The Progress Bar

Easy to install plugin enables peeking into zipped files via QuickLook. Very cool. Found via Daring Fireball.

I am constantly amazed that more website are not using drag and drop capabilities of Scriptalicious or other Javascript libraries to enhance the user experience. Panic Software has a nice drag-n-drop downloader that’s simple and fun. I’ve been spending more time with Adobe Air applications which promise to bring the desktop to the web, or the web to the desktop, or make the web more like the desktop, you get the idea. Early days for these types of apps, they can only get better.

Rapleaf continues to add features and gain traction after seemingly beating out several other reputation tracking systems. What services do you use to track your reputation?

Thousands of sites are building address book importers so their users can find or invite their friends – the problem is that you have to buy the code to do it (and only the very expensive products are reliable) and you have to maintain that code.

Now Rapleaf just released the Rapleaf Address Book API, which you can use to build your own address book importer with no effort. Accelerate your viral growth with this easy to use API.The Address Book API allows you to:

• Ask your users for their email login credentials (for Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail/MSN)
• Securely pass the credentials to the Address Book API
• Obtain the names and email addresses of all the contacts in that person’s address book

Check it out at: http://www.rapleaf.com/apidoc/v2/abook

Last nights TechCrunch party was a blast, ran into people I knew 12 years ago, several clients and I got to finally meet Michael Arrington. Various people took photos and a good time was had by all. I walked over to the after-party with a guy who drove all the way from from Virginia, that’s how important these networking events are these days. Off to review the giant stack of business cards I collected.

This guy called Verizon reps 56 times, asking them the same two questions each time. Overall, Verizon reps misquoted rates 93% of the time.

Tehcrunch is throwing a party for 700 people in Boston tonight. Judging from previous parties, this one should not disappoint. My liver is shuddering at the thought of hitting the after party.

Twitterific is terrific, but I couldn’t figure out how to send direct tweets. Turns out Control-D does the trick. they really should connect Twitter to IM networks for longer discussions. Twitter is fun but it’s rapidly approaching it’s max usefulness with such a limited set of functionality. I grok that simplicity in design and functionality was part of the original idea but following 100 people? Time for some ambigious Facebook-style privacy control controls. Have you seen those sliders? Ridiculous.

I stopped using Ecto, my favorite offline blog editor, a while back because it ate a number of draft messages and tag support with Ultimate Tag Warrior was always broken.

I went back to the Rich text editor in WordPress, which I can’t stand for a number of reasons: it’s slow, unresponsive, doesn’t preserve text between rich text and edit html mode.

At the time, I was on Tiger, blogging in Firefox, with PPC Powerbook. Talk about a recipe for slowness.

I blogged a lot less after a while. Then I started tagging and posting items through Delicious. Then I got really lazy and started Twittering everything.

Ecto 3 is in beta, and it supposedly works well with WordPress and Leopard. No more Ultimate Tag Warrior- WordPress supports tags natively and they were smart enough to let third party developers create tag management system.

Now I have to figure out details like getting ordered lists to stop printing out in Arial and dealing with images. While I’m at it I’m going to import my blog CSS into post drafts, easy to do in Ecto, between that and the new WebKit, WYSIWYG blogging is finally here.

People say Windows Live Writer is even better than Ecto, which is saying something.

The new WebKit-based Ecto is smoove. Some nice eye candy for trackbacks and search & replace, along with a zillion other improvements, big and small. Definitely worth checking out if you’re not happy with web-based blogging.

I haven’t used Flock much, which has blogging tools built in, or Performancing, which pops up a layer to edit a post over the web page you’re browsing. Makes quick work of simple posts, but lacks enough must-have features for it to stay in the uninstalled Firefox extension folder.

Speaking of FF, I can’t wait for version 3. The memory leaks kill me, very slow response to input, lot’s of spinning beachballs.

For a change of pace, later on I’m going to MIT to hear the producers of Heroes discuss:

…Their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audiences.

Vivox, boston-area leading provider of integrated voice services for online games and virtual worlds has announced that it has secured $7.8 million in a second round of equity financing led by Benchmark Capital. Proceeds from the round will fund product development, sales support and marketing. You may have seen the Vivox phones around SecondLife or used their voice technology in an online game. I blogged my meeting with Vivox CEO Rob Seaver back in December of 2005.

Last week’s Webinno was as usual a great event. Nothing comes close in terms of local net-heads cramming into one room to imbibe, rant, demo and press the flesh. Founder David Beisel is setting up anther small group dinner, this one is titled “The Secrets of Social Network Platform Apps”.

I just sent David a list of topics, hope he thinks they are interesting enough to invite me to the dinner.

Topics of interest:

• Separating reality from they hype of FB apps.
• What probably won’t work as a FB app.
• The total lack of business applications on FB. Surely we all will get sick of throwing food and writing on Superwalls.
• Zombies and Vampires – how to unearth the hidden value of reputation on FB.
• From websites to web services, what’s next?