foomandoonian

Mozilla have a prototype called Prism that lets you turn web applications, like Buzzword or the Aviary suite into stand-alone apps, that still use the browser's engine, but presents the app in a new window. You may not realise that the slick new Google browser, Chrome, lets you easily do the same trick.

Simply navigate to a page that you want to use as a stand-alone app, say Gmail, and select the drop down 'page' icon to the right of the 'omnibar'. Now decide what shortcuts you want created, and boom, you're done. Even if you don't like Chrome as a browser, it does run webapps nice and sharpish, and this is a great way to use your calendar or RSS reader. Of course, with Google Gears support, you can even use some applications offline. Handy.

Last month, the mixtape website Muxtape went down, leaving the understated message: 'Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.'

Users jumped to the pretty reasonable conclusion that Muxtape is effectively dead, although the official support tumblelog says: 'No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.'

Muxtape is dead. Long live Opentape.fm

Dead or not, seemingly the same instant Muxtape went down, Opentape.fm sprung up.

Opentape's creation and design are inspired by Muxtape's success and sleek interface. We were disappointed with its untimely shutdown and wanted the web mixtape movement to continue.

Molly Wood on Buzz Out Loud expressed a theory that 'the RIAA's constant crackdown on sites and services that ought to be fair use is creating cockroach-like, drug-resistant strains... like Opentape'. Speculation aside, Opentape is all the cooler for being open source and easy to install on your own website. The same slick Ajaxy page is all there, except instead of the links to buy music on Amazon, Opentape has a direct link to the MP3. It also has a flash player you can embed elsewhere:

Roundup

• Read Write Web has a good overview, and Lifehacker has the nicest guide to installing Opentape.
• Get more help from the official forums.
• Subscribe to the Opentape tumblelog, and follow them on Twitter.
• And, of course, download Opentape.

Drop.io - simple private file sharing

In the (grand?) tradition of my blog, this is yet another 'web 2.0' service that does something very simple, but does it brilliantly. In fact, drop.io takes the concept of sharing small files and adds on so many clever tricks, it's actually hard to know where to start.

Things start simply enough - you pick a name for your 'drop'. This will become the URL, so although you can go with a randomly generated sequence of characters, you have the option of picking something a bit more memorable. Then add your files and decide if you want them to be private (ie. password protected), set an expiry date, and choose what rights you want any visitors to have. You'll be offered one chance to set an admin password, giving you the ability to edit the drop later. And that's it - see an example at http://drop.io/foomandoonian.

You can view your files by media type, as a blog or like a system folder. There's even PicLens support. The blog view is especially interesting, as drop.io can be used to store notes, links and even has commenting - in fact, it's a fully featured blogging platform!

In addition to uploading files from the web, you can email them, phone in messages and even send faxes to a drop. As many ways as there are to add content, there are even more ways to share content!
For example, I've embedded the excellent Jonathan Coulton song, Flickr above. Of course, there are the expected RSS feeds for people to subscribe to, as well as email and SMS alerts and (surprise, surprise) an option to post updates to Twitter.


If the blogging capabilities are a neat feature, then the podcast hack (found at drop.io/hacks) is brilliant: since drop.io supports audio files (and other media) and provides an RSS feed, it naturally makes it possible to host a podcast (or a 'dropcast' as they call it).

This is hardly an exhaustive overview of drop.io, but I'm sure you can see how useful this service could be. Go and have a play. There are some tutorials and a FAQ if you want to read some more.

Drag & Drop.io

One new feature, currently in the testing phase, is a Firefox extension that will sit in the status bar and let you upload files by simply dragging them from your desktop, right onto a drop, or the icon. Sadly, it seems to conflict with Gmail Manager somehow, but it's early days. It also lets you bookmark drops, which could be very handy if you use several.

 Cloud.io - a new generation of Twitter client?

