Webware

Gist on Tuesday is releasing an application for the iPhone that brings many of the site's big features to user's small pockets. The free app is meant to compliment Gist.com's people-analyzing and organizing tools, letting users get an alert on upcoming meetings as well as background information on those who they're meeting with. This includes how important the user's contacts are, as determined by Gist's algorithms.

Where users will spend most of their time though is the app's dashboard, which breaks down the latest news about people and companies they're corresponding with based on news stories, blog posts, and tweets. This screen doubles as a RSS reading tool too, since you can read small article summaries that your contacts have noted, as well as bookmark them and open them in Safari. It's not the best way to get news headlines on the iPhone, but it's nearly identical to how it works on Gist.com, which should help longtime users feel right at home.

Gist's iPhone app can give you a quick bird's eye view of your past correspondence with one of your contacts.

(Credit: CNET)

Other nice features include being able to send your meeting attendees a quick alert that you're running late, and a media viewer that lets you very quickly peruse attachments you've been sent from one of your contacts via e-mail. These two tools alone could be their own iPhone apps.

All is not sugar and spice though. I found the app's loading quite long at times, which can be a deal breaker when you're trying to use it on a cellular data connection--as most users are likely to be doing. And there is no way to use the app without first setting up an account at Gist.com; you cannot do this from the app itself.

It's also inherently missing a way to be integrated into the iPhone's e-mail and calendaring services. This is entirely Apple's fault but means that while you can do a whole lot of viewing of your connected calendar events and e-mail conversations from the app, as far as using it as a two-in-one office tool, it comes up a little short for things like creating new events and searching through old conversations. That falls in line with Gist.com though, which is simply there to serve as an organizational layer on top of the e-mailing and calendaring tools you're already using. It just sticks out a whole lot more on a device where so much of the business utility revolves around those two applications.

The iPhone is not the first platform destined to get a Gist app, but according to the company, it's been the most asked for by users. Versions for other devices will be on the way next year.

I recently went on a nice, long vacation, and the first thing I did when I got back was to upload some of the best 200 or so photos I had taken.

As an experiment, I uploaded many of the same shots to two services--Flickr and Facebook. Both let users tag photos, so I wanted to see which ones would get tagged first, and not by me.

The winner? Facebook.

Just an hour or two after having uploaded to both services, all of my 88 shots on Facebook had been tagged. The most amazing part is that very few of them were tagged by me. Right after my upload, I tagged a handful of them, which in turn alerted those users to view the shots. From there, they (not me) went on to tag some more of my photos, continuing the cycle.

Facebook lets you tag individuals within the photo like in this group photo.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Flickr, on the other hand, was a different story. I uploaded close to 200 photos to the service. There were still the same shots of the same people, but there were also additional shots of landscapes or nature. Of those shots, only a handful were tagged, and only by one user--my colleague Stephen Shankland, whom I had pestered to look at my artistic capturing of sand castles. His tags weren't even of people; instead, he added descriptive keywords about the photos.

Now, to be fair, I have far more friends on Facebook than I do on Flickr--more than eight times the number to be exact. But in terms of photo usage, my Flickr activity far outweighs what I do on Facebook. I've only created 37 albums on Facebook which contain a total of 532 photos. On Flickr, I have 101 photo sets (Flickr's nickname for albums) which total 3,438 photos. More importantly, anyone on Flickr can see the photos I've uploaded, not just people I've put on a friends list.

In terms of use, the sites are quite different, too. Facebook may have gotten into the photo arena a little later than Flickr, but it's quickly outpaced it. The company says it's getting 900 million photos uploaded each month from its more than 200 million users, whereas Flickr's official numbers put that number somewhere around 90 million uploads from some 40 million registered users. Just keep in mind those 200 million Facebook users are probably not using the site specifically for photo hosting like they are on Flickr.

A tale of two tags

So why are Flickr users so hesitant to tag other people's photos? There are many reasons, but the biggest is that the two tagging systems are just plain ... Read more

On Thursday, Photobucket introduced two new features: a way to skin albums and an overhauled organizational tool that lets users drag and drop photos into various folders.

