Librarians are experimenting with a huge range of Facebook Application ranging from the productive 30 boxes calendar,Meebo,Twitter & Zoho Online office to silly with Zombies ,Likeness ,My Aquarium and super poke
Here are the some of the Facebook Application design for a librarian in all of us.We all love reading books .Many of my friends on Facebooks are interested in reading books ranging from Novel to children comics Books iRead – With nearly 200,000 users, this handy app claims to be the most popular book application on Facebook. iRead lets you share a virtual bookshelf of titles you are currently reading, those you want to read, those you have read in the past, and books you won’t read. You can also rate titles, spotlight book reviews you’ve written, and list books you own as well as your all-time favorite books. By accessing your iRead dashboard you can check out your friends’ reads, tweak your display settings, and view new books added to the quickly-growing collection of 2.8 million books. Other options – Visual Bookshelf (115,881 users), Books By Martin Mroz and Larry Gadea (50,542 users), Books By Jonathan Lipps, (26,177 users).
LibGuides Librarian – For those of you using Springshare’s LibGuides subject guides maker for libraries, you’ll be pleased to see this new app which lets you display your guides in your Facebook profile and also provides a search of your library’s catalog.
Librarian –This virtual librarian service provides links to books, scholarly sources, and reference resources which the community can add to and vote on. Those who access this application can access an “Ask a Librarian” service, as well as customize and build their own widget based on the original. Over 1,000 people have installed this useful application which was created by library school student Brad Czerniak.
June 20, 2008 (PC World) Like most people visiting PCWorld.com, you most likely live on the Internet. And that means you need help — help with your home or business network for accessing the Internet, with troubleshooting, with downloading, and with e-mail, instant messaging and security.
We’ve got that help for you — in 14 great downloads. Whether you need a universal messenger or programs to keep yourself safe, downloadable software can come to the rescue.
General Networking and Internet Tools
Need to troubleshoot your network, manage your downloads or get a free alternative to the bloated Adobe Reader? Here’s where to go. (And that’s just the beginning of these nifty downloads.)
PingInfoView
The simplest of all Internet tools is the humble ping command, which lets you use the command prompt to contact a Web site and see if it is alive and responds to your ping request. It also resolves host names to IP addresses. In other words, if you issue the command ping www.pcworld.com, it will tell you the site’s associated IP address. And it also tells you the speed of the connection and response.
The free PingInfoView makes the simple ping command a lot more useful. It lets you ping multiple Web sites simultaneously, will ping the sites on any schedule you set and displays the results in a graphical interface, rather than in a command prompt.
Is this an earth-shaking tool? Certainly not. But if you use ping at all, you’ll find it a useful, worthy alternative.
Here’s another update of a venerable command-line Internet tool, tracert. This tool displays the route you take to contact a Web server or another Internet device — every hop on every server or router along the way, plus the server’s or router’s IP address and how long it takes to get to each one.
This program displays all that in a visually appealing way, not just through the command line. It shows a map of every hop and graphs it against a background that shows response times. Highlight any hop, and you’ll see important details, such as packet loss and speed.
In addition, the program displays a narrative of the route, detailing whether the route has fast, average or slow throughput and highlighting any problems.
This version of VisualRoute is free, but a variety of for-pay versions is also available, with many extra features that display the network names of devices, test domain-name services and more.
What’s the most annoying Internet-related application of all time? For many people, that question has a simple answer: Adobe Reader. Countless documents online are in the Acrobat format, so there’s no way around it: You need Adobe Reader. But it’s bloated and prone to crashes, nobody’s idea of a good time.
Foxit Reader is a far better solution. It’s small and loads much faster, so it doesn’t take up much memory when you use it. It also doesn’t seem to suffer from the same instability issues as Adobe Reader does. The program also has some nice extras, such as the ability to embed comments. (However, when you embed comments, the page you mark up will show that you’re using an evaluation version of the software. You can pay for the Pro pack to get rid of those marks and get some other extras as well.)
Note that when I installed the program, it integrated directly into Internet Explorer as the default PDF reader, but it didn’t similarly integrate into Firefox. To make it the default in Firefox, you’ll have to select Tools, Options and then click the Manage button in the File Types area. Double-click each of the files that Adobe Reader opens, and tell Firefox to use Foxit Reader instead.
If you’re a techie and have more than one PC at work or home on a network sharing a single Internet connection, you’ll welcome this freebie, which offers surprisingly powerful scanning capabilities. Use it for everything from troubleshooting Internet connections and network configuration to making sure your PCs are as safe as possible when they’re on the Internet.
When you first run the program, you may encounter an error message saying that a default configuration is being used. You can safely ignore that message. Simply click the Scan button, and it goes to work. It looks across your network, finds all PCs on it and then gives you quite a bit of detail about each. Besides the local IP address of each PC, you’ll also find which ports on each PC are open. Armed with that information, you can use a firewall to close them down.
In addition to open and closed ports, you’ll see lots more information, such as what services are running on each PC, the NetBIOS names (if any) associated with each, and even a list of users and groups on each system. If any machines have shared folders, you’ll see those as well. All this data is immensely useful to those who want to keep their PCs secure or need to troubleshoot networks or Internet connections.
Making the software all the more remarkable is the fact that it’s free.
If you live to download, this freebie is for you. It’s a great download manager that will speed up the process, keep you safe and help you organize everything that you’ve downloaded. Flashget makes downloads faster by using multithreading, and it lets you find downloads via many different protocols, including HTTP, FTP and eMule. It’s also terrific at file management, showing you all the files you’ve downloaded, including information about each. You’ll even be able to delete downloaded files from directly in the program.
