Flock is an excellent browser that I have grown to love. Although, I know of many people that say otherwise because they feel it could easily be done in Firefox by installing some extension. Yes, this may very well be true, but why would you go through all that hassle when Flock is built with a great interface that has these features at default? It’s built for these features for Flock, by Flock, and I’m sure functionality and performance would be much better then installing extensions. Well, I’m a happy user and maybe you will too when you see the features.

I am going to give a run-down of new features and features with large updates including photo sharing, blogging, and Flock’s feed reader, and bookmarking. I feel these are the features that makes Flock so great and each deserves a detailed explanations (full screenshots provided). Let’s take a look.

Photo Sharing

Flock has excellent photo sharing integration. I’ve spoken to many Flock users and read user reviews about the photo sharing and many say they use Flock simply because of the photo sharing. I must say, it is of the main reasons why I use Flock too. What makes it so great is that Flock has direct integration to photo sharing services that many of us already use today, such as Flickr and Photobucket (with more coming). It takes a few simple steps to connect the browser to your Flickr account (one time setup) and will then allow you to easily view your photos, upload and modify photos, and even look at of photos from supported photo sharing services. Flock has this great feature called the Photos Topbar. When you turn on the Photos Topbar (see first screenshot above), a photostream will appear, much like a film-strip, that allows you to scroll through all of your photos. You can also search for photos on the web, find friends using a specific photo sharing service, star (bookmark) your favorite photostreams to easily keep track of them, and more.

Flock also includes a photo uploader with simple drag and drop publishing and image modification options. The uploader allows you to drag photos from your desktop directly into Flock’s upload and will then allow you to set titles, descriptions, and even tags to each photo. At the click of the “Upload” button, Flock will then connect to your photo sharing account, inform you about your account’s space, and upload to the service. I uploaded around 20 photo’s in around 2 minutes with each photo containing titles, descriptions, and tags. Further more, if I ever needed to resize, crop, or rotate a photo, I may do this as well with it’s built in image modification tool.

One feature that I found really neat with this was that if you were posting a thread at a forum or making a comment somewhere on the web, you can easily upload any photo to it in seconds. Simply find a photo on your desktop or from your Flickr photostream and drop it into the text area. If the photo is not available online, Flock will bring up the image uploader and allow you to instantly upload and insert the HTML into the text area. I found this pretty neat and definitely easy.

Blogging

Flock also includes a built in blogging platform so any user can easily pickup on blogging and manage their blogs all within the browser. Flock also includes a neat tool called, Web Snippets, that allows users to easily save images, snippets of text, links, and more in one container while they browse the web. Many users will use this so they can save quotes from a website and include it in a blog post, which Flock allows you to do using simple drag and drop. I however don’t often use others photos or refer to direct quotes on sites, but I found it to be a really helpful tool for when researching a specific topic or product. I can create my own snippets of text, save any photos I may want to refer to later, and save resources all in one area. This way, while I write a post, rather then opening all these tabs and looking at individual pages while I write a post, I can just open Web Snippets and view snippets that I have saved for reference.

The blog editor allows you to connect directly to your blog and create and manage posts. It provides a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor allowing you to easily format text, add links, lists, and more. If you’re not into the whole formatting thing, you can easily switch to the HTML Markup tab. Flock also allows you to save blog posts as drafts to your hard-drive and open them at a later time for publishing. You may also open up the Web Snippets tool while you blog so you can easily drag and drop items in your post or refer to items while you write. And for those of you wondering about pings/notifications to services, like Pingomatic, Flock supports them as well.

Feed Reader

I spend many hours of my day reading through RSS feeds and it was nice to see that Flock has stepped it up with their feed reader since their initial alpha release. It now is a fully functional feed reader allowing you to easily import feeds from any website, create collections of feeds for organization, and read them in a clean interface. It works much like your basic feed reader listing feeds/collections along the left and posts on the right. You can choose to view feeds in a single or double column format and the reader also provides a one page overview off all collections called the “Front Page.” The feader reader works fairly well, although when I imported all of my 250 feeds from Bloglines, it started to lag the browser a bit and have a hard time at displaying stories in the feed reader. I’m sure with less, it would perform much better, but I was hoping it wouldn’t of had any problems.

