See Ya Later, LookLater?

I started using LookLater last year, before del.icio.us introduced private bookmarks. I used LookLater primarily as a scratch pad that I could tuck away URLs that I wanted to revisit in more detail later on.

Well, it appears that over the weekend, looklater has just stopped working. Specifically, you can submit bookmarks to it and not receive any errors from it, but you can’t retrieve any URLs submitted after October 12th (or at least I can’t). The help forums for looklater have been taken down and I have not received a response from the email link that is in its place.

I guess this is the ‘price’ of free software and services on the web. Here today and gone tomorrow — then you are stuck with spending time trying to find a suitable replacement. Some of them turn out to be really useful (like searchfox) and to a lesser extent looklater. When searchfox went away, I tried out Rojo for a while. But after Rojo’s nearly week long outage and absolute lack of comprehension of testing and change control that rendered it largely unusable, I fled to NewsAlloy. NewsAlloy was an passable online reader, but the developers seemed to focus more on whiz-bang AJAX visual cruft than performance and reliability.

Luckily for me, as I was reaching my pain threshold with NewAlloy, the new release of Google Reader came out and I was able to move my OPML file to reader and have been a (largely) happy puppy since then. Now, I need to find a replacement for looklater that is hopefully going to be around longer. Maybe its time to take another look at Diigo to see if it will meet my needs. Another possibility is working more with Google Notebook, but that never felt like a good fit.

Time will tell. I’ll probably leave some notes here when I get further along with my tire kicking.

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Nokia Looking To Software And Services

Nokia is shifting its focus from just making mobile phones to offering more software and services to customers.

One front they are moving on is the widget arena, with their new WidSets site. This site allows you to configure widgets on the site and then send them to your mobile. More on widsets as I get a chance to play with them.

Update: Unfortunately, I won’t be able to find out anything more about widsets. Running the client on my Nokia 6620 causes it to lock up solid — I have to pull the battery out to regain control of the device. Apparently older phones may have problems with the Java client that widsets makes use of. Ah, yet another excuse to upgrade phones…

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Google Promoting Mac Software

Google has a new blog up reaffirming their commitment to Mac software:

We’re pretty serious about that mission, including the “universally accessible” part. It means making products that everyone can use – including Mac users. We want to provide great products and services to the tens of millions of Mac users around the world, because it’s the right thing to do, and because Mac users inside and outside Google demand it. That’s why we’ve recruited some of the best, most passionate Mac people out there for a Mac Engineering team.

Kind of surprised that there was no mention in the blog posting of SketchUp which has a Mac version that is also available from Google.

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Strange ‘Google’ Activity

I noticed in my access logs that a server purporting to be www.google.com.ua (aka 72.14.221.104 aka google ukraine) was fishing around trying to find a file called show_ads.js in a /capcha.files directory at various levels around my site. Not sure what the hell this is about, but I hope that a) google explains what they are trying to do b) it stops soon.

A bit of poking around indicates that show_ads.js is something to do with google adsense ads. Still doesn’t explain why they are trying to put or find the file in relation to some capcha configurations (which I don’t have).

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