6 Ways to Stay in Touch with ALL your Friends!

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I have to admit, it's getting harder and harder for me to stay connected with all the social networks I'm signing into. But what can I say... I really want to stay in-touch with my friends and keep on tracking their activities. Surely I want them to keep on tracking me as well. There's no doubt that our status, meaning 'what are we doing right now' or 'where are we', is getting to be a huge part of our Internet life. It almost seems like if people don't know where you are, you're not existent.

Lately I find myself jumping between the networks, trying to stay updated, or to update other with what I do, and boy it's not easy! It is also taking too much time. OK, so maybe I'm not the average user but I'm sure lots of people are facing the same problem: You want to be in all those networks, but is it possible?

I really wish someone will come up with an application that looks like 'meebo', only for social networks. But until then, here are some cool services that might going to help with this issue:

HelloTxt is an aggregate of microblogging services through which the user can insert their messages on all main microblogging services in a simply and simultaneous way. I've tested it on Twitter/Pownce and Facebook - worked fine. Not perfect, but fine. Hellotext also supporting Jaiku, Tumblr, Meemi, Beemood, Frazr and Gozub applications. Not only Hellotst allows you to send a message to all these apps in one click, it is also displaying your timeline in most of the services, so it is easier to track your friend messages and comments from a single page.

The only one with the meebo look, is TwitKu, which allows you to monitor your Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce accounts at the same time. Most of the functionality of the respective sites are reproduced, but there are enhancements not offered on those sites like Flickr thumbnails based on links, auto-expand of "tinyurls," and more.


Coudn't test Brabblr since I didn't yet got the invite-code, but it is definitely a site I'll keep my eye on. From their description, Brabblr connects you with all the microtools out there, including: Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Tumblr, Jabber, Frazr, Wamadu, Mambler, Boomloop, Wevet, Gmail(???) and many more.

Another service that will allow you to keep your microblogs up-to-date is PRESENCR. According to the site, you will be able to publish your messages to at list 17 services (!) with a single click. Couldn't find the registration form though, so if you knows anything about PRESENCR, do tell...

I was surprised to see that Fuser is open to the public, so I test it immediately. The application is far away from being stable but this is the only place that I saw so much harmony between Facebook and Myspace. Theoretically, Fuser supposed to gather all your mail and social accounts into one management. In practice, only the social accounts worked for me - But worked GREAT. I've been hearing people saying they want Facebook to improve their Inbox so it will be easier to use. Well, I think Fuser are far ahead with that, and if the Gmail feature will work, I'd get my ultimate mail application. (because I need my Gmail and Facebook Inbox in one place)

Check out some screenshots:
The Fuser Leaderboard ranks the friends who communicate with you most frequently.

Manage all your Facebook/Myspace messages from one page:



I really don't like to download desktop clients to my computer, but this one is a worthy. 8hands is a small and friendly desktop application that will simplify your social networking experience. It have one point access to MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, Flickr, YouTube and more. Get notifications of new comments, messages, friend requests, videos, feeds, all in real time. Currently supporting: Twitter, Facebook, Blog platforms, Myspace, Flickr and Youtube. More social networks coming soon.
Download here - Free.

BTW, If you know about a service that sync Ginger status with Twitter and Facebook, please email me.

*Thank you Jack Dorsey for this lovely photo.

Oh, man! I was looking for free music in the wrong places...

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I wrote about SeekMP3 - a Music Search Engine, only a week ago, but got so confused after I saw the post comments, with two more identical services. Frankly, they're so much alike, I don't even know which is the original one! They all look the same and have the same functions:

SeekMP3

Woonz

Groupzz


All of these three, enable you to search for any music you like and download it to your own computer. Oh, and they have another thing in common: They all transfer music from eSnips. I thought it would be a good time to pay eSnips a visit to see what's going on there and was surprised to find the largest music-database I've ever seen. Not only you can find songs, but you can also find pictures, videos and any other media related to an artist..

I think eSnips is one of the first Web 2.0 application that I've tried, so I really respect them for their hard work - They really have an amazing community. Even if they're not focusing just on music, it's simply there, so you might as well enjoy it. Personally, I'd prefer to use them than other music search engines, but I still have some issues with their 'must have window player' in some places at the site. On the other hand, I was impressed that I could find songs that I didn't even find at YouTube and was happy that I could search in my own language. (that's important and none of the other services above offer). Moreover, it was very easy to create this playlist and share it here
Music at eSnips is all user generated content, and because eSnips actually giving a stage for young musicians and singers, they've recently changed their download policy at the site:

Up to now, audio files could be downloaded only when you were signed in. As of today, users who upload or already have a MP3 or WMA audio file in their folders can decide if it can be downloaded or not.

More on this in their blog.

