Extend Firefox 2 was a contest run to see who develops the best Firefox Extensions from around the world. Obviously with my addiction for new Firefox extensions, I checked out the winners and decided to dedicate this week’s Picks of the Week post to these great extensions.

3 Grand Prize Winners

1. MiniMap Sidebar Extension by Tony Farndon (UK)
2. SamePlace by Massimiliano Mirra (Italy) - my favorite!
3. Shareaholic by Jay Meattle (US)

12 Runner Ups

1. All in One Sidebar - Ingo Wennemaring
2. Boox - Nicolas Martin
3. del.icio.us IncSearch - Hirokazu Onozato
4. Fast Dial - Sergey Suhoruchkin
5. FireGestures - Taiga Gomibuchi
6. FootieFox - Boris Ruf
7. qtl - Gilad Kutiel
8. Shrinkify - Mark Muday
9. Table2Clipboard - Davide Ficano
10. TwitterFox - Kazuho Okui
11. Update Scanner - Pete Burgers
12. URL Fixer - Christopher Finke

The grand prize winners each get a 15″ MacBook Pro & some other awesome goodies and the runner ups get some nice gifts as well. Check out this contest winners announcement post for more details.

Of the extensions mentioned, I stumbled across SamePlace and started using it and was just blown away by the elegance and the ease it gives using an IM client. It is far from perfect yet but nevertheless is a great extension to check out. Especially, if you have a wide screen monitor and don’t mind having a sidebar. I will soon be reviewing it here if you’d rather hold off before trying it.

Extend Firefox 3 is getting ready to launch in early March and I am eager to see what kind of prizes they offer this time and what kind of cool extensions people come up with.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my beloved readers!

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Friday is here and I am looking forward to a weekend of not doing a whole lot after last 4 weekends of hectic work from my day job.

Without further adieu, here are this week’s pick of extensions.

• Password Hasher: You can create strong passwords with this extension and have it generate unique passwords based on destination. Very good security options available within it.
• Meebo: This is a Firefox extension for the popular web based IM client, Meebo. After installing, a new tab will open and all your chat sessions will reside in this tab and you can view all your contacts in the sidebar. Has some nice features like flashing tabs when you have new messages, group chat, send a file, chat logs, etc. [via CyberNet News]
• Price Drop: Adds a ‘Track this item’ line to a Amazon product page so you can get notified when the price of that item drops. Even after purchasing this is helpful to get a refund. Tools menu shows you all the items you are watching and you can delete the stuff you are nto interested in anymore. [via gHacks]
• Interclue: Think Cooliris done better. Way better. Interclue lets you preview a link and has an option to clicking the link to preview instead of mouse over avoiding those accidental annoying pop-overs. Plus, it adds options in a preview to bookmark, email, copy the url to a clipboard and open in tabs options. It has a lot more features to list here so try it out if you have been looking for something like this. [via Download Squad]
• GDirections: If you often delete your browser cookies and are tired of entering your address in Google or Yahoo Maps, you will love this extension. It can remember up to 3 addresses and you can get directions by selecting an address in your browser and a right-click.

If you are a Gmail & Greasemonkey user, get your fix of scripts from Top Greasemonkey Scripts for New Gmail 2.0 . If you are looking for more Firefox extensions, check out any of the posts in this series listed below.

Wish everyone a great Friday and a good weekend.

 Thanks Silki, for noticing that I have the wrong year in the title! I blame it on the lack of caffeine this morning.

Are you annoyed by those calls from 1-800-number missed calls when you come back from work and wondered ‘Who called us?’.

Wonder no more. There really is a website named Who Called Us where you can enter the number you want to look up.

It is also interesting to see the most frequently reported/called numbers and most called states as well. California sits at the top of the list there.

For any particular number, you can see all the comments for that particular number a map overlay of how the calls are spread out throughout the US. You could not only figure out who called you, also most often what they wanted from the comments.

The lookup is not limited to just 800 numbers as a lot of marketing people these days use regular numbers as well.

Next time you wonder about the number on your caller ID, you know you’ll use this bookmark.

I love a good Google Maps mashup. I have previously talked about a Sex Offender mashup, Flights mashup, etc.

I can spot a good one when I see it and YourStreet is one of them. The concept is simple and that is what makes them attractive to me.

You can get your local news in a lot of different ways. YourStreet gives them to you as markers in a Google Map. You can just type in your city name or zip code and you will see markers popping up on Google Maps with news articles. When you click on a marker, you will see a list of relevant headlines for that location even down to the street level if there are conversations going on.

YourStreet does this by indexing local newspapers and blogs. This is an interesting visualization of local news. It also has a personalization and social aspect to it. You can sign up for an account and start a ‘conversation’. You could also add new stories to the mix.

YourStreet is a very nice concept and would love to see it grow as the service will become more relevant to smaller places with a large userbase. Also, it would be nice to see some way to narrow down the results like Sports, Politics, Entertainment, Restaurant reviews, etc.

Seeing the news articles by location in a Google Maps is cool but I am going to wait until it gains more friction to start using it regularly. I can see it being a big part of my local social life if it pans out to be what I imagine.

What do you think about YourStreet?

