Social butterflies, take note: RockMelt is the browser for you. I’ll try to keep this brief, but the scope of RockMelt could easily take multiple pages.
If you love crawling the web and/or have multiple social networking accounts as well as a penchant for sharing any and all content that you find, RockMelt will help your re-direct it to your audience. While several current “normal” browsers can be socialized via plugins and extensions and taking into account a couple of “social browsers” have already come and (mostly) gone, go out on a limb and give this one a shot.
What makes RockMelt different than past attempts at this social browser scene is how well the social aspect is built in for when you’re using it and how well it can disappear into the background when you’re not. The most obvious differences between RockMelt and your standard browser are of course the two sidebars. Along the left you have the pictures of your friends from whichever social accounts you’re signed into and interact with most. On the right, you have your tracked accounts — As of writing, Facebook and Twitter are the only supported accounts, though more are planned — and RSS feeds if you should so choose. Though one thing is very clear — RockMelt is heavily tied into Facebook. No Facebook account = much less usefulness.
I’m still waiting for my download link to try it out myself. But judging be the few hands-on accounts I’ve read and watched so far, it’ll be worth the wait. The only question now is can it succeed where others have failed?
What do you guys think: Has the social browser idea been flogged one too many times?
If you are one of tens of millions of gmail users, you may have noticed a bit of lag and latency issues plaguing your daily Gmail adventures. I can attest that it’s been awful — Im talking wait times of anywhere from 5 seconds up to 30 seconds. When contacted by TechCrunch, Google responded saying that they weren’t aware of any issues, though they would investigate the matter further.
Google did in fact turn up something in their search. In response to TechCrunch’s original email, Google had the following to say:
We recently experienced an issue in one of our datacenters which increased latency for a small percentage of Gmail users (approximately 2%). Issues like this can cause temporary slowness for small fractions of users from time to time. Speed is of utmost importance to us, and we are always working both to prevent these kinds of issues and resolve them as soon as possible.
So it wasn’t the crazies just rambling. There was a legitimate issue. Of course, how big it actually was is unknown. Google claimed in their official statement that it was less than 2%. But even then, 2% of roughly the hundreds of millions of adds up to quite a bit.
We’re interested to hear just how widespread it was. Were you affected by Gmail’s recent rash of slow down over the last few weeks?
In other news: Google added an extra two pixels-worth of vertical space to all our inboxes. Yay.
Online storage and “cloud” services are all the rage these days. With business looking to cut costs and move data storage offsite as well as consumers looking for easier and more convenient ways to share/store their information for easy accessibility may have found iCloud’s basic package at 3GB total storage a bit anemic. But the great thing about iCloud was that it wasn’t just about storage. Web apps covering multiple spheres including work and play allow consumers to get their work done and their time passed all via the convenience that a cloud based service can offer.
While the web apps and desktop in the cloud experience are certainly talking points, the real excitement for today’s announcement is the launch of iCloud Premium. Said service now offers customers a full 100GB of online storage so that users can store pretty much anything they want via the cloud. While HD movie buffs and music aficionados still won’t find ample storage for their digital collections, I’d wager a guess and say 80-90% of the general population will find the 100GB limit more than ample enough.
For those mobile warriors in the truest sense of the word, mobile devices are also supported in varying degrees depending on the mobile platform — specifically the iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile. I haven’t personally used iCloud yet on a mobile device so if anyone is willing to chip in a few words it would be more than welcome.
The 100GB iCloud Premium will cost $39.99 per year over the Basic 3GB plan’s price free entrance point. But for those honestly needing the extra space tied together with a robust allotment of web apps will find a winning solution with iCloud.
Google fanatics and Mac power users are experience a bad case of digital doldrums tonight. While starting the week off on a high with Gmail Offline support officially rolling out to everyone — and not relegated to a simple, option lab feature — many will be ending on a completely different plane. You see, in order for Gmail’s offline features to work, your browser needs to support Google Gears. Macs don’tdo support Google Gears, but only through Firefox. Safari support is hit and miss. And Google Chrome is moving to HTML 5… But all is not lost — in the impending future anyway.
Google themselves came forward recently and announced that they were abandoning Gears and instead putting the majority of their developing muscle behind HTML5. The biggest benefit of course being widespread and non-proprietary support as well as a close feature set to Gears with untapped potential for future innovations.
