Webware

CopyTaste is a new service that lets you very quickly post text, photos, and videos to an anonymously hosted page. Think of it like blogging, but without a destination page, or any breadcrumbs that lead back to your identity.

The service features a WYSIWYG text editor, along with the option to insert videos and pictures into your post, the latter of which can be hosted on CopyTaste's servers. Heavy users can install a Firefox extension that lets you rip down the content from any page you're on and squirrel it away for viewing and sharing later on.

What makes CopyTaste really interesting is that you can in fact associate one or more of your posts with an existing profile. In this case it's your OpenID profile, where any posts you've made will be listed. You can also go and look at what other people have shared, which puts it in line with services like ClipMarks, Jeteye, Diigo, and others.

Still in need of some work are the social features though. You can see other users' CopyTaste posts if they'd made them public, but there's no way to follow that user or get in touch with them.

CopyTaste gives you a registration-free means of publishing blog posts or dumping text for sharing elsewhere.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Social bookmarking site Magnolia, which suffered an extensive data loss last week, has posted a new update that says attempts at restoring user data have been unsuccessful. The site continues to be offline while repairs are made--a process Magnolia founder Larry Haff tells us is still ongoing.

Since last week he's been in touch with a handful of other services that might be able to do something with the data that's left. One of those places is Diigo, where Haff is encouraging users to begin a "new collection."

Haff is also pointing users toward tools that, for some, will let them grab a portion of their bookmarks for safe keeping. Magnolia users who are also using FriendFeed can pull in previously bookmarked pages using an officially sanctioned tool that crawls that RSS feed and spits out a stream of bookmarks. However, the tool does not pull in tags or descriptions that were created by users. It also will only go so far back as to when the user had signed up with FriendFeed, a service which is a little over a year old.

A second option that's not nearly as automated as the FriendFeed tool, but can go back further is Web caching. User pages that were picked up by Google and Archive.org can let users view their bookmarks pages and copy over links they had saved. These caches have the added benefit of the tags and descriptions--the two things the FriendFeed tool can't grab. Missing, however, is the option to take the cache and turn it into a quick RSS feed, which would make it simpler to import into another service.

Another side effect of the outage is that paying premium members of the service are being refunded their money in the next two weeks. The two levels of premium membership, which cost $8 and $25 a year respectively, removed ads from Magnolia's bookmark pages and groups. Assuming the site comes back if the data is eventually restored, users might be able to sign up for the service yet again.

Just a little more than a week ago Google announced it would no longer be developing Google Notebook, its free collaborative notes and bookmarks service. While this doesn't mean the service is closing its doors--and more importantly, not allowing people to create and work on new notebooks--most folks will want to move to something that's (hopefully) going to have bugs fixed and a person to talk to when things go wrong.

On Friday we put together a short list of possible alternatives, and now several of those have come up with import tools that will grab whatever you had put together in Google Notebook so you can continue to work on it.

The latest service to come up with an importer is Zoho Notebook. Late last night the company rolled out a new version of its Zoho Notebook plug-in that lets you slurp up all your Google Notebook entries with one button. To go along with this there's also a new option in Zoho Notebook called "text pages" that attempts to emulate the drag-and-drop text list ordering found in Google Notebook. For now the tool is Firefox-only, and cannot display anything besides text clippings when viewing your notebooks from the its small pop-up window.

Ubernote's co-founder Joshua Ho pinged me to let me know that he and his team had a 24-hour coding "marathon" to put together a Google Notebook importer. After working out some kinks with duplicate tags and some stray parsing errors the tool looks up to snuff.

The good news about Ubernote's iteration is that you don't need to install a browser plug-in like Zoho is requiring. The bad news is that you have to go into Google Notebook to export each notebook individually, then re-upload the files to Ubernote one at a time. If you have a ton of Google Notebooks this might be a royal pain in the you know what.

If you want to offload Google Notebooks to your local machine there's always the HTML option.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Coming really soon:

Diigo, which I did not originally include in the Google Notebook alternatives post, but offers many things that Google Notebookers might find attractive, is also working on an importer. It's not out yet, but should be soon.

