Talkster: VoIP App for Facebook

Talkster, the makers of a cool VoIP app, have now released a Facebook application. The original Talkster app lets users make free calls over the internet, but, unlike other VoIP apps like Skype, Talkster users make free calls to voice-enabled IM services. From your web-enabled mobile phone, you can call some on your IM buddy list. From the Information Week article on this app, Talkster gets rave reviews:

Talkster pushes the VoIP envelope in the direction of presence, the ability to see whether the person you want to communicate with is online, and how. Once you’ve set up your voice IM contacts in Talkster, you can see your buddies’ presence information from your mobile phone’s browser. (Talkster does this without installing any software on your phone, either.) …Talkster’s technology has an immediate benefit — it lets you pick the least expensive way to reach your contacts — and it’s got long-term potential as well, because voice communications are moving away from reliance on the 10-digit telephone number and over to Web 2.0 addressing schemes, such as IM handles that can be resolved to IP addresses. Talkster is positioning itself for the future.

Now, with the Facebook application, you can use Talkster and the Free World Dialing application to make free calls to friends or groups of friends from your mobile, your home phone or wherever. To get started, just add the application, send your friend(s) an invitation, and start calling immediately.

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Until recently, our older, red Roomba was doing a great job keeping our floors clean (well, when we bothered to turn the little guy on). But then, one morning, I turned on the power and he played a sad song and shut off. The battery light immediately changed from green to red, despite having been charged overnight. Joel stopped by Sears to get us a replacement battery, but discovered that our warranty would actually be up in a month and upgrading could get us a new Roomba for only $150.00. Needless to say, he took the bait and came home with the new Roomba 560. As much as I loved the old Roomba, the new Roomba offers major improvements, like the following:

• Improved navigation and floor coverage
• Improved edge and corner cleaning
• Improved brushes and filters
• Improved anti-tangle technology (won’t get caught up on rug fringe and cords!)
• Schedule up to seven cleaning times
• Automatically returns to the self-charging Home Base™
• Most efficient room-to-room cleaning

This morning, as I was getting ready for work, the new Roomba woke up, played a happy song, then went straight work. (We scheduled it to do a weekly Tuesday morning clean). I can personally vouch that this Roomba does a much better job, based on the way the floor looks now. I watched as it rolled over my laptop cord twice, something that would have killed red Roomba, then it did some fancy spin and kept going. I walked out the door with the 560 still whirling away. Joel got up after me, but in time to see the thing backing itself back into the docking station. OMG, I love robots.

( Yes, Dave, you did scoop me on this one!) Mozilla has announced a new IM client called Instabird. The client will let you use several instant messaging services, including:

• AIM
• Gadu-Gadu
• Google Talk
• ICQ
• MSN
• QQ
• XMPP
• Yahoo!

I’m not even sure who some of those are, but they’ve got the main ones covered, so I’m good. The download is available now, but you should be warned that this is an early beta, and despite what the web 2.0 world would have you believe, that does actually mean something. This early version is a little rough, with many features not implemented yet. However, it is open source, so you can download the source code and modify it, if you choose.

If you tend to open a lot of tabs in your Firefox browser, then you know that when you get too many open, you end up having to scroll to see the tabs that have gone off-screen. I’ve had enough of this, so I found a way to turn off the scrolling feature altogether. In the address bar, type about:config and choose the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth key. The default value is 100, which means the minimum width of a tab is 100 pixels. You can modify this number, so the tabs get smaller, which would allow for more on the screen before the scrolling feature kicks in. But if you want to disable scrolling, you enter 0 to turn the feature off entirely.

On Friday, the Google News blog announced the launch of the Google News Application for Facebook. This app lets you create custom sections of new content or you can select from a set of pre-defined content to create a Google News page of your own that you can access through your Facebook profile. The stories on your Google News pages can then be browsed and shared with your friends. To share a story, you click the “share” button and then the content can either be emailed to your friends using Facebook’s mail program or you can share it on your profile.

(via Google News Blog: Google News goes social)

Twine is a new service in private beta whose goal it is to help you share, organize, and find information with people you trust. In Twine, you can safely share information and knowledge, and collaborate around common interests, activities and goals and this helps you better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your network. Although this sounds like a very generic web 2.0 service so far, it’s how Twine accomplishes this that may make it the harbinger of web 3.0, often referred to as the semantic web.  