Bottom-line I'm going to use eSnips more simply because I really like the way people sharing music there, and the way eSnips itself care about their community.

The Beatles - Beca...

A Simple "ignore-all" bookmarklet for Facebook Application Requests

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Too many Facebook application requests? Want to delete them all in one-click?
Enter this site, drag the "ignore-all" bookmarklet to your browser, and click it when you're on this page. Don't worry, friend request, and group/event invites stay.

From Digg

My Mahalo Experience

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Finally, I'm writing about Mahalo. I think it is the only platform that I like and dislike a bit at the same time. The only way for me to describe this is - to write the good things that I found in Mahalo alongside the bad. There won't be anything ugly though, in fact Mahalo has one of the prettiest interface I've seen around the net.

The Good:

• Huge data-base of just about everything you need to find. Since most of it edited by humans, you can be sure you'll get clean, free-spam results. Another good thing is that someone has already filtered them for you, so you most likely to find exactly what you need.
  
• Good sharing options, with one click you can send favorite links from the site to your friends via email or directly to some of the social networks.
• Mahalo Daily Show - Gotta love it! There are few shows on the web today that can make you watch them all the way through. The Mahalo Daily Show is definitely one of them. Veronica Belmont is doing a terrific job there, naturally.
• I liked the Mahalo social page that's gotten even better now with the multi-profiles feature. It is like having a mini browser inside your Mahalo page - Although, Mahalo still needs to figure out how to make this connection good for Mahalo. Another thing, not all my links works there (flickr, pownce, stumbleupon) but if they did, I might make it my start page, (a tab for personal blogs will be great as well).
• Mahalo Follow - When you perform a search in any search engine, Mahalo Follow will open automatically and suggest more relevant links to your search. That's pretty cool.
  
• Did I mention they have an amazing design?

The Bad, that's not so bad:

• I've downloaded Mahalo Follow, but that was an issue for me since I've already have more than one toolbar. In my opinion, Mahalo needs to give the user an easier way to publish stories (this is if they want more people to submit stuff to the site) I'm suggesting they release a simple bookmarklet for this. I guess this is my lucky day because Jason Calacanis just announced in Pownce that they releasing new version of Mahalo MultiShare for Firefox, allowing easy link sharing at Mahalo and other social services, (not sure if they had another version before, never saw it - anyway, great for me).
• I was searching info about my dog race, of course I found lots of information but I was amazed to see that I couldn't save my search anywhere in Mahalo! (Maybe a good thing would be to add a favorites tab inside the social page where users can save favorite searches.)
  
• What can I do with my friends there...? I can't even send them personal messages. BTW us, I'm hearing from everywhere lately that startups don't want to compete Facebook and assuming if we have all our friends in one place, we don't need another site that behave like a network. I say, "wrong." I simply don't have the same friends in every platform I use, I would like to be able to create some connections with users in Mahalo.
  
• The last thing that was annoying for me was the search terms when submitting something to the site, but I guess it is improving the search later anyway...

Bottom-line, I think this site is here to stay for a long time, and will improve (I see lots of updates all the time - Good for them). I'm going to start using the site more and will update my review after a while. Overall, I didn't use the site much so maybe I'm missing some stuff.

New Features in my Blog

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I've added 2 new features to my blog that hopefully will make it easy on you readers, to search and share content. The reason that I'm announcing about it, is because I really like these services so I'm gonna write a short review about each of them:



Lijit is not a new service but until I tried it, I didn't actually knew it is that good. When someone search in your blog, Lijit service searches your blog, bookmarks, blogroll and more, all from one little box. It also provides free web state that help you better understand and serve your reader community.

If you need to search previous posts in my blog, enter you query and click on the result you want, then Lijit will suggest you more relevant results from my community networks (digg, mybloglog, and more), this way I'm almost sure you'll find what you need.

Search:

Choose:


Discover more from my community:




Another feature that I've added is the ShareThis button. I've been using it in my Firefox (as plugin) for quite some time now, and I'm very please with the results, so I thought it will be good to use it in my blog as well.

Unfortunately I'm not so good in playing with my blog template so I may did something wrong when placing these codes, and this is why it's taking my blog some time to load..
:-/ Sorry about that..

TV Advertising at its Best!

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I've never thought I wouldn't mind watching so many commercials by my own free will, but Firebrand is so nicely done, I really enjoyed spending time at the site. It is like the home of television ads, with content from almost every brand you can think of, and some of the hottest ads around (Appel, Firefox, XBOX, Yahoo, HP, eBay, MTV and many, many more)

On the social level, users can rate, save to favorite, DOWNLOAD the ad-clip to their computer, embed commercial onto blog or site etc.



Overall the site has a sexy interface with unique navigation, and one of the greatest player I've seen.

