the moment. I can’t wait until it’s available to everyone! Are you lucky enough to have this feature in your Gmail?

If you subscribe to the sarahintampa feed, then you know that, in addition to the posts, you will also get to see the links I’ve been posting to del.icio.us throughout the week. Sometimes, these are work-related, but more often, they are fun and useful. For those of you webpage readers, here’s a sampling of what you’re missing out on…at least this time, I can give credit to the source of the link:

• I found some cool, new tech blogs to read: TAP and GeekySpeaky. What’s funny is that they’re both fans of the giant, blue RSS button. TAP posted a great link to a holiday Firefox theme and GeekySpeaky is ranting on blog comments. (two tech blogs posted & the Firefox theme posted to del.icio.us)
• free/Hogg has the latest uTorrent news (utorrent posted to del.icio.us)
• TheMadAdmin posted the latest Dot Comic. Hilarious! (Comic link posted to del.icio.us)
• Joe’s got a review of the new Protopage features (Protopage posted to del.icio.us)
• LifeHacker posts about elevator hacking (I-Hacked website posted to del.icio.us)

Here’s something new - Spokeo is an aggregator for social networks. Spokeo works as an RSS reader supporting RSS and Atom feeds, but it also lets you add photos & videos from MySpace, LiveJournal, Friendster, Flickr, Youtube, Xanga and more. In some respects, Spokeo works like Google News - aggregating content from multiple sources. Spokeo offers a "featured users" section where it lists what is, I suppose, supposed to be the "best of the best" of the social networks. In the "My Friends" section, you can add RSS feeds, friends, etc.

Are you a little confused? So was I. Does Spokeo want to be an RSS reader on steroids or a one-stop for keeping up on what’s going on at all your favorite social networks? Or maybe Spokeo wants to be the place you go instead of a social network’s website. It seems that Spokeo has a good concept here…multiple social networks aggregated at one site, but it needs to clarify it’s focus.

For something like this to work, they need specify what they’re trying to achieve. In my opinion, a clearly defined section for feeds and a separate section for your social networks would be better; and while they’re at it, they should scrap the "featured users" section. And why is "Digg" considered a featured "user"? They’re a website, not a person. I’m not at all interested in what the "featured users" (Barcelona blog? Stuff on My Cat? Ethan?…Who are these people?) are up to…I’m only interested in what my friends have been posting. To make matters worse, to add a friend’s "social network", you have to do this manually, typing them in one-by-one. For example, to add a MySpace friend, you add their URL (www.myspace.com/username). This is not going to work for me. Spokeo should let you just fill out your profile with your social network identities, and then import your friends for you into their own section. If they did this, that would really be genius. Beyond being just an RSS reader, you could keep up with your friends here, too. A bonus feature could be the option to add "featured content" from various sites…like the top stories on Digg, the top 10 YouTube videos, the top 10 MySpace videos, etc.

Just my 2 cents, for what it’s worth.

For now, Spokeo looks like the beginnings of a great idea, but I can’t see myself using it in its present incarnation.