[via DownloadSquad] 

If you have traveled by flight anytime, you know how unpredictable flight schedules are. It is even worse when you are trying to pick or drop someone at an airport. Sometimes it’s bad weather. Sometimes it’s bad luck. Sometimes it’s just plain incompetence on the airlines’ part. Now, you can be a little bit more prepared for such instances when planning to make a flight or trying to schedule picking up or dropping a loved one at an airport.

GMaps Flight Tracker

Gmaps Flight Tracker.com site tracks incoming flights for a few US airports (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, JFK NY, LA, Miami, SFO & Seattle at the time of writing) with data from fboweb.com. This data is shown on a Google Maps overlay based on position reports for each aircraft once per minute.

Once you pick a city of interest, a list of incoming aircrafts are shown. Click or mouse over a flight number to see altitude, height and heading for that flight.

The new beta preview shows way points for the flights showing the flight travel path as trails which is pretty cool.

If you are a Google Earth user, you could download the .kml file and view it in Google Earth to look at past flights and height profiles for aircrafts. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Flight Tracker at FlightStats.com

Flight Tracker is another Google Maps mashup from FlightStats. Apart from showing the flight path on Google Map, this service is much more useful to a traveler or someone receiving a friend or family at an airport.

A few features at FlightStats are:

• Shows Arrival and Departure times
• Shows flight status
• Shows estimated Gate Arrival time
• Weather at departure and arrival cities

• Email or SMS alerts about flight delays are very useful
• Free registration gives you access to extended info such as access to forums, historical flight data, etc.
• A US map shows airports with delays as red dots

FlightView Live

FlightView Live! is another live flight tracker. A major difference between this and the other services is that you can view info about flights that are in-air as the data is from the flight itself. If the flight you want to look up is still in the ground, you won’t find it here.

Couple of features that sets this service apart are:

• You can pop open the map window, so you can surf or work while this data keeps loading real time.
• You can turn on weather to see a light fly around or through bad weather systems. Very cool.
• Hit Replay to view the flight path from the point of departure to its current position.

Although a little slow to load, the weather information is great to look at. You can see it’s raining in Florida but the sky is clear in the flight path.

FlightAware

FlightAware is yet another Flight and Airport activity tracker service. You plug in your flight number to get a map and other flight information.

Some features here are

• Flight stats like the other services
• Has a nifty feature of looking at other flights between the same airports as the flight you are looking at
• Great Airport information
• Tracks commercial as well as private aircrafts
• Watch Airport activity like Arrivals, Scheduled departures, etc.
• Looks like it is geared for pilots as well as travelers.

Hope you enjoyed these sites. Besides being a great way of wasting some time gawking at flights in real time on maps, they can really come in handy when you or someone you know are traveling.

[via Webware]

Google Maps has become one of my main everyday search tools. I use it to lookup addresses, phone numbers for business and location at one shot and even sometimes use it to call the business right from the web.

Google Maps have added a couple of new features that I really liked.

Embed Google Maps in your Blog or Website

If you are a blogger, you are probably used to embedding YouTube or MetaCafe videos in your blog by just adding a HTML snippet. You can do the same to embed Google maps. The embeddable maps are customizable. You can select it’s size to a few different preset values or specify your own custom requirements.

This is very useful to everyone trying to share information with other folks through their websites or blogs. A business could just post a embedded map with their address in their site. Or you could share the map of the place you visited last weekend. Here is the map of one of our favorite State Parks in the west coast of Michigan.

Maps with Featured Content

I just discovered this little hidden section in ‘My Maps‘ called the Featured Content. This section features a variety of content that you could add to the map you are looking at, like Real estate listings, Gas prices, Distance measurement, pictures, etc. You can just check the box for the content you wish to see and it appears in the Map.

Here are the contents currently listed in the Featured Content area:

• Google Real Estate Search
• Photos from Picasa Web Albums
• Photos from Panaramio
• Gas Prices from GasBuddy.com
• Distance Measurement Tool

Of all the above, I see the last two being very useful to me. I use GasBuddy to check gas prices before every fill up and I have started to keep track of my mileage and cost of my driving habits using MyMileMarker. Now, I can check gas prices right from Google Maps.

The Distance Measurement Tool is very useful as I can just click on any 2 points in a map I am looking at and find out how far apart they are! I can see it coming handy in situations like when you do not have the specific addresses to find driving directions or if you are trying to use the satellite imagery to see bike trails or hiking paths.

Google Maps is one of my daily used web apps and I love the fact that Google is continuously adding new and useful features to an already great product.

Google Docs get Context Menu

Unrelated to Google Maps, thought I would mention a new feature I noticed in Google Docs. Context Menus. You can now access a lot of the functions in toolbars with a right click. Neat. [via Google Operating System]

I just came across this Windows Live maps mashup that lets you find sex offenders in your neighborhood on a map. Vision 20/20 is a free web based service that uses the publicly available data of 650,000 sex offenders in the US and displays it in a map of your area.

You just enter your address and Vision 20/20 displays a map of your area and the sex offenders as push pins. If you click on the pin, it opens up a window with name, address, DOB and a mug shot of the offender.

I was like wow when I looked at the area surrounding us but there weren’t anybody in a 5 mile radius if that’s any comfort! What does your neighborhood look like?

I think this is a great tool for everyone. Residents could be aware of their neighbors. And new home buyers could foresee what kind of neighborhood they are moving into.

[via TechCrunch]