Facebook is planning to introduce a full featured webmail code named Titan. According to Tech Crunch, there will be full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than Facebook through Facebook itself. Your email account name will be your vanity url – vanityurl@facebook.com. Though Facebook has several million users, I’m not sure how many of them would like to use another webmail. Let’s wait and see how it shapes up.
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Tech Crunch, Webmail
Larva Labs has introduced a new Android Apps called SlideScreen. According to Larva Labs, the purpose is to create an intelligent home screen that creates a meaningful hierarchy out of a user’s information. The Apps displays messages/information from various sources like your email, Tweets, text messages, calendar, Google Reader, stocks etc. You can scroll through those information and each source has a color coded side bar to indicate it’s a tweet or it’s an email etc. A center bar divides the personal messages and appointments from news, stock and more general information. By moving the bar, you can see less or more personal information. You can also completely hide the personal information by moving the central bar all the way up.
Most of the information on the SlideScreen has icons to their right, which when long pressed will open the respective applications. The central bar also shows the weather information, which users can flip through to get weather, date and time for different cities. A micro forecast gives a compact indication of the week ahead.
SlideScreen is available in the Android Market in two forms, an ad-supported free version and the Pro version for $6.99. I’m not sure if I would go for it. Though it shows useful information in your main screen, it makes the phone look more like older version of text only OSes rather than recent Icon(ic) OSes. It also lacks Facebook and Google Talk integrations. I might give the free version a try once they add those 2 services and if I feel it’s quite useful, I might buy the paid version.
Here is a demo video from Mobile Crunch.
Technorati Tags: Android, SlideScreen, Twitter, Facebook, GMail, Google, Larva Labs
Facebook has introduced a new feature yesterday which gives you the ability to reply to Facebook conversation by replying directly to email notifications. When you receive an email notification about comments, you can just click “Reply” and start typing a comment at the top of the email. Then hit “Send” from your email and your reply will automatically be added as a comment on Facebook without you having to even log in.
It’s a long awaited feature. It was a pain to go to Facebook page to reply, each time you get an email notification. This is a welcome change. If you don’t get email notifications, you can go and set that up in the Account Settings page under Settings.
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Email, Notification
Rhapsody announced today in their blog that Rhapsody App is coming to Android and is in beta stage. If you have an Android phone like Droid and you want to participate in beta testing, you can go to their Facebook page and sign up. Non-Rhapsody subscribers are also eligible and will have the opportunity to try Rhapsody at no cost for seven days. Once the free offer expires, you have to pay $14.99/month for unlimited streams.
(Credit: Rhapsody)
Mozilla Lab has introduced a new tool called Raindrop that integrates different messaging systems like email, Facebook, Twitter, IM etc using a web browser like Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc. The project is open source and is led by Thunderbird team.
According to Mozilla, A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal — we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we process messages, and in how we can help give people control over their personal data and experiences.
The idea behind Raindrop is, according to Mozilla, when a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup.
The development platform for Raindrop includes front-end support for applications of various kinds (including mobile), but Raindrop’s flagship applications will be built entirely for any modern web browser that supports Open Web technologies. Version 0.1 embeds Bespin to support a fast, iterative development style. It also provides front-end widgets and back-end code that supports important high-level concepts such as people, conversations, and mailing lists, with more to come. CouchDB and Python are key parts of our prototype architecture as well.
If you want to try it, you can download Raindrop from here.
Update: First look: Inside Mozilla’s Raindrop messaging platform.
If you are a Facebook fan and if you want to change your Wordpress blog to appear like Facebook, then here is the theme that I came across today, that can do that. I didn’t try the Smells like Facebook theme, but the preview looked good.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Facebook, Smells Like Facebook, Theme
Cooliris is a plugin that displays images from Google, Youtube, Flickr, Facebook, from your PC hard drive etc as a 3D wall. You can effortlessly scroll through the images and videos. Once installed, you can launch Cooliris from the toolbar in the browser window or my moving the mouse over the image if the image is from one of the supported sites.
Cooliris now supports Linux. According to the Cooliris blog, Cooliris now has a linux version that is shipping with 1.10 release. Here are the system requirements:
I wanted to check the Linux file. I was using a Windows machine, so when I clicked “To see all products, click here” in the download section, I could see only Windows and Mac versions. I couldn’t find the Linux one. CoolPreviews has a Linux version. I have to try it from a Linux machine and see if it works.
Technorati Tags: Cooliris, Google, Youtube, Flickr, Facebook, Linux, Ubuntu, OpenSuSe, Fedora, NVidia, ATI, Intel, Firefox 3.0
Tech Crunch Reports:
Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash.
Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine. But discussions between the companies are confirmed.
Twitter is painfully slow in the last few days. I hope they fix that issue soon. Google is following the path of Microsoft to become a monopoly, but I think the network speed won’t be an issue if Google acquires it.
People are going insane. A man murdered his estranged wife after becoming “enraged” when she changed her marital status on Facebook to “single”. Is life so cheap?
You might have read the news yesterday about a woman who struggled with her new Dell laptop. Lots of Ubuntu fans responded back to WKOW TV and some of them used harsh words and bad language. Some Ubuntu fans sent hateful message to that lady’s Facebook account. I don’t think such news will get any respect to Ubuntu or it’s fans. However dumb that lady was, this is not the way to respond. If you want to criticize, criticize in a constructive way and put down valid arguments rather than just calling words. I was little upset when I read the news today.