Flock will notify you of new posts as they come in by displaying a gold circle on the news reader icon from the toolbar. If you are wondering how often Flock will check for new posts, according to the FAQ section, Flock will check feeds for updates every hour or you can individually refresh feeds.

Flock also provides simple feed importing to the feed reader. First, on any website you can click on the feed icon in the address bar to view and import the feed. This isn’t anything all that new and popular browsers do this already too. But what really got me was when I went to import my Bloglines OPML. I clicked on Bloglines export option which opens up an OPML formatted document with all my subscribed feeds. Flock recognized it was an OPML file and allowed me to view all the feeds and with one click, subscribe to all of them. In one click, without me having to save the OPML file to my hard-drive, it imported all 250 feeds in less then a second. It honestly put a smile to my face – no joke. It’s rare that you find such simple import options such as that and I feel they did a nice job with it.

Bookmarking

Flock tightly integrates social bookmarking into its browser with Del.icio.us and Shadows. It allows you to easily connect to either of these services so you can view your bookmarks within the browser and save bookmarks as you browse the web at the click of a button. On the left of the address bar is a star. Single-clicking this star with perform a quick save, only saving the link to your bookmarks on your hard-drive. However, double-clicking the star will allow you to save a bookmark to a collection, tag, and add a description to the bookmark, as well as automatically publish it to your social bookmarking account (Del.icio.us or Shadows). It’s simple and quick. My only complaint with the bookmarking functionality is that the bookmark manager feels a bit cluttered to me. With hundreds of bookmarks, opening the manager presents you with a full list of bookmarks close together making it a little difficult to pick one. Although, the search located at the bottom does help with it’s filtering as you type. Just my opinion though and many may not even use the bookmark manager if they are happy with sticking to the social bookmarking service. Either way, Flock offers nice and simple bookmarking integration and I like being able to save bookmarks with a click of the mouse.

You do not have to register with Qunu, although I recommend doing so just so you can create a profile and obtain your own unique Qunu Jabber ID (mines bbenzinger[at]qunu.com). However, if you have a Jabber account for instant messaging already, you may login with that which will get you setup with the service as well. Lastly, if you decide not to register, that is perfectly fine too because you can freely ask questions to experts as a Qunu Guest.

To start, head to the Qunu alpha site and make a search on any skill (ie: PHP, Photoshop, Linux, etc.). It will then connect to the server and find any available experts that are online in that you can request for support. When the list is returned, you click on the expert name and you will be presented with the experts profile, skill set, and amount of experience for each skill. If the expert seems to match what you’re looking for, click on the “Request live help from this expert” button at the bottom of the profile and the expert will have the option to accept or deny the request. If you did not find someone who you are looking for, you can try filtering through the list of experts by selecting more tags relating to your question on the right of the search results.

If you found an expert and the expert accepted your request for help, an instant message window will popup. The window looks very similar to your basic messaging application, so you should have no problem getting comfortable with it. Chat is Ajax powered and in real-time using the Jabber IM Client. Experts that are logged in can optionally use the Qunu web-based interface to chat or they can use their own Jabber client (supported Jabber Clients). The expert will be given the topic of discussion and then you both just have at it. Say your usual, “Hey” and “How’s it going?”, then ask your question. Remember, the experts are normal people that simply like to help, so just act like you usually would, like speaking to a friend. Also, if you’d like to include more users in your discussion, you can do this simply by clicking on invite on the message window and entering the username of your friend/expert into the text box.

When you have finished your discussion and received your answer (or not), you may save your conversation using the save button and when ready, close the instant message window. Once closed, you will then see a new window appear asking you to answer two questions regarding the expert. You rate the experts level of expertise and you say how nice the expert was when you were discussing things. As of now, I’m not sure if you can view these ratings or not, but I’m sure Qunu is planning to do something with them. If not, maybe this is Qunu’s way of moderating experts making sure they’re actually “experts.” Either way, the questions are optional and I was actually happy to see them.