Likewise, Evernote is hard at work on an import tool of its own. I'm told it will be ready on Thursday. In the meantime, if you have a healthy knowledge of coding language Python, Livejournal user rainyrhy has put together this script which will take exported Google notebook pages and convert them into .enex files which Evernote can then import. This probably isn't the best option for most folks, and will chop up any pictures you might have saved on the service.

I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.

But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more time on multiple services isn't nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services, right?

Social bookmarking keeper: Delicious

Social bookmarking services are extremely handy when you want to remember a site at a later time, but that doesn't mean they're all created equal. In fact, Delicious, the leader in the space, easily sets itself apart from competitors like Ma.gnolia, Diigo, and ZigTag by boasting a better interface, more users, and better tagging, which makes it easier to find and share bookmarks.

Although Diigo's highlighting options are useful, ZigTag's semantic technology tries to improve bookmarking, and Ma.gnolia aims at providing a more thorough solution, none compare to Delicious. Yahoo's social-bookmarking service now features a streamlined search function, which makes finding bookmarks simple, and its new design makes it the most intuitive social-bookmarking service on the Web. But Delicious' most useful offering--its Firefox add-on--has nothing to do with the site at all. By installing the Delicious add-on, users can tag pages on-the-fly without being forced to visit the Delicious homepage. Granted, its competitors have Firefox add-ons as well, but after using each, it quickly becomes clear that they simply don't work as well as the Delicious tool.

Taking all that into account, I simply don't know why it's worth using another service besides Delicious. It's a superior tool with more convenient options, offering the same basic functionality as its competitors. It's the cream of the social-bookmarking crop.

Micro-blogging keeper: Twitter

I'll be the first to admit that I complain about Twitter as much as the next person, but after using competing services like Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Plurk, it's not hard to figure out that it's the only worthwhile micro-blogging tool.

Granted, Twitter still doesn't offer groups and I wish it had an element of open source like Identi.ca, but the sheer number of users who comment each day on Twitter makes it the best choice for your social-networking portfolio. If you want to be a part of a community that's both lively and engaging, you won't find it anywhere else but on Twitter. And now that it's more reliable and the Fail Whale is an occasional annoyance instead of a daily occurrence, Twitter has become an even more compelling service.

As the best place to find friends, colleagues, and thought-leaders in any industry, Twitter is the obvious choice as the only micro-blogging service that should be found in your social network portfolio.

News Aggregation keeper: Reddit

Trying to find the ideal news aggregator on the Web can be difficult. Depending on your definition, there's conceivably hundreds of services that package the best stories into one page. But it's the "social" news aggregation services, like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon that lead the pack. And although Digg is the most popular service in that grouping, I'm a firm believer that Reddit deserves to stay in your portfolio as your chosen news aggregation service.

Normally, I would pick the social site that offers the largest and most engaged community. But when it comes to news aggregation sites, Digg simply doesn't cut it. Sure, it's the biggest and arguably the most important to content sites, but that alone doesn't make it the best. Instead, I find Reddit's site design, while simple and ugly to some, incredibly useful and designed to help users find the best stories as quickly as possible without gaudy extras. But the most important differentiating factor working to Reddit's advantage is its community. It might be smaller than Digg's, but generally, the comments on each story are more edifying and lack the invective that has become a staple for Kevin Rose's brainchild.

Reddit may not be the biggest, its site design may be odd, and its community not as rabid, but in terms of providing interesting stories on a slew of topics without as much "gaming," it leads the pack and deserves to be in your social network portfolio.

Social Network keeper: Facebook

Choosing the single social network to use while ditching the rest isn't easy, since most of us have friends scattered across Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace. But it's because of those few friends still clinging to the past that we hold on to all those social networks. Enough is enough. It's time to rebuff the rest and stick to Facebook.

Why choose Facebook when MySpace is still the world's most popular social network? It's simple: Facebook doesn't have the awful design found on MySpace profile pages, offers a huge, engaged community, and most importantly, it's growing at a rapid rate, which means all those friends who still hang out at Friendster, LiveJournal, or even MySpace are starting to make their way to Facebook.

MySpace still provides value and Hi5 could be a significant competitor in just a few short years, but for now, Facebook, with its addicting features, applications, and growing community, should find its way to your portfolio as you leave the others out.