In barely-related news, Cloud.io has revealed a little information about itself, in this Vimeo video:


Clearly it is a new Twitter app, with the ability to display rich content that individual tweets may point to, even if the links are hidden behind a shortened URL. Since it promises to be 'a better way to navigate the twitterverse' I imagine we may see other media embedded in the client, like YouTube videos or mp3s, and some other neat tricks.

I hope the creators are thinking beyond the 'twitterverse', as they have one cool feature that many other Twitter clients don't - they are not riding on the Twitter brand. There are no bird metaphors in the name or the design, so if they are so inclined, they could add support for Plurk, Identi.ca, Ping.fm, FriendFeed, Blip.fm, bit.ly, Kwippy and all the other services that are crying out for unification in some form or other.

Whatever we get, hopefully we will only have to wait until the end of this month.

Bit.ly launched the other day to compete for attention with all the other URL shorteners, the classic example being TinyURL. In my recent roundup I showed how many of the alternatives had unique selling points. So what does the newcomer from Betaworks offer?

Pretty much everything, it turns out. Of course, it will shorten your URL, and like many others, you have the option to use a custom keyword to make the link more memorable (eg. http://bit.ly/foom). But that's just the start. A cookie remembers the last 15 links you shortened and lets you view stats like clickthroughs, traffic sources, thumbnails and even a mirror on Amazon S3.

If you're interested, Dave Winer elaborates some more on the thinking behind the service on his blog and Webmonkey has a simple guide to making use of the Bit.ly API.

Ping.fm is either a valuable resource in this Web 2.0 era of endless social networking communities, or a sign that things have gone too far. Simply put, Ping.fm lets you update your status on Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Brightkite, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Blogger, Tumblr, Bebo, hi5, Mashable, Xanga, Plaxo, MySpace and now Identi.ca, with more being added all the time.

You can send updates via email, IM, various gadgets, apps and widgets, or build something yourself using the API. In addition, you can 'group' your different services. By default Ping.fm defines 'micro-blogs' and 'statuses', letting you choose which group you want to update. When you're not using the web interface, you can use customisable 'triggers' (like @s for status updates).

And that's it. Another service that does a simple job, brilliantly. So now you can update all your services at once, and collect all the updates on FriendFeed or one of the other aggregation services. The cycle is complete.

If you want to sign up, the current beta code is "pingyoulater". Enjoy.

Wordle just makes 'word clouds', and a beautiful job it does too. You can customise the layout and colours and you can either paste in the raw text from anything, or link to your Delicious links page, like I did here:

It's more of a novelty than a useful application, but it has got me thinking about putting more effort into organising my tags.

It is easy to become an OpenID provider, and hundreds have popped up. Even if you don't know what an Open ID is, you probably have one. The challenge for providers is to add a little extra into the offering. To use marketing jargon, they need a unique selling point.

ClaimID have one of the best, in my opinion. Quite simply, ClaimID lets you manage your online identity by 'claiming' ownership of the various places on the internet you appear.

If you can edit the source code of a page, then you can use a MicroID meta tag to verify ownership. Otherwise you simply list pages, like your del.icio.us bookmarks, Twitters, Google Reader Shared Items and anything else you want people to find. It is also useful to keep track of the more obscure sites you may have a presence on, if only to remind you of them!

Check out my ClaimID page for a working example.

There is, of course, the ubiquitous RSS feed, bookmarklet, tag support, basic social networking features, a blog widget and all manner of microformat goodness, including hCards, ensuring that the service is future (and geek) proof.

If you're anything like me, you probably sign up for every new Web 2.0 service you see. ClaimID is invaluable for keeping track of everything and is a single source to point people who want to know where to find you online.

Here's another great web service that does something incredibly simple, incredibly well. Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight content on any website, add a note and store that information for later reference.

Then you can share a short URL (like http://awurl.com/jmmppy93267)with others that links to the page, with all your highlighted text and notes. Twitter is supported, naturally, along with Facebook, Delicious, Live Journal and Tumblr, making it simple to share whatever you find.

So there you have it. If you don't need all the power and flexibility of Evernote, then you have Awesome Highlighter. Enjoy.

