sNetwork
'cause Webnotes stick on me!
Posted By Jeff On November 19, 2008 @ 1:33 am
Now with invites and annotations!
Ever wish that you could have a cheat sheet for a webpage? Get through all that useless junk that the author wrote? I’m sure that most of my readers do. And thus comes Webnotes.
Webnotes is a new web-working tool designed at letting users add annotations and highlighting to websites. They combine two of my personal favorite things: Post-it notes and websites, it was just a matter of time. The utility is easy to use, just install the toolbar (Firefox plug-in FTW) and you’re set. There is a button to create a sticky note, button to highlight text and a button to share what you’ve done. It’s that easy.
Once you have that done, it’s easy to place sticky notes around. I know I’m going to have the bad habit of putting them on every site I visit (I have 29 of them in sight right now around my desk offline, yikes!). The good use for this is that you’ll be able to see a site, put your options on it then send it to your friend so they can see it how you see it. Here, check out I R Blogging with some annotations I put in (I may have put a few too many…).
Some uses for this that I came up with:
- Looking at somebody’s website and giving them pointers.
- Studying notes and highlighting the parts that would be important.
- Adding reminders for the next time you visit the site (like checking out a certain link that you know will be a time-sink)
- Being used as a bookmark when going through archives.
The only thing I can think of right now that this is missing is a social aspect of this. For example, if I could make my notes, send it to a friend then have them add some of their notes and send it back to me (displaying both sets of annotations) it would make it a great collaboration tool. Also, being able to select the color of sticky note would be pretty cool as well.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few invites (Thanks Ryan!), so for those of you interested in some just leave a comment to this post. Be sure to include your email address when filling out the comment form, I’ll be using it to know where to send it.
Twinity
Posted By Jeff On September 3, 2008 @ 10:12 am
At first, twinity seems like it’s just about virtual world attempting to play with the big boys at Linden Labs. In that sense, you’re right, but they have a trick up their sleeve: you.
Let’s start off with accessibility, shall we? Twinity requires a download to play and is currently only available for Windows. Though this is often a big concern down the road, I’m sure they’ll have something in the works once they come out of beta (hopefully). Next is price, which because of beta is free as well as they also give you some in-game currency to play with off the hop which is always nice.
One of the biggest things I look for in these worlds is creating my avatar (yes, I’m a fashion whore leave me alone) and Twinity gave me quite a shock here: you can actually import your face onto your avatar. I thought at first it would simply match the hair color, or eye color but no, It actually shapes my face onto the avatar. To be brutally honest with you when I was doing it (be it almost 3am) I said to myself “wow, that looks familiar…holy crap that’s actually my face!” does need a bit of work on that feature, but it’s off to a good start. The base selection of clothes/hair seems to be a bit limited, but I think it’s possible to have user generated stuff so I suppose it’s not that big of a deal.
The next list is things to do. My main interest is often creating a ‘home’ or ‘apartment’ and Twinity isn’t too bad at that. I was able to create a place that is going to charge me 47G (in-game currency) a month which isn’t too bad given that I was given 3000 when I signed up. Users have the ability to choose layout of the place, the style (apartment, office, cafe, etc) as well as location. It was the location here that shocked me, as they’re real places. I chose an apartment then for skyline chose Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Well to my surprise when I looked out the apartment window I saw the CN Tower. Now that is cool. On top of that, it has the basic abilities to wallpaper each wall, create the objects you want and has a nice list of textures you can buy as well as make and upload your own.
The interface and controls are two things that can use some work. Most of the things you need to do in Twinity involves right clicking, which is kind of annoying. On top of that, when the menu loads you have 3 different options for the one thing and none of them make a lot of sense (change texture, apply texture, change texture settings). After playing with them, you get used to them but some better wording would help, since all I wanted to do was make the walls red. The next issue is camera control, it doesn’t follow so you constantly have to be right clicking and swinging the camera around with the mouse as you walk which is annoying beyond belief. A little more user-friendlyness would be appreciated.