Video site keeper: YouTube

Maybe YouTube is the safe choice for the only social video site you should keep in your network portfolio, but I simply don't see how anyone can choose anything else. Vimeo is nice, but much of its content is barely watchable and while Metacafe is still an interesting site worth visiting, it doesn't provide the professional content that YouTube does.

And it's that professional content that I find most valuable when it comes to YouTube. Sometimes, I want to find a music video that isn't available elsewhere and YouTube will have it. And when I'm feeling nostalgic and I want to watch an old clip from The Wonder Years, it's sitting on YouTube waiting for me. As a bonus, some of the user-generated content is pretty good too, though most of it is strange.

I know that anyone can make a case for why practically any user-generated video site on the Web should be the exclusive service in your portfolio, but when it comes to finding the obscure, professional, or just plain weird, YouTube is the only place to go. All the others are practically useless.

Snipd, a Web clippings service we profiled in September, has just opened up to everyone. Its claim to fame is that it lets you clip bits of the Web including text, images, and videos, all without having to download any software or register for an account. The first time you use it via its tiny bookmarklet, it simply creates an account for you, which can be claimed later on.

One of the things that separates it from something like Evernote, is that your snippings can be found in a public directory--at least by default. It fully supports keeping items private, which you can change later on. However, you're encouraged to publicly share things for the social element. Just like FriendFeed people can follow you and track your latest additions in a chronological flow, complete with comments and favorites.

Besides its utility as a social-clipping tool, Snipd lets you mark whatever page you're on for reading later. This emulates some of the versatility of the popular Firefox Extension Read It Later (which updated this morning). However, in Snipd's case, you get e-mailed the entire page.

Snipd co-founder Alex Schliker tells me the amount of adult content Snipd has brought in has been so substantial that he and his partner Emil Gilliam are working on a separate site called Stripd that will house it all and keep it out of Snipd's public feed. This could end up getting the pair more traffic than Snipd, considering no-one has really filled that market niche.

Snipd's real threat still comes from Evernote and FriendFeed. Evernote has a product that lets you clip standard bits of the Web while offering a viable alternative to paid word processing applications. Meanwhile, FriendFeed brings a large team of developers (including ex-Googlers), which results in a rapid release cycle. It also offers a stream of content that flows even when users are not implicitly using it. To get past these two the best thing Snipd can do is offer better tools to make Web clippings that more engaging to make and read.

See also: Yoono, Clipmarks, JetEye, and Diigo

Snipd lets you clip bits and pieces of a site to share the parts you want.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Several of the companies from the TechCrunch50 demo pit are brand-new and have some really neat products to show off. For one reason or another they were not chosen to be among those pitching to the crowd--either out of editorial selection or not being able to meet the day-of-the-conference launch requirement.

Two products I wanted to highlight are of interest because they do some handy things that many other start-ups have attempted with the use of software or browser-specific extensions. In both cases the below products (Snipd and 2pad) manage to do just about the same thing without software. Let's break them down:

Snipd is a very simple text and media grabbing tool that works with nothing more than a bookmarklet. You just drag it up to the top of your browser and a single click gives you the option to copy over text to a bucket, hosted in the cloud.

There are a slew of other companies that let you do this (see Yoono, Evernote, Clipmarks, JetEye, and Diigo), but the fact that this works without software is handy in case you want to get some clipping done while using a borrowed or public computer.

2pad grabs photos and videos floating around the depths of your Web e-mail in-box and various folders. You just plug in your credentials and it spends a few hours culling it together. Like Xoopit, which is currently Gmail-only, you get to view all of this in a really simple file browser. 2pad manages to do this, Windows Live Hotmail, Apple's MobileMe, and AOL mail as well.

The company is planning to make money off of photo prints and printed gift books, which users can create, buy, and order using media it pulls together.

The one weak point is the individual media pages which scale down the image or video to fit your screen with a wide border. This works OK with wide-screen videos, but you'll need to full screen nearly every photo to see it in a reasonable amount of detail. Otherwise, it's very snappy and managed to pull in about 100 photos from my Gmail account in about half an hour.

