If you are a web application lover, you probably have accounts everywhere in different web services such as Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. And it could be incredibly hard to remember which service has something you saved or marked as a favorite or bookmarked or dugg or shared via RSS feed. The information you need is with you but spread around in various services with no real structure.

Sometimes, it might be easier to search in Google than finding it from your own favorites beating the whole purpose of saving it in the first place. In other times, you may not get so lucky to remember the right search phrase to land on the exact you link you need.

SecondBrain aims at combining all your social networking web accounts and bring all the data together in one place. It works by pulling data from your various accounts into your SecondBrain account. It will become your repository of data from various web services pulled together so you can organize them, share them and search them to find what you need.

How does it work?

A lot of the social networking sites and web applications provide public API’s or atleast provide RSS feeds for a user’s content so that someone interested can follow the feeds or interact with the data from elsewhere.
SecondBrain works with public API’s where possible and uses RSS feeds to pull in updated content for an user in other cases. Once added, SecondBrain will keep your account synchronized automatically. Some of the popular services it can aggregate content from at the time of writing this post are:

• Blogger
• Delicious
• Digg
• Flickr
• Google Docs
• Google Reader
• Picasa
• Twitter
• WordPress
• YouTube
• ZohoDocs

After importing your content, you can mark them private or public. Plus, SecondBrain can import tags from various services like Flickr, YouTube etc and you can organize your entire content by tags and collections.

Some thoughts

I like some of the integration such as with Twitter where it imports your content as well as let you post to Twitter from SecondBrain. You could also bookmark urls you come across directly in SecondBrain or via a browser bookmarklet. (added to my favorite browser bookmarklets)

I would like to see some more of my favorite sites integrated into SecondBrain like StumbleUpon, Facebook, PhotoBucket, etc. I am sure they are on to it as I am probably not the first one to request this either.

I like the idea of having an Internet content repository from all my favorite services so I can go back find what I am looking for easily. Plus, I can share all my content with everyone from one place instead of having to find and share with my friends in every service. You can find your friends from your Gmail contacts or invite them easily. One think they have improve on is to tell us in advance that we can only invite 10 people at a time. I can understand why they do this but I just quit with the inviting out of frustration as I spent a good 15 minutes going through long list of contacts and selecting the folks I wanted to invite only to find that I can’t invite more than 10 people at the same time! Atleast I am able to warn you about that.

If you sign up for a SecondBrain account, you can follow my updates at Karthik’s SecondBrain page.

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!

I use Craigslist a lot. I have found free boxes for moving, a couch, a car vacuum and many more things from my local sellers through Craigslist. In fact, my wife even finds some freelance web development/WordPress work through Craigslist.

Craigslist operates with the less is more motto. No web 2.0 graphics. No ajax. No poncy logo. They have managed to stay in the 90s with their looks but you cannot beat the power this simple site offers. It probably owes its popularity by making it easy to use for even the not-so web savvy folks as well. That’s a good thing.

Crgslst comes to offer an alternative interface to Craigslist users. I for one welcome Crgslst with open hands for the excellent features it offers to the goldmine of Craiglist data.

Crgslst Quick Look

• A simple Ajax interface with the search form to the left
• A way to save your favorite locations and keep them visible for easy access - very useful for me as I tend to search different locations for different things. For eg: when I am looking for a furniture I will be looking for something close for easy transportation and when my wife is looking for some freelance gig, distance wouldn’t matter
• It also shows your past searches - great for quickly searching the same item day after day. There’s a clear button if the list gets too long or if you don’t want it
• The search results are neatly displayed sorted by the date of posting and the actual title of a Craigslist post.
• Another great feature I like is that you can ‘remember’ the results you like for easy access later. Right now it shows a serial number for the post in the items that remembers and it’ll be helpful to see atleast the first few words of a title instead. I also like that it highlights a whole listing in yellow if you have already saved it to ‘remember’.

Crgslst is in beta and are saying that they are adding more features soon. I am really looking forward to seeing those but I will be content with just the functionality they have given already. It just has made my Craigslist surfing 100x faster.

There have been a couple of attempts such as this in the past but were shutdown because they were burdening Craigslist’s servers. I am not sure how the earlier attempts worked but Crgslst say they are working off of existing Craigslist feeds to show us the information and they don’t serve multiple city search at the same time so they don’t bring down Craigslist’s servers.

When you click on a Crgslst result, you still see the original post in Craigslist so I don’t see the harm of this new service to Craigslist.

What do you think of Craigslist alternative, Crgslst? Can you think of a reason why Craigslist might get pissed off by this new service?

[via Download Squad]

You have probably heard about Joost, one of the popular Internet TV clients that made the rounds in the blogosphere for a while. I hardly hear about it anymore.

Joost was proprietary and had about 250 channels. Did you know that there is an open source alternative that has about 2500 unrestricted channels? Yes, I said 2500!

Miro is the open source version that is free and can turn your computer into an Internet TV. It is loaded with numerous features and a built-in bittorrent client that touts faster downloads. Let’s check out some of the impressive features that make up this hard to ignore piece of open source software!

Read More

Newsgator is the company behind the popular RSS feed readers FeedDemon for Windows & NetNewsWire for Mac. With freeware being so popular these days, Newsgator was successful in selling paid versions of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire so far.

Now, they have announced these 2 excellent feed readers FREE for all to download and use. In fact, these 2 programs have just gotten some major feature enhancements.

Newsgator products come with sync facility with their internet-based servers. This means that your FeedDemon in your laptop and NetNewsWire in your iMac will be in sync all the time. Plus, the free web based version Newsgator Online will be in sync as well.

