SearchFox RSS Reader to Cease Operation

I received an email from the creator of SearchFox a day or so ago stating that SearchFox would be ceasing operations as of January 25, 2006:

SearchFox Users,
Thanks for all your help in making SearchFox what it is. We have enjoyed providing this service, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all personal information on January 25 after we shut down the services.

Esteban Kozak

I am very sorry to hear this as I had been using SearchFox as my sole newsreader for several months now. The user interface was clean and easy to use, but the feature that I liked the best was how it would notice what I read and prioritize subsequent feeds so that (more often than not) what I wanted to read was at the top of my river of news.

I guess now I need to find the second best online news reader available. Google’s offering is just horrible, Bloglines (which I started with) is still pretty feature poor and Rojo really needs to do some work on usability. Interestingly, many of the features being requested by users of Rojo would, if implemented, make it on par with SearchFox. Any suggestions on online feedreaders that you are happy with?

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New Yahoo Go = So What?

I read several announcements today about the new Yahoo Go service. After searching endlessly for an actual URL that linked to the offering, I finally found one. I’m sure I won’t be the first or last to say that the offering should have been called ‘Yahoo No Go’. The computer portion of it is not currently available and will be PC only, the ‘TV’ portion of it is also a PC app (and also not available). Ah, the mobile portion is available for Nokia series 60 phones — I’m in luck, I have a Nokia 6620 that fits the bill.

I download the ~1.7MB app and install in on my 6620 with great interest after having seen the screen shots and read the hyperbole from the CES announcement. The ygo.sis file expands to take nearly 4MB of phone and memory card space, then goes on to download another app for connections. After the initialization, I try out the apps. One by one, I grew less and less impressed. Yahoo Go, it turns out, is just 4MB of bloat that does nothing more than start the WAP browser on the phone (which wants you to login to Yahoo again!) to display the services that are already available to you through the Yahoo mobile site. Accessing the Yahoo mobile site directly using the Opera series 60 browser provides a much better user experience that this. What a total crock. Hell, Cingular’s J2ME IM application kicks the crap out of this thing (even as a single tasker). Google’s J2ME Maps implementation makes Yahoo’s effort look like the brown stuff in the bottom of a college dorm fridge.

I then went about removing this craplet from my phone, but, guess, what? As part of the removal process, it wants to ‘phone home’ to Yahoo and waste more bandwidth before it will remove itself (shades of Microsoft). It’s no wonder that Yahoo recommends that you allow the app to connect whenever it wants to (versus letting you know that it want to make a connection). I finally had to go into the Nokia AppManager and delete the various pieces of it manually.

Based on this experience, Yawnhoo needs to try harder and put out something useful (other than hype).

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ReminderFeed

If you spend entirely too much time (how could that be?) keeping up with things in your feedreader of choice, you might find the services of reminderfeed to be valuable. Basically, you set a date, time and description, then use the subscribe buttons to have your feed-based reminder delivered to you.

You could always use this in conjunction with alerts function at Yahoo to have this reminder delivered via SMS to you mobile phone. Perhaps that will be a option directly from reminderfeed in the future.

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Adding The New Feed Icons



Microsoft has agreed to use the feed icon found in Mozilla (aka more MS Innovation). Here are the ‘new’ feed icons. This post really doesn’t serve any other purpose that to allow me to upload the icons so that now I can link to them in blogger.

If you prefer your feed icons all pixel twiddled in a thousand different ways (and available in EPS, SVG, PSD, PDF, PNG, JPG, and GIF formats), then FeedIcons is the place for you.

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RSS based Package Tracking

This holiday season, I created my own little mashup by combining this web service (created by Ben Hammersley) to track a FedEx package via RSS and the Yahoo Alerts service to notify my mobile phone when the FedEx status was updated.

The combination worked pretty well (Yahoo Alerts sent several false/duplicate updates). It would be nice if all of the major shipping carriers provided this as a service. Tracking multiple packages via RSS is much simpler via RSS than having to go ping individual websites. The option to couple this with SMS notification is a big plus for critical, can’t miss shipments.

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Google Firefox Extension and Music Search

Google has introduced a new Firefox extension that displays Blogger Web Comments for the site that you are currently viewing. This reminds me of an IE plugin from around 1996 that allowed you to view post-it note type annotations that were placed on websites and viewable through the plugin. It wasn’t long before this became abused and if I recall correctly, the company went out of business. This approach seems to have only slightly more accountability in that it ties back to a blog. Then again, Blogger blogs have been notorious of late for their splog activity.

Google has also recently introduced some functionality to make it a bit easier to search for music on the Internet. According to the Google Blog, the search works only for well know artists by name and primarily for US based artists (though I did get results for David Sylvian, oddly enough). The results include links to reviews, lyrics and online stores to purchase some releases. Not surprisingly, I didn’t see any purchase links to Amazon (though there were links to the iTunes store). It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

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Google Homepage And The March of Widgets

Google has added some new content and options to their personalized home page. In addition to drag and drop screen layout, probably the biggest news is the creation of an API to allow for developers to create their own widgets and content. It’s no netvibes, but it is getting better.

