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About time: Joost to launch browser-based player

Greg Sandoval — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:24:00 GMT

Joost isn't letting the public try out the site yet but that will change soon.

(Credit: Joost)

Finally, Joost is going to correct the error that badly hobbled the Web video service many once considered to be a serious YouTube competitor.

Joost is planning to launch a new site later this month that will feature a browser-based plug-in and will no longer require users to watch via the company's much maligned desktop client.

CEO Mike Volpi acknowledged in an interview with CNET that the desktop client was one of the company's missteps but that the new browser-based player would provide ease of use, a high-quality video experience, and more content. The new site, according to Volpi, will even be less taxing on laptop batteries. News of Joost's new site was first reported by The Industry Standard.

But the big question that Joost must answer is whether the site overhaul comes too late to catch up to Hulu or Google's YouTube.

Joost pounced onto the online-video scene with seemingly the right combination of founders, investors, and technology. The media instantly christened it a legitimate YouTube killer.

The start-up was the brainchild of Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Among the backers was media conglomerate Viacom. Joost was powered by the same peer-to-peer technology that turned Skype and Kazaa into the most disruptive forces in the telephone and music sectors, respectively.

The public wasn't impressed. The content offering was thin. The player often stalled or stuttered, and it relied on the desktop client--meaning that you couldn't just log on to the Web from any computer to access your Joost account.

Volpi came on a year ago, and not much changed until January, when the company's CTO left and Volpi initiated a house cleaning. Volpi says it's still too early in the game to crown any site a winner.

"There is still ample opportunity to create a portal or aggregation site," Volpi said in an interview last week. "People will go where they can find the content they want."

Yes, but are Web video fans already used to getting what they want at Hulu, the company created by NBC Universal and News Corp? The competitor launched last spring to glowing press reviews, and traffic has continued to mushroom. A report issued this week by LiveRail reported that Hulu is probably already generating as much revenue as YouTube, which launched in 2005.

When it comes to YouTube, the Google property is still far and away the Internet's most popular video site. More than a third of every video viewed online is at YouTube. But YouTube is a user-generated site, with most of its content 10 minutes or shorter. Joost is much more like Hulu, a distribution platform for mostly professionally made content.

Volpi said Joost will offer shows from Warner Bros., Comedy Central, and other Viacom properties.

More to come.

10 things we'd like to see in Chrome

Josh Lowensohn — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:43:00 GMT

So far we're pretty smitten with Google's Chrome. It's certainly not without its faults, but for version 1.0 of a browser it's pretty sharp. We've compiled a list of 10 things we'd really like to see added or tweaked. Some come from other browsers, and some are just improvements on some of the existing features. Google, we hope you're listening.

1. Profile roaming between multiple browsers. This may be a pipe dream, but if Foxmarks for Firefox has proved anything, syncing up your bookmarks between multiple machines is awesome. Doing the same with passwords, settings, and history would be even better. Considering Google already has a way for your browser to send data back to the mothership, and a hosted Web history service of its own, a little sync using my Google account doesn't seem that hard does it?

2. Better bookmark management. Speaking of bookmarks, the bookmarking system in Chrome is about as basic as it gets. "Stripped-down" might be a better way to describe it. On the outset, it seems as robust as Firefox 3's with a really simple one-click way to save links. Where the system falls apart is the lack of tools for organization, and a complete lack of a back-up tool to save your short (or long) list of favorite sites. Of course, a bookmarks plug-in like Delicious would help sort this out, which brings us to the next yearning...

Chrome's bookmark management is incredibly sparse compared with some of the more mature offerings from browsers like Firefox 3. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

3. Plug-ins. Google has acknowledged that plug-ins are on the road map, which is a good thing. Here's how the search giant can totally one-up Mozilla, though: let me install and make changes to extensions without having to restart the browser. Nothing is worse than having 30 tabs open and having to restart, even if it remembers what I had open before. This reminds me...

4. ~~Saved sessions/~~Warning messages when closing multiple tabs. Firefox's little warning for when you're closing a group of tabs was a huge lifesaver in version two. Firefox 3 brought with it a way to save that grouping of open tabs for later. ~~Chrome has neither of these features.~~ Accidentally closing your browser with a slew of tabs open means they're gone for good--that is unless you set it from the default option of clearing what you were looking at. Chrome is also nice enough to tell you some of the most recently closed tabs back on its special start page, but that's it.