FeedDemon Quick Facts

• Newspaper format in neat tabs & News bins for future reference
• Synchronization with all RSS suite products
• Find what’s popular with other Newsgator users as well as who is linking to the news items you read
• Watch embedded video in the newspaper view
• Panic button - mark everything as read when you come back after a break
• Watches - Watch for keywords as they are downloaded
• Search outside of your subscriptions and create a dynamic channel with the results
• Download podcasts automatically and copy them to your iPod or other media player.
• iPhone support at http://m.newsgator.com

I used my portable GreatNews desktop reader for the longest time before getting addicted to the online Google Reader. And my main reason was that I missed having the ability to read feeds when I didn’t have my USB drive with me in a browser.

I have decided to give FeedDemon a whirl just like I give everything else a try. Importing my Google reader XMl file was painless. I haven’t tried their online counterpart yet but I doubt if it will come close to Google Reader, my current favorite RSS reader of choice. I might eat my own words after I try it, but you will know if I do.

What is your feed reader of choice? With the ability to have your desktop and online RSS reader in sync, would you give a desktop reader a chance?

Download FeedDemon 2.6 for Windows

Long gone are the days of Napster & Kazaa. There are many options in the fray now for a P2P file sharing program. Limewire has its one following of people who love it and use it. I have used it for a while as well. LimeWire used to be totally free but they offer a PRO version now for $21.95 with features such as optimized search results, turbo-charged downloads and Tech support. Sound familiar? That’s the route taken by a lot of free programs and I don’t blame them.

And you can’t blame me for looking for a totally free alternative, right?

Frostwire is a great alternative for LimeWire and it has so much promising features that I find hard to ignore. It offers a lot of the PRO features of Limewire and even more like iTunes support.

Frostwire Quick Facts

• Completely free & open source (an awesome combination)
• It is a Java Gnutella P2P client
• Offers a clean slick interface with no spyware or adware
• iTunes integration
• Firewall to firewall transfers
• BitTorrent support
• Proxy support & community chat rooms
• Turbo charged maxmum download speeds & network connections
• Works in Windows, Mac, Ubuntu/Debian. RedHat /Fedora and available as a tarball.

I love open source software and Frostwire is a welcome addition to my list of open source software I use in my computer.

Download Frostwire (7.1 MB - Windows)

What do you use for a P2P client? Does it matter to you if it’s open source?

It’s no secret that everyone is developing a taste for free open source alternatives to traditional proprietary software. Mozilla Firefox as an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is my favorite example when I explain ‘Open Source alternative’ to a friend or a family member.

Even if you haven’t actually stepped out of your way to find an open source alternative, you might be already using a couple of these. Some people consider open source versions to be inferior to proprietary software but in a lot of occasions that’s far from the truth.

I have shared many of my finds here and I have a bunch of these apps bookmarked in del.icio.us as well! A fellow open source lover has done something very useful with his collection of bookmarks. He created Open Source Living.

Welcome to Open Source Living, a collection of the Web’s best Open Source software, applications and references for a zero-cost / top quality digital experience.

Open Source Living has a great list of open source apps categorized based on their function so you can easily find an application you are looking for.

Each open source link comes with a short description and the site’s link. I browsed through various categories and found the listing to be quite extensive and features some of the best in the category. Here are some screenshots from Open Source Living for your viewing pleasure.

I like the simplistic interface and it makes it very easy to find an open source alternative you are looking for.

I am always looking for sites such as this one that makes finding the right app for the job at hand very easy. Where do you turn for your open source needs?

Using bookmarks to get to the sites i daily use has become the thing of the past for me. It is after I started using HomepageStartup for my startup page needs. It allowed me to have my links that I use often in separate tabs based on their function.

Symbaloo does the same and more in a really cool interface. Symbaloo has redefined startup pages where they have integrated search and most frequent links you would use in a predefined tab.

Symbaloo Quick Facts

• A drag and drop ajaxy web interface where you can rearrange your links as you please.
• Add pre-defined bookmarks, searches, RSS feeds or define your own
• In a default desktop, Symbaloo has pre-defined modules and there are empty spots for you to add more modules.
• The center of the interface sports a search box which can search the web from regular to weather to dictionary lookup.
• You have the option to use and empty desktop or he default desktop for a new tab
• When you click on a box to add a link, you could select from one of the pre-defined links or enter your own
• While entering your own, Symbaloo shows you the favicon if they already have one for a website like PayPal or lets you choose one from their iconset.
• The News desktop has to get a special mention as it is rather unique. You can see news in a pciture view where it takes up different squares depending on the size of the picture and on mouse over you get an excerpt of the news.
• Once you see the way to delete, you are going to love it. Just drag a module to the center console and it turns into a trash bin.
• Symbaloo also supports RSS feeds & widgets and I haven’t explored this yet.

Should I try it?

In short, Symbaloo has taken a fresh approach and enters charging into a not so new niche. One awesome thing about Symbaloo is that you can try it and customize it to your hearts content without ever creating an account. But, if you don’t want to lose all the work you put in or want to use it from multiple computers, you could create yourself a login.

I did find the adding bookmarks part a little slow in the Ajaxy interface, but it has gotten significantly faster in just these 2 days. It probably shows that they are constantly improving the performance with increased load as it gains traction. Another issue I see is that, Symbaloo has switched my account to ‘Nederland’, as you can see in the above screenshot, which is where I believe this startup is from. Even if I change the language option (English - US, UK), French, Spanish & Nederland, it doesn’t take effect. I am sure it’ll be an easy fix if I contact them.

Symbaloo is not just eye candy but it is a great blend where function meets flashy design.

Now that you know what’s in store for you, what do you think of this service? Would you make this your start page in your browser?