Overall, I found Qunu to be a unique and helpful system. It’s like a normal instant messaging client, but without the buddy list, and to talk to someone, it’s just a search away. Qunu currently supports Firefox and Internet Explorer with Opera support on it’s way. I had no problems using the interface and everything was pretty straight forward. Also, because of the fact that searching, managing your profile, setting your online status, etc., is all powered by Ajax without redirection, you can still browse the site while having a discussion in an IM window so you won’t mistakingly leave it.

What I like about Qunu so much is that usually if I was in such a need to ask a question, I’d resort to a forum on the topic and wait for a few hours until receiving a reply. With Qunu, it’s support right when I find an expert and in real-time. It definitely saves time! But to answer the question many of you are probably thinking, why would someone be willing to help me, especially when it’s for free? As Qunu says in their FAQ section, “It’s simple. In general, people love to help. They’re doing it already, on forums, email lists and a hundred other places. What we’re doing is giving people a way to help in real time. And get thanked in real time too.” Qunu also says, “It’s community helping community” and I can’t agree more with both statement. Great work, Qunu. I’ll try to help out where I can!

View Qunu Live Support with Web-Based Messaging.

Getting started is very simple, but make sure your blog meets the requirements first. You must have access to the server your blog is hosted on and must support PHP 4.3.0 or later. Your blog’s database also needs to be a MySQL database. If your a WordPress user like myself, everything should be just fine. After confirming your server meets the requirements, you then have to setup BackupMyBlog to backup your database.

You have two options when setting up BackupMyBlog to your server. You can either use their quick and easy Wizard Setup or the Manual Setup. The wizard will take you through a three step process that will ask you for some basic information about your database and FTP. You first enter your FTP information (FTP details will not be saved) and it will display your servers file system. Select the directory where your blog installation exists and it will automatically do the rest for you and upload two files to your server for BackupMyBlog. It’s that simple and your ready to go. However, there was one part that I felt uncomfortable about during this process. When it successfully finds your blogs configuration file, it asks for your MySQL database information, which it should, but what I didn’t really like was how it prefilled all of the MySQL information for me (host, username, password, and database). Maybe it’s just me, but it spooked me a little, specifically because of the password. Anyone else feel the same? Anyways, the manual setup just steps you through making two files that you include in your blogs directory (same files the wizard would setup).

Once everything has been setup, you will be directed back to the management area where you can access your backup history, restore your database from a previous backup, and modify reporting options. Shortly after (around 15 minutes) you will receive your first report, either by RSS feed (available in management area) or by email. Make sure everything looks correct and if there are any problems, submit a support ticket. I haven’t had any issues yet. The history area will show all your database tables and the amount of records in each so you can easily compare differences in the backups, making it easier for you to pick the best date to restore to if your database every does run into problems.

Restoring a database takes only a minute and is a very simple process. If you go into the restore section of BackupMyBlog, you will see a list of your backups sorted by date. Select a backup and then pick a method to restore. You can choose either a PHP script that will perform the database backup for you or an SQL file that you have to run yourself. Either way, you have to download a script and get it on your server, which I much prefer over having a remote service attempt to do it. If you have chosen the PHP script, all you have to do is upload the script to your server and access it. Submit the form when the page loads and all is set. Just make sure to delete the file when you are done so no one can attempt to back it up again.

That’s about all there is to it. I have ran multiple tests and everything seemed to work great without problem. I first setup a fresh installation of WordPress for our company that we hope to blog at soon. I wanted to do a fresh database rather then jumping at Solution Watch and find an error occur, just to be safe. Everything went through perfectly though. I collected a few days worth of backups. Added test posts to the blog here and there and restored the database a couple times. Once I knew things were working well, I have setup BackupMyBlog on Solution Watch and the backups are being made. Hopefully, I wont have to use them, but atleast I have them and don’t have to worry about making backups on my own.

