Songbird Developer Preview

Songbird is a free media player and web browser mashup developed by the folks who previously engineered both Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. Both a media player and a platform, Songbird is built on the Mozilla platform and has a UI that looks very similar to that of the popular iTunes application. Like the Firefox browser, add-ons are available for Songbird that extend the power of the application; there are even add-ons called “feathers” that skin Songbird’s visual appearance. With Songbird, you can play mp3s without leaving the webpage or view web pages like mp3 blogs as playlists that you can save, download, or subscribe to. The application supports both Windows Media DRM audio and Apple FairPlay encoded audio as well as mp3s, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC formats. The recent alpha developer preview release, Songbird 0.4, is meant for testing purposes, but I imagine many web-savvy music enthusiasts will be downloading the app, too.

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If you haven’t yet tried Amazon’s mp3 download service, you now have yet another reason to give it a shot: Warner Music announced on Thursday that they, too, would begin selling their tunes on Amazon in the DRM-free mp3 format. DRM-free songs can be copied to multiple computers, burned to CDs as many times as you would like, and played on any digital media player, like an iPod or Zune. In the coming week, Warner’s entire music catalog will be added to the Amazon store, bringing the total number of available mp3’s available for download at Amazon to 2.9 million. (The other two big labels, Universal and EMI, are already participating). Mp3’s on Amazon sell for 99 cents, or sometimes 89 cents, which is cheaper than iTunes; the bonus of the tracks being copy-protection free makes the Amazon store my first choice for legal downloads now. It’s important to note that other major music stores also offer DRM-free music - the Zune Maketplace has 1 million or so DRM-free songs, Walmart sells some DRM-free tunes alongside its copy-protected tunes, and iTunes offers iTunes Plus tracks that are copy-protection free, too. What’s great about Amazon, though, is that every track they sell is DRM-free, so you never have to worry. Even though other labels went this route a while ago, Warner had been holding out until now. Warner Music Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Edgar Bronfman Jr. even responded to Steve Jobs’ plea for dropping DRM on iTunes with the following statement: “We will not abandon DRM nor services that are successfully implementing DRM for both content and consumers.” Not surprisingly, Warner is starting the DRM-free “test” with Amazon. If successful, they can roll it over to iTunes without looking too sheepish. Honestly, though, I don’t care - I’m just happy to finally see DRM-free, LEGAL, music become available. I predict that by the end of 2008, DRM will be a thing of the past. For music that is…Hollywood is still clueless on this.

Christmas is over and now you have a stack of gift cards but are short on cash to pay your bills…what are you going to do? A website called Swapagift.com can help! Launched in 2003, Swapagift.com will let you buy, sell, swap, and exchange gift cards or use your gift cards to pay bills. You can even mail them in for cash! If you wanted a gift card to your favorite store and didn’t receive one, you can also visit the site to buy gift cards at a discounted price. If you want to swap cards with another user, you can directly do so directly - one-for-one - or you can swap several cards for a single card. You can add cash to the transaction, too, if the cards aren’t of equal value or popularity. It is $1.99 to list a gift card and the listing stays active for 150 days (or until it sells or swaps). If you want to pay bills or receive cash for your gift card, you must refer to the preferred merchant list for bill paying or cash. So, get what you really wanted for Christmas! And feel free to send me your unwanted Starbucks cards!

Mucelli is a brand-new service that allows you to listen to your favorite music, watch videos, listen to the latest charts, or even create your own playlist by using a music player that is available right in your browser. You can create a playlist easily by dragging-and-dropping favorite tracks into the player. The tracks available in Mucelli aren’t the mp3s housed on your computer - instead, you use the search box to find songs from your favorite bands, then drag these results into the screen on the left to create a playlist on-the-fly. There’s even a feature that allows you to copy a song to your clipboard and send it to a friend (sounds illegal), but I couldn’t get this feature to work, so maybe it’s still in development. It’s possible that this just sends your friend a link to the song in Mucelli as opposed to a downloaded file, which may be more acceptable to the record labels, yet still a cool way to share new artists or bands with your friends. This makes Mucelli a customizable, streaming online radio station - something that complements, though does not replace, services like my personal fav, last.fm. (found on go2web20)

Fuser is a service that unifies your inboxes, allowing you to aggregate your mail from various inboxes as well as from social networks into one place. Your unified email is then available on the Fuser homepage as a quick snapshot or you can view your entire Fuser inbox(es) and even organize your mail into folders from within the Fuser service. And now, in the spirit of integration, Fuser has released a new Facebook application that lets you view your MySpace messages, comments, and bulletins without leaving Facebook. You can even display your MySpace comments as a separate wall on your Facebook profile! Unfortunately, you cannot yet reply to the messages, nor does the Facebook app integrate any of your other email or social network accounts you may have added previously using the Fuser service. However, in the future, some of those features may be coming, which would make Fuser a real killer app! (Via Mashable)