Please Minimize your Facebook Profile

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Last week Facebook added the ability to "clean-up" your profile in order to reduce your profile page's load time and to make it easy for other people to explore your content. This means that you can choose which applications are available at first glance and which are hidden under the 'Extended Profile' feature. Bottom-line, it's all there

Unfortunately, most people are not using this feature, and most of the profiles that I'm exploring on a daily basis are still taking so much time to load because of the heavy applications (funwall, supperwall, etc.) If you're one of those applications fanatic, please clean-up your profile because frankly, you're waisting your friends time on waiting for it to load, and you might be losing from that.




Read more on Facebook Blog

Introducing the Cheeky Twitter (NSFW)

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Sharing news, notes, links, comments, etc, on Twitter is great, but what about other stuff.. personal stuff, or in other words - Not geeky news. Well, if you're looking for a place where you can share sexual experience, fantasies, pictures, videos and more, be sure to check out boobik?.

Pretty much similar to Twitter, only other content. You can follow people you like (actually you spy on them), update from IM, text from mobile, send messages via emails or simply form the web. You can get notifications on what's new and comment on posts.
I can honestly tell that I liked the navigation through media files, and I think the interface in general is good and has cool Ajax-based performance. (not sure about the orange color though..)



For posting using text and IM you'll have to first go to your “Personal Details” page (found in the “Private Area”) and tweak a thing or two. Posting using email is very simple - just email the text you want to share in the subject line from the email you registered with.

I don't think the site has so much content at the moment, but something tells me this will change soon...

Companies that Joined the DeadPool in 2007

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It wasn't easy to go over Go2web20 Directory and find out almost 60 broken links. But I think this is part of the Web evolution, clearly not all services can exist forever, and I guess most startups won't make it. There is no room for everyone, so I'm afraid many more will land in the DeadPool. But think about it, maybe 60 out of nearly 2,000 links is not that bad after all.. somehow it puts some thoughts into perspective: companies are rising up or falling down every day, yet we do not feel it affects us nor the economy.

Anyway, we didn't wanted to take these services down from the directory, so we simply tagged them under a tag named: "DeadPool". This will still give you the ability to browse through the content, and track the services that not working anymore. Just go onto the site, click on the tag cloud, and select the tag DeadPool.




While going over the links on the site, we also found and gathered some updates, and upgrades:

1. Chuguet is down at the moment but asking you to watch the URL
2. Looking for Froogle? Try this Google Base link
3. Perenety has become Wambo
4. Smsconnect has become Zong
5. ifilm has become SPIKE
6. OfferTrax has become LinkTix (Launching Soon)
7. Comeeko changed their name to PikiStrips
8. Xcellery joined forces with Expressocorp
9. ME has become Snappville
10. Playtxt is now Rummble
11. Approvr changed their name to ProofHQ
12. Barracudasuite to become Simple5
13. Mingle2 has become Just-Say-Hi
14. Fauxto is now Splashup
15. Linkmybox has become Profileomat
16. Linkya has become Zaabiz

In addition to this list, 46 new logos were updated, tags were reorganized and overall we worked pretty hard to make sure the content on the directory is up-to-date! So feedbacks are always welcome :suggest@go2web20.net

Important note!
We've checked and double-checked (and triple-checked),all the startups that inside the directory DeadPool. HOWEVER, if you are one of the companies, or someone that know for sure about a company that still alive but listed as DeadPool, please let us know and we'll change their status immediately.

Check out Techcrunch index
for more companies that end up in the DeadPool..

MP3 Search Engine with Free Music Downloads

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seekmp3.info is a good search engine that helps you find music you like on the web, then allows you to listen and download your favorite songs to your computer.

None of the songs on site are hosted on seekmp3 servers. seekmp3 system crawls the internet for audio tracks and then provides the information for the users.



You won't be able to create playlists, communicate with other users or share favorite tracks from the site, but you will be able to find and enjoy lots of good music for free.

The Human Body in 3 Dimensions

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The Visible Body is a full interactive 3D human body application. It consists highly detailed, anatomically accurate, 3D models of all human body systems. The application includes over 1,700 anatomical structures, including all major organs and systems of the human body.



With the Visible Body, a user can:

• Search for and locate anatomical structures by name.
• Hide, rotate, see through, and explore parts of human anatomy.
• Move the model in three-dimensional space, by either clicking directly on the model or using the virtual joystick.
  
• Zoom in and out, using either the on-screen zoom slider or a mouse scroll wheel.
• Click on systems or structures to make them transparent or hide them entirely.
• Click on anatomical structures to reveal names.

The site is not so stable at the moment, so it was pretty hard to test it, but after I did, I can tell the experience was very interesting and unique. It's not working on Firefox though, so you'll need an IE if you want to explore the application, you'll also need lot of patience but overall it's worth it.