Overall, I found BackupMyBlog to be a great service that can definitely help many bloggers out there. Many servers, especially on shared servers, do have some kind of backup system already, but those of you that don’t may want to look into BackupMyBlog. It would have also made things a whole lot quicker when switching my hosting for Solution Watch to Media Temple. It took some time to get the database over then, but I imagine it would only take a matter of minutes with BackupMyBlog.

BackupMyBlog is a service by Doug Martin who is also the owner of LookLater, one of my favorite bookmarking tools. I could not find a price at BackupMyBlog for when it’s out of the free beta stage, but a post over at Mark Allen’s states that it may be $20/3 months of daily backups. Not bad at all, but no word on official pricing as of yet.

View BackupMyBlog – Automatic Remote Backups for Blogs. (via LookLater)

One feature that I did not notice at first is the searching of your favorites and history. The way it works is very neat and makes searching easily. At the top right search box, begin typing a word and it will create a list of sites in your favorites and history and present them in a nice organized dropdown that you can select from. One thing that I did not notice though was a method to search in the actual Favorites Manager. I would really like that becuase it will provider a much bigger area to view and search.

I have also received a few emails about adding bookmarks with tags. It is actually very simple and I love the way you write out the tags in Flock. You go to, Favorites > Star and Tag this Page. This will then bring up a window like you see above. As you type a tag, it is appears as normal. But once you hit comma, it will turn it into a bubble circling the word. To edit a tag you have already written, double click it and it will allow you to do so. This tagging method is also used when tagging a post for your blog.

Just a few other notes about Flock. You will notice that you do not have a stop button. Why is this? It is because when a site is actually loading, the refresh button will then change to a stop button. I really like this because it provides Flock more space for their features and it also gives us more space to add any additional buttons to the bar. As for Blogging Platforms, I know that WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad work. I did hear that they were working on Movable Type. This is for the release that I have received and not the one they are soon to release, so I am not sure as to how much of a change their will be. You can setup multiple blogs and have multiple ping services. You can add ping services by going the options for Flock and selecting, “Blogging.” I have also recieved a few questions about the rendering engine of Flock. Flock uses Firefox as its backend, which is absolutely great. You can use Firefox extensions on it and I have tried a few and they seem to work just fine. I do not believe you can change themes though, but really, I don’t want to. I love the design and I even have my wallpaper set to Flock’s wallpaper right now!

On an important note: Geoffrey has also informed me that the issue with del.icio.us automatically adding their Flock bookmarks is now fixed. He told me it will be fixed for the next build, which I am assuming is the one that is going to be released shortly.

Did I have any other issues? Honestly, nothing too serious. Sometimes the feed viewer would lag on me and then say the script couldn’t continue running and sometimes when I viewed my memory usage, it was fairly high. But this will all get better in time and I do not know if these problems have already been fixed or not in the new release that we are all waiting for.

Now just sit back and wait for the release! Great work, Flock, and congratulations.

P.S. If anyone was wondering, I have purchased a new hosting provider and I will be switching servers hopefully in a day or two. I just need some time to transfer all my files and databases. Thank you for your patience and I apologize for the problems that have been occuring.

Flock did a good job at sticking to the basic structure of a browser and basically looks like a beautified Firefox, but with extra features. The buttons on the navigation bar has the basic back, forward, refresh, and home button. But you also get a few new buttons such as a button to open the blog editor, the favorites manager, and the star button to star a site (will get to this later). You also have the address bar and search bar just like Firefox. You will also notice in the screenshot above a dark gray shaded area with photos. That is one of Flock’s topbars. There are only two topbars as of now. The “Flickr Photos” and “Blog Topbar.” The Flickr is the one that you see above. You can enter a username and then it will load the photos right into the top bar. Then selecting and dragging a photo down into the browsers window, it will load the Flickr page for that photo. I absolutely loved knowing that I can be at any website and then open up the a topbar to view the latest photos. I also mentioned the Blog Topbar. With this Topbar open and setup with your blog settings, you can easily select any text from a website and click and drag it into a box that they provide. When you drag it into the box, it will actually bring up the Blog Editor allowing you to create a post very easily with the text you selected in a blockquote and reference to the source, where you selected the text.

