Published on August 28, 2008
For the last 7 days I’ve been carrying around an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, thanks to a new loan program from the NCSU Library. I’ve fallen in love with the device, and in these 7 days I’ve read much more than I expected. I’m also a big fan of Shelfari, a site that lets you manage your books on “shelves” (much like Delicious Library on the Mac) with shelves for Read, Plan to Read, Wish List, and so on. In the last week, as I start a new book on the Kindle (the one I have had over 50 books preloaded on it by other students) I’ve had to log into Shelfari and manually add the book onto my shelf for books that I’m currently reading. This feeds me reviews and suggestions on related books.
A few moments ago, as I filled out a rating for a book I just finished (Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely) I started wondering if there was an opprotunity here. What if Shelfari could tap into your Kindle’s information, automatically filling your shelves with books you have on the device. This would deliver an experience quite a bit closer to the way Netflix monitors what movies you have at home, what movies your friends are watching, and what movies you have listed in your queue. I brushed the thought off, though, figuring that for an outfit as small as Shelfari to get so intimately involved with Amazon’s systems would need a level of access that Amazon would be reluctant to give. I also figured that Amazon wouldn’t want to invite such direct competition to their own “Media Library” service.
No more than 3 minutes later, I came across a post in the Shelfari Discussion Group announcing that Amazon has aquired Shelfari!
Amanda writes,
We just announced that Amazon.com has acquired Shelfari! This is a very exciting time at Shelfari and there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit all members. In the meantime, members will continue to have access to the great community and tools that you’ve always known and used on the site. You can continue to build virtual bookshelves and socially interact around the books you care about at http://www.shelfari.com/.
We look forward to working with Amazon to continue with our mission of building great communities that celebrate books. Thanks for your interest in Shelfari and Amazon.com.
Happy Reading,
Amanda
It makes sense… as Shelfari has been using Amazon’s repository of information, even providing “Buy This Book at Amazon” links for titles you come across. It will be interesting to see if Amazon leaves Shelfari as it’s own entity, much like Yahoo did when it aquired Flickr, or if it will pull the developers and existing code into Amazon’s own Media Library site. I think that a lot of users would like to see Shelfari remain independent, but as a heavy user of Amazon (as I think most web-savvy readers are) and a hopeful owner of the second revision of the Kindle, I can’t help but hope that Shelfari gets much more tightly integrated into Amazon’s print and electronic book sales systems.
Published on August 9, 2008
This may be old news to some, but it dawned on me to check for this a few minutes ago, and I was excited to see that it works exactly as I had hoped.
The [amazing] music site Last.fm has an events calendar system. Each artist page has an events listing, showing you when they’re playing where. There’s a great social networking mechanism where you can say that you plan to attend an event. You can see other users who are going, and there’s a message board for posting notes about the event. There’s even a unique Flickr tag for each event, and photos posted with that tag will automatically show up on that event’s page on Last.fm. As a user, you get an events calendar on the Last.fm site, but you’re planned events aren’t stuck there.
At the top of your events page there’s a iCal sync link. Click that link will add a subscription to your iCal that will auto update your calendar with your planned events. This is killer, the exact type of information freedom that we’ve come to expect from cutting edge sites. I recently found that it is possible to export Facebook events into iCal, but it looks like a one-time syncronization, and will have to be repeated as you add new events in Facebook. Last.fm, however, will automatically update your calendar, which makes the whole transaction seamless to the user.
What other sites with “event” tools have this level of syncing?
Published on June 17, 2008
Today is Download Day for Firefox 3. The official release is out today, and the Mozilla Foundation is trying to break a record for downloads in a 24 hour period. First of all, you should get Firefox 3 because it’s faster, more stable, and more feature rich than Firefox 2. I’ve been running a couple of the release candidates for a few weeks and I have noticed a huge difference over Firefox 2. While you’re helping yourself, you can help Firefox get publicity by downloading today and contributing toward reaching the record.
You can head over to www.spreadfirefox.com for more information and a download link. As of writing this (9:20am EST) the download link still goes to Firefox 2. I believe that Firefox 3 officially launches at 1pm EST.
Published on June 16, 2008
I’ve been using Google Browser Sync for a while now. It syncs your bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords, and open window sessions across multiple computers (and multiple operating systems). Unfortunately, the plugin doesn’t work in Firefox 3, and many users have been anxiously waiting for an update. A Lifehacker.com reader shared the reply e-mail he received from Google when he contacted them about Firefox 3 support for the Google Browser Sync plugin.
Thanks for trying out Google Browser Sync and for all of your feedback. It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.
The e-mail goes on to suggestion Mozilla Weave, Google Toolbar (for syncing just bookmarks online), and the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer plugin as replacements. I gave Mozilla Weave a shot last week, but it is in very early development and was far from stable enough for use. I’ve heard great things about Foxmarks, but like Google Toolbar, it doesn’t syncronize cookies, saved passwords, or window sessions. Weave is the only viable solution for my needs, so I’m hoping it will mature quickly and reach a stable release soon.
Google Browser Sync was a really great product, and it’s a shame to see it go. Google says that it will support current users until the end of 2008. Of course, I’m guessing that most Firefox users will be upgrading to Firefox 3 long before that (like June 17th).
Via: Lifehacker.com
Published on April 8, 2008
Right now, if you go to mymilemarker.com to update your fuel mileage info, you’ll be greeted by a ad-filled spam page (Thanks to NightOwl for the heads up.) I was crushed, cause I’ve switched my mileage tracking over to M3 completely. Thankfully, I did some digging and found this post on the M3 Twitter account, mymm.
Gah, domain issues!! Use http://m3.sidebarcreative.com/ until they’re resolved, which should be soon.
