Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Web

Tweebay is an online auction service that uses Twitter to let people know about the items you’re selling. Here’s how it works. You follow Tweebay on Twitter and you’ll receive a direct message to verify your account. Then you can bid on auctions posted on the site or post new listings.

Auction terms should look familiar to anyone who has ever used eBay. You can upload a phoot, set a buy now price, or a reserve price. You can also set a postage price and choose your currency, although right now all listings are in British pounds. In Twitter-like style, you have to keep your descriptions under 240 characters.

There’s no feedback, which is one of the things that makes buying and selling from strangers on eBay possible. But since the people most likely to see your Tweebay listings are your Twitter friends, they may trust you enough to buy from you without seeing a feedback rating.

If the site takes off, that feedback issue could become a problem, since there’s nothing stopping you from visiting Tweebay.com and looking for auctions from people you don’t know (although the lack of a search engine makes the web page only moderately useful). And the site likely faces another problem: trademark infringement. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Tweebay change its name to something that sounds a bit less like eBay at some point.

[via TechCrunch]

Tweebay: What if eBay was powered by Twitter? originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 26 Dec 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0, Web

For a surprisingly long time, there’s been no way to look up Twitter users by name. Twitter used to offer a people search feature, but removed it when the service was experiencing some technical difficulties. Today the microblogging service has relaunched Twitter Name Search with a few improvements thrown in for good measure.

The new name search is faster and attempts to find names that are similar to the words you type into the engine. So if you mispell a name, Twitter will try to help you find the correct user anyway.

Results are ranked by the number of followers each user has. You can search for users by clicking the “find people” button on the upper right side of the page.

[via VentureBeat]

Twitter relaunches people search originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Linux, Open Source, Social Software

Now that Adobe AIR is officially available for Linux, you can run plenty of popular desktop clients for Twitter in Linux. Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and TweetDeck all run on Adobe AIR. But if you’re looking for a native Linux application that can handle Twitter status updates and much more, there’s Gwibber.

Like Twhirl and other desktop Twitter apps, Gwibber will show you a list of the most recent updates from your contacts and let you respond with short messages. In addition to Twitter, Gwibber supports updates from Digg, Jaiku, Facebook, Flickr, Indenti.ca and the now defunct Pownce.

One thing that’s a bit confusing is that Gwibber doesn’t provide a clear way to tell which messages are coming from which services. For instance, I added my Twitter and Flickr accounts to Gwibber and the only way I could tell that some of the updates were from Flickr was because they were accompanied by thumbnail photos. Update: You can adjust the colors for each account in the preferences.

Gwibber packages are available for Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Fedora.

[via MakeUseOf]

Gwibber brings Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more to Linux desktops originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, AOL

AIM Blast is a new AOL Instant Messenger feature that makes me feel old, because I just realized that it’s been a decade since I first wondered why there was no way to IM multiple buddies without opening a chatroom. Well, it’s finally here, and it works pretty well. You can’t make a Blast Group from within AIM, but if you go to blast.aim.com, you can set up and edit a group from there. Blast seems to work with third-party AIM clients, although AOL says that Meebo may have some problems with it.

The Blast Group will then show up on your buddy list, and any IM you send to it will go to everyone in the group. The group acts like a normal AIM account, it just puts people’s individual screennames in front of their messages, so you know who’s talking. When you invite people (using your group admin page), they’ll get a message in AIM asking them to accept or decline. Once they’re in, they can IM the group, unless you make it admin-only. That makes your group more like a notification system than a chat, but that may work better for some people.

AIM Blast: finally, you can IM multiple buddies at once originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Web services, Open Source, Social Software, Browsers

OpenID is a really great concept. The ability to use a single digital identity across the web and avoid having to sign up for yet another user account is a real productivity boon. More and more high profile sites and services are adopting OpenID, but the project still hasn’t gained the traction that many of us think it deserves. This is partially because it still isn’t easy to use OpenID — or even find out if a site supports OpenID — on all services. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop think they’ve come across a solution: let the browser handle it.

Back in June, MySpace announced support for OpenID and also became an OpenID provider. In order to help users more easily manage their online identity across other sites and services, MySpace teamed up with Flock and Vidoop to create OpenID for Flock, available today at https://extensions.flock.com. OpenID for Flock is an open source plugin, part of the larger Identity in the Browser (IDIB) project which is focused on having the browser, not the user handle, authenticate and mange multiple user identities.

I had the chance to demo the plugin yesterday and it is pretty cool. Essentially, once installed an OpenID icon appears on the right of Flock’s chrome bar. The extension scans a page for OpenID compatibility, and if a site supports OpenID, the icon starts to glow. You can then automatically choose to populate the OpenID fields with your designated OpenID URL or associate that site with a specific OpenID account. You can manage all of your OpenIDs, choose what sites to associate certain profiles with and view the login history and OpenID-to-site-relationship with each site.

Continue reading MySpace, Flock and Vidoop release OpenID for Flock plugin

MySpace, Flock and Vidoop release OpenID for Flock plugin originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Freeware, Social Software, Browsers

First off, let me clarify: I’m not saying that StumbleUpon isn’t a very complex, smartly built addon. It’s just that I don’t go stumbling off to a (somewhat) randomly selected site all the time. Sometimes I’d like walk a path that has been trodden by others searching for the same things I am.