Another annoyance of Twinity is the fact that is a complete memory-hog and runs very slow. I understand it’s in beta, but the fact that it runs as though we were still in 1998 annoys me to the point of not wanting to play this any more. Every time I load something, I get a spinning loading icon, even if I’ve already loaded this window 3 times. A caching feature would be a nice touch.
There was also some options and talk about making movies, but at the time of this post I didn’t have the patience to check it out given how incredibly slow in seems to run.
All in all I think Twinity may show some potential for some users who want the ‘realistic’ approach to virtual worlds, but given that is lacks the friendly approach to casual players I can’t see it taking visitors away from competitors. Perhaps further along when it comes out of beta we can decide if it will actually become a player or not.
Ping.fm
Posted By Jeff On August 25, 2008 @ 1:07 am
Ping.fm is the best sNetwork manager EVER!
Ok, maybe not ever, but it’s really really good. Ping allows you to take tons of your microblogging, blogging, and status updating service and put them all as 1. This way you can update on Ping, and it will update everywhere (or only on 1 spot) without you actually having to go there.
What’s nice about this is that it has the different types separated, so you don’t end up making a blog post simply saying “I have cake” where as it should have maybe gone to status updating. What is nice about this aside from being able to post in one spot, with the aide of the PingPress.fm wordpress plugin I can now send out a small message to all of those networks telling people to come see my post; or in the cases of the blogging networks it hits, actually posting it (woot for posting on multiple platforms at once!)
Ping.fm is currently in beta, so you’ll need a beta key which is “vivalaping” right now. If it doesn’t work when you read this and it’s still requiring a key, comment on the post and I’ll update it accordingly.
Smallworld
Posted By Jeff On August 21, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
Smallworld is a new MMO virtual world currently in Beta out by Outsmart. Unlike many Virtual worlds, there is no downloads but also isn’t horrible 3D graphics. I made a list of the Pros and Con that I could think of. I’d highly recommend everybody to check it out, it’s one of the best I’ve seen it q very long time. With such a nice build, I’m hoping this doesn’t end up being another one that goes from Beta to Nada.
PROS
CONS
Virtual worlds timeline (with dipity)
Posted By Jeff On August 19, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
An amazingly, well put together timeline of anything relating to virtual worlds or simulations. Reading over it, there was even somethings I missed which is something to be said.
LiveSpace a Virtual ‘Wow’
Posted By Jeff On August 14, 2008 @ 8:51 pm
Gizmodo has a video today of a new Virtual World called LiveSpace (CitySpace? They call it both in the video) and it looks amazing. It’s server-side rendered with OTOY, which means your crappy computer can still run it and it will look good. I’m honestly just impressed at the graphics, server-side or not. I’d love to play around in a world like this. It almost makes me giddy just thinking about it.
LivePlace Is a Virtual World Rendered Server-Side, Streamed To Any Device @ Gizmodo
Lively? Hardly
Posted By Jeff On July 31, 2008 @ 1:01 am
The other day I decided to play around with Google’s new play thing Lively and to be brutally honest with you it was pathetic. This comes as something really hard for me to say, given that I have a history of spouting off at every given opportunity about how great google is but Lively is just unbearably bad. For those of you just tuning into what Lively is (or at least trying to be) it’s an avatar based 3D char room. Players are able to ‘create’ and ‘customize’ a series of avatars and chat it locations similar to the real world. This is hardly a new concept, but given that it’s being backed by one of the most powerful forces online the expectations are fairly high.
The first issue I have with this is the idea of it being browser based but requiring a download. A download for something is normal these days, especially for virtual worlds/mmo; Having browser based with no download are no problem either. However, the expected quality between the two is going to variry a great deal. If a user is required to download something it should be far superior to something thrown together in java or shockwave. This isn’t the case with Lively which is a big turn off right from the get-go.
Next lets tackle what is actually in this world and how it’s presented. Avatar selection is very slim. Users have a choice of 8 (I belive it was 8, might be 6 come to think of it) different avatars ranging from an anime styled character to a cat-like creature. For each of these avatars, you have a very limited appearal options which includes mostly different colored hats. There is no skin tone option or clothing layering option which most other servies offer making uniqueness very limited among users.