Since I have been away from my home PC for a few weeks, and am back using XP, I wanted to try Windows Live Writer. Very impressive it is too! I can write blog posts using my own blog styles, add tags, pictures and all the formatting I like. It is easily far superior to using the Blogger interface and also beats publishing from Google Docs, which I tried, but it added too much rubbish code. Here's hoping Mozilla, or someone, can come up with something just as nice.

Twist

I have been building up a list of useful Twitter tools to write another roundup. Twist is worth highlighting here though. It provides a simple analytic overview of whatever you search for, taking its results from the Twitter public timeline.

Above is a comparison search for 'plurk, pownce, jaiku, twitter, friendfeed' showing results for the last month. This is interesting because you can see when interest for Plurk spiked. It's dropped right down again now, but it's still fresher in peoples minds than the other services. Apart from Twitter, of course.

Compete also shows the spike, and makes it pretty clear that Twitter has gained a substantial lead in this space.

It will be interesting to see if Plurk gains any momentum. They turned down an interview with Leo Laporte on net@nite recently, so I guess they aren't ready to scale. I get the feeling they lack the mainstream potential of Twitter, anyway.

Despite being generally out of touch with internet news, I have not failed to notice the dramatic uptake of Plurk recently. I didn't sign up immediately because of a negative gut reaction (I don't really have much 'emo-ness' to express) and a reluctance to commit to yet another social service.

Obviously, I couldn't resist - find me here (or get an invite here).

I rather like the odd cartoon graphics (even the zombie dog). The qualifiers and the karma system are neat features too. I'm not sure about the timeline yet though - it feels too tricksy and not practical. A more polished version of the mobile interface would be much clearer. The ajax trickery is well implemented, but it feels slippery to me, and I feel like it would be easy to miss posts. Maybe I'm just not used to it yet.

The interest in Plurk is probably more about users frustrations with Twitter than anything else. I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more microblogging alternatives popping up this year - and if they are all as innovative as Plurk, we'll have a lot of fun trying them!

Orgoo describes itself as 'your personal communications cockpit'. In real terms this means that you can send and receive email through multiple accounts, through a single inbox (unless you use free Microsoft or Yahoo webmail). It similarly collates all your IM accounts and uses Joopz to let you send SMS messages (in the US and Canada). The interface is one of the cleanest I have used - It's as polished as Yahoo Mail but with more of the simplicity of Gmail.

TinyURL is the original URL shortener. The service is very simple - take a long URL like:

http://omnomnom.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/chihuahua.jpg

and make a much tinier URL, like: http://tinyurl.com/3qyjpe. TinyURL offers several additional features that are standard for most URL shortener services, including 'preview' links (eg: http://preview.tinyurl.com/3qyjpe) and bookmarklets, so you can streamline the process of creating short URLs.

So that's all pretty simple, right? Why would you want to use one of the many copycat services? Well, as with my other round-ups this one is not going to be comprehensive. Instead, here are a selection of URL shorteners that have some genuine value add. Still too much text? Skip to the end. Enjoy.

is.gd is one of my favourites. It produces some of the shortest URLs (eg. http://is.gd/mdt). Users can see a preview page by appending a hyphen to the URL (eg. http://is.gd/mdt-). You are also free to add any hints you like, after another "/", for example: http://is.gd/mdt/meow.

snipurl, snurl or snipr.com, by contrast with is.gd, makes a simple service seem complicated. They have tons of features, and I hate to do them a disservice, but I wasn't prepared to create an account for something that is so non-critical. If you need Excel integration, RSS feeds, support forums, 'multi snips', privacy keys and tons of other features, check them out. Example url: http://snipurl.com/2atwu.

memurl tries to generate mnemonic URLS, like http://memurl.com/kepumi.

doiop.com lets you pick a keyword (provided you can find a unique one) to produce more memorable URLs: http://doiop.com/flyingrat. It seems short of other features though.

icanhaz.com does the same as doiop, but with extra LOLcat, making for some amusing URLs: http://icanhaz.com/schrodinger. You have the option of entering your email address so you can edit your URLs later, but I could see no way of logging in. Just to be safe, I would advise against it.

moourl.com's unique selling point seems to be 'cuteness'. It also has the option to personalise your URL. http://moourl.com/hownow. And it is cute!