Of the two, the organizer is the biggest enhancement. Users are taken to a dark gray editing environment that lets them make changes without the entire page having to refresh. Everything is drag and drop, which is useful for ferrying photos and videos between albums, and reordering album arrangement. There's also support for batch operations, so you can quickly move, reorder, and rename multiple photos at once.

Compared with Adobe Photoshop Express and Flickr's Organizr, this new organizer isn't nearly as technical. Missing are things like group tagging, and control of the metadata. Considering you can add and edit tags from the individual photo pages this seems like an oversight.

The new organizer is black and sleek, but is missing some editing capabilities found elsewhere on the site.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The other big feature is the skinning of album pages. This is just another level of personalization you can give an album short of reordering the images. There are a few hundred themes to choose from, and like a blog theme on Wordpress.com, you can preview what it looks like before applying it. Each theme changes the colors of various page elements, with the centerpiece being the background. I found most of the themes with background images to be too distracting, but there are some simpler ones that dramatically improve the somewhat barren white look the service had before.

The album theme editor.

In addition to the grouping of Photobucket-built themes, users can design their own with a simple editor that lets them pick the color scheme, background image, and border colors. You can preview all of the changes in real-time, then push it out to one or more of your albums. There's also a publishing feature that lets you share it with other Photobucket users.

One thing I'd still like to see with both of these features is more cohesion among other parts of the service. For instance, if you want to edit a photo from the organizer, it kicks you out to the special partnered FotoFlexer editor. Likewise, if you're in an album and want to rearrange the shots it feels like you're going to a completely different site. I'm not saying Flickr's done a better job at this, however on Photobucket the experience feels far more disjointed.

Receipt-scanning service Shoeboxed just launched a new feature that automatically files scanned receipts into one of 15 expense categories. These include groceries, gas, and travel expenses, which you can view simply by clicking on them. Users can also create their own expense categories, although there's currently no way to have the service auto-tag expenses by keyword.

In addition to new receipts, users will find a good number of their old receipts categorized. Dan Englander, Shoeboxed's VP of Communications says some may not get the tagging treatment if the system can't find a match, but that a "large majority" have.

Users of Mint.com and other online banking services have been enjoying auto-categorization for some time now, but keep in mind these places are getting the information digitally. Shoeboxed must first scan your receipts then run them through optical character recognition. The categorization is not just for the scanned receipts though; any online receipts you "CC" Shoeboxed with will get tagged too.

If an item fits into a category it's now automatically tagged with it for easy sorting later on.

(Credit: Shoeboxed / CNET Networks)

Shoeboxed is one of the more inventive and useful services I've seen lately. It lets you organize some of the payments you make with cash (not credit cards) by sending in the huge wad of crumpled receipts you end up with from retail stores. Those receipts will automatically be scanned and plugged in to a financial tracking tool for you to manage with the site's tools, or to export to something like Quicken.

(Credit: Shoeboxed)

The site launched in July of last year, and this morning it is unveiling two new useful features. The first is a new analytics engine that will break down your spending habits with svelte-looking charts and graphs. What makes this particularly useful is that it can track both your on and offline purchases, which is shown in one of the new graphs.

Mint.com, which also does this (sans the paper receipt scanning) can be incredibly useful in this regard, but it goes the extra mile by tapping in to your credit card and bank account information to itemize these purchases for you. Shoeboxed's solution is slightly more low tech, with a special e-mail address you can CC to get your payment confirmation sent from online retailers. It will automatically figure in those payments and add them into your total spending.

Also new today is an envelope-tracking system that will keep a history of all your sent and received receipt envelopes alongside a live status indicator that gives you the heads-up on when a new envelope has been sent out. If you're a user of Netflix or any other shipper of goods this tends to be more important, but in Shoeboxed's case it's a nice touch if you want to make sure someone didn't steal the envelope full of financial goodness from your mailbox.

Shoeboxed has a free service where you plug in all the information. The plans that will scan your receipts and actually send them back start at $10 a month, all the way up to the $60 express plan, which guarantees same-day scanning and processing.