This feature in Firefox has saved this author many hours of hardship over the years. Sadly, it's missing from Google's Chrome.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

5. A full-screen mode. I love the minimalism of Chrome, but sometimes I just want those extra 60-90 vertical pixels back. Give me a keyboard shortcut for this too, and I'll be in screen hog heaven.

6. A more customizable interface. The blue is neat, but getting that great deep purple found in incognito mode is enough of a tease to make me want to change the way it looks based on how I'm feeling. Plus, you've taken away the nice special Windows-theme coloring I had when you got rid of the top of the application, so let me choose how I want it to look. Bonus points for a tie-dye mode or something that changes depending on what time of day it is--like your personalized homepage service iGoogle.

Dragging tabs in and out of windows is really cool. Trying to do this with sites you've designated as applications does not work though.

7. A way to drag "applications" back into the main browser. The option to turn a certain site into a self-contained browser window with a stripped-down interface is great. However, the inability to drag it back into an open Chrome browser window is maddening when you're trying to re-open some real estate on the task bar. You can do this with existing tabs and windows, and it works great.

8. A Mac/Linux version. The lack of a Mac client has left the growing percentage of Mac users in a bit of a tizzy. Worse yet, based on Google's track record with some of its other cross-platform software offerings like Google Earth and Google Desktop search, the Mac has fared a little worse with slower release schedules and less features than its PC siblings. Hopefully new features will be rolled out to all the platforms at about the same time.

9. A pop-up blocker that blocks. Clearly Google is trying to shake things up with a pop-up blocker that really should be called a "pop-up relocator," since it not only lets them open but also load. Frankly, this drives me nuts since I have to close them down to get them off the screen. Also if it's really important and something I meant to click, I have to go drag it off from the bottom of the screen.

10. A regular old search box. Yes progress is good and the "omnibar" does a pretty slam-dunk job of getting new searches going, but let's get some of the ambiguity away from that thing and have an option to leave it for URLs only. Also, a separate search box would let me pick from the other multitude of search providers in addition to Google without compromising my screen real estate.

Any you think we missed? Leave them in the comments.

Update: Changed number 4's lack of a session saver, although this feature is turned off by default.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

Timelope makes your browser history public, social

Josh Lowensohn — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:54:00 GMT

I had a funny moment earlier this week when I showed Google's Chrome to one of my friends. She was floored that one of the top nine most visited sites featured on the browser's start page was Woot.com. Given how much browsing I do as part of this job I suppose it was surprising even to me, but it's also a hint of how intriguing your browsing history can be to others.

A service called Timelope is banking on that idea, letting users share their browsing history (or at least selected parts of it) with the rest of the world. Unlike Friendfeed which aggregates just the items you want from the sources you have chosen, Timelope posts all of your activity in one large stream and does it passively without requiring you to click on anything out of the ordinary. You can then befriend other Timelope users and see what they're looking at (almost in real time) as long as they're sharing.

All of this hinges around a browser plug-in that currently only works for Firefox. You simply plug in your user name and password and it pipes over the data in the background once the page has loaded. You can turn it on and off with a just a click, and it remembers its state between browsing sessions so you don't accidentally start sending off things you don't want others to see.

There are some obvious privacy concerns here. Making what you're viewing online public, able to be searched, and timestamped is a very open window into your habits and who you are. There are, however, some decent protection measures you can instate, like an anonymous log-in and both a black and white list for controlling which sites are shown to others, even when the plug-in is turned on.

Another company that offers a very similar service and a slightly deeper analysis of your habits, along with a way to create private groups is Hooeey, which we profiled back in late 2007. I thought then, as I do now, that these services can be incredibly useful for a certain few, but are likely to instill fear in people who are already worried enough about having their e-mail passwords stolen, let alone sharing what they're doing with strangers.

Timelope is currently in private alpha but was still accepting new sign-ups when I published this.

Timelope lets you browse other people's browser history as well as publishing your own using a Firefox plug-in.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

Docstoc offers simple sync with your hard drive

Josh Lowensohn — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Online document-hosting service Docstoc on Thursday is introducing a useful new tool for PCs and Macs that will automatically back up and sync documents from your hard drive to your Docstoc account.