Facebook launched a great new feature today that is sure to make it stand out from any social network out there - yes, even MySpace; the feature is called friends lists. On the new Friends Page, you can create named lists of friends and organize your Facebook friends into groups in ways that have meaning for you. You can have “internet friends,” “work friends,” “best friends,” etc. or whatever else you want! Using these private lists, you can message people, send group or event invitations, and even filter updates from certain groups of friends. Now you really have control over how much of your personal life you are sharing and with who! Thanks, Facebook. I now officially forgive you for that Beacon mess.

By the way, if I refused your Facebook request before saying that I was only going to use Facebook for people I knew in real life, I’ve completely changed my mind now that I can categorize my friends here  - feel free to re-add me as a friend - I will accept your request now. Just fill in the details saying your a blog reader so I’ll know how we know each other. However, I will still ask for details before accepting friend requests…just in case it’s spam.

Oh there’s that holiday theme! Thanks Google, but next year, try to get your holiday theme out a little quicker. I mean, 6 days until Christmas and you just now put out the holiday theme? Jeez! There are two other new themes, too.

For more holiday goodness, Mac & Vista users can pick up some new holiday icons to dress up their desktop, too:

Don’t be put off by the very un-web 2.0-ness of the Orb website - while other companies were busy building the perfect bubbly logo and tagging system, the people at Orb were busy building actual useful technology. Orb is software that manages all the media on your PC and lets you access it remotely while you´re away. This isn’t online storage, though. You don’t have to move files in and out of some “cloud storage space.” Instead, the Orb software gives you a way to stream your media over a wi-fi or broadband connection to any device with a browser. This means you can stream your media to another computer, your phone, your portable game console, or even your Xbox, Wii, or PS3 . The computer running Orb software, of course, must remain on and connected to the internet for Orb to work, but beyond that it’s dead simple. Orb can easily stream your photos, music and videos to you anywhere. You can even stream TV if your computer has a TV tuner card connected to your cable box, antenna, or satellite. It’s like Slingbox without the box. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free? Oh yeah. Orb works on XP, XP Media Center Edition, and Vista. To get started, set up an account and then download the software.

This weekend, Mozilla Labs released a new Firefox extension, “Personas for Firefox.” This browser add-on gives you the ability to quickly apply different themes to your Firefox browser. Personas hopes to address several issues with the current process involved with theming your browser, including that fact that themes are too hard to find, install, and use and also that graphic designers can’t style the browser without having to code. In this newer version of Personas (an older prototype was discussed and tested earlier this year), a tool called the “Persona selector” is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all the designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources. When you apply a new theme, the changes are applied instantly, with no need to restart the browser. Yay! Unfortunately, loading a new “Persona” is not the same as loading a real Firefox theme, as Personas do not change the browser buttons; instead the Personas extension loads a custom image behind the buttons, like a sunset, a pattern of some sort, or a winter wonderland scene. The Firefox status bar is also set to match the color scheme of the image used. It would be great if you could use your own images, but as of now, that is not the case. Still, the Personas extension did make my boring default theme much more interesting. This extension has a lot of potential as more designers get involved and more Personas become available. In the meantime, it certainly is fun to play with! You can download the Personas extension here. (Via RRW)

Wow, first colored labels now all this. Google has been busy lately!

Google Knol: an author-driven, Wikipedia competitor, Knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge, will be the core unit of the project, and is, essentially, just a webpage. People who know a particular subject are encouraged to write an authoritative article about it. Editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. Knols on a particular subject will be the first topic that appears when someone does a search for that information. Hmmm…does this mean Google search will favor its own products in the search results? Also, do we really need this? Isn’t Wikipedia already available? And there’s Mahalo too.

Google Profiles: Google Profiles have just been introduced. The profile is “simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.”

Google Reader & Talk Shared Items: Google Reader and Google Talk (aka “chat” in Gmail) have been linked up to make shared Reader items available to Google Talk buddies. You can see your friends’ shared items in Reader’s left-hand navigation area under “Friends’ shared items.” Looks like my friends have to be GTalk users (or Gmail users, since that has chat) for this to work. Even though I’m subscribed to a friend’s shared Google Reader’s feeds, his “shared items” didn’t appear under my Friends list since he doesn’t use Gmail/GTalk. Bummer.