Webware

Browser side-bar chat and friend app extraordinare Me.dium has just released a new version this afternoon. I met up with founder David Mandell at last week's Web 2.0 Expo to chat about the new functionality, which he says is a very early version of Me.dium's next big thing. This big thing is actually a small change--your friends and their presence in the app, which is now taking the focus.

(Credit: Me.dium.com)

Previously Me.dium's claim to fame was meeting random people at sites you visited. Now it's all about your friends and improving the ways you can interact with them. Mandell compared his app with world travel, and that coming to a new city with people you don't know isn't nearly as fun as interacting with those you know and trust.

The functionality in question is the outright removal of the "everyone" tab, which would let you see the entire world of activity for other Me.dium users, and limit it to just your friends. Mandell says the tab will be added later on down the line, but he wants people to start focusing on their friends list, and expanding the ways you'll be able to interact with them in real time or asynchronously.

Part of that expansion uses the Facebook API to let you share links. If you find something you're interested in you can simply drag it over to your list of Facebook friends and it will set up a Facebook share for them right away. When they get it, it's the entire piece of content with a small note that says you shared it via Me.dium, but doesn't require your recipient to sign up read what you've sent their way.

Maybe a more important new feature is the similar pages button that will pop up with a list of sites related to the one you're looking at. In my testing it didn't do a whole lot of good, like when it likened Webware to CNN.com, but the concept is insanely great if it lets you discover new sites in a similar fashion to that of StumbleUpon.

Also on the list of things that are new is a skinning tool that lets you retheme the side bar. Mandell says they'll be opening up a way for people to design their own themes, as well as provide a place to parse through them and track what's hot. Users of Twhirl and other AIR-based communication apps will feel right at home.

As I told Mandell last week, I'm not too keen on apps that take over a big chunk of your browser. With that said I think anyone who's used to the Flock browser will be the happiest to adopt since so much of the browser's social features hang out in the same general area.

Here's a quick way to make sure you never need to open your Google Calendar in a tab again: Open it in your Firefox sidebar instead. Discovered at Firefox Facts, it adapts some code from iGoogle and streamlines it down to just the calendar. This is a great hack if you can't or won't use the Google Desktop Sidebar.

Log in to your Google account first, and then load up this Google Calendar link in a regular tab.

... Read more

Amnesty Hypercube is a small application for Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X that will help you pull bits of Web content to use as widgets. These widgets can be brought up or dismissed ad hoc, or added to your desktop as a permanent fixture. Besides its cool name (second only to flux capacitor), the service is not so different from many existing widget platforms, like Yahoo Widgets, OS X's Dashboard, or the Windows Vista sidebar. Yet the company is taking a slightly different approach, one a little closer to Yourminis, which uses Adobe Integrated Runtime to run widgets on your desktop.

The application has a built-in directory of widget sites, which acts as a mini-Web browser to take you to places such as Finetune, last.fm, and eBay's eBay To Go widget maker. Once you've found embed code on a site's original page, copying the code to your clipboard will automatically turn it into a desktop widget. Of course, you could accomplish something similar using Mesa Dynamics' other tool--Amnesty Generator, which will convert all sorts of Web widget code into widget-friendly code for other platforms.

One nice feature on the Mac and Vista version is that you can "push" a Hypercube widget to OS X's dashboard or the Vista sidebar with two clicks. Also neat is its multiwidget desktop functionality (hence the cube name), which lets you organize your widgets on several virtual desktops. You can add more widgets and switch between them from the drop-down menu that installs itself on your system toolbar. It's a little bit like the upcoming Spaces feature in OS X Leopard, but not nearly as flashy.

The only real snag I ran into using the application was surfing through the widget directory. Since it's a miniaturized browser, pages are often cropped below their native size, unless you are using a wide-screen display or are running your computer at a high resolution. This means there's a lot more scrolling both up and down, as well as side to side, if you're on a laptop or small screen. I'd also like to see the service add a right-click contextual menu to let you create a widget from any embed code you run into while browsing on your regular browser. Currently, you have to copy and paste code into a preferences box on the application.

Mesa Dynamics is planning to add a few more features to the beta release, including sharable cubes (similar to the publicly shared page directories on single-page aggregators), cube customizations such as backgrounds and color schemes, and a tool to push a widget collection to Apple's iPhone.

Grab widgets from all over the Web and put them on your desktop. If you're a Mac or Vista user, you can also push widgets to Dashboard or the sidebar to use the native widget tools.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There are a lot of widgets out there. So many, in fact, that sorting through them can be absolutely daunting. Joining the fray of sites that attempt to solve this problem is Widgipedia, a site that catalogs and hosts widgets, both Web-based and downloads. We've covered competitor Widgetbox several times, and the two sites are quite similar. Where Widgipedia differs is in mixing up widgets that run on different platforms: those that run right in your browser and ones you download for various engines such as Mac OS X's Dashboard and Yahoo Widgets. The result is a diverse listing that's fun to explore and play around with.

To sort through all the entries, Widgipedia employs tags instead of categories. This ends up working out pretty well for searching, as long as widgets have been tagged correctly. I still prefer Widgetbox's organization structure with its tags and nine comprehensive categories, which is a little more user friendly. As the site grows, there definitely needs to be some categorization.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For budding widget designers, there's a dedicated section of widget-creation resources complete with step-by-step how-tos and links to helpful walk-throughs. All the information is relegated to the forums, but there's plenty in there to get a newbie going.

Widgipedia is a great place to browse for new widgets. The site is fairly young, but it already has a pretty diverse collection of neat widgets. If you're a widget developer looking to keep track of what's happening to your widgets, you're likely better off using Widgetbox for its metrics service. If you're just looking to spice up your social-networking profile or desktop widget collection, Widgipedia is definitely worth bookmarking.

This post has been updated from the original. Added: Hands-on video with Amnesty Generator.

For those early adopters out there with Windows Vista, you might be struggling to get some widgets from the Web onto your flashy, new sidebar. To help you out is Amnesty Generator, a small and free app that converts nearly every type of online widget into the 'gadget format' that's compatible with Vista's new desktop toolbar. Using the program requires no coding experience; it's as simple as pasting in the embedding code, and the program does the rest.

Amnesty generator works with Google homepage widgets, as well as simple embeddable objects such as YouTube videos. For Mac users, there's also a version that does the same conversion for Tiger's Dashboard.

[found on Google Code Blog]