Considering the growing trend of Netbooks with relatively little built-in storage, users with this desktop application installed with be able to offload whatever they created without having worry about running out of room.

By default, the syncing application goes for your documents folder, though you can set it to sync up with other folders on your hard drive or folders within your home network. Documents that are automatically updated get set as private, so others will not be able to see them, but you can set specific folders as public too.

To help manage all these files, the document home screen has also been given an overhaul that the company is calling MyDocs. It offers a little bit more than the documents folder on your computer, with simple thumbnail views, as well as a quick preview mode that lets you open up documents of any size and nearly any file type in about a second.

If you're a Mac user running Leopard, you've been able to do this with the proper quick-look plug-ins, but this is all on the Web.

Docstoc creator and CEO Jason Lawrence Nazar tells me that future versions of the syncing tool will include bidirectional syncing, meaning that changes made to documents in the cloud can be pushed back to your local machine. This should be coming in "weeks."

In the meantime, a company called Dropbox (review) has been offering something similar. It also requires special desktop software to get the job done.

Docstoc now offers a bird's-eye view of your Web documents, complete with live previews and editing. Using the new utility, you can also have it sync up all the documents from your hard drive.

(Credit: Docstoc)

See Chrome's inner workings--and an Easter egg

Stephen Shankland — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:06:00 GMT

Google's Chrome browser has as Spartan a user interface as possible, but the browser's Omnibox also turns out to be a window into a much more elaborate view of the browser.

That's because Chrome users can type several commands into the browser's address box to uncovers a wealth of nitty-gritty detail and an amusing Easter egg.

Google Chrome can display lots of detailed information, such as which plug-ins are running. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

Firefox can be fine-tuned by typing "about:config" into its address bar, and other about: commands shed light on many details. Google followed suit.

Most folks won't care a whit, but the feature is notable for programmers--both those creating Web pages and those who might want to toy with Chromium itself, the open-source project behind Chrome. Programmers are a key audience for Chrome, which Google hopes will advance the state of the art in particular for Web applications.

One Firefox tool popular with Web developers is the Firebug extension, which permits detailed analysis of a Web site. Although Chrome lacks an extensions ability for now, right-clicking on Web page elements offers an "inspect element" option that reproduces some of Firebug's abilities.

Happy Easter
For you non-programmers, there's an Easter egg, too: type "about:internets" into the Omnibox. I'm not going to be a spoilsport by revealing what happens, but here's a hint: Ted Stevens.

Because I'm interested in browser user interface limits, though, I'm very curious what rendering technology is used to produce the Easter egg output. Feel free to offer your theories in the comments field below.

Among the "about" features:

• about:memory shows how much memory the browser--and any other Web browser--is using. Conveniently for Web developers, it also shows how much each Web site in a browser tab is using.

• about:stats shows a wide range of internal measurements such as the time taken to initialize Chrome, load Gears, or perform various operations while running JavaScript programs with Chrome's V8 engine. The page also carries the amusing note, "Shhh! This page is secret!"

Typing about:histogram into Chrome's address bar shows many performance details. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

• about:network tracks the detailed network activity of using a Web site.

• about:version shows details of what version of Chrome is running, along with the user-agent text that the browser reports when identifying itself to Web sites. Why "Mozilla" is in this string is a mystery to me, though perhaps it has to do with the way Chrome can use Firefox plug-ins; why "Mozilla" is apparently in the iPhone's user-agent text is even more a mystery.

• about:histograms graphs various performance measurements such as the time taken to autocomplete text users type into the browser.

• about:crash crashes the active browser tab.

With a little noodling around, I also found out that some of these services, but not all, can be retrieved with a different syntax. Try typing "chrome-resource://about/stats" for example.

One more tidbit for folks closely following Chrome: TG Daily uncovered a so-far hidden "themes" folder that's empty for now but that presumably could be used later to give Chrome different, well, chrome. Depending on how Google proceeds, this could be useful for adapting the browser to the native looks of Linux and Mac OS X, operating systems that Chrome will support later.

This is the error page that results from invoking the about:crash command in Chrome.

