Web Crawler

(Credit: Mozilla)

It's been just under four months since Mozilla launched its pilot program for contributions, a way for users to donate to add-on developers for their time and effort.

The program was launched in tandem with a redesign of Mozilla's add-ons site that gave developers their own profile pages. Many add-on makers were already running donation programs through their own sites, but wanted the option to show up in Mozilla's catalog too.

Already it appears to be working, but on a smaller scale than some developers might have hoped. For the half dozen developers that CNET News talked to, none has made enough from it to, say, quit their day job. While Mozilla would not reveal specifics on which developers are getting the most contributions, it did provide us with the total amount given: around $20,000. An organization spokesperson said that most of that came in September and October.

Of the 500 or so developers who are participating in the program, the average contribution falls somewhere between $5 and $6, with the largest thus far being $150. All have gone through PayPal, which is the sole way to pay through Mozilla's add-on site. PayPal then gets a small fee out of each transaction, something that comes out of the developer's pocket, although this varies based on how much the user gives.

Other ways to make money

Some developers believe Mozilla has gone about the payment problem in reverse. With the current contributions program developers are given the chance to ask for money before the user even downloads the free add-on. So why not give them a way to ask for a contribution after a user has downloaded and installed it?... Read more

Facebook's "like" feature has been around since February, but the massive social network never provided users with a way to quickly voice their opinions going the other way. French developer Thomas Moquet took matters into his own hands by creating a cute (albeit useless) Firefox extension that adds a dislike button to Facebook, letting users who have it installed mark things they don't like.

In order to make the tool work, Moquet had to use his own servers, which keep track of every item that's disliked as well as who clicked it. Any other Facebook users who have the extension installed can then see who disliked it right next to the usual like list.

Feeling grumpy? Add a "dislike" button to Facebook.

(Credit: CNET)

There are a few very clear downsides to this system, one being that if the dislike servers ever go down, you won't be able to see what you or others have marked as not liking. It also cannot be seen by other users who don't have the extension installed. Nonetheless, it fits in quite well with the rest of the Facebook interface, peacefully coexisting alongside the likes while adding a bit of snark.

It's worth noting Facebook's exclusion of a dislike button was under the pretense that likes were added as a quick way to replace simple one-word comments. By adding a like button the hope was both to better surface content in its news feeds, as well as cut down on throwaway comments like "this is great!" or "cool."

Facebook dislike is an experimental add-on, meaning you'll have to grab it from Mozilla's add-ons site. See also the competing Facebook Dislike Button add-on, which goes one step further and will actually send the person who's news item it is a Facebook note saying that you didn't like what they posted. Ouch.

Got an older iPhone or iPod touch model and been jealous of the Voice Control feature your antiquated hardware is incapable of running? Check out Vocalia (link opens in iTunes), a voice-powered launcher that's quite fast, and accurate. Just like Voice Control, it can look up a contact by name then launch a phone call, or do the same for a song from your iPod's library. It also goes a step further to let you launch your Safari bookmarks simply by speaking their name.

Vocalia lets you speak your contacts, songs, and even Web bookmarks to launch them.

(Credit: CNET)

Vocalia doesn't run at a system level like Voice Control does, but it's up and ready to receive a voice command in under 10 seconds--the clear benefit here being for people who may be driving and who want to control their device without fumbling through menus. It's also a bit more customizable since you can go in and add nicknames for people you want to call, edit the phonetic spelling it's given them by default, and change the spoken language to one of the five other options including German, Spanish, and French.

As far as setup goes, Vocalia is able to slurp in your contacts and iPod library as soon as you launch it for the first time. The bookmarks on the other hand, are a little more complicated. The app can't grab them from your device due to a limitation in Apple's SDK, which means you have to download and launch a small executable file from Vocalia's site that can send your Bookmarks.html file to the iPhone/iPod. The two devices also have to be on the same Wi-Fi network.

