The New Google Reader

Google’s online RSS reader just got an overhaul. I liked Google Reader just fine before, because it was simple and easy to use. However, although the new feature-rich reader may take some getting used to, I know I will enjoy it.  The new version offers two types of views - an expanded view and a list view, the list view looking very much like Gmail. You can easily switch between the two views by clicking the tabs at the top. As you scroll through the items, they’re marked as read.

Another new feature is the ability to share items. At the bottom of each item, you can click a link to email (you must have a Gmail account for this to work - love the integration!), share the item, add a star (you can star items at the top, too), or edit the item’s tags. The sharing feature adds items to your public page, which anyone can view, if they know the address. Items you’ve tagged are called "clips," and these clips can be added to your webpage by copying-and-pasting some HTML code. Nice job on this one, Google!

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Windows Live Writer (which I wrote about back in August), has just released an update to their 1.0 version (Beta) that offers a lot more features. The list of new features includes the following changes:

• Tagging support
• Support for Blogger Beta
• Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
• Improved startup performance
• Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
• Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
• Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
• Custom date support for Community Server
• Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
• Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
• Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
• More robust image posting to Live Spaces
• Improved style detection for blogs
• Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
• Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
• Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts

Additionally, an expanded gallery of plug-ins are available at the Windows Live Gallery, including a nifty "Blog This For Firefox" extension. Nice!

On Tuesday the Facebook blog announced they were opening their doors to all, in a post titled "Welcome to Facebook, Everyone." Originally just for college students with a .edu email address, Facebook had expanded to allow high schoolers and employees of select companies to join as well. So now that Facebook welcomes all of us where we were previously shut out, the question is "do we care?" Facebook’s original incarnation, a college network was brilliant in its simplicity. If you were in school, you were on Facebook (and MySpace too, of course). The exclusivity was the key - your mom and dad couldn’t join, for example. Why would we want to join now? What does Facebook offer that we can’t get from the myriad of other social networks we’ve joined in the meantime and other, cooler ones that are just launching? No seriously - what? I honestly don’t know.

Google is celebrating their 8th birthday today, and, of course, they have a customized logo. For a little Google history or to see previous birthday logos, visit Google Blogoscoped. Thank you, Google, for changing our world!

I’m tired of things not working. For the fifth time, I’m trying to upload pictures to my flickr account using their flickr uploading tool. Every time I drag and drog the photos into the tool, the program crashes. Do I want to send an error report?, it asks. No, I just want it to work! So I headed over to Zooomr to see what they had to offer instead. Their upload page pointed me to a great tool called jUploader. What’s great about this tool is that you can set it up to upload to both your flickr and your Zooomr accounts. Nice! Also, it seems super-fast compared to flickr’s tool. I installed jUploader and it was a piece of cake to use. Goodbye flickr uploader, piece of (something else).

So, YouTube has been on mind this weekend since my little incident with the service yesterday. YouTube spammed my Gmail address book, or at least some of it before it errored out. (Sorry if you got an email from YouTube saying I wanted to share videos with you - it was an accident.) I just imported my address book into YouTube thinking it would show me which of my contacts were already on YouTube, but I guess YouTube thinks that it then has permission to email everyone saying I want to share videos with them. The horror! I have business & professional contacts in my address book, as well as people I don’t even know…one-time blog commenters, for example. I sent out an apology email to some, but according to some responses, not everyone received the YouTube email — thank god. I can only hope! I thought the best course of action at that point would be to close my YouTube account - the truth is, I didn’t want all 1200 of my contacts to see what a fangirl I am. Unfortunately, despite the fact that your account is closed on YouTube, your YouTube profile remains perfectly intact. Also, your uploaded videos remain in the YouTube index, but clicking the link to play them gives you the error message that the video has been removed. So, it was all for naught.

I don’t understand the mentality at YouTube that a closed account & removed videos should remain visible. When you close an account somewhere - anywhere, then that’s it! You’re gone! Anyone tries to access your page, view your profile, etc., they will just receive an error message. All YouTube does is disable your login. Unbelievable. And don’t bother emailing YouTube support - if you’re lucky, all you’ll receive is an automated response with dumb Q&As like "How do I upload a video?" You will NEVER, and I mean, NEVER get an actual human response. I even attempted emailing some @youtube email addresses I found on their blog, but to no avail. So be warned - if you have a YouTube profile, make sure you edit it to remove all personal info BEFORE you close your account, because, apparently, it will be online FOREVER. Or at least until YouTube runs out of money.