According to CEO Nova Spivack, “Twine uses natural language processing and statistical, link and graph analysis, as well as Web crawling, data mining and machine learning to figure out what information users put into the system is about, what it means and what is should be related to. Then Twine connects it and organizes it for you automatically. Web 2.0, as Tim O’Reilly says, is all about collective intelligence. Twine does it in a smarter way—it’s Web 2.0 with a brain, which is sort of what web 3.0 is. From an industry and technical perspective Twine is the first mainstream example of how the semantic Web could manifest for end user. As Twine learns, it helps you to search better. Social search is based on the semantic graph. It ranks information in a couple of different ways—by relevance, time and relative to me, meaning the social distance from me in the semantic graph. We also have a new way to rank information based probability analysis of the semantic graph and how you are connected to the information, showing you stuff that is likely to be from sources you trust or is things you would be interested in. Basically it combines social and semantic search—the more you put it, the more it learns about you.”

Twine is designed more for teams sharing information among themselves, rather than individuals users. If you are as intrigued as I am, you can visit the Twine homepage and register for the beta.

File this under the category “Why Didn’t I Think of That?!” Lifehacker has a great post about setting up a email archive of your Google Reader items. With so much great content out there, I find myself tagging longer posts to read later, then not getting around to it as new posts show up every few minutes. With email, though, I don’t bother with my inbox until I have time to really read, so having posts delivered via email may mean they get attention they deserve. To set this up for yourself, you’ll need your feeds in Google Reader, which is one of the best online readers now that they have added search (duh!). As you may know, you can set up RSS feeds for your Google Reader items, either by using the feed for your Shared Items, your Starred Items, or even by tag. Once you have a feed going, go over to Feedburner and burn another feed of the Google Reader feed. Using Feedburner’s option for RSS subscriptions via email, you can subscribe to the feed and get an email with all your favorite links. To go one step further, Gmail users can even use Gmail’s filtering option to have the emails automatically tagged upon arrival and archived to the tag of their choice.

Speaking of email subscriptions, you can subscribe via email to this site, too. That’s what the box to the left is for!

New Technorati CEO, Richard Jalichandra, is already making things right after only one week on the job. To that end, Technorati is making some great changes:

1. Filtering tools are back. Filtering search results by the source blog’s authority is a tool that bloggers wanted & were very upset over when it was removed.
2. Tag search results and keyword search results have been separated once again. As Richard says, “We also know now that we alienated bloggers who tagged their blog posts, say, as being about Facebook (a really nice little company, I might add) by burying them with all blog posts that mention Facebook.”
3. Charts are back - you can see the popularity of a word over time.
4. They had been moving to a new co-location facility. They know they had issues during the move. The move is over and everything is going to be okay now. Promise.
5. They are implementing plans to enhance crawler accuracy & reduce indexing latency.
6. They know they need to get back to what is at their core: blog search.

Looks like we can’t count Technorati out yet.

Listas is a new online list making tool from Microsoft Labs, now available as a tech preview. With Listas, you can create, manage, and browse lists that you make, share & collaborate on lists with your friends, and explore topic specific & popular lists within the Listas community. As you browse the web, you can collect content for your lists, by using the (optional) Listas Toolbar which lets you highlight web content and add the clipping to the list. However, Listas isn’t really designed to replace an online, bookmarking service, like del.icio.us. Rather, it’s simply a tool that lets you make lists - lists of whatever you want. Browsing through some of today’s lists, I can see that people have used the tool for shopping lists, a vacation ideas list, a movie quotes list, a list of iPhone optimized websites, and much more. Your lists can be tagged and each list has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Maybe not revolutionary, but handy. However, as far as online lists go, Listas has some stiff competition. Popular online to-do lists, like Remember the Milk and Ta-Da List are rich, web 2.0 apps with tons of features like mobile access, offline sync, widgets, online calendar integration (Remember the Milk) and nifty features like checkboxes for completed items (Ta-Da List). For more on Listas, Channel 10 has the video.

If you have an iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile Device, you can now take the office with you with the mobile version of Google Docs. The service went live today, offering a mobile version of the popular, lightweight online office suite. In the mobile version, your recently uploaded documents display in a list beneath a search box. You can even navigate to your various Google Docs folders to locate your files. Unfortunately, at launch time, you could not view presentations - only spreadsheets & word processing documents. The word processing documents display normally when opened, but the spreadsheets give you the option to view them as HTML or XLS (Excel) files. The documents can be viewed, but not edited (yet, they say!) To visit the Google Docs for Mobile website on your phone, go to http://docs.google.com/m from your mobile phone’s browser. (Via Google Blogoscoped)