Frankly, I don't think all that effort is worth it for syncing up your bookmarks; especially considering that you'll need to do that entire process over again if you've added new ones. In most cases it's also going to be faster just to launch Safari and find the bookmark yourself. Maybe a future version could make the whole thing a little simpler by tapping into an existing bookmark sharing service like Xmarks, or Delicious.

Vocalia is $3.99 in the App Store and works on both the iPhone and the 2G iPod Touch. As mentioned before, you'll have to have a Mac or PC on the same Wi-Fi network as your device to make use of its bookmarks feature.

See also: Midomi music search gets funding and opportunities

We've covered a number of Web history tracking and organizing tools in the past, but Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.

Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right to the page.

Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.

(Credit: CNET)

Like some other Web history trackers, Wikipedia Diver intelligently tracks when you hit the back button on your browser. Each time you leave whatever Wikipedia entry you're on to visit a link that's on that page, it simply attaches it to your history. In one entry I was looking at, I had clicked on seven different links that were on that page, and the extension kept track of how I had arrived at each of those pages. That in itself can be fun to look at--e.g. how I got from the Zoopraxiscope to the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen.

One thing it does not track are the reference links you click when exiting the site to view a source. I'd like to see this added as an option, but understandably that takes it into the realm of watching everything you do.

Also worth a mention is that all of this data is kept safe and secure on your local machine, and never sent to the cloud. Like any other extension that does this, this means that your information isn't being beamed elsewhere, although you can only access your history on that particular machine, and in that particular browser.

If you're a frequent Google Reader user, you know full well that user comments on blog posts do not come along for the ride. On some blog feeds, it can tell you how many user comments there are, but on others, you typically have to visit the post to know.

A new solution called GReactions has attempted to fix this by slurping up comments from around the Web that are related to the post you're looking at. When it works, it's a seamless experience.

The Firefox extension is powered by Context Voice, which does the dirty work. This service tracks related conversation in places like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, WordPress blogs, and FriendFeed. It then clumps together those bits of conversation it picks up, and orders them chronologically.

To help sort through this mess, the tool lets you filter by source. You're also given a time line, which breaks down when each comment or mention is from.

GReactions sucks in comments from a variety of sources. Here it's grabbing them from Twitter, WordPress and FriendFeed.

(Credit: CNET)

In my brief testing with it installed, it was most useful with older content that had been given a chance to be passed around the Web. Newer items, especially from niche blogs, had no related discussion.

For heavy Google Reader users, this is an extension that's definitely worth installing. It doesn't actually do any of its magic until you hit the "comments" button that's added to the Google Reader interface when installed. This means it's not going to slow down the initial load of your feed, or interfere with things like Gears.

Google continues to run its own internetwork comment system on top of blog posts, which can only be seen by other Google Reader users. So short of visiting each site to see what other users are talking about, this is the next best way to quickly eyeball user discussion.

RSS is great technology, but one of its shortcomings is that it doesn't always represent all of a site's content stream. Many times there are parts of a news or content site that change either through an editorial hand, or with items chosen by users. A new Firefox add-on called AlertBox helps track these "scraps" of content, and can be used to keep an eye out for any changes. This includes things like price changes, edits or updates to a news story, and the top stories on content sites.

To make sure it's not looking for activity on an entire Web page, AlertBox is designed to let you grab bits and pieces of any site--not the entire thing. Once installed, you can summon it by clicking the little bell shape in the bottom corner of the browser, or using a keyboard combination. It then pops up with a selection screen that, similar to Apple's Web clips widget, lets you pick what part of the page you want it to track. You can then choose how often you want it to check for future changes in increments of two minutes, up to one day.

The AlertBox in-box lets you keep track of all your alerts, and delete ones you no longer use.