(Credit: CNET News)

(Via Google Operating System and Tech-Pro.net.)

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

Google: 10 ways the cloud is good for business

Rafe Needleman — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:49:00 GMT

Matthew Glotzbach from Google's enterprise products group took the stage at the Office 2.0 conference Thursday with a talk called, "10 Things I could do in the cloud today that I couldn't do a year ago."

10. Everything on the go. Glotzbach showed a picture of the iPhone, and talked about how smartphones let us do "almost anything" from the mobile phone. Of course, Glotzbach's online life is "almost entirely in the cloud," since he's a Googlehead, but he's right. Smartphones with access to tools like Google Docs are workable backups to full-sized computers.

Google's Matthew Glotzbach at the Office 2.0 conference.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

9. Search through all my e-mail. I take issue with this claim, since I, like many other corporate e-mail users, are slaves to Exchange, and while I can occasionally get a search to run on my PC's archive of mail when I'm looking for something, I don't have access to that data when I really need it: on my iPhone.

Glotzbach also talked about how IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) opens up e-mail access to other interfaces, like Web-based and mobile clients.

8. Chat with customers and partners in any language. The real-time translation service in Google Talk has make collaborations possible that weren't before. Good point. Glotzbach did a demo on stage, showing how one invites a translator bot into a chat and uses that connection to talk with a person who speaks another language.

"It's a service you can mash up with," Glotzbach said. So "Why don't you have this in Zimbra or Google Docs?" he challenged.

7. Collaborate simply and securely on projects with Sites and Docs . It's one place for him to go to create and store project info, and it can be easily opened up to partners and other stakeholders (like journalists or the public) when needed. It helps "streamline the communication flow," he said. In this case I agree: I'm using Google Docs now for collaborating on documents inside the CNET workgroup, and when I need to share files outside of our walls, it's just as simple.

6. Organize all my business travel with e-mail. This was Glotzbach's paean to Tripit, which is a pretty cool service I also recommend. It's cool, he says, because it uses a communication method we already have, e-mail, to make things simpler for everyone. One wonders if Tripit might find itself in the Google stable at some point soon.

5. Easily collect data from co-workers and customers in forms. Google recently added a forms collection tool to Google Spreadsheets. It's a good feature. Glotzbach demonstrated how easy it is to embed a form in a blog.

Stalk your favorite TV characters (legally) with Whrrl

Josh Lowensohn — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:25:00 GMT

Location-based social network Whrrl has forged a rather odd partnership with content provider HBO to place various fictional characters from the show Entourage as real users on its network.

Events from the television show will end up as annotated items on Whrrl's user-generated map. You can subscribe to whichever of the characters you want, and each of their items go into your central friends feed along with regular users who are providing "real" ratings and locational bookmarks. As the series progresses, locations seen on the show will continue to be placed on the map.

This is a novel move in a time when content is getting its own community-made fan characters. Some of the first signs of this were on Facebook with fake user accounts, then later fan pages administrated by fans once Facebook began to clamp down. Most recently, the trend has ended up on Twitter with characters from AMC's Mad Men and Marvel comics getting taken down by the parent companies who own that intellectual property.

You can find the various characters from the show on this page. If this ends up being a hit, expect it to leech out into other social networks and shows.

Whrrl now lets you follow characters from the TV show 'Entourage'. The characters will continue to update with events from the show as the season progresses.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

New Microsoft Office competition from Zoho, Zooos

Rafe Needleman — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

The third annual Office 2.0 conference, which starts Thursday, is where people talk about getting real work done on the Web.

There will be no robotic ice-cream machines at the San Francisco conference. Likewise, soft-core porn start-ups won't be showing up.

Once again, I'm looking forward to hearing what's new in the world of work 2.0. First up are two productivity suites, one coming out Thursday from the hyperactive Zoho and another from a company you've probably never heard of: Zooos.

Zoho Docs: This is a new integration app on top of the company's suite of apps. We continue to point to Zoho as a prime example of how much productive work can really be done on the Web, without requiring downloadable software.

Zoho Docs integrates the main Zoho applications--and all your online data files--into one application. So like Google Docs, it's a launcher and a file system. But unlike with Google, the files can actually be opened up in the docs window, which makes for a somewhat simpler experience than Google, which opens docs in new browser windows or tabs.