First Apple introduces widgets behind the desktop with Dashboard, Yahoo recently provided widgets on the desktop (as well as on newer Tivo DVRs), Opera is pushing widgets on mobile devices and now Google (not surprisingly) is pushing widgets in the browser (or on the web, if you will).

I believe that there is room for all of them; consumers will decide where and how they want their functionality and information delivered to them.

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OpinMind

OpinMind is an interesting take on blog search engines in that it attempts to categorize the blog content as either positive or negative. I would guess that it somehow uses the surrounding text to make the determination.

You can also do comparison searches by putting a ‘vs’ between two terms. Just for fun, I tried a few, with mixed results: Peace (91%) beat out War (42%), but then again Life (50%) lost out to Death (65%). It probably has all the statistical relevance of Magic Eight Ball, but can be kind of fun to see the results (like the perennial favorite ‘Ginger vs MaryAnn’).

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Tips for Del.icio.us Users

I found this piece on The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users to be a handy reference to some features that I have yet to discover/explore on del.icio.us. I just recently starting using the for: tag to push bookmarks that would be of interest out to other del.icio.us users that I know.

The inbox functionality sounds interesting:

The inbox is a mystery for many folks, but it’s a powerful tool. Your del.icio.us inbox allows you to track what’s been added to particular tags and to track what particular users have bookmarked. There are a couple of ways to begin using your inbox. You can click the ‘inbox’ link at the top of any page when you’re logged in and then click the ‘edit inbox’ link on the right side. Or you can just click the ‘settings’ link (top right corner) and then click the ‘inbox labels’ link under the ‘experimental’ section. Either way will get you to the same page where you’ll see a couple of text entry boxes. One is for adding USERNAMES and the other is for adding tags. If you know the del.icio.us USERNAME of someone you want to track, enter it in the ‘user’ field and hit the subscribe button. If you have a particular tag you want to keep tabs on, enter it in the ‘tag’ field and hit subscribe. Once you get the hang of this, you’ll fill up your inbox in no time.

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Free Hostname For Your Mac

nonstopmac has a detailed description of how you can use DynDNS to obtain a free hostname for your Mac.

Why would you ever want to do this? Well, its one way to make it easier to connect to your home computer when you are away from home. As the Internet is a wild place, you also need to take adequate precautions regarding what you expose and how. From the nonstopmac writeup:

For those who are still wondering what am I talking about, DynDNS can be used for giving your IP address a good-looking hostname. This is especially useful in situations where you are using dial-up access or ADSL connections with dynamic IP addresses. By using the DynDNS service with a combination of their software installed on your computer, you can be always available through the same host name. You can use this setup when you are hosting a web server on your local computer or when you want to use service like Virtual Network Computer (VNC) to access your desktop from a far away location. In both of these scenarios, you will need a static address, so the DynDNS service comes quite handy.

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Sun Microsystems Giving Away Software

Sun has announced that they are giving away (providing for free download and use) of all of their server side software and developer tools. I assume that they hope to make money off of services and support (like Red Hat). This also allows them to claim some karma by now having ‘free and open source software’ while making a last ditch effort to compete with Windows.

Frankly, it feels like an act of desperation, as they have seen the open source community eating their lunch in the software arena and Intel in the hardware arena. It also feels like a real opportunity for anyone with an interest in Sun software to download and have a look.

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New Tivo Applications

Tivo have announced new Online Services for Tivo series 2 owners who have broadband capability (like me!). Several of the services are tied to Yahoo! (Photos, Weather and Traffic). Others include the Live364 Radio Network, movie information and ticketing via Fandango and the ability to listen to Podcasts.

Apparently, some screenshots of these functions were leaked last week by a beta tester who claimed that they would not be available until some time next year. Tivo was a little more prepared and announced them today. I priority registered both of my units and the confirmation screen said it would take ‘a few days’ to push out the update. Very nice.

Hopefully, this is the just the beginning for Tivo services and the catalyst for more services being re-purposed from the web onto consumer electronic devices.

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Amazon mturk Still Broken

I thought that I should follow up and have another look at mturk to see if Amazon has addressed the performance and functionality quirks and issues. Nope.

Granted, the home page loads quickly, but when you actually get into the meat of the app and try to do something with it, it is still crap. For example, viewing the list of ‘HITs’ available shows one with 350 available. Ok, request a HIT for that one. Buzz. Returns a screen that states:

There are no more available HITs in this group.

Great. Honest mistake. Wrong again. The same HIT group shows up on the screen again, stating that it has 350 HITs available. In fact, clicking on any HIT group other than the one that lists 30000+ HITS available (and also has the lowest per HIT payoff) gets you the same message.

It’s amazing to me that this thing has been around for weeks now and still operates like some CS101 I-just-learned-how-to-code-sort-of web app; especially with all of the resources of Amazon behind it.

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