YouTube exists solely for your guilty pleasure, not to help you, not to support you. For me, YouTube is like candy — I know it’s bad for me, but I can’t stay away. I need my videos. YouTube just thoroughly screwed me yesterday and I’m back again today. However, since they did screw me, I don’t feel bad telling you about this: YouTubeX. YouTubeX.com allows you to download & save YouTube videos using your browser. However, these files are saved as flash video files, so YouTubeX points you to a flash video player software download, which you’ll need to view the files. Or, if you want to get geeky, you can convert your .flv files to .avi. Another option for downloading video from YouTube is DownUTube - this is software that you install on your PC to both manage & view your videos.

For all of the hype, all of the bright shiny logos and quirky login greetings, for all the street (or rather, "geek") cred, the fact of the matter is that flickr doesn’t hold a candle to the number of users of Yahoo Photos. Lately, I’ve begun to realize just how many people use Yahoo! Photos. In a week’s time, I’ve seen vacation photos, baby pictures, sonograms, and family pics via Yahoo Photos. Why Yahoo Photos? I’ve asked; the answers include: flickr limits how many you can upload with a free account; I just want to email my photos to my friends; it’s easy; what’s flickr? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the flickr UI over Yahoo Photos any day.

Are you a flickr user, too? Probably, since you know what a blog is and are bothering to read this one. You’re an early adopter; you’re on the bleeding edge of the new web: the Web 2.0. The masses are just learning Web 1.0, and for them Yahoo Photos is enough. They haven’t needed more yet. They don’t see the joy of tagging. They think MySpace is cool! Millions and millions of them. The MySpace crowd is cut-and-pasting HTML code and typing things like <img src =….> to post a photo. (Yes, full disclosure: I’m one of them, but only because I HAVE to.)

Years from now, flickr could be king as the web-handicapped join the communities we’re just now forging. Or maybe not. A message in my Yahoo Photos album tells me the new Yahoo Photos is almost here. Think they took a page from the flickr bag o’ tricks? Of course they did. That was probably the point of the acquisition - new tricks. The new version of Yahoo Photos will bring in tagging, but they’re doing more with it: photo albums will be automatically created for you when multiple pictures have the have the same tag. Useful! The new Yahoo Photos will bring in the community aspect - it will let you see your friends’ public photos on your homepage. Sound familiar? Plus there’s that whole free, unlimited albums thing. I’m not paying to make online photo albums….I’m just not. Sorry, flickr.

Let’s face it. We want to get the most out the Web 2.0 community sites, but a community is only as good as its memberbase. Do we want to revel in our elite unknowns at the risk of segregating our supreme geek selves from the moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas and co-workers and friends in our world? Because, seriously, ask them if they’ve heard of flickr. (It doesn’t count if you’ve told them about it.) Let me know.

I got behind on reading TechCrunch (who can keep up?), but no worries, my readers keep me in the loop! In fact, a reader sent me a tip about the cool new minicards you can get from moo.com. Moo has joined up with flickr, to offer flickr MiniCards, which are small, customized calling cards that each feature a different photo from your flickr photos! You can use these as business cards, or even better, personal calling cards. Because of these cards are fun and quirky, they may work better for sharing personal info like email, IM, mobile, flickr username, etc. To help spread the word, flickr Pro users can receive 10 free cards just by signing into their flickr account. Who doesn’t want some of these?

Are you addicted to watching videos on the net? Then you’ll love this site: Viralvideochart.com. The site maintains the list of the hottest viral videos on web (currently, it’s tracking YouTube, MySpace, and Google Video). You can see ranking by day, week, or month, and you can view a list of videos that were previous #1s. The site shows a current video’s change with an up or down arrow, or tags it as "new." You can subscribe to the RSS feed or get the FeedBurner email subscription. Too fun!

I just noticed a new feature in my Gmail. (Well, maybe it’s been around for a while, but I just noticed it!) When you want to select all the conversations within your inbox or under a particular label, you now have the option to select ALL the conversations, not just those on the first page. That way you can perform actions (such as mark as read, delete, etc.) on all the messages, instead of having to do it page by page. This is great for me, someone who uses the "archive" button quite a bit, preferring to delay any sort of email management until hundreds of messages have accumulated! Wow, what else have I missed in Gmail lately? I had better go find out!