I could tell you happy tales of HTML 5 and open source development all day. But it won’t mask the cold hard reality that settles in when the glitz and glamor of “HTML 5″ wear off. The reality being that for the hear and now, Mac users are left in the dark when it comes to offline Gmail support. As of writing there isn’t a solution for Chrome/Gears use on Macs. But give it some time. I’m sure some crafty developer can whip something mighty tasty up. Though I’m sure you would just as easily be pleased if Google hopped to it and whipped up some offline Gmail support via HTML 5.
Of course there is that one small problem of HTML 5 not actually being a standard yet….
In a move that is sure to spur countless ramblings, clown faces, and repetitive though baseless comments from The Balms himself, the L.A. City Council voted an astonishing 12 – 0 on a $7.25 million contract to move all 30,000 of the cities’ employees over to Gmail and other Google related apps. Not a small move by any stretch. In fact, after the move is complete, the city of L.A. will be one of the largest municipal users of Google apps. Pretty cool huh? In an effort to prevent mass chaos, the city isn’t going all in from the get go. Initially a small test group of city employees will put the new system through it’s paces to ensure it can stand up to rigorous demand before all 30,000 are cut loose. A wise move I say. I guess that added corporate acknowledgement Google was looking for is finally starting to materialize eh? Now the only question is if they’ll really save all $7.25 million of those dollars…
MySpace: dead. Facebook: still growing but old news. Twitter: here and now. YouTube, Flicker, Wikipedia….the list of entertainment, multimedia, and social networking services goes on for days. You take on each service as to it’s relevance in the current online world will differ from mine. However, one thing that we can mostly agree on is that navigating to and signing in to each service can be time consuming and a pain. That’s where 44 Tips looks to change things up.
Since broadband has taken off here in the states (mostly) as well as the rest of the world, people, especially those with older machines that are having a not so easy time keeping up with the increasing demands placed upon them, have started started focusing their attention on cloud services. Of course there is Apple’s paid MobileMe service which is decent, there is Microsoft’s LiveMesh, Google of course has their own venture and host of services to brag about, and today iCloud, founded by Daniel Arthursson and funded by parent company Xcerion, can themselves brag a little louder with the announcement and release of some much improved features.
If you were a fan of Apple’s in house email service known as “.Mac”, today will bring a sad announcement and possibly a tear to your eye. Apple has officially stated that July 7th would be the end of .Mac homepages and groups. The homepages you currently have would still be accessible, however you will not be able to edit old, or create new pages after said date. Homepage changes aren’t all that bad as you can still use MobileMe and iWeb to get your life out there. However the .Mac groups feature is really getting the chopping block as everything is being taken offline including group email addresses, group homepages, message boards, and iDisk groups. If you have any of these services set up on MobileMe you’ll want to notify your users of the changes about to take place. Don’t worry about losing data as Apple will be moving anything in a group folder to a “group archive” folder so that you still can access all of those files and memories. When Apple moved from .Mac to MobileMe did you come along for the ride? Is the ending of .Mac while inevitable, still leave you longing for a piece nostalgia?
Barcelona was the home to Microsoft’s grand revealing of 2009 as as far as mobile services go. Sadly, while WinMo 6.5 and Windows Marketplace won’t be available until late this year, Microsoft did give us something somewhat tangible to get our hands on…My Phone. For the cave dwellers out there who haven’t had the mail dinosaur come by today, My Phone is Microsoft’s “MobileMe-esque” cloud syncing service. The lucky people who pre-registered and received invites got to get in on the action a wee bit early. For a truck load of pictures painstakingly detailing every little process involved head on over to JCXP.
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Google fanatics and Mac power users are experience a bad case of digital doldrums tonight. While starting the week off on a high with Gmail Offline support officially rolling out to everyone — and not relegated to a simple, option lab feature — many will be ending on a completely different plane. You see, in order for Gmail’s offline features to work, your browser needs to support Google Gears. Macs 
In a move that is sure to spur countless ramblings, clown faces, and repetitive though baseless comments from The Balms himself, the L.A. City Council voted an astonishing 12 – 0 on a $7.25 million contract to move all 30,000 of the cities’ employees over to Gmail and other Google related apps. Not a small move by any stretch. In fact, after the move is complete, the city of L.A. will be one of the largest municipal users of Google apps. Pretty cool huh? In an effort to prevent mass chaos, the city isn’t going all in from the get go. Initially a small test group of city employees will put the new system through it’s paces to ensure it can stand up to rigorous demand before all 30,000 are cut loose. A wise move I say. I guess that added corporate acknowledgement Google was looking for is finally starting to materialize eh? Now the only question is if they’ll really save all $7.25 million of those dollars…