(Credit: CNET)

AlertBox's way of tracking new content is an in-box-style counter down in the bottom of your browser. When clicked, it takes you to a page of Web clippings that are constantly updated with whatever the latest text is of the page elements you had selected. To be honest, this part of the add-on could use a little work, as it's just a text rip that loses all of the formatting on the page. And all of these alerts are housed not in the cloud, but on your local machine, which has two big downsides: One is that you need to have Firefox going at all times for it to alert you. The other is that you can only access those alerts on that particular machine.

Faults aside, I really like the idea of creating a simple in-box of changing content that does not rely on RSS. I think this, with a little bit of archiving to let you track changes in content throughout the day (like Web archiving service Iterasi does), would make for a very useful alternative to widget start pages and feed readers.

AlertBox lets you choose particular sections of a site to keep an eye on for updates.

(Credit: CNET)

Here's a must-have Firefox add-on. Called Multi Links, this extension lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It's just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You're also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links--just in case you're into that sort of thing.

Want to open up multiple URLs? Just drag your mouse over them with this handy extension.

(Credit: CNET)

Advanced users can utilize keyboard shortcuts to limit mouse work. For instance, holding down the control or shift button while creating a box means you can hop around a page of results--selecting the items you want to open or save, while skipping over others. The extension is also coded to ignore extra links on search pages, which keeps you from unintentionally opening up the cached and similar links on each result. This worked fine on Google and Bing, but not on Yahoo or Ask.

This extension is definitely worth keeping around because it does not interfere with normal, right-click behavior. My one hope is that future versions will forgo the options menu in place of a small pop-up, or slide-out menu that asks what you want to do with links after selecting them.

See also: Snap Links (which does the same thing, but has not been updated since February) and Selection Links.

If you're the type of person who uses a lot of search engines and doesn't mind having a toolbar installed, you might want to check out Firefox Super Search. This Firefox-only add-on puts the power of 160 search engines in one toolbar, with about 70 that can be searched right from the toolbar itself.

If you're used to Firefox's built-in search box, this is a pretty big step up both from selecting one engine at a time and having to add additional engine tools from Mozilla's catalog. It's also laid out in a really straightforward manner, putting search engines with which you can search (from within the toolbar) in drop-down menus on the right side of the query box. There's also a directory of the other 90 or so engines that require a visit before beginning a new search.

Super Search is set up to let you search from nearly 70 search engines right from the blue options on the right of the search box. And the green button on the left is a directory of ones where you have to begin the search from that particular site. (Note, this screenshot has been edited to show off all of the toolbar's features at once).

(Credit: CNET)

My only qualm is that you cannot reorganize the order of the engines or make a shortlist of your favorites. It's also missing out on modern search box niceties like auto-complete and search-as-you-type suggestions--two things that require the search box to know which engine you're searching with first. On the plus side, though, the curation and organization of the engines is spot-on.

Note: This add-on is experimental, which means that it may not work perfectly in your browser. We used Super Search on Firefox version 3.5.1 without issues.

Last week Google released a Web app version of Latitude, its geolocation-based social tracking service. At Apple's request, Google made it a Web app instead of a native app that required installation. This isn't an entirely bad thing as I found out after extended use this weekend. There's a lot to like, and some that's not so great. Here's the breakdown:

The good:
• Simple service to use. If you've got it set to automatically refresh your location you just have to fire it up from a bookmark, or home screen shortcut and you're done.
• You can keep it running in a browser tab while you're doing things in other tabs. It's almost like running multiple applications at once!
• Works in both portrait and landscape modes. And what's impressive about landscape mode, is that you can still drag your finger around the map without scrolling the rest of the page.
• Really granular control over who can see where you are and what you're doing. Right down to a per-friend level.
• Turn-by-turn driving directions in your browser.

The bad:
• Safari-only, which means no push notifications, full-screen user interface, or special sounds.
• Missing some of Google Maps' bells and whistles including things like public transportation and walking directions. And no Street View of course.
• Slightly sluggish performance when compared to the Google Maps app. Filling out forms, and response when clicking on a button can be a bit delayed. Might just be our old, chugging iPhone 3G though.

The video: