Rafe's Radar

Welcome to the first entry in our new feature, CNET to the Rescue. In it, I'm going to look out for your rights as a consumer of technology, try to help you save money, keep advertisers honest, and in general do what I can to keep tech vendors from taking advantage of you. If you've got a consumer complaint, send it to me at rescue@cnet.com or join the CNET to the Rescue forum.

Where have all the videos gone?

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

On March 3, Chris Christensen, author of the Amateur Traveler Web site, posted a worrisome entry on his blog: Did this video get me banned from YouTube... for life? He said three weeks ago all the video reports he'd posted to YouTube for embedding in his travel blog, plus his channel on YouTube itself, had been disabled. Three weeks after communicating with Google through what he thought were the proper channels, he finally received a terse response to his query that left him as confused as he was originally--and his 39 innocuous travel videos remained banned.

I've looked at Christensen's videos and see nothing untoward in them that would merit their removal from YouTube. On one video, he does discuss and show a topless beach, but even in that video there is no frontal nudity.

I've taken on this issue for CNET to the Rescue because it highlights things that need to change in the way Google polices the user-generated content that makes up YouTube. The good news is that after I talked with Google about this issue, the company said it would start the process of updating its appeals processes to prevent this confusion and hopefully to safeguard users like Christensen who rely on YouTube for their businesses. Also, I'm happy to report that YouTube finally put Christensen's videos back online.

Picnik, which makes an online photo editor, announced on its blog Monday that the company is being acquired by Google.

The editor works directly with online photo libraries like Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa Web Albums. Users can also upload files to the service and download them again when they are done. The editing capabilities it offers are a natural complement to a Picasa, even though the technology appears to be a mismatch: Picnik works in Flash, while most advanced Google apps use the slower JavaScript. (Google, however, is working to improve JavaScript performance with its Native Client technology.)

Neither Picnik nor Google provided financial terms of the deal in their blog posts.

Flickr uses Picnik by default. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo, which owns Flickr, deals with the new owner of its preferred photo editor.

Picnik is a Webware 100 winner. It competes with Pixlr, Fotoflexer, and Aviary.

Picnik brings photo editing to the browser.

(Credit: CNET)

This show is about one of the categories for the Academy Awards: visual effects. This year, there are three films up for awards in the visual effects category: Avatar, Star Trek, and District 9. We're going to be talking with Russell Earl of Industrial Light & Magic. Russell was co-visual effects supervisor for one of those films, Star Trek, and also worked on Transformers, Pearl Harbor, Pirates of the Caribbean, and two of the Star Wars movies.

Also joining us is CNET writer Daniel Terdiman, who covers digital media, culture, and gaming for the Geek Gestalt blog on CNET.

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A year ago at the Intuit booth at MacWorld, Quicken founder Scott Cook pressed a CD into my hand. It contained a beta version of the company's long-overdue update of the Mac version of Quicken, called Quicken Financial Life. Eagerly awaiting its release were Mac users who needed a personal finance app with some meat on its bones. They were getting frustrated with Quicken's maker, Intuit. The ancient Quicken 2007, which was the last new version of Quicken for the Mac, was so unloved that you didn't have to look far to find people running Windows (inside Parallels or VMWare Fusion) on their Macs just so they could use one of the grown-up versions of Quicken that was available for the PC.

QFL never saw the light of day. It was unloved even inside Intuit. Before the product could make it out of beta, Intuit bought Mint.com, the upstart online personal financial information company. Mint's CEO, Aaron Patzer (interview), became the general manager of Intuit's Personal Finance Group, and took as one of his first jobs overseeing the re-creation of Quicken Financial Life into Quicken Essentials. Features were dropped from QFL, the interface was redesigned, and Patzer made sure new users could set up the product in 10 to 15 minutes.

Quicken Essentials, the first new version of Quicken for the Mac since 2007, finally ships Thursday, at a retail price of $59.99.

Quicken Essentials takes a page from Mint in its approachability (sample data used).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The app is a modern financial product. It's approachable instead of feature-laden, and in most areas it's very Mac-like. It's clearly not a Mac port of the Windows version of Quicken that old fogeys like me are accustomed to. It's missing features like bill payment, and it's no good at tracking investments.

In exchange for its limited feature set, Quicken Essentials gets ease of use. It is very easy to set up if you're starting from scratch. Once your accounts are hooked in, an Overview page gives you a super-clean Mint-like screen that shows you where your money is going to and coming from. Patzer says Quicken is very smart about automatically categorizing expenses so you can identify your habits accurately. It aggregates categorization corrections from other users to continuously improve its performance (the Windows version, by contrast, uses Yellow Pages lookups).

Like the now-departed Microsoft Money, Quicken Essentials will show you activity in individual accounts or in a combined ledger with everything. But its real benefit is its budgeting tools. Here again its smart categorization helps a lot: It does a good job of analyzing your spending habits to help you create realistic budgets, and it has a good, simple screen to keep track of them.

As I said, Quicken Essentials doesn't do bill payment for you. Patzer says that only 6 percent of Quicken Windows users use this feature; most people today pay bills either through their banks' online systems or at the site of the companies billing them. Quicken Essentials is also a miserable product if you want to keep track of investments. You can't even enter investment transactions manually. Quicken Essentials will download and record your transactions, but you can't see them. You can't get more detail than current values of your holdings, in fact. There are no historical charts or other forms of analysis. Patzer says that in 2011, a Deluxe version of Quicken for the Mac may include these features.

There's also no integration with Intuit's consumer tax product, TurboTax.

Quicken Essentials features "the mother of all file converters," Patzer told me. It will read data files from any version of Quicken as well as from Microsoft Money. But you do need to run old files through an external converter, which I did not receive in time to test.

The Mint aesthetic is clearly part of Quicken Essentials, and that's good. Patzer told me he's aware that Mint will never appeal to a large number of users who don't trust a company, even Intuit, to store all their financial passwords on computers outside of their control. For many of these people, Quicken Essentials is a very good solution. The app is simple, attractive, and useful. It doesn't overreach and it's not bloated. However, people with complex financial lives may run into walls with the product.

The app's portfolio tracking tools are nearly nonexistent. This is it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

You can dive into each account's register for full transaction details.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Related: Mint founder on branding: Keep it simple.

Seesmic Web has features many installed apps don't.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Can a Web-based Twitter client do a better job than its downloadable stablemate? With Seesmic, it appears so. The new update to Seesmic Web does some handy thing that Seesmic's two download apps, for AIR and Windows, don't do.

Seesmic Web has a robust contact manager. You can see your followers and followees and people in your lists, drag users from one list to another, drag users from a time line into a list, or easily follow or unfollow users. You also get nice stats on people.

If you use Seesmic to reply to tweets, you can also see the conversation thread easily. Google Buzz and Friendfeed still handle conversations better, however. You also get some Tweetmeme-powered stats on links in Tweets, plus a quick excerpt of the text on the destination page, so you can get idea of where the link goes.

The link detail button tells you where you're going, and its retweet count.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

There are a few things that desktop client Twitter apps can do that Seesmic Web doesn't. For example, while Seesmic Web will let you upload an image (which then gets posted on a picture host), the AIR app of Seesmic will let you snap an image directly from your Web cam. The desktop clients also support multiple Twitter accounts; Seesmic Web is a single-account service. And competitor Tweetdeck, it should be noted, supports Facebook accounts in addition to Twitter.

Seesmic Web also doesn't give you a visual or audio cue when there are new tweets mentioning you. So narcissists or product marketers should stick to client apps. But it does put new tweets up on the screen without requiring a re-load, and it highlights them in yellow (which eventually fades out, Huffington Post-style).

Seesmic Web is a very attractive, highly functional, and very fluid Twitter client, even stacked up against pure downloadable apps. It's worth taking for a spin. The new version of Seesmic Web should be live later today.

Last week, Google launched Buzz, a status update tool that has elements of Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. Google launched it inside the Gmail app, giving it an instant installed base of millions of people. More importantly, Google gave Buzz access to your Gmail contacts.

When the app first launched, it's fair to say that the Buzz app was a little too eager to use and share the details of users' personal networks. Furthermore, privacy controls for Buzz were spread over multiple configuration screens. Some necessary controls, like the off switch, were just flat-out missing.

To Google's credit, within days, the company corrected the major privacy failings of Buzz. More than once, in fact:
Google tweaks Buzz privacy settings
Google changes Buzz privacy settings--again

But the question remains: what was Google thinking? How did this giant search company, with more lawyers than most Web companies have engineers, get itself into a situation that required it to revise the product almost immediately after it launched? And what does the Buzz experience say about social networks and privacy on the larger scale?