Watch this great Demo for more information:

Create Animated Gif Online

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There are so many web applications today that allowing users to create great slideshows from their own pictures, or any picture that stored online (flickr/picasa/photobucket), but usually you'll need to sign-up to be able to create something in those apps, and it can take you quite some time to create a good slideshow. (though you get amazing results at the end)

Anyway, if you wish to make someone happy but don't have the time nor the need to create something complicated as slideshow, you can use one of the web-tools below in order to make your life easier. The results are standard, after all it's Gif based, but sometimes it's enough. Bottom-line, it's fast, easy-to-use and free.



GIFUP is your personal GIF generator. Here you can easily make shiny avatars and animations for Myspace, Facebook or any other personal web page, blog, etc. Creating animations with GIFUP is extremely easy. Select the source of your images: Computer, Flickr or any image-web-link. After you get images you have a bunch of options for editing. Feel free to rotate, crop, add various effects and text, change frames order and animation speed and choose size of your final GIF animation art work.



After GIFUP generated your animation code, you can either save it to your computer or share it on your favorite social netork, webpage or blog.






Another good tool to create quick animations is Picasion. Unlike GIFUP, it won't give you the ability to edit the pictures you upload, but it is the only tool (that I found) which gives you the option to grab pictures from PicasaWeb as well as from Flickr.

For example, to create this sweet animation, all I needed to do is to choose where I want to import the pictures from (in this case: Picasa), add the tag: "DOG" and let Picasion do the rest.





I wrote about Gickr over a year ago. Back then I really liked this Gif animation creator, but after testing them again today, I found it hard to focus on the animation with all the ads around. Now, I'm not saying no to ads, but this site has one of the annoying ads I've ever seen.
(pay attention to the tags that falling from wherever, when you go onto the site)

Regardless that, good result:

Crunchies Award Winners

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Crunchies is the first annual competition and award ceremony that recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
Seemed like the first Crunchies event which took place yesterday at Herbst Theater, San Francisco, was very successful! Read all the good stories about this event at Technorati or GoogleBlogSearch, and be sure to check this amazing set from Flickr: (powered by zivity)




Congratulations to all the winners, especially to ! First, because they are Israel-based company and being an Israeli blogger that's definitely makes me proud. Second, because it was really good to see some fresh names on the list of Winner statups, and I really hope we're going to see more of them this year.

Using Delicious on your iPhone

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Yesterday delicious team posted on their blog that they are going to publish some new updates about their new version next week, so it's definitely something to wait for. Being one of their beta tester I still can't decide if I like the new version better then the old one (smaller fonts).. but since delicious is one of my favorite sites, I'm willing to get use to any changes they'll make. If you can't wait to see how the new site is going to look like, check out Techcrunch post which has some exclusive screenshots.

On their blog post, delicious also published a video-clip from CNETtv that quickly demonstrates how to use delicious on your iPhone:



A little tip I'd like to give Tom Merritt who created this video:
Who said iPhone doesn't support copy-paste ;-)

Fancy Web 2.0 Style Calendar - For your Office

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Check out Bad Usability Calendar - One of the coolest Calendars I've seen:



Free download here - PDF format.

Just Panoramas

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Found this lovely site today and was pretty amazed by its content. Panoye is a place where people can upload, organize, geotag and publish their panoramas, then share it with visitors at the site. Also, users can comment and rate the beautiful panoramas, and embed the code onto their site or blog.

If you're a photographer, traveler, or just someone who love to see places you've never been before, I really recommend you to take the 360° virtual panoramic tour - You'll enjoy it.

IsraelWebTour Returns to Silicon Valley

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The second round of IsraelWebTour is about to kick off on February 4th, 2008 and will take place in Silicon Valley, SF. IsraelWebTour will host 15 Israel web-based companies, for week of activities. The companies will meet with investors, strategic partners, customers, entrepreneurs and industry leaders in a mix of private one-on-one meetings, roundtable discussions and ad-hoc networking events. The highlight of the week will be a public showcase on Wednesday, February 6h hosted at Microsoft where each start-up will present to the industry and press. The tour will end with a closing night party in San Francisco on February 7th.



The list includes these startups:
5min, PLYmedia, AllofMe, Nuconomy, ClickTale, blogTV, Sportingo, PicScout, Qoof, 8hands, Velingo, Innovid, Semingo, PageOnce, Journeys.

You might want to check out the list of companies from the first IsraelWebTour: 2 of these 15 companies already made their exits last year: Yedda (AOL), and kasamba (LivePerson for $40 million).

IsraelWebTour can offer lots of opportunities to these young startups, and I don't see any better way to start this year! Good-luck all.

More on Techcrunch.