Webware

Unofficial Child Surveillance Day: IMSafer and MySpace upgrade

-- IMSafer, the parental IM monitoring system we covered in October, got a big upgrade today with support for Mac OS X and Windows Vista. The app keeps an eye on your child's (or spouse's!) instant messages, and alerts you via e-mail if the analysis tool finds inappropriate content. Previously, there was no Mac support.

-- MySpace is planning to launch an app that lets curious parents or significant others track MySpace log-ins on the family computer. Code-named "Zephyr," the app will make note of username, age, and location, then save the data to your machine. … Read more

The latest in Facebook tweaks

Social networking site Facebook is one of those sites that tends to churn out a steady stream of small updates and modifications rather than releasing massive "2.0" and "3.0" revamps. It looks like they've recently gone through a few of them, too:

Easier "wall" posting. (See image at left.) Instead of navigating to a different page to post on someone's "wall" (basically a free-for-all bulletin board at the bottom of a Facebook profile), there's now a cool little text field that lets you post right from the … Read more

Price Protectr: Watch for Price Drops without Watching

Price Protectr is a service that monitors online stores and alerts you to any changes in price within 30 days of buying a product. If it sounds simple it is, and frankly that's the way it should be.

Nobody likes finding out they could have saved money if they had paid attention to price drops, but it's easier said than done. Price Protectr does the work for you. All you have to do is give them the URL of the product you bought and your e-mail, and it will keep an eye on it for 30 days. If … Read more

LinkedIn Answers can hook you up

Question-and-answer Web sites can connect the curious with the well informed, but some fail to live up to their promise. For instance, Yahoo Answers covers a vast array of subjects, but too often it attracts too many teenyboppers. With the new LinkedIn Answers, however, you can tap into the wisdom of a professional crowd.

This could be a great way of reaching out to those in the know without having to directly contact individuals who aren't so familiar with you. You can close a question to all but a small circle of chosen contacts. I also like that LinkedIn … Read more

News Roundup

-- IE 7 reaches 100 million users. Even with all those users, it still comes in second to Internet Explorer 6, which makes sense considering IE6 is the default browser on nearly every single PC. (News.com)

-- Google plugs account hijack holes. The vulnerabilities in question affected both Google Documents and GMail, giving hackers full access to your e-mail and spreadsheets. (News.com)

-- Report: Apple to charge some Mac users for wireless technologies. 802.11n, the next-generation wireless protocol, has secretly been shipping in Apple's computers for the past several months, but that functionality hasn't been … Read more

Geni: Finally, Genealogy made easy

Geni.com just launched. It's a family-tree-making service that's easier to use than any other competing system I've seen. And it's free. It also has a straightforward way to invite other family members in the hopes that they'll put in their own data.

I covered competitor Amiglia last year. Like Geni, it has a Flash-based interface for adding people to your tree as well as for navigating it. Geni is not as snazzy as Amiglia, but it is much easier to use. Data entry is a snap, because when you're first building the tree, … Read more

Acrobat Connect: An excellent online meeting service, but overpriced

Adobe has launched Acrobat Connect (formerly known as Breeze); a very slick, Flash-based, screen sharing and videoconferencing tool. We've had a few experimental meetings using the product here in the Webware labs and came away impressed. And if anything deserves to be impressive, it's a Web app that costs as much as this one does: $40 a month.

It's really good, though, and you can sign up for a 15-day trial to give it a spin. Unlike Webex and GoToMeeting, Connect does all its magic in Flash. (Connect also doesn't demand your credit card number before … Read more

Forget your passwords safely with PassPack

Passwords are a real pain. It's not so bad dealing with one or two, but once you have five or more log-ins and passwords at various sites, even the sharpest mind will have trouble remembering what goes where. PassPack is a new service that attempts to solve this problem, letting you create a personal archive of log-ins and passwords that can be packed and unpacked with one master password.

After setting up PassPack, you can start plugging in as many accounts as you want. When you're done you can "Pack it up!" using a special packing … Read more

Data made fun with Swivel

Swivel is a data visualization service that lets you add your own data sets or search from a large pool of public submissions. If this sounds boring, it shouldn't. It's actually kind of fun and very similar to browsing Flickr. Data is presented in several ways, from pie charts to bar graphs to scatter plots. You can also easily tab over in any graphical chart representation to get the raw chart numbers. Where was this when I was in college?

Most of the content on Swivel is fairly bland, such as the prime loan rates for banks, but … Read more