Another Google Buy: JotSpot

Today it was announced that Google has acquired JotSpot, an application wiki company. JotSpot is "do-it-yourself" application publishing that lets anyone to create, publish, share, and collaborate using personalized wiki applications. In case you’re not familiar with the term, wikis are websites made for collaboration where everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing any HTML. They can be either public or private pages.

So, why JotSpot? Will this be another offering in the Google office suite?…well, the one I’m imagining… Docs & Spreadsheets isn’t quite an "office suite" yet (though I enthusiastically called it that at first.) The Google Office I imagine is Docs, Spreadsheets, Page Creator, Gmail - either make up your own address @gmail.com or use Gmail for your domain, IM, Google Calendar, & now…maybe JotSpot?

A handful of these apps are bundled together at Google Apps for your Domain, but I think they should all be bundled together. Maybe Google is thinking so too: the Apps for your Domain homepage informs visitors: "If your organization has advanced needs not met by this free service, let us know and we’ll get in touch when a premium service is available for your organization."

All Google needs now is an online slideshow app, and they’re all set!

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I downloaded Firefox 2 last night. (I know I’m a little late, but in my defense, I was out of the country on vacation). It’s awesome - there are so many new features! For starters, tabbed browsing is improved: each tab has an "X" to close it. The History menu has a list of recently closed tabs in case you accidentally close one, something I tend to do…a lot. When you’ve opened too many tabs to fit in a window, scroll bars appear, so you never run out of room.

Another new feature I love is the built-in spell checking. Even as I compose this post at TypePad, Firefox is spell checking it for me in real time by subtly underlining misspellings in a light, dotted red line. I can even add words to the dictionary! Changing the misspelled word to the correct word or using the dictionary feature is all available via a right-click.

Search improvements in Firefox 2 include search suggestions - text that appears in the search box as you begin typing. You can also choose your preferred search engine via an easy drop-down, and this page offers tons of other search engines you can add, too.

If Firefox 2 ever crashes on you, the new session restore feature brings back all your previously open tabs. Hopefully, I won’t be using this feature much!

Feeds are improved - you can still subscribe via the Live Bookmarks feature, but the drop-down box also gives you the option of subscribing in Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, or you can choose an application that’s installed on your computer. Options are good. I chose Google Reader, and when I subscribe to a feed, I get the option to add the feed to My Personalized Google homepage or Google Reader. Sweet.

A brand-new feature some may not have heard of yet is the Live Titles feature. As described on the Firefox features page, "Live Titles are regularly updated summaries of the most important
information on a Web page. As the information on the page gets updated,
so does your Live Title." The example they use is keeping an eye on an auction. You could add the auction to your Bookmarks Toolbar folder and the bookmark itself will display the current status of the auction.

Firefox 2 also brings built-in phishing protection. If you come across a phishing website, Firefox warns you and offers to take you to a search page so you can find the real website you’re looking for. You’re protected from spyware as well -  Firefox won’t allow a  website to download, install, or run programs on your computer without your explicit agreement.

Most of my extensions were compatible with Firefox 2 (except my "copy plain text" extension which the developer seems to have given up on. I may have to learn to live without it.) You may have to double-check even after the upgrade, which searches for updates for you, by opening the extensions…errr…add-ons window (Tools –> Add-Ons). In this window, click the "Find Updates" button. The add-ons window is also where you can change themes. IE7 refers to its "extensions" as "add-ons", which may lead to a little confusion. I think putting "Themes" on Firefox’s Tools menu as a separate option may have been a better choice, like it was in 1.5, but details, details…

Overall, a great upgrade; and if you’ve never used the Firefox browser, there’s no time like the present!

On the blogosphere, people are giving the "thumbs up" to Paint.net. Techcrunch approves, as does Scoble. Paint.net is an alternative to Photoshop & it handles many Photoshop functions, even some advanced functions. Better than that, it’s FREE. Although an earlier version of Paint.net was sluggish, this new version does not seem to have that problem. Download here. Sweet!

If you haven’t ever explored what Google has for mobile phones, then check out the latest over at the official Google Blog. They have a great post about their mobile offerings, including Gmail, Google Maps, SMS, etc. Nice!

