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.

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.