It's a good evolution of Zoho's product set.

Zooos: This is a very interesting development: It's a port to the Web of Sun Microsystems' Open Office, a desktop productivity suite. And it has some clever tricks that even Sun doesn't support.

In addition to having the main Open Office apps, Zooos also has real-time collaboration, almost exactly like Google Docs offers. (Zooos doesn't let two users change text in the same paragraph in a word doc at the same time. Other than that, it does let them edit the same document simultaneously.)

Offline support (and syncing documents to the desktop) comes via a small browser plug-in (Firefox and Safari at launch; Internet Explorer to trail; Chrome unknown). And Zooos has a clever file management system. In addition to the usual suite-specific storage service, people can also access documents on their local PCs via Box.net accounts, FTP servers, and even YouTube and Picassa Web accounts. All these show up as folders.

Since Zooos runs on servers and doesn't require much on local machines other than a browser, it's also a decent solution for mobile users; most smartphones with browsers should be able to run the company's mobile-specific Web services and be able to use all the Zooos apps.

Zooos will run its own server farm so people can try out the suite over the Web, but the real business is selling software for companies to install on their own servers. This allows businesses to take advantage of cloud services without putting their employees' data on some other company's machines. The service will cost $999 a year for 10 users, with significant price breaks for more users and for extensions to the subscription after the first year. CEO Hishan El-Eman told me he hopes to launch the product in October.

The Zooos system gives you access to Web version of Open Office apps, as well as a very flexible file storage system.

(Credit: Zooos)

Anonymize your phone number with LetsCall.Me

Josh Lowensohn — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:03:00 GMT

LetsCall.Me is a smart new service for giving out your contact information to others without actually revealing it. At sign-up you get a special vanity URL and the option to have it direct callers to whatever number you provide. People who have your URL and want to call you can simply enter in their phone number and it will call that number to connect them to yours.

Unlike some other services that offer de-centralized calling (see GrandCentral, Jaxtr, JaJah, and iNumbr), LetsCall.Me preserves the caller's number so you can see it before picking up. I had my brother help me test this and he was a little confused to be calling Palm Springs, Calif., whereas I knew it was him because he was in my phone book.

Users who want to use the service as a virtual business card can simply make various bits of their contact information publicly available, although the phone number will always remains hidden. In future versions, I'd like to be able to display a wider array of profile information, as well as have a simpler way to manage multiple URLs with the same account. As it stands you've got to remember which ones you've set up even though they're on the same account.

[via MakeUseOf and Lifehacker]

Just enter in whatever vanity URL you want, and if it's available, anyone who clicks on it will be able to see what contact information you've made public, as well as being able to plug in their phone number and have it connect you.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

Office Live, you're no Google Docs

Rafe Needleman — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:02:00 GMT

Microsoft has announced a milestone with its Office Live Workspace product: It's scored its millionth user. And the company has announced the product will be out of beta this year.

Yay, Microsoft. Now go back and build the service we want, please.

There are people who say that Office Live is a Google Docs competitor. It certainly could be, someday, and I'd like to see that. But it's not right now. What it is right now is a way for people who have paid for the Microsoft Office suite to share files with other people who have the suite. It's useful, but it's no Google Docs, nor Zoho for that matter.

Those other productivity suites are a) free, and b) browser-based. They don't require that you pay for and then install software on your PC.

As ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley writes, Microsoft believes that users don't want to create big files and documents "on the Web." Maybe that's because they can't.

Offlice Live does have its own text editor, but it's rather weak and doesn't have Google Docs' killer feature: simultaneous editing. If someone edits a document you've got open and you then try to save it, you get a conflict error and have to decide whose edits you want to kill.

I believe Microsoft could make an honest Google Docs competitor without killing its Microsoft Office business. Eventually, Microsoft will have to. So it might be smart for Microsoft to encourage people to start thinking about the company as an expansive supplier of productivity solutions--desktop and Web-based--rather than just a company that makes desktop office products that, by the way, also have some add-on Web support.

Tidbit: Office Live Workspace works nicely in Internet Explorer and also in Firefox. But you get a blocking error page if you try to use it in Google Chrome.