AOL has rolled out an online tool for sending messages to multiple AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) names at once. Even if you're rocking your AIM account through Digsby, Pidgin, or another multi-protocol client, you'll get a new Buddy List name that serves as a marker for sending out group messages. Users have to be invited and accept to get your messages, and the group creator decides whether the message recipients can see who else is in the group, and whether replies go direct to them or the whole group. It's one of those features you can't believe wasn't there already,...
The = sign makes a serviceable Hitler mustache - which is all you need to know to begin offending your friends over instant message. Here's a list of historically accurate options to get started with. Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment » The Best Links: Via URLesque...
Now that we can officially say we’re in a recession, it makes sense that there’s a resurgence of sites devoted to floundering companies. We have to bleep out some names, but they include LayoffBlog.com, Screwdd F—-edStartups, It Died, Timely Demise and web2.0f—edcompany.com (which BizTech wrote about in October), in addition to TechCrunch’s longer-running deadpool. F—edStartups, or FS, has garnered attention in less than two months of existence because of how aggressively it’s covering the downturn. All the sites cover the latest rounds of layoffs, but FS virtually preannounces bad news, warning when startups are rumored to be sacking employees or...
Chances are you use at least two major social networks - 49 million people, for example, visited both MySpace and Facebook in October 2008 (Comscore, worldwide). Nearly 7 million people in the UK use both Bebo and Facebook. A lot of people maintain very different friend lists on LinkedIn than MySpace or Facebook. Etc. And when you add in niche social sites like YouTube, Flickr, etc., there’s even more overlap among users. There has never been an effective way of aggregating and merging all the data and activity on these sites into a single user interface. A new venture backed...
Need to chat with a group of people all running different chat clients and you don't have time to coordinate everyone switching to a multi-service chat client like Digsby? Stinto is a free web-based chat application, specializing in disposable chat rooms. There is no registration required, upon visiting the site you simply click "New Chat" to generate a random URL and set basic settings like the name of the chat room and how long it can remain empty before it auto-deletes. Email or instant message the URL of the chat room to your friends to get started. Moderate your...
RSS readers may make it easy to quickly browse through all of your favorite news sources, but they can quickly become overwhelming - many of the most popular blogs publish dozens of posts a day. Notify.me is looking to help cut through the noise by offering keyword filtering for blogs and other sites that support RSS (like Craigslist), and the ability to send immediate update notifications across a variety of services. Notify.me allows users to create a list of RSS feeds they’d like to monitor for a set of specific keywords. Whenever one of these keywords appears in a...
Filed under: Fun, Google, Search, Web We've all been there. You're working, and an instant message window pops up. It's your friend, who I'll call "Captain Obvious," and he wants to know what that new James Bond movie is called. Even if you know, why is he asking you? That's what Google is for. Instead of answering his question straight away, just say "Here, let me Google that for you."Let Me Google That For You will give your friend a step-by-step reminder about how to Google. Step 1 (type In your question) shows the question being input into the Google...
When my wife watches Dancing with the Stars, she often trades text messages with her friend about the show they are watching. It appears that VH1, MTV networks, and Mobui Corporation have taken this habit a step further. Mobui has announced the launch of a downloadable Instant Messaging application that allows “VH1 viewers to use their phone to chat in real time with friends and other VH1 fans while watching VH1’s popular programming”. In other words, viewers just don’t sit back and watch a VH1 program, they are communicating with other viewers of the same program via their mobile phone....
By now, it comes as no surprise that young people have different preferences for how they use technology than the older folks in the crowd. But the techie habits of young people are beginning to creep into the most mundane of activities, such as banking, as companies look for ways to appeal to the younger generation and grow their businesses. A new survey conducted for Microsoft by Javelin Strategy and Research shows that "Millennials"--people between the ages of 18 and 30--heavily prefer interacting with their banks through higher-tech (and lower-human-interaction) methods like the web, IM, and SMS. Unsurprisingly, a large...
Which third parties can access sensitive data that users post on Facebook, such as email addresses? It depends on the partner, according to Facebook. So here’s the latest tidbit about how this policy is being implemented. Earlier today, Michael Arrington at Techcrunch spotted a way for Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger instant message service to access your Facebook friends’ email addresses, using its Invite2Messenger feature for importing contacts from other sites. Invite2Messenger has been live for eight months. It lets you pick which Facebook friends you want to add to the service, and apparently until today showed you their email addresses...
When you want the latest update to an important RSS feed sent to you wherever you are, the moment it's published, give the Notify.me notification web service a try. Set up source feeds in Notify.me and have new items sent to you via instant message, SMS, or email. I signed up for Notify.me two days ago and got no new items from my feeds for a day; then yesterday afternoon the IM bot kicked in and I was getting notifications of new feed updates faster than my check-every-15-minutes desktop feed reader. Suggested uses for Notify.me include job listings, social...
If you're looking for an easy way to set up reminders by date for everything from tasks to complete to events to attend to birthdays to remember, Deadline can help. You can set up reminders via email or instant message simply by typing a phrase like "Book proposal due next Tuesday," and Deadline will parse the text into a dated entry and then send you a reminder the day before. Since a calendar and schedule is only helpful if you actually use it, Deadline might be a way to get into the habit since it's fairly easy to email...
From viewing videos on YouTube to screening family events, people love being able to watch something exactly as it happened. And as webcams have become popular, more and more of us are realizing that video is the next best thing to an in-person conversation. Today we're introducing Gmail voice and video chat, which lets you have free voice and video conversations right from within Gmail.Video chatting from Gmail is as easy as sending an instant message. With our team spread out across Google offices in Sweden and the U.S., it's been really handy in helping us work together. Just click...
FriendFeed, which seemingly rolls out a new feature every day, has just launched the option to get updates via instant message. Similar to the recently added feature that will stream your FriendFeed activity to Twitter, the aggregator offers a built-in set of filters so you can control how much information you receive through Google Talk or Jabber. Further, if you make use of FriendFeed’s options for organizing your friends, you can specify that you’d only like IM updates from a specific group of people. This should go a long way in making the feature useful without overloading you with constant...
For those of you who use FriendFeed and are looking for even more information bombardment in your lives, you can now receive every update via instant message. FriendFeed now supports notifications and posting for Google Talk and Jabber. So if it is not enough for you to visit the site 12 times a day, or keep updated via a desktop client, or get your feed in your e-mail, you can now turn on the information spigot even more. FriendFeed ultimately is a communication platform, so adding IM was inevitable. But please kill me now. Just the thought of getting...