That's what we're going to discuss today, and we have two great guests to do it. First, we have a taped interview with Mike Yang, senior product counsel for Google. I taped this interview earlier. Then I have a discussion with Jared Kaprove, a fellow at EPIC, The Electronic Privacy Information Center.

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Buzzzy searches Buzz.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

U.K. search firm WorkDigital has launched Buzzzy, a search engine for Google's Buzz. You should use it if you want to see what's buzzing on a topic and, for some reason, don't know that Google Buzz already has its own search function.

Google's own Buzz search gives different results.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

That may be a little harsh. Buzzzy does give you different, and more configurable, results than Google Buzz's native search engine does. And name notwithstanding, it actually searches more than Buzz.

Buzzzy pulls results from Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as from numerous other sources like Google Reader, Flickr, and LiveJournal. And, unlike Buzz's own search, which orders results in a seemingly random (but probably algorithmically elegant) way, Buzzzy's search results pages put results in roughly chronological order, which makes more sense for a microblog search tool.

WorkDigital, whose eponymous site functions as a job search engine, built Buzzzy because the semantic search technology firm needed an index of Buzz items to layer into its tools, co-founder William Fischer told me in an e-mail. "We believe that it is the semantic layer that we apply to Buzzes where we create value," he wrote.

I hope that WorkDigital does create value with its Buzz indexing tools, since, as a standalone product, a Buzz search engine will be tough to make money from, if only because the company that makes Buzz has a little experience building its own search products.

For comparison's sake, remember Summize, the real-time Twitter search engine that Twitter eventually bought and molded into Twitter Search. That made sense: Twitter wasn't a search company. Google is.

One of the biggest criticisms of Apple's new iPad, and of the iPhone, is that it does not support Adobe's Flash, a system that lets Web developers code streaming videos and interactivity into Web pages. Steve Jobs is reported to be a big booster for HTML 5, a new extension of the HTML standard that all Web pages are encoded in. HTML 5 will allow Flash-like features without relying on Flash, which is a proprietary system. Meantime, users are caught in the middle. Only a few browsers support HTML 5, and there are countless Web pages, videos, and games written in Flash already. Not to mention a legion of developers accustomed to creating media in Flash. At stake in this battle: the future of interactive content on the Web.

To discuss this topic on the Roundtable, our guests include CNET's Stephen Shankland. Shankland is author of the Deep Tech blog on CNET News, and covers technology now from London. He recently wrote about this very subject. See HTML vs. Flash: Can a turf war be avoided? And from the New York office of Gizmodo, John Herrman, who recently wrote a great story, Why HTML 5 Isn't going to save the Internet.

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Divvyshot, a photo-sharing start-up I first heard about last March, has opened to the public. It's a clever and attractive site for photo sharing, with an emphasis on group events. It also has the world's cutest sharing feature for iPhone users.

The site succeeds as a photo sharing service. It's easy to use and very, very clean. Firefox users also get the benefit of HTML 5 support: you can just drag photos onto the Web site to upload them. There's no need for an uploader app, although one is available for other browsers. A new Flickr link button also lets you create albums from images you have on that service.

With Divvyshot you can drag files straight into an HTML 5 browser, like Firefox 3.6

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Albums are wide open by default. Not only can anyone with an album's URL see pictures, they can upload to the album too. You can restrict viewing and sharing (separately) to just invited friends if you like. People with access to albums can also easily download images from them, as Divvyshot creates ZIP file archives on request. Other photo sites also have versions of group albums, but I haven't seen any as simple to understand and use as Divvyshare.

The slideshow viewer is mercifully clean and simple.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The iPhone app gives you access to your images, like apps for other services. Its cute bonus is the sharing feature: you can transfer your photos to another Divvyshot iPhone user by holding both phones in one hand and shaking them together. It's a gimmick, and the whole thing is hung up a bit since both phones have to be running the app and set up for sharing, which ruins the spontaneity. But it's a good party trick.

Divvyshare is no Flickr, Picasa Web, or Zooomr. It's light on the features. But it succeeds as a simple site for sharing albums with family or friends, and especially for creating shared repositories for images from events that several people attend and photograph, like weddings, concerts, or parties.