Flock also said that there was del.icio.us integration with the browser, so I went straight to the Favorites Manager to see what they have done. When entering for the first time, it asked if I had a del.icio.us account. I filled in my information and then the bookmarks page refreshed with all the bookmarks that I have in del.icio.us… that was easy. On the left are your collections and tags. On the right are your bookmarks in columns with the name, url, tags, and any other information that you wish to select to list, such as description from del.icio.us, and last modified or added dates. Although, when I added the last modified or added dates columns, no values were shown. Maybe something that needs looking at.

In the left column of the Favorites Manager are your collections and tags. Focused in the collections area you can view your current collections, which are pretty much your own groups of bookmarks, You will see, “Your Library,” which are all of your bookmarks. I like how they used the term, library, for this. It makes me feel like im in iTunes. Now, something that I did feel weird with though was the fact that the History is also in the Favorites Manager. I like how it is in here, but it is just a little odd being that History is not my favorites (but could be) and also because I am used to doing “View > Toolbars > History” inside of Firefox. Not a big problem, it just means a little change for me. You will also see your own created collections. They start you off with one called, “Default” that has a few Flock bookmarks in it (note that it also added these to my del.icio.us bookmarks, which was unexpected). Your own collections are good for your own organization and not only that, but for the favorites toolbar built into the browser. You will see these links when you first setup the browser on the favorites bar (which is in the same spot as Firefox had your “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder”). The thing that I liked though was that it splits the favorites up by your collections you created and you can then select a collection on the right of the favorites toolbar to view. So, I can have a collection for my blogs, frequent visits, etc.. Something that is also really neat with collections is that if you have sites that have feeds, then it will detect this and show them. But, on top of that, on the side of the collection name, it will say, “Feeds.” When you click this, it will actually show you all the sites combined in that one file that Flock generates. It will use its built in feed viewer for this (I will explain this later).

Adding of favorites is also very simple. Now, remember that the favorites are integrated with del.icio.us if you provided login details, so when you add a favorite, it will add it to del.icio.us as well. Another difference is that they do not refer to adding of bookmarks as, “Add to Favorites,” but rather, “Star this Page.” Staring is your method of adding links to your favorites and delicious. If you look at the top address bar (where the URL of the site you are at is), you will see a blue star button. When you click this, it will star the page and add it to your favorites/del.icio.us bookmarks. If you look at the star closer, you will notice that there is an arrow on it as well. Click on the arrow and the favorites menu will open allowing for more options to select from. The favorites menu allows you to star a page along with adding tags to it, you can star multiple tabs at once (all tabs that are open), add the page to a collection that you have, and you can even see your most recent favorites or frequently visited bookmarks. If you do not like how it adds to del.icio.us, you can disable this in the options.

Now lets take a look at the Flock Blog Editor. The blog editor actually surprised me on what can be accomplished with it. It is a small editor but it does have some great features. In the screenshot above, I have the Blog Topbar open. This allows me to see a list of recent posts and drafts from my site (Note: I have it pointing to a different server right now. Flock is still in the works, so I’m not plugging it to Solution Watch yet.) You can have multiple blogs setup for it. When first opening the Blog Topbar for the first time, you will setup a blog for it. You can then go to the options for Flock to add more along with pinging services for when you update a blog. Now, back to the editor itself. It uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor on the top and right below this is the source that you can edit. I really like that because being a programmer, I just don’t really trust WYSIWYG all the time. It does seem to work really well with producing valid code, however. You can bold, italic, change font size, tab, and insert links. One thing that I really felt was a necessity though that Flock did not have was a way to add images through the WYSIWYG. Just functionality like links would please me. You can open the Flickr topbar and drag the photos down from that though, which is great. You can also just drag an image from a site and drag it right into the text area, like other WYSIWYG. If the Flock team could create some type of image manager or something of the sort, that would be excellent. Maybe having a window that you can open that will show a list of images on your server that you can select from and insert into a post? I would absolutely love that. Moving along with the editor, you can also add Technorati tags to your posts using their simple tag box on the right on the text areas. If you are not done with a post, you can save it as a draft and when you are done, you can publish it and it will update your blog. Great work on the editor. I just want a little better image functionality.