Fast Forward by BuzzBox is an excellent alternative, suggesting possible destinations based on where other surfers clicked through. The addon installs as both a drop-down menu in the main toolbar and as a simple button in the status bar.

The dropdown presents the top destinations for you to choose from, while the status bar icon zips you off to the most popular one with a single click. Two other nice features of Fast Forward are its small size (the .xpi is only 69kb) and the fact that no registration is required.

There is a privacy policy that you may want to read - this is, after all, a recommendation engine and it needs to gather information about your browsing. According to the policy, “BuzzBox does not attempt to determine the identity of any BuzzBox user by analyzing Web usage paths. “

With only 245 total downloads from Mozilla’s site, it’s going to take a little while before you start seeing suggestions on every site you visit, but Fast Forward has tons of potential and is well worth a download.

[ via TechCrunch ]

BuzzBox Fast Forward adds smarter “Stumbling” to Firefox originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

If you’ve been to a tech event since SXSW in 2006, you’ve probably seen some kind of large monitor displaying info from the conference-goers. Often, this means Twitter tweets by attendees. Brightkite has just taken this a step further, with their own “Wall” feature. Because Brightkite is a location-based service to begin with, the wall has a built-in way to gather data. This means the usefulness of the wall isn’t limited to events: you can just display it in any place (like a coffee shop, for example) and show all the people who are posting messages nearby.

I love the Brightkite Wall. It could turn out to be a brilliant way to show new users what the service is all about, as well as making an interesting public installation. It also opens up Brightkite to people who don’t even have Brightkite accounts: you can put the appropriate location at the top of the wall, next to the Brightkite shortcode, and anyone can text a message onto the wall via SMS.

Brightkite’s new killer feature is … a wall? originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Freeware, Social Software

Until about 15 minutes ago I was a big Digsby fan. When I fired up the installer on my clean Vista x64 machine today, I was greeted with an unpleasant sight.

First off, you don’t even download the actual installer from Digsby.com anymore - it’s a downloader application. While I’m not a fan of downloaders in general, this one in particular got me all riled up.

Apart from half a dozen crapware install offers, the final screen before anything actually happened asked to change my homepage and switch my default search provider to Yahoo. I’m all for supporting an app, but this was more than I’m willing to tolerate from an installer.

Are you kidding me? Digsby, tell me you’re kidding. Looks like it’s time for me to give Pidgin another try.

Update: interesting new comment from user Aaron.

If you think this is bad, you should check out their new ‘help digsby do research’ option that’s buried in their menu structure and ENABLED BY DEFAULT. This allows your computer to join a computational botnet that does commercial work that the Digsby team gets paid for (think folding@home for money). Notice your laptop fan whirring away unexpectedly? You’re probably doing protein analysis for some drug company. Totally shady. I’m dropping Digsby like a hot potato, I’ve lost all trust in the developers if they somehow think this is ‘okay’.

What about you? Are you willing to put up with skipping over the crapware so that you can still install the latest version of Digsby? Sound off!

New Digsby installer loaded with bloat and adverts originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Web

Everybody says there’s no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but sometimes a ridiculous Twitter app comes along to make me wonder whether that’s true. Right now there are two of them: Tweetstalk and Twollow. Tweetstalk lets you “stalk” a Twitter user, reading his or her tweets without formally following. Twollow automatically follows anybody who posts the keywords you specify.

I’m conflicted about these two services. Tweetstalk is a Firefox plugin that adds a “stalk” button next to the follow button on users’ Twitter pages: click it to subscribe to their tweets without following them. This doesn’t do anything you can’t do by going to a user’s Twitter page and reading it. But if you intend to do it on an ongoing basis, you might as well let him or her know you’re doing it by following.

Twollow could be useful for business Twitter accounts, and marketers who want to reach out to people who are discussing their clients. Depersonalizing it by making it automatic hardly seems productive to me, though. Why not use search.twitter.com to see who’s talking about a topic, and decide whether to follow them yourself? Otherwise, you might end up following some really lame people, based on only one of their tweets.

Two new Twitter ideas that miss the mark originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: E-mail, Yahoo!, Social Software, Web

Yahoo! has been talking about plans to make its web-based email inbox smarter and more social by integrating other web services for months. Now the company is spelling out what that means a bit more clearly. VentureBeat reports the company held an event today where it showed off a demo of the next generation email inbox with a new sidebar with support for web applications like WordPress, Xoopit, and Flixter.

The new Yahoo! Mail will also feature Flickr integration, allowing users to share photos by logging into their Flickr accounts from their email inbox. Yahoo! Mail will also be able to mine your personal data to figure out who your closest contacts are. It will then be able to prioritize emails from those contacts.

Yahoo! will also be rolling out a new version of the Yahoo! Toolbar with access to your web applications and adding a new section to the My Yahoo! homepage where you can access the same apps. TechCrunch snagged an image of the new toolbar, which is scheduled for a beta release next week.

Update: And the official announcement is up on the Yahoo! Mail blog. Check out a video demo of the new Yahoo! Mail after the break.

Continue reading Yahoo! lays out plans for Inbox app integration

Yahoo! lays out plans for Inbox app integration originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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