Meetup, the popular events management service will be undergoing several large changes in the next few weeks. According to an entry posted to the company's official blog last night, users new and old were watched while using the site to help restructure the design and layout.

Screenshots have been posted showing a new look, which is possibly a little less important than the announcement of a developer API that's launching alongside it. Developers will be able to tap into a limited amount of the data found on the site for use in third-party sites and tools. Personal information from members is not making the cut.

Also new is an updated payment system that will be provided to social organizers who need better ways to manage events with a price tag. Meetup currently has PayPal, but the new tool will integrate Amazon Payments--a PayPal and Google Checkout competitor that launched late last year. What's smart is that the new system lets event planners set it up so that people who want to RSVP "yes" are required to pay up front. As a host, they can also refund everyone at once if an event is canceled or the funds are no longer required.

To help people plan where they should have events, the service is also adding a new location finder called "Places" that lists locations where Meetup events have been held in the past, alongside a user-maintained rating system. With enough use, this system could help weed out potentially bad places where newbie event holders might try to book without knowing any better. It's something that's made Yelp quite popular with restaurants and hotels, and this is a nice vertical for a community that thrives on where events are being held.

Meetup sits in a space that's been shaken up a little in the last few years. Newcomers like MyPunchBowl and Facebook's own events service have given people easy ways to create some of the more simple get-togethers using lists of contacts from other services or their core groups of friends. Competitor Yelp has also thrown its hat in the ring with an events service that's a smart pickup on user bases and their penchant for leaving the house and spending money. One remedy for this is getting places where competitors aren't. In the case of Meetup, it's attempting to spread internationally, starting with the markets where it's being used the most--like Italy. Others will follow, but will it be enough to crush some of the big boys?

Thinking about setting up an event here? Check the scores from other users on how good it is for meetups first.

(Credit: Meetup Inc.)

University students face a certain challenge keeping their homework, class schedules, and research developments organized among paper documents and computers in their room, home, and the lab. When epiphany strikes, it's just as likely to be recorded on the back of a crumpled sandwich receipt as it is on a Word document or online briefcase--or was that just me?

That's exactly why Tom Whitson wrote Notely.

Developed in the Netvibes Ecosystem and translated into a number of languages, Notely is positioned to meet students' organizational needs by storing notes, important links, a calendar, a class schedule, grades, and a to-do list, and is accessible from anywhere a student logs on.

Notely racks up points for online document storage and data backup, and a word processor that supports links and images. It also has a language translator and can export and e-mail some of the stored data. Friends who jump on Notely's bandwagon can share information, such as class schedules or lecture notes.

You can add as many courses as you want into Notely, just not the lecture time.

While Notely has much to offer students, there are some snags. For starters, it's not clear how much storage Notely offers. Also, the calendar and scheduling sections deserve some attention and are the program's weakest sections. Despite assigning preferences for a 12-hour clock, I had to schedule my adviser meeting for 16:00. And while I could list my courses and the meeting room, Notely didn't note the class time. I also didn't like having to drag and drop classes into Notely's schedule. I'd much rather enter the time once and let the schedule populate itself. Many of these ills can be improved by emulating Google and Outlook calendars and offering greater flexibility for adding events directly into a schedule instead of one by one.

With a Mac dashboard widget, a Facebook app, and iPhone and mobile phone interfaces, Notely is also accessible to (technologically advantaged) students traveling between points who might otherwise reach for that degraded receipt.

Students solely interested in online note taking and collaboration should also consider Notesake, another free tool reviewed on Webware.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Facebook has introduced all sorts of interesting things to social networking culture. It began with a poke, and more recently allowed you to set people on fire (virtually, of course). As of yesterday, users are able to purchase and send virtual gifts (in the form of emoticons) to their friends on the service for $1 each, to benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and promote breast cancer awareness.

The icon set was designed not by Facebook but by Susan Kare who made the icons for the first Mac, including the notorious bomb icon which showed up every time an application crashed. The icons include hearts, cupcakes, and even women's underwear.

The icons can be purchased at the new Facebook gift shop. This marks the first time a paid service has been integrated with Facebook since its launch in 2004.