The next thing that I felt was worth mentioning is what Flock calls, Shelf. Shelf is actually a very helpful little tool. What you do is go to the menu for Flock and select Tools and then Shelf. A small window will now open that looks similar to the Download window from Firefox and inside it will have a background image saying, “Drop Stuff Here.” So, that is what you do. Go to a website, select some text, and then click and drag it down onto the Shelf window and drop it in the white area. It will then add an item to it, similar to what you see above. Now that you have an item in Shelf, what do you do with it? Well, simply with Shelf open, you can now click and drag any item from it into a text area in Flock. It will then paste the HTML and everything for you. What I really liked about it though is that if you selected text from a site, put it in Shelf, and then dragged it into a text area, it will actually blockquote the text and link to the site where you got the text from. This makes Shelf very useful for blogging and quoting people.

The next thing I want to mention is that Flock has an inline feed viewer. Whenever you go to a feed, it will show it in a format, much like what you see above. Very clean and layed out page. You can collapse and Expand all the entries, sort by date, sort by source, and it makes it very easy to read with simpe typography that is at a readable size. They also have a button for switching back to the website the feed came from. It is perfect for getting a quick glance at an RSS feed or you can even add it to your favorites or a collection for your navigation toolbar if you want to keep up on it that way.

I am almost done! Let me just spit out some thoughts and ideas for Flock. First, Even Eckard has wrote his feelings about how Flock automatically adds themselves to your del.icio.us account when first setting it up. I don’t like this and I know that others do not agree with it as well. If you want, maybe even give the option or a warning? Have a yes or no dialog come up asking if we will allow it to add them to our del.icio.us accounts. Next, as I mentioned when writing about the Blog Editor, I feel that a method for browsing images from a directory online or even from your computer would be a great addition. It would make the environment a whole lot easier for me and other bloggers that use images a lot in their posts. Scott Jarkoff also stated in his review a feature request. The request was for adding a Topbar that will show images from Flickr based on the context of the site you are currently visiting. This is a great idea, but I understand it could be fairly stressful for the browser too, so I am not too concerned about that. It would certainly make the browser even more social. Now, an issue that I seem to be coming across as I am writing this post is that it has problems with refreshing content when submitting the form from WordPress. Let me explain first. I would write a few sentences and then save the draft. When it refreshes back to the same page, it did not show my updates, nor my content in the text area. At first I thought it ignored it, but I then when to a different page and then back to the draft again and it was there. Seemed like some sort of cache/refreshing issue when submitting a form repeatedly. I am not sure if this is only me experiencing this, but it definitely made me scratch my head for a while. (Note: I just saved at that last sentence and when it came back, the sentence wasn’t there. I then went to a different page and back again or a simple cache refresh of the page and it was there.)

Overall, I love Flock. It has some excellent features and it definitely shows the social and blogging side to it. The interface is designed beautifully and it is a great browser. Sure, there are a few issues here and there, but it isn’t complete yet and only in Beta. I was very impressed with what I saw and am sure they have more coming. Flock team, excellent work. I love what has been done so far and I see a great future for Flock.

View Flock (announcement signup).

Update: Just noticed another helpful feature built into Flock. When you have multiple tabs open, you can click and drag each one of them to the left and right. You will see small arrows pointing down in the position to drop it. I have been wanting draggable tabs for a while in Firefox. (Thanks to Tristan and Tom who pointed out Firefox Beta 2 now has draggable tabs.) Great addition to Flock.

Update: Geoffrey from Flock has left a comment and mentioned on his blog that they are working on fixing the del.icio.us issue with automatic adding of Flock bookmarks and it was not their intent. They are working on it, and remember, this is what Beta releases are for!

Also, my server seems to be a little bogged down today. Sorry if it is acting up for you. I am trying to get the issue resolved.