2Pad grabs photos and videos from your e-mail in-box.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

Postica has to be one of the more single-serving Web apps I've seen in a long time. The service lets you create a slew of tiny sticky notes that can be maneuvered around the confines of your browser with ajaxian flair. They don't hover over pages you're looking at like Diigo or Fleck; instead it's all about your personal note space. Whatever notes you create are saved, and can be accessed from wherever. You can also share them with others, and they can send notes to your workspace, too.

Each note is confined to just 140 characters, the same length as an SMS text message or a note on Twitter. You can also add a single file to each note. I managed to get a few image files that were over 5MB in size, but it choked on the 50MB video file I tried. There's no documentation on what the size limit is, or if you'll run into any sort of cap on total storage so I'd stick to small files like PDFs, pictures, and office docs.

I'm still wary to recommend Postica over something like Shifd, a similar Web-based sticky note service that does a much better job integrating URLs, addresses, and letting you access and sync up your notes on both desktops and mobile phones. The one area where Postica has the leg up is file sharing, but you've got to be patient for each upload to make its way there.

Little post-its made easy, but that's about all you can do with Postica.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This afternoon I've been playing with a real fun annotation tool (at least fun compared with Microsoft Word). It's called A.nnotate, and it's one of the simplest tools I've come across, letting you add small (or very large) notes, corrections, or scribblings that float on top of the document like little widgets.

By default the notes are anchored to where they've been put on the document, but you can simply move them about, or sort them on a one-page listing that will organize them by time or who wrote them.

Power users will get the most use of the small notes. You can re-color them one of 21 shades and give each one tags, either from a preselected list or by making your own. This is one of the simpler ways to organize corrections, things to delete, and additions, so whoever gets the document back can sort out what needs to be done and very easily turn it into a workflow.

In addition to Word docs and PDF files, the service works with entire Web pages. You can plug in any old URL and it will take a snapshot of the page in a similar fashion to Iterasi (review). These same notes will show up on a source list you maintain. Clicking on any of them will take you right to where you left the note on the saved page, which will stay the same even if the source content changes.

The service is free to use--to an extent. Each document you open costs credits. You get 150 free each month, and the standard document costs 5 credits a page. If you want to work on docs with others, and work on several larger, multipage documents, there are premium plans that expand the amount of credits you have at up to 50,000 per month.

Other services in this space include Diigo (coverage), Evernote (coverage), Fleck (review), and TrailFire.

(Via Web Worker Daily via Lifehacker)

Leave notes on any bit of document, PDF, or Web page with A.nnotate. You can even add tags to each note and sort through them later.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I was impressed by the preview I got in September of the bookmarking and Web annotation tool Diigo 3.0. It's taken the company until this morning to release this version to the public. In the interim the team has added features and tweaked the design. It's been worth the wait. This is a powerful and deep tool for serious Web users.

As before, the service has a plug-in (I tried it in Flock) that lets you clip and save text from Web pages, or just page URLs themselves. You can categorize and tag your findings for later, and keep your stuff private, shared with friends, or make it public. It's also very easy to annotate pages and send your mark ups to other users. Diigo is not the only product that does these things (see ClipMarks; BlogRovr), but this version's implementation is especially strong, which is not something I said about previous releases.

Diigo's sidebar plug-in is surprisingly useful.

There's also a very nice new browser sidebar that shows you a lot of useful and focused information, including your own latest bookmarks, those from your Diigo friends, and most cleverly, the Diigo users who have also saved information from the page you're visiting as well as the site itself.

The service finds people who bookmark like you do.

Diigo takes all the data it collects from users and lets them rotate it in interesting ways. When you're looking at the page for a site, for example, you can easily see what other users who bookmarked that site also bookmarked (sort of like MyBlogLog, Medium, eSnips). The system will suggest other sites, based on the tag cloud for a site as well as the affinity you have with its other bookmarkers, that it thinks you might like (see also: Twine). There's also a social angle: The system suggests people that it thinks you'll find interesting, by identifying the ones closest to you in bookmarking behavior.

I recommend Diigo, especially with the plug-in. It's a complex tool but if you take a few minutes to learn what it can do and how it does it, it can make you a more productive, smarter Web user.