The latest sitcom from Microsoft:

Thanks UNEASYSILENCE.

Tags: windows 95, funny, humour, humor, friends, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry

Yesterday afternoon I received an email for Moscow’s Quintura which calls itself a ‘web discovery engine’. Quintura’s a mix between a tag cloud and a search engine; allowing users to find related search terms to ones they input.

For example, if I search for “web 2.0″ I get ‘expo’, ‘conference’ and ‘blogging’ amongst others.

Quintura seems to be fairly fast despite that it’s heavy on Ajax. Many sites which utilise Ajax, such as Gmail, can be resource hogs but Quintura doesn’t seem to be one.

The site has web, image, video, Blinx and Amazon search. The first three are powered through Yahoo! . I have to admit that I’d much rather they used Google but to be honest the site is still very interesting.

The uses of the site are minimal but they allow you to discover new topics related to the one you’re searching for.

Quintura has received VC funding from Mangrove Capital (who ironically have a very Web 1.0 design: complete with frames and start page), the same company who funded Skype.

Unfortunately, the site uses the US Amazon, which I find is slightly strange for a Russian company. This is another company focusing the American audience over the international one.

Tags: russia, moscow, web 2.0, web2.0, web 2, web2, ajax, search

Properazzi is a property search engine which searches for houses which are available to purchase or to rent which uses the Google Maps API.

The site is quite clever; as well as having a search facility it allows you to click on a region on a Google Map and see the properties available. The site seems to have good coverage of all European countries besides Austria, Turkey and the former Eastern bloc.

A nice feature of the site is that you can zoom into any region of the map, choose a radius for your search and click and it shows you nearby properties from a variety of websites. The site also has a search tool where you may type in a location, minimum and maximum price and keywords.

It’s not perfect though. I was browsing around the North East of England and I saw a result for North London. I expect this is because any mash-up will have a bug of some sort. Annoyingly, when you select a property and are redirected to the estate agents you have a frame for Properazzi displayed at the top much like sites such as About do. Also, the site doesn’t seem to handle areas such as Cleveland well as they are no longer counties yet Properazzi still refers to them as counties.

I do think this is an amazing mash-up, though!

Tags: properazzi, web2.0, web2, web 2.0, web 2, property

Twango is a Redmond, WA-based media sharing site founded by former Microsoft employees (which is probably the reason for its Redmond location!). Also, the site appears to be built on Microsoft technogies such as the .NET framework, ASP and MSSQL.

The site has the same principle as those like DivShare: allowing users to upload files and where appropriate to embed them into web pages. Without registering, Twango limits you to 10MB files without an account and 100MB with an account. This is roughly the same (perhaps a bit lower) than its competitors and doesn’t give it anything unique.

Twango does, though, allow you to embed your files (providing you get an account). This is quite useful if you are into adding things such as music to social networking profiles. Similar services are offered by other services though and it isn’t anything that unique.

Finally, Twango has facilities to view through people’s files. This makes me feel a bit strange as I’m not quite sure if all files I upload will be made so public. I also think the site’s abilities to play videos etc are somewhat pointless as I’d be more likely to go to more specific sites such as YouTube for videos, Flickr or Wikimedia Commons for images or Odeo or RadioBlogClub for audio.

This review has been pretty negative; Twango offers nothing unique and tries to take aspects of other services and mix them together but doesn’t do it well. If I have made any errors in this review, or if Twango staff feel I have been unfair, they are more than welcome to post a rebuttal.

Tags: file sharing, web2, web 2, web2.0, web 2.0, twango

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I’m a great fan of OpenID and the whole idea of an open-source single sign on. Since I first started to use the technology in late 2005, I’ve seen it become more and more supported. Today, even AOL, Mozilla and Microsoft are working on supporting it.

It has jumped miles from being a protocol a few odd blogs use to authenticate commenters to a leading log-in mechanism employed by various start-ups as well as estabilished Internet companies. The OpenID Directory has 271 sites listed which support it, including ourselves, but this is a tiny handful of the total amount.

However, I expect many of you will not use OpenID or if you do you will not know how to unlock it’s full potential.

1. Why?
It’s annoying having a different log-in for every site online. OpenID allows you to have one log-in (a URL) to use to sign onto many sites. It follows the same principles as earlier SSOs such as Passport.net but allows people to integrate it into their sites free of charge.
2. How can I allow people to comment on my blog through OpenID?
It depends on your blogging engine: some such as LiveJournal have support out-of-the-box whilst others such as WordPress or MovableType require plug-ins. Some engines, such as Blogger or MSN Spaces, do not support it.

The odds are you’ll be using WordPress or MovableType.

Personally, I use the OpenID Comments for WordPress plug-in although the OpenID Registration plug-in is more impressive as it lets users log-in to the site using their OpenID. Sadly, the latter dislikes the new WordPress log-in form.

If you use MovableType, you could try Mark Pasc’s plug-in which I used when I was on MT.

3. How can I log-in to site’s using my blog’s URL?
You have two options: you can either run your own OpenID server or delegate the URL to another server via. HTML.

Running your own server may prove hard if you are using shared or free hosting or if you lack technical experience. The OpenID Wiki has a good article on how to set-up your own server in a variety of different languages from PHP to RoR. The advantage of running your own server is that you get full control over your identity as you do not have to rely on a third-party to host it for you.

Delegating is a much easier options. If you choose to delegate, you still get some control over your identity as you can move between identity providers whilst keeping the same log-on. To delegate, all you have to do is sign up for an identity provider such as MyLID, MyOpenID or even TypeKey and then link to it in the head of your website’s HTML like this (changing it when necessary):


<link rel="openid.server" href="https://www.myopenid.com/server" / >
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://username.myopenid.com" / >


Additionally, if you use a LID service such as MyLID you might like to add:


<meta http-equiv="X-YADIS-Location" content="http://mylid.net/username?meta=capabilities" / >
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://mylid.net/username?meta=capabilities" / >


Eran Sandler has a WordPress plug-in which supposedly makes the whole process easier.

Does anyone have any questions I could answer? If so, just fire them away in the comments area.

Tags: web2.0, web 2.0, openid, faq, identity 2.0