Webware

If you have a MySpace or Facebook account, you know how hard it is to ignore friend requests. And in no time, you end up with a long list of buddies that contains mostly people you've never met or even talked to before. The definition for "friend" has never been more blurred.

In reaction to this and to bring back the true meaning of buddy-ship, on Monday, Clubbyclub announced its new social network to provide a private and safe place for friend groups, like student clubs, schoolmates, and sport teams.

This means random surfers can't find out about members or groups on this Web site. Only members of a private group can visit their online place. Clubbyclub states that its Web site is built for fun and with the assurance that "your ex, boss, or mother-in-law will not be sneaking around your pictures and other materials".

At Clubbyclub, you are supposed to connect only to your real friends. The Web site owner goes even further, stating, "Your cousin, your classmate from 2nd grade, or your colleague are usually not your real friends." Basically, Clubbyclub is a lively place to communicate with your actual friends without using e-mail.

This also means, however, that if you don't mind using e-mail, it might not be necessary to join the club at all. Personally, I believe if you have something that you don't want people to sneak around and found out about, it's best not to put it on the Internet at all.

The U.S. presidential race is in full swing, and as usual it has captured the attention of the news media. But where can you go to dig deeper than the headlines? Obviously there are a million news resources, like CBSNews.com, where you can go to find news stories, but the Web offers more specialized Web sites that can give you even more insight.

Some give you predictions, so you can see who's ahead, others give you facts and figures, so you can check who's doing what, especially regarding money. Still others dig into the beliefs and histories of the candidates so you can gain insight into how they think.

Watch the video version of this tip.

Predictions

I just discovered fivethirtyeight.com. The number spelled out in the URL refers to the number of voting members in the U.S. electoral college, the 18th-century institution that actually elects the president. The site is run by a couple of admitted Chicago Democrats who endeavor to provide an impartial look at the surveys being done across the country.

By weighting the history of the poll along with some other statistical analysis, the pair provides projections on how each candidate is doing in the different states and how many electoral votes they seem to have at the moment.

Another great prediction Web site is one you can take part in and make money from. The Iowa Electronic Markets allow anyone to buy futures in an event, in this case the election of the president.

This is done for research purposes. There are a few different ways you can participate, but one way is through vote shares. You buy shares in a candidate and are paid off based on the election results. The better your candidate does the more money you make. The idea is that the candidate more likely to win will tend to maintain a higher market value. Experience has shown the predictive market to be pretty good at predicting results, so it's worth paying attention to, even if you don't actively participate.

Facts and figures

OpenSecrets.org is dedicated to educating the public about campaign finance. You can read up on lobbyists, check to see how the fund-raising is going for the candidates, and even look up who gave how much money to whom in your local ZIP code. Followthemoney.org is another resource for funding info.

Of course, all this research is more fun on a map. Politcal Base provides a Google Map where you can browse around the country and see which regions are supporting which candidates.

But once you have the money, next come the lies.

FactCheck.org keeps track of statements from campaign speeches and ads, and ascertains just how truthful they are. Politifact.com has an Attack File that pays attention to attacks on candidates and how true they are.

How the candidates think

Project Vote Smart attempts to arm voters with a "self-defense manual," which provides the facts about every candidate.

The League of Women Voters provides similar candidate information, as well as more practical stuff like polling places and dates, all of which is available at vote411.org.

And Glassbooth.org is one of many Web sites that asks your opinions on the issues and then shows you how they compare to the candidates' views.

I know those are a lot of Web sites to slog through, but hey, nobody said Democracy was easy. In any case, you can now be the most educated voter on your block. Use your vote wisely. But DO vote.

Facebook's EZcode.

(Credit: ScanLife)

Scanbuy announced on Wednesday their free Scanlife barcode reader for iPhone called ScanLife. The software allows for scanning an EZcode using the iPhone's camera then instantaneously executing an individual action that the code is associated to, such as launching a Web site without you having to remember its URL and typing it on the phone's browser.

ScanLife saves you from having to remember and type in the URL for a web page.

(Credit: ScanLife)

I tried ScanLife on my new iPhone 3G to launch a few Web sites, and it worked very well most of the time, even when the code is not on the center of the photo. A few times when the photo was blurry or underexposed, I had to take it again.

The software only works with EZcodes, which you can create your own for free after a quick registration. You can even create an EZcode for a specific Web page, for example, to send users directly to an iTunes page to preview and purchase a specific song or to watch a particular video on YouTube.

ScanLife is available for other smartphones, too. You can get it by texting the word "SCAN" to 43588 to receive the download instructions or go to www.getscanlife.com on your mobile browser. ScanLife supports hundreds of other camera cell phones running major mobile operating systems including BREW, Java, Symbian, Palm, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile.

This seems a fun and convenient way to access and process information from your phones, especially when the implementation of EZCodes becomes popular.

There's a catch, though: your memory will atrophy, and soon enough you won't be able to do anything without your phone. This has already happened to me.

Google Trends, a service Google started two years ago to track searched-for keywords, has unveiled a new tool for inquiring minds looking to find out more on any given site. Like tracking services Compete and Alexa which use tool bars to grab user data, Google Trends now lets you pop in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site (or .tv, .biz, .net, and so on) using nothing more than organic user searches.

Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and related sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session. All of this information is color coded, and up to five sites at a time can be pitted head-to-head, with bar graphs and charts for each.

