With the rise of the social network culture and more and more new social networks coming to life, socializing over the internet is picking up. So a nifty addon for your browser that packs in support for some major social networks, IM services and also provides you with a handful of other useful features - all combined in a sexy, slick and smooth looking user interface would be something that would make your life a lot easier. Well, that is exactly what you get with Yoono!

So what is Yoono? As the tagline of Yoono reads, it helps you socialize your browser. Yoono is a browser addon for Mozilla Firefox that sits besides your browser tabs and keeps you updated with what your friends are doing across social networks including MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter. It also supports major IM services including MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk and AIM. Even Flickr, Piczo and FriendFeed are supported. You’re never gonna miss an IM while Yoono is running in your Firefox window!

Yoono in action!

Want more? Well, Yoono also synchronizes your bookmarks with its servers so that you can share your bookmarks across different computers. You can view links related to the content you are currently browsing, and you can also post Web Notes regarding something you love, something you find funny or even something you hate. This ’something’ might range from anything between links, images, text or videos. Yoono also has additional widgets that support mail, newsfeeds, videos, photos and music.

I’ve been using Yoono since a week on Firefox 3, and so far I’ve been impressed. It silently hides as a vertical bar in my browser window, showing me a popup whenever I have a message waiting. I’ve faced some minor connection issues, where it keeps on getting disconnected, but that seems to be a problem with Firefox 3. This addon is a must for people who have been addicted to IM and social network services!

Much has been already talked about Yoono. With more widgets still in the making, it might truly become the social networking browser plugin of all times!

You can install Yoono from its Firefox Addon page here. Incase you want to check out some more news and features, headover to Yoono.com.

Until next time,
Akash.

With “chat in a 3D virtual world” style client-server applications getting noticed, Google has recently made it’s first footstep into what most of us might think will change the way we interact over the internet.

Google has launched a service named Google Lively, which it has labeled as a Chat Experience. Lively is a simulated virtual world where any user can create a room or more precisely, a space for friends to chill out and chat within. The space can be customized, with furniture and objects, video and photo streams and much more. Each user signing in gets to create an avatar and control how it looks. Although, there are not abundant customizations that are available yet. But Google sure seems to plan on going the Second Life way, allowing users to shop for customizations and apparel inside Lively.

The service is in it’s first beta. But yes, it is slow. If you have a slow internet connection, I would advise you to stay away from Lively as of now. Even after you sign into a room, loading the room environment takes up some time over an average broadband connection. Also, the service requires DirectX 9 hardware acceleration enabled on your machine, so make sure you have a nice video card installed before you end up being disappointed.

Getting Lively running is as simple as downloading their installer, installing the software and signing in. You have a good choice of Lively or user created spaces or rooms to get into. Once you’re in, you can move around, interact with objects (like, sit on chairs, move them), and ofcourse, chat with people. Although I did find the moving around part a bit unfriendly.

Google seems to to have made more of a “Mee too!” kind of an attempt with Lively, especially if you end up comparing it with Second Life. For people who have been used to Second Life, I must say Second Life has way more depth as of now. But you can sure give Google Lively a try.

Go ahead, explore Google Lively and invite your friends over. You can visit the help section in case you need to know more. Drop me a “Hi” incase you come across me having a coffee in one of the rooms.

Until next time.
Akash.

I was just having a look at SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards winners. And I noticed something called “Yahoo! Pipes” in 1st place for the Web Development category. Out of my curiosity, I headed over to Yahoo! Pipes. After a little bit of exploring, what I realized was that Yahoo! Pipes deserved the 1st place under the Web Development category!

So what exactly are Yahoo! Pipes?, you’d ask me.

Well, Pipes are tools which can allow you to gather various content from all over the web, filter it, transform it, modify it and do what not, and then present it again! That too, in a format you like! Still confused?

Okay, imagine, that you have been visiting a lot of blogs about a particular topic. You’re subscribed to a zillion feeds. At times, you would still want to look out for specific content and track it separately amongst those feeds. Now reading about something in particular across multiple feeds or sources is surely a big pain! You suddenly start to think if you could somehow combine multiple feeds so that you get exactly what you wanted. Forget feeds, imagine if you could combine content from feeds and multiple websites. Imagine if you to extract particular portions from multiple websites and generate a unified feed for them! Sounds a bit far-fetched? Enter - Yahoo! Pipes.

With Yahoo! Pipes, all that is mentioned above is possible. Well, I guess you’ve heard about pipes in Unix. Yahoo! Pipes is the web version. Pipes provides you with multiple modules, which range from simple ones like getting user input, formatting strings, and stuff to the more typical ones like applying regex expressions to content. And if you’re wondering where to get the content from, then let me tell you, you have a whole lot of like 11 modules (as of now) to get content from various sources, may it be an RSS feed, or a web page, or a CSV file on the web, or just about anything. It even as a module that searches for images from Flickr!

Using pipes is fairly simple. You just need to drag the modules and they will appear as boxes with configurable parameters on a canvas. You need to make sure that the final output you desire is connected to Pipe Output. I’ve setup a simple pipe that allows you to search the RSS feeds for AkashBhavsar.com. You can check the pipe output here and if you need to see the structure, you can do that as well here.

One incredibly good thing about the Pipes that you make is that the content output from the Pipes will be indexed by search engines. There have been some really creative ideas that have come up, like searching for an apartment on maps, searching for geo-tagged photos and so on. You can go over and browse some Pipes and get a feel for yourself. And just head over to Yahoo! Pipes and get a hands on experience in creating one yourself!

With such a powerful nifty little tool that Yahoo! has provided us with, rewiring the web doesn’t seem that tough a task!

Until next time,
Akash.