Metamark can also generate custom URLs. A typical URL is http://xrl.us/tortoisefail, but that link will fail unless the user knows to append the password (in this case, add: -fail)

notlong.com is the only one I found that actually uses a custom subdomain, allowing you to create URLs like http://kingarthur.notlong.com. It also, by default, gives you a password to access your stats and manage the URL. One of the neater shortening services!

TweetBurner caters to the Twitter market by giving you stats associated with your account, and making it easy to tweet your twurl (!). Again, the bookmarklet simplifies the process. Typical URL: http://twurl.nl/5wucdf.

HURL.WS is hosted on Google, so won't go down unless Google does. The URLs are not the shortest (eg. http://www.hurl.ws/7y) but it does let you check how many people have clicked through one of your links by appending /hits - for example: http://www.hurl.ws/7y/hits.

urlTea is open source and has some extra funkyness. Typical URL: http://urltea.com/38vd. You can also append descriptive info to the URL after a question mark, http://urltea.com/38vd?like_this.

Finally, LinkBunch does something a bit different and creates a short URL for multiple links: http://linkbun.ch/dw1. It does mean that users have to be routed through a special linkbun.ch page, but there are many useful applications that make this compromise worthwhile.

In conclusion...

Use is.gd to keep it simple and short. Use Tweetburner if you use Twitter. Use notlong if you want the URL to look semi-professional.

Muxtape quite simply lets you roll your own mp3 mixtape on the internet to share with others.

As you can see from the main menu on the left, things are kept very simple. Upload your files, rearrange the playlist and rename any tracks you need to, and settings lets you name and caption and associate a colour with your muxtape.

The social networking features are pretty basic too. You can add anyone else's Muxtape to your list of favourites and you can explore a random selection from the front page. Last.fm this is not. Take a look at my muxtape to see the player in action.

A nice alternative is altertone, which is very slick looking and open source, but lacks the minimalism of Muxtape.

One final note worth mentioning is the official Muxtape blog. There was a short service outage over the last few days and this kept the users very well informed - something that Twitter has only just figured out!

We Heart It is a simple image bookmarking site, without the elitism of Ffffound. The service stands out because it keeps things simple and does things well.

After signing up, be sure to add the bookmarklet to your browser. Then it is just a matter of clicking a button, and optionally tagging and writing a comment on the We Heart It site. The tagging makes it easy to find similar images. You can choose to filter out NSFW content and there are rudimentary social networking features, but that in itself is no weakness. There is also the usual RSS feed so you can export your discoveries to your tumblelog or wherever.

I'm going to be writing about several other sites that serve a small niche but do it very well this week, so stay tuned for some more high quality discoveries.

In a perfect link with my post about useful Twitter applications from earlier today, Get Satisfaction have just announced a new service called Overheard:

Get Satisfaction's powerful Overheard feature enables you to support customer conversations across the Web by bridging the Twitter stream to your Get Satisfaction community. Hear what your customers are saying, and respond to them in a channel they are already using. Simply set the keywords you want to track, and you'll see all the messages on Twitter ("tweets") that match your search terms. See someone you want to reach out to or a customer idea worth exploring? Turn that tweet into a topic and quickly bring the rest of the Get Satisfaction network into the conversation.

Get Satisfaction have built a fantastically useful website built around a concept so simple and brilliant it's staggering to me that it hadn't been done before. Essentially it's a tech support forum, linking customers with companies, including Twitter.

Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. You’re free to ask, free to answer, and free to start a new conversation. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate: companies, employees, customers — anyone with an opinion, an answer, or something to say.

Overheard is powered by Summize. The company or individual simply runs a search on the company name and identifies an issue. They can then get a topic started on Get Satisfaction:

The topic starting page makes you narrow the problem down over several stages until it is well defined. It even estimates the likelihood of the discussion getting noticed once it is posted! Presumably this could also be an ideal forum for companies to steal away customers of their competitors who are less web savvy! All in all, this use of Twitter is probably smarter than any of the others I listed earlier.

There seems to be a new Twitter app every few hours. Some, like Twitter Mood Status or Twistori are entertaining distractions, but are hardly essential tools. Here are some of the more useful applications of the Twitter API:

Search & Filter

Summize and Quotably both allow you track conversations and see what topics are popular. Quotably attempts to thread the search results from Summize, but in my experience it is impossible to do this effectively.

TwitBuzz is one of many similar sites to take the idea of monitoring trends a step further and does an excellent job or organising popular links and popular conversations. See also Tweetmeme, which seems a little more polished and Twitt(url)y with its simple and clear layout powered by Summize.

TweetWire does a good job of categorising the information in draws into newspaper style categories like sports, celebrities, tech and current election coverage.

TwitLinks narrows its sources to 'the worlds top tech twitter users', but - apart from the Jason Calacanis spam - the results are typically high quality.

Favrd keeps to the popularity contest just by listing the most 'favoured' current tweets.

Hashtags and Twemes take a different approach. Both search for tweets that have been explicitly tagged by users with the hash character (eg: #hashtag). These are commonly called hashtags, although naturally enough Twemes prefers the term tweme. I have a strong preference for Hashtags because of the much cleaner presentation, the interesting trend graph and a better selection of related search results (photos, videos, blog posts etc, all similarly tagged).

Manage

Twubble helps you expand your Twitter bubble (geddit?) by scanning through your current friends and looking at who they follow. The theory being that you'll probably appreciate those people too.

Twerp Scan helps you with the opposite problem. It checks the followers-to-following ratio for all your contacts and clues you in on those who may be trying to spam you. At the least, you can remove or block those users who clearly aren't taking any real interest in you.

My Tweeple is probably the most useful way to trim your followers into shape. It imports all your contacts and lets you immediately see who you follow, who follows you and when the relationship is mutual. You can view their Twitter page in a floating iframe window and you can see the same stats that Twerp Scan will give you. Best of all, you can follow, unfollow or block people from the page and even ding them to help other My Tweeple users identify spammers.

Tweet Clouds generates a cloud of keywords based on the text in your tweets. This can be pretty fascinating and has all sorts of SEO type potential. Tweet Clouds is a prefect example of a really simple but valuable idea executed perfectly. You can even mash in your del.icio.us tags and hopefully more services will be included soon. Similarly, TweetVolume will compare the total use of up to any five words or phrases from the public timeline.


I'd like to be able to review Twistory, which is apparently a way getting your tweets into your calendar, but I'm still waiting for an invite.

Extend

TwitPic probably adds the most value. You can upload a picture to the site directly or send one with your mobile phone and it will post a link via your Twitter account. People can leave comments below the photos and they will be sent as @ replies on Twitter. Perfect integration. SnapFoo is an uglier alternative, but it does support FriendFeed, Facebook and others.


Twitter Feed takes any RSS feed and posts from it directly to a Twitter account. You can control how often it tweets, so be sure not to spam your followers. If you want people to link to your content over Twitter themselves, then TwitThis gives you a simple badge you can add to your site.

I used to use Twitter to make little notes for myself when I was out and about and now TwitterNotes makes this practice more useful. Starting your tweet with a plus (+) character tells TwitterNotes to keep track of it for you so when you login later you get a list of your current notes to manage. Simple and handy.

plusplusbot also looks for user entered metadata to gather its information. In this case it searches for ++ (plus plus) or -- (minus minus). This slightly Orwellian construct lets you rate people (or anything). For example '@Foomandoonian++ because He wrote an excellent article about Twitter applications at http://is.gd/k6e' Try it!

Tweetburner is a URL shortening service in the same vein of TinyURL. While there are many, many alternatives already out there, Tweetburner has some extra features that make it ideal for use with Twitter. As you would expect, it can turn your long URL into one like http://twurl.nl/xe247i, saving you valuable space in your 140 character tweet and then you can post directly to Twitter. There is the usual bookmarklet, making the whole process effortless. But the unique selling point are the statistics. You can come back later and login with your Twitter information and see how many people clicked on your links, complete with cute little graphs.

And finally...

Is Twitter down? Probably. And when Twitter is down, what are you going to do?

(Did I miss any really good ones? Please leave a comment and I will add them to the list :-)

EDITED ON 23 MAY 2008: Added Tweetburner and twit(url)y

UNIX Airways

Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on...

Mac Airlines

All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air

The terminal is pretty and colourful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air

Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Windows XP Air

You turn up at the airport,which is under contract to only allow XP Air planes. All the aircraft are identical, brightly coloured and three times as big as they need to be. The signs are huge and all point the same way. Whichever way you go, someone pops up dressed in a cloak and pointed hat insisting you follow him. Your luggage and clothes are taken off you and replaced with an XP Air suit and suitcase identical to everyone around you as this is included in the exorbitant ticket cost. The aircraft will not take off until you have signed a contract. The inflight entertainment promised turns out to be the same Mickey Mouse cartoon repeated over and over again. You have to phone your travel agent before you can have a meal or drink. You are searched regularly throughout the flight. If you go to the toilet twice or more you get charged for a new ticket. No matter what destination you booked you will always end up crash landing at Whistler in Canada.

OSX Air

You enter a white terminal, and all you can see is a woman sitting in the corner behind a white desk, you walk up to get your ticket. She smiles and says "Welcome to OS X Air, please allow us to take your picture", at which point a camera in the wall you didn't notice before takes your picture. "Thank you, here is your ticket" You are handed a minimalistic ticket with your picture at the top, it already has all of your information. A door opens to your right and you walk through. You enter a wide open space with one seat in the middle, you sit, listen to music and watch movies until the end of the flight. You never see any of the other passengers. You land, get off, and you say to yourself "wow, that was really nice, but I feel like something was missing"

Windows Vista Airlines

You enter a good looking terminal with the largest planes you have ever seen. Every 10 feet a security officer appears and asks you if you are "sure" you want to continue walking to your plane and if you would like to cancel. Not sure what cancel would do, you continue walking and ask the agent at the desk why the planes are so big. After the security officer making sure you want to ask the question and you want to hear the answer, the agent replies that they are bigger because it makes customers feel better, but the planes are designed to fly twice as slow. Adding the size helped achieve the slow fly goal.

Once on the plane, every passenger has to be asked individually by the flight attendants if they are sure they want to take this flight. Then it is company policy that the captain asks the passengers collectively the same thing. After answering yes to so many questions, you are punched in the face by some stranger who when he asked "Are you sure you want me to punch you in the face? Cancel or Allow?" you instinctively say "Allow".

After takeoff, the pilots realize that the landing gear driver wasn't updated to work with the new plane. Therefore it is always stuck in the down position. This forces the plane to fly even slower, but the pilots are used to it and continue to fly the planes, hoping that soon the landing gear manufacturer will give out a landing gear driver update.

You arrive at your destination wishing you had used your reward miles with XP airlines rather than trying out this new carrier. A close friend, after hearing your story, mentions that Linux Air is a much better alternative and helps.

Linux Air

Inspired by the possibility of free air travel you decide to fly Linux. You search through hundreds of similar sub-companies. They all claim to be able to get you there quickly and safely, but some airlines don't seem to have been used for years and many just specialise in freight. Almost none offer any in-flight entertainment and lack for any instructions but all claim that the other passengers will know what's going on and you should have no problem finding help.

You select Ubuntu Air and have an enjoyable and speedy journey. You even liked the brown suede décor. However you didn't hear anything through the headsets, even though everyone else seemed to have no problems!

(I know this gets circulated around the internet a lot, but I'm posting it here because the final 'Linux Air' analogy is my own. I posted it in a comment on digg over a year ago.)

One of the software picks on the last Mac Break Weekly was the cool-sounding Tape Deck.

It is just a very simple audio recording/playback app. that mimics the look of a classic tape deck. Open source software developers should consider using this approach where it is applicable - it could do a lot for the perception of 'ease-of-use' of Linux.

(Tape Deck is Mac only and not open source)

[Ars Review]

The BBC are reporting that Windows XP will be shipping as an alternative OS on the One Laptop Per Child. Techcrunch dumbs the story down, typically, but a commenter links to an insightful essay by a former OLPC developer, Ivan Krstić about his anger over the direction the project has taken.

This is good for Microsoft of course, because they get their hooks into a massive emerging market. It's also good for OLPC Foundation, because right or wrong most people still consider Windows to be the only true standard.

I do wonder why OLPC chose to devise a bizarre and unique OS (The Sugar OLPC Human Interface). Matching the UI to the intended target audience sounds like a great idea, but surely emulating a more 'standard' desktop environment, like Gnome or KDE, would have been much more appealing to nations who would see that skills learned would be transferable. Krstić makes a similar point in his post:

Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business.

So instead these new users will have to use an operating system that Microsoft is trying to persuade those in the developed world to leave behind. After all, XP isn't going to be available after June... or is it?

Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs (ULPCs). To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs.

via PC World

This is exactly why developing nations should want open source software. It is tragic to me that Microsoft are using their clout to force themselves into markets that have been made possible by open source software and free thinking. The Eee PC runs perfectly on Linux, and Asus were able to customise Xandros to make a unique interface, perfectly suited to the limited capabilities of the tiny computer and full of free software. But the current Eee 900 has the option Windows or Linux, and the tragedy is that most retailers will probably sell more Windows machines - because that's what people want.

I'm trying not to sound like some Linux hippy, but it's hard not to be frustrated. I have only been using Linux exclusively on my home PC for six months now and it's pretty clear to me that all Linux needs to be ready for mass market is ... more users. High profile machines like the Eee or OLPC is exactly what free software needs to prove its worth. And, of course, Microsoft knows this.

Right now, I can think of no reason I would want to use a decommissioned operating system on such a small laptop. Web browsing, emailing, word processing and all the other basic software food groups are perfectly well catered for. Linux still falls behind Windows or OSX for some advanced software users, but this isn't an issue here. If you could run Photoshop, I doubt you would want to! The game isn't over here fortunately: the Linux version comes with 20GB of hard disk space, while the Win version has 12GB and is reportedly much slower to boot.

It'll be interesting to see what happens next. I have a feeling that the OLPC project has no soul behind it. Nicholas Negroponte comes off pretty poorly in the Krstić essay:

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

The ramifications for Microsoft forcing themselves onto Eee PCs doesn't seem like such a big disaster for the future of humanity. After all, most of us use Windows already - it is only fair for it to be an option.

The truth, as I see it, is this: Free software is the future. Right now, it works and the more people who use it, the better it will get. The takeaway from these stories is that we can't trust businesses to have our best interests at heart, because they are necessarily more interested in the bottom line than progressive ideologies.

We need to do something more to spread the message ourselves.

Open Source has been around in spirit for a long time, but it became what it is today thanks largely to Richard Stallman, hacker, software freedom fighter and beard wearer. RMS wrote the original GPL (GNU General Public License), which outlines the principles of free software. Starting in true geek style with freedom zero:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel in 1991. Rebel Code has a pretty good account of this, and also covers the whole history of the open source movement. Worth a read.

The internet has benefited greatly from the so-called LAMP stack, a collection of open source software that makes websites reliable and dynamic. Wikipedia breaks it down as follows:

• Linux, referring to the operating system;
• Apache, the Web server;
• MySQL, the database management system (or database server);
• PHP, the programming language.

You may not realise it, but if you use the internet you have already benefited a great deal from open source.

Although Google doesn't release much open source material directly, it is a big proponent of OSS, and practices what it preaches. Most Google employees run Linux (specifically, a tweaked version of Ubuntu called Goobuntu), and it is often rumoured that A Google Linux distro may be in the works. Although Google denies this, such a big name behind Linux could be just what is needed to move Linux to the mainstream.

And a big name is what Ubuntu has in Mark Shuttleworth. He made his billions in the dot com boom and became the second space tourist (and the first African in space).

The money he has poured into Ubuntu has helped make it one of the most user friendly distros - and certainly the most publicised. Now with it's 'Gutsy Gibbon' release (7.10) it has added flashy 3D effects, desktop search, encryption and other advanced security features.

See also...

• Wikipedia Free Software Portal
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• Groklaw - Open Source Software: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Software Picks

The Big Ones - I'm not going to go into much detail on these since they are so well known.

• Mozilla's Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird. Replaces Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Outlook's calendaring features.
• Open Office. Replaces Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, with a few extra goodies thrown in. IBM have recently released the new Lotus Symphony suite, which includes a documents, presentation and spreadsheet editor all in one app. I've been using it for a few weeks now, with only minor issues. It'll be in Beta for a while, but mark it down as one to watch. Could wind up being an OOo killer!
• GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
• Alternatively try GIMPshop, a modification of the free/open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.
• Ubuntu is by no means the only Linux distro out there, but it is currently getting the most press. With Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) hot off the presses it has added some of the glitz and glamour of commercial OSes, like Vista and OSX. Available in many variations and for all platforms, 32 and 64 bit, desktop and server variations, and now super easy to install (or test by running from a live CD), I can honestly see no reason why a basic PC user would need Windows!

Other Cool OSS

• Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
• Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
• FileZilla is a free FTP client for Windows, with Mac and Linux versions on the way.
• VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms. It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.
• Notepad2 is a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry.
• Also Notepad++, another source code editor and Notepad replacement, which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.
• Password Safe is tool that allows you to have a different password for all the different programs and websites that you deal with, without actually having to remember all those usernames and passwords. KeePass is another alternative.
• Toucan is a small utility allowing you to synchronise, backup and secure your data with more options than the built in suite utilities. It is split up into 5 tabs, allowing you to easily find the function that you want.
  If running applications off a portable hard drive or USB stick is news to you, check out Portable Apps for Toucan, Firefox, Notepad++ and many more OS apps.
• TrueCrypt creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. It can encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB flash drive. An essential piece of software to protect sensitive data.
• Miro (formerly the Democracy Player) is a free video platform with a mission to build a more open and diverse world of online video. RSS, BitTorrent, HTTP, HTML, and CSS are all open technologies that they use to create a level playing field for video creators to distribute their work and for viewers to connect to any publisher in the world.
• Media Player Classic (MPC) is a compact free software media player for Microsoft Windows. The application mimics the look and feel of the old, light-weight Windows Media Player 6.4 and uses a completely different codebase, integrating many options and features found in modern media players. (Click the downloads tab and look for Media Player Classic)
• VLC media player (Video Lan Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
  Between MPC and VLC, you should never download a video file you can't play again!
• Juice is the premier podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts anytime, anywhere.
• HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
• Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. A killer app for many, but possibly too complex for the casual movie. It's well worth checking out Elephants Dream, the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license. (Follow the production of the second project, Peach)

Web Based Open Source - Just a taster

• Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!
• Wordpress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability - according to the blurb on the frontpage. Basically it's a blogging platform, and it's free.
• Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.
• For a more complete run-down of open source content management systems, and the option to try them all out, take a look at Open Source CMS.
  
• Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. The licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.
• Open Clip Art Library is an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used.
  
• OSWD and Open Source Web Design - Two different sites that offer a large number of hight quality web templates, all released under some open licence.
  

Lists like this are abundant on blogs and frequently pop up un sites like Digg. Do a quick Google and drink from the firehose. Welcome to Open Source Software.

[NOTE: This post was rescued from an older blog I have discontinued, which is why it may seem out of place in this blog. I hope you enjoyed it.]