The service marks a notable openness for Google, which is privy to keeping its data locked up tight. It also appears to not tap into the data dug up by its own site reporting tool Google Analytics, which is used in many sites across the Web. As Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineLand notes, it's also a great way to figure out related keywords and searches from people visiting your site, and those of your competitors--which is more than you get from Google's own AdWord choosing tools. I regularly bother my colleague Rafe Needleman to help me dig up similar sites to something I'm writing about, but with this tool I'll be able to use the wisdom of the crowd to do it for me.

One of the more interesting uses for this is comparing sites with traffic that surges around product releases. In the screenshot below are sites that cover Apple. Despite the minor differences, you can clearly see huge surges at various points in the year. In practice, you can cross-reference this with product keywords (still using Google Trends) and the data magically lines up.

Comparing these Apple-centric sites to one another on Google Trends can prove useful. In this case we see huge surges during product announcements. With Google Trends you could compare this site data to keyword searches too.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

MoFuse, a mobile Web site-creation service, has removed even more steps when converting a .com Web site into a .mobi site, which is optimized for viewing from a cell phone, smartphone, or any other Internet-lovin' device.

With MoFuse Grow beta, individual and business bloggers can simply feed their site's RSS link into the blank field to generate a MoFuse URL with a .mobi suffix. New users looking for a more articulate link are enticed to join the service, which has both free and affordable options (compared here with Zinadoo's similar offering.)

Images render nicely with MoFuse Grow.

The MoFuse Grow interface carries a lush pastoral theme, and stays true to its word with a straightforward field for pasting a copied RSS link. Another link ushers bloggers to a partially-emulated view of a stripped-down mobile site that, in turn, takes you to a full emulator with navigation and appropriately rendered images. Back on MoFuse Grow's landing page, there's a prominent area that market's MoFuse services and gives users the option to register so they can customize and style the newly-created mobile blog site, or buy into additional services, like choosing a catchier domain name.

MoFuse Grow is essentially a supremely accessible, one-click Web app for drawing users in and promoting MoFuse.com's more powerful and more involving WYSIWYG interface for customizing a blog's mobile look. The tool is a gift for those who want a no-fuss, no-muss way to get at their blogs from the small screen. Those who plan to share their URL around, however, are best served by Mofuse.com's full visual design process and by shedding the clumsy, free .mobi URL. For them, MoFuse Grow produces the bud, but by no means the blossom.

LinkScanner Lite warns against a hidden IFrame launcher in Megaupload.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Those of you who haven't yet installed a link scanning or Web site rating program for your Firefox or IE-based browser should hop to it--and consider using LinkScanner Lite when you do.

I've been using LinkScanner Lite and McAfee Site Adviser on both Firefox and IE browsers. Overkill? No way. Each program serves the greater goal of alerting you to dangerous links but differ in their approaches.... Read more

Zinadoo promises to create a home for you on the Web; a site of your own devising that will be accessible to your friends and jealous frenemies from any device. I'd yawn if not for the fact that Zinadoo, like so many other Webutainment or social networking sites, offers an engaging activity with good usability that really delivers.

Zinadoo.com's WYSIWYG authoring interface

Register a site name and it's smooth sailing to a four-part WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) site creator that's built with Adobe Flash Player. File controls that add another Web page, upload an image, and so on live on the left sidebar. It's also one point for publishing. You type your Web content directly into a large rectangular authoring field, and play with text formatting and hyperlinks from the nearby options menu. Click a button to preview the fledgling site on an emulator, and another to generate your site's URL (here's mine.)

Editing is as easy as logging in and typing over what you wrote, then republishing. The hardest part of the process is supplying the content.

Then you name your site, give it a description and tags, and start sharing by way of e-mail, text message, or publishing to MySpace.... Read more

MySpace.com may be great to keep in touch with your friends. But when it comes to family, one may want a site that is more secure and a little less slimy. A closed-networking site, Famster, which came out of public beta last month, hopes to become your family's virtual home on the Internet. Although there are a vast number of things to highlight on the site, the five following features are the cream of the crop:

1. Photo and video uploads: What would a family site be without a visual media exchange? On Famster, you can upload an unlimited number of photos with no size constraint. That is a nice change from the photo sites with strict parameters. Users are also allowed 1GB of encoded video space, and 1GB of space in the file cabinet for documents and the like.

2. Recipe book: Most social networking sites integrate blogs (Famster included), but this site also has a recipe book. If your family is anything like mine, food and authentic recipes are a big deal. With the Famster recipe book, you can share recipes and add to the already populated database.

3. Building a virtual home: One of the fun parts of playing with Famster was making my own avatar and the virtual home for the family. The avatar customization tools are detailed, and the themes for the online house are diverse, from holiday settings to artsy photographs to the traditional brick-and-mortar abode.

4. Instant messaging: This feature was just added this week and is expected to be a parental favorite. The administrator of the account can monitor additions of friends, activate chat logging and review chat logs. Famster chat aims to provide a safe place for young family members to chat with cousins or other friends in different Famster networks.

5. Family tree and calendar: The Famster virtual family tree is a sweet way to preserve your ties to the past and get the whole family involved. Another way is by using the shared calendar. Administrators and members can add notes to dates on the calendar, which could be useful for announcing events like weddings or birthday parties.

For the aforementioned reasons, Famster has a lot of promise to become a popular family networking site. Safety seems to be its chief concern, which may help and harm the site's success. The fact that it offers a sex offender look-up may be helpful, but that feature also adds a touch of stark reality to this fun family site. In any case, if you have family all over the place, Famster may be the way to reconnect with loved ones and get on the same page.