“Your GNU/Linux desktop is actually sitting on our servers in California, and the screen graphics are transported in real-time, to appear in a Java applet running within the web page. This applet is GPL, open source software: VNC (Virtual Network Computing), code formerly maintained by AT&T’s Cambridge laboratories. This lab has since closed, but, as is the nature of open software, the code lives on.” (Workspot F.A.Q)

I was also surprised that Internet works. That’s Solution Watch open in Firefox in the screenshot! Everything runs a little slow, small, and is a little slim on the quality, but that is okay with me because this is just really slick.

How is this possible? Through the use of a pretty hefty Java applet. “The magic is a Java applet, an AES encrypted, graphical connection to a Linux desktop. It works through every Java-enabled browser, and through most corporate firewalls. It works through fast native clients too, available on Linux, Unix, Windows & Macs. Transfer files easily to your Workspot, with the secure WebDAV protocol, available on all platforms.” Very impressive, indeed.

I am using this to learn the environment, but there are a lot of other uses as well. I don’t think I am going to subscribe though. I just want to get the feel of hour the system works. And you know what else is great? They plan on releasing a GPL distribution of the server software.

One last thing: I noticed that when you go to subscribe, it shows that the total comes to $0.00. BUT, in the F.A.Q., it shows that it is $9.95 a month. Has anybody signed up to this yet? Does anyone out there know what the deal is with this? Otherwise… this is just amazing. Great work to the crew behind Workspot.

View Workspot – Linux… through your browser!

Musicmobs has a great method of finding music by allowing members to actually upload their iTunes Library files (XML) and add the music to their collection. In doing this, the service can immediately help you find music of interest. I imported the my iTunes Library of around 2,000 songs and here is what my account looked like after 10 seconds of signing up: bbenzinger’s music (now you know what I listen to). After seeing this, I was quiet impressed on how easy that was.

(Screenshot from listing my songs in Musicmobs in order of Most Played)

First, to give you an idea of what is capable with Musicmobs, go to the main page and look on the left column where it says, “Get Recommendations.” You will see three text boxes. Fill those in with three artists/bands you like and click on the “Recommend” button. It will then fetch artists/bands that are related to those that you have entered. For me, the list returned an excellent selection. For each name that comes up, you will see an iTunes icon on the side of it. Click on that and it will bring up a page to open up iTunes Music Store so you can sample the artist. I love that feature and if I like the album, I will buy it and add it to my library.

Next, what you want to do after signing up is to download the Mobster application that is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. This makes the whole experience of finding music easier by bringing the results up in the application instead of having to go to the website and logging in. Below is a screenshot of the application in action on Windows. So, once downloaded, open the application. It will then ask you to play a song in iTunes so it can search for related music.

You can see that I have started playing in iTunes, Say Anything. Mobster picked this up and automatically search for groups in relation to them. On the left column, it returns the bands that you already have in your library that are a match and on the right, it shows groups that do not exist in your library. This is really nice because now I don’t have to look through one list with music that I already have. You will also see two selection boxes on the bottom, one under the left column and one under the right. I set them both to Search in Mobster. Now, when you select a song, it will search mobster for that selection and refresh the lists with the new results that are related. If I see a band that I am interested in on the right column, I go to the dropdown and select Open Musicmobs Page. Now, when I select an artist I do not know, it will bring me to the website allowing me to view albums, songs, and members that are fans of the artist. This allows me to even further get more information and relations. On the left column, if I find a band that I like that is in my library, I change the selection to Play in iTunes so that I can just click on the name and it will then start playing their music in iTunes.

What I have said about Musicmobs is not all there is too the service, there is a lot you can do. I recommend signing up (its Free!) and giving it a try. Go find some music! And, Brian, let me know if that helped you!

View Musicmobs: Music Intelligence.

Now let me give you a little rundown of what Qnext is capable of. Qnext hit communication right on the money with features such as Instant Messaging with Qnext users and even users from AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ. You can do VOIP to anyone that has a mic (free), and if you want to go a notch above voice communication, you can do Live Video Conferencing to receive video from the users webcam in real time. Want more methods of communicating? Qnext even has a built in chatroom system and an IRC interface.

Another feature that impressed me was the Photo Sharing zones as you see in the above screenshot. It will give you a listing of the photographs that insert into the zone with detailed thumbnails. On selecting a thumbnail and dragging it to the viewing area, you can get a full view of the photo with zooming and rotating features. Very well done job on this. And if you were wondering, those are my photographs that I have taken.

Above is a screenshot of the Jukebox zone. This is my personal favorite area because when someone is connected and has their Jukebox accessible to you, you are given the ability to view their library of music and stream any song that is inside of it. You cannot download the music, although you can simply do this in the File Transfers area, but the streaming is all I need to be happy. When Ben was on and had his open, I was able to view his large library of music and see what kind of music he is interested in and listen to them. At anytime a user is online and has a Jukebox, you can stream any of the music available in the list. Also, from looking at the screenshot, you can see that the music is sorted. You can sort the music by Album, Artist, or Genre. You even have the choice to make playlists.

Qnext has many more amazing features such as QnextMyPC. QnextMyPC is their secure P2P-based Remote Access service that gives you “fast, easy and secure access to your computer from anywhere in the world using a standard Web-browser. You can remotely access your email, applications, files and network resources as if you were sitting directly in front of your computer.” Want more? Qnext even has games that you can play with users with the games Go, Chess, Checkers, Backgammon. If you don’t have anyone to play with, you can play against the computers. Maybe I should work on my chess before playing someone. The File Sharing also has no limitations and is extremely fast from what I can tell.

Qnext is definitely the best P2P that I have used and I am positive that you will agree. It is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. My username is bbenzinger if you wanted to get in touch. Enjoy!

View Qnext – P2P that has it all.

Last.fm was exactly what I have been looking for. I was not really interested in the fact that you have the ability to meet people that have the same musical interest, but rather to see what people recommended on the music I already listen to. The way Last.fm works is a great method to find what people listen to and to combine that information to make an ultimate recommendation list, and it really works well.

What you do is signup and then download the Last.fm plugin that you can use with iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, etc.. The plugin will then send a message to Last.fm of what song you have recently played and make a listing what them, like what you see in the above screenshot. It will tally up how many times you listen to each song, find what you listen to, and compare them to other members of Last.fm. The plugins are available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux too!

You have the ability to find related bands of any type, and I was surprised to see many bands that many people are not aware of in their listing as well. Because of their recommendations, I proudly purchased 6 CD’s at the mall today. I feel refreshed now :)

View Last.fm, the social music revolution.

Bibble features some of the most advanced manipulation I have used, but I suppose that isn’t saying much as I am not a professional. I can however see a big difference between many of the Art programs I have used in comparison to Bibble. To try out the program, I pulled a very fuzzy picture I took of a clock with an old camera that really needed some touching up. The first thing that came to mind was sharpness and noise. The photo was consisting of a horrid pixelated look to it. I popped open the Sharpening options, and played with the bars as you can see below:

I am no professional, but I did see a huge difference in detail already and I was surprised in how well it worked out. The above is not my finished product, however. I continued messing around with other features such as highlighting, exposure, histogram curves (don’t know what I did, but it helped!), and simple color adjustments. By then, the photo was looking pretty good and definitely better then the previous.

Bibble also has a photo browser, batch processing, and a neat printing queue. The batch processing will allow you to have multiple photos render with all of your seperate batch configuration and really makes an efficient work flow when working with the photos. The printing queue is really cool. You can set printing queues that can set a set of photos, photos on a grid, contact sheet, or seperate photos. You can even create your own customized layouts to use for printing the photos.

Overall, Bibble Lite is amazing. Maybe a little too advanced for myself, but for a more experienced photographer, this is a gold mine. Everything you need, and if it isn’t they Bibble Labs also has a Pro version available that consists of more top notch features.

View Bibble Lite, Professional Photo-Manipulation.