As we’ve now established that all the avatars will be clones, lets look at the functionality of this system. In an attempt to ‘create a room’ (which is common in many virtual world to allow to to customize a small space to call their own) I managed to put down a sofa, a table and a poster to float in the middle of my room. This would have been easier if the viewing screen is not cropped so small and the camera angles were not horrid.
The last things I can possibly think of at this time which irritate me about this poorly designed website is that the characters use chat bubbles (which is ok if the whole environment is viewable, but quite obviously is not due to poor camera controls) but does not support a chat log feature that I was aware of in my time using it. On top of the chat bubbles, character movement is completely done with the mouse by clicking and dragging a character to place which becomes very annoying, very fast when the cameras try to keep up with the mouse location.
Final summation: If Google wants to make it completely browser based they have to remove the inital download and install of the modules and make control a bit easier. They did a fantastic job with Google Docs and not having to require any downloads so there is no reason why they can’t do it with this. If they choose to go with the download route make it a true virtual world download and up the quality of the product (which honesly has to be done even if you stick with a browser based envirtonment) to allow more customizable feature and some sort of user interface would be a huge help. Until then, I’d stick with Second Life.
Yoowalk
Posted By Jeff On July 27, 2008 @ 3:59 am
This is weird. It says it lets you “Walk around the internet”. It looks like they’re trying to mix websites with a virtual world using an avatar. From what I can tell, it’s just putting down chairs then putting the website on the wall.
The only catch here is that it it’s a real pain in the rear. I say this because there is no ‘plaster my site’ button. You have to reconstruct your whole site while hotlinking in Yoowalk. That’s not going to happen, sorry guys. Check it out anyway if you’re bored. Maybe I’m wrong and it isn’t a complete waste of time (but I doubt it).
Second Life'd
Posted By Jeff On July 26, 2008 @ 4:30 pm
I decided to download Second Life again so that we can hang out in there this year. LJ and I are dancing it up in…I have no idea where we are to be honest with you. But we’re here!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/AICR/226/212/22
Be sure to stop by, I’m dancing like an idiot. If you need help, my name is Ed Edman. Or message JL (Kirasha Urqhart). We’ll be here…until we’re not.
ListBums
Posted By Jeff On November 2, 2007 @ 5:35 am
I got a request earlier this week to review ListBums and the second I looked at the front page said to myself “Wow, this looks like it has something to offer, I’ll leave it until I have time to give it a proper review.” I’m glad I did.
PROs
+ Easy to use: Click and type. Editing is simple, double click on the section (title or description) that you want to edit and correct it without the need to go to another ‘editing’ screen which is useful.
+ RSS feed enabled for user or EACH LIST!
+ You can attach an image/video, related link and description to each list item.
+ Others can add comments to lists as well as add items to the lists you create.
+ ‘Digg’-like system allowing users to add points to lists for rating/popularity purposes.
+ Easy embedding. Just go to the bottom of the list, choose your colors, paste the URL. Sure you could just make a list using HTML on your site, but why? This way they can link back to ListBums to use the comments/additonal features as well.
+ Fun layout/theme. Funky faces, tons of graphical elements and (for the most part) easy to navigate.
CONs
- When creating list you have to add the item then add the description after you add it to the list. A field where you can put in both item title and description before adding would save time.
- I can’t for the life of me get the ‘reverse order’ button to work!
- Pain in the ass to figure out where the widget part was. It’s at the bottom of the list you’re viewing. Easy once you know where to look, I was looking for a ‘widget’ button for at least 5 minutes at the top of the screen.
In comparison to Listography (which I reviewed awhile ago here) I think ListBums is in the lead as far as quality goes. Listography seems to have simple ‘ it’s there and it works ‘ look to it, where as ListBums has more of a ‘ look I listed stuff and it’s pretty! ‘. That brings me to think that though both social sites based on lists, the targeted markets would vary. I’d think that Listography would be more for people who want to just get something down and be done with it, where as ListBums is for those who want to have fun with the lists.
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