The final version of Internet Explorer 7 has arrived, finally out of beta. If you’ve hesitated to try IE7 because of the "beta" label, you can now download the "official" working version. The question is, will you? By now, anyone who wanted the extra features that IE7 provides (tabbed browsing, RSS support, built-in search options, security features, improved UI, etc.) has probably already moved on to another browser like Firefox or Opera or Flock. I felt that the IE7 beta was a resource hog; if I used the multiple homepage feature, it took forever to load compared with Firefox. After playing with the IE7 beta for a while, I ended up uninstalling it. I’m fine with Firefox as my main browser and IE6 for the rare sites that are only coded for IE.

Via Postbubble, I discovered a toolbar made just for me, and for any of my fellow Web 2.0 junkies. It’s called simply "The Web 2.0 Toolbar." Shouldn’t that be toolbr? Anyway, the Web 2.0 Toolbar is available for both IE and Firefox and has a pretty decent feature list - searching, submitting, alerting - with all the top sites including digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, Technorati, Feedster, flickr, Grouper, furl, Wikipedia, and many more; thirty-five sites in total so far are included. I’m not usually a huge toolbar fan (Goolge notwithstanding) but I can see myself getting addicted to this one. Especially if I start using that Power Alert feature…oooh trouble.

Here’s a quick summary. Yes, I C&P’d…

POWER SEARCH
You can enter a search term once and then use the arrow next to the search icon to toggle between the search results on over 35 sites including social linking, picture, video and news sites.

POWER ALERT
Need to know what is going on, news sites, what everyone esle is looking at or the top videos online? The Web 2.0 toolbar automatically alerts you to the most popular content on the top Web 2.0 sites.

iLike is an upcoming service that will "help you organize your music, share your music tastes, and discover new music through your friends." Thanks to Joe, I received an invite. I signed up & I can tell you, I love this service! And I think that’s all I can tell you right now. According to this post on Joe’s blog, he was asked to take down his post about iLike because he wasn’t supposed to reveal any details just yet. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to send invites, either? I’m confused. I just googled my Gmail, but I don’t see where I received any email requesting me to keep quiet; I’m also searching the beta site & the blog and I don’t see anywhere on either of those that tells me not to blog about this. Maybe it was in the "terms & conditions"? Hmmm. However, I’d rather not waste a post writing about something I’ll have to remove later (though you may argue that this is somewhat of a wasted post itself). Well, iLike is cool. You’ll like it. More later…

Are you one of those people who always has a funny, insightful, or inspirational quote at the bottom of your email signature? Well then, you’ll want to bookmark this site: Quotiki.com. Quotiki is a quotation search engine, done web 2.0 style. Not only can you search for quotes by keywords or person, you can also browse for quotes by tags as well as rate & collect the quotes you find. I found the site very user-friendly with a clean, uncluttered design. Even though there were small ads on the side of the page, they were well-placed and did not hinder or annoy. I loved the collecting quotes feature - now I can track of all those hilarious computer quotes I so enjoy. Top of my list: "Oh, so they have internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson. He is too funny! All the site needs now is more users to submit quotes, so there’s more to search. I’ll have to get on that.

LinkedIn has just added a new feature: Services. This new section appears as one of the tabs at the top, in between Jobs & Hiring and My Profile. This feature allows you to recommend service providers, such as real estate agents, IT consultants, attorneys, etc. to your network. I really need to get linked to more local people! Do we know each other? My public profile: linkedin.com/in/sarahintampa.

A Yahoo News article reports that YouTube, now owned by Google, has anti-piracy technology under development that will allow copyright owners "to identify their content, locate it and then make a decision based on whether they want to remove it," according to YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan.
The technology scans a digital file, either as an MP3 or a video, and compares the electronic "fingerprints" of the file to databases of copyright material. Beyond that, neither YouTube nor Google will say anything more about the technology except to say that it should start to rollout by year-end. No more copyrighted content on YouTube? Then what will be the point of visiting the site? I can only watch so much user-gen, you know.