Making it even more useful is that it integrates with your browser, so whenever you download, it jumps into action. It will also pause and resume downloads and works with your antivirus software to scan for viruses as it downloads.
One of the Internet’s oldest file-transfer protocols — FTP — still lives. Contrary to popular wisdom, not all files are downloaded from Web sites. Many are still downloaded from FTP servers. And many individuals and businesses continue to use FTP as a way to share files. Also, many Internet service providers block large files, so using FTP is a great way around that problem.
FileZilla is an excellent FTP client that combines simplicity with a robust feature set. It has just about every FTP feature you could need, and its interface is easy to use.
Here’s a simple, easy way to check on your current bandwidth use — both uploading and downloading — and to track your usage over time. This freebie displays that usage in a constantly changing chart so you can see the fluctuations in real time. It also shows you the current bandwidth use in a text display.
Bandwidth Monitor 2 Lite is quite customizable. For example, you can skin it and change the time span in which it measures bandwidth. Also very helpful is that it will keep logs of your bandwidth usage, so you can make comparisons over time.
The Internet is all about communications — but as we all know, it is not always as easy to communicate as we would like. These downloads will help you with e-mail, instant messaging and social networking.
Email Tracker Pro
Tired of being whacked by spam? Not sure if an e-mail message that you received is legitimate or is instead a forgery or from a scammer? Then give this program a try. It gives you a set of tools for examining any e-mail message that pops into your in-box.
The program traces an e-mail back to its true point of origin, shows you the IP address and location of the sender, and tells you whether the e-mail header was tampered with in order to fool you. In addition, it provides contact information for the domain from which the message was sent so that you can report any abuse.
In order to use Email Tracker Pro, you’ll have to copy an e-mail message’s headers into the program. These headers, however, don’t refer to the Subject or From line. Instead, they’re usually something hidden. How you find them varies according to your e-mail software. For example, in Outlook 2007, right click on a message and select Message Options; you’ll then see an Internet headers field.
One obstacle I encountered: The program says that it integrates directly into Outlook, but I was unable to integrate it with Outlook 2007.
If you’ve got multiple Web-based mail accounts, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail, you can easily spend far too much time checking each account for new mail. This simple freebie neatly solves the problem. It automatically logs you in to all your Web-based e-mail accounts, checks for new mail, then tells you how many new messages you have for each.
In addition, you can read the messages from right within ePrompter, so you don’t have to go to your Web-based mail account. You can also delete and compose mail. When composing or reading, you won’t get a full range of options as you would when you’re on the Web-based mail site. But for quick and dirty e-mail, it’s all you’ll need.
Don’t expect a fancy interface; this program is as bare-bones as you’ll find. Also, it may not be obvious at first how to set up a new mail account; select Menu, New Account and follow the directions.
Note that this program works fine on Windows XP, but I was unable to get it working on Windows Vista. Also, if you have a Hotmail e-mail address, select the LiveMail option in ePrompter when you’re setting up the account to check; I was unable to get it working properly as Hotmail, but it worked fine as LiveMail.
The Internet was created as a way to bring people closer, but in some ways, it drives people apart. If you’re an AOL Instant Messenger user, for example, you can’t communicate with someone who uses Yahoo Messenger. And there’s no simple way from an instant messaging program to check your presence on social networking sites such as Facebook or to check e-mail from a Web-based mail site not associated with your instant messenger.
Until Digsby came along, that is. This program is a universal instant messenger, like longtime favorites Trillian and Pidgin. But it does them one better because with it, you can also check your social networking sites and e-mail accounts.
It’s extremely simple to set up any instant messaging, social networking or mail accounts from within the program. And it lets you use just about all the features of any of those programs, such as sending files via instant messaging. Considering that it’s free as well, there’s no reason not to give this tool a try.
When you install this program, by the way, it changes your home page to a Digsby home page, so if you want to retain your current home page, make sure to go into your browser and change it.
Most of the time, sending e-mail messages goes off without a hitch. Set up your e-mail program to work with an SMTP server, send your messages, and you’re done. But sometimes SMTP — the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol — won’t work, and it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s wrong. Your e-mail program won’t give you any clue about what the error might be. All in all, it can be one of the most maddening of Internet-related problems.
SMTP Diagnostics helps. It performs a complete set of diagnostics on your SMTP connection and provides an in-depth report about any errors. You can then use the report yourself to fix the problem or send the report to your Internet service provider or network administrator, who can track down the cause of the woes.
The program is particularly useful if you’re setting up an e-mail account for the first time and can’t make a connection or if you’re on the road and can’t send mail through a hotel’s broadband connection or a wireless hot spot.
This free client is about as good as it gets when it comes to FTP. It has a simple interface that you can master in about three minutes, yet it still has plenty of powerful features, such as being able to compare local and remote directories. It also lets you have multiple simultaneous connections, for faster transfers.
You need to protect yourself when you go online. Download the following programs, and you’ll go a long way toward making sure that the bad guys and bad software won’t get you.
Comodo Firewall Pro
If you’re using the firewall that ships with Windows XP or Vista, you’re not safe enough. They don’t offer customizable outbound protection — important in a world in which spyware is everywhere. This free firewall not only stops inbound and outbound threats, but it also does things such as protecting selected files and folders so that malware can’t get at them or alter them.
When you first start this program, be prepared to spend a little time training it. Whenever a program wants Internet access, Comodo pops up and asks whether you wish to let the program use the Internet. To cut down on those pop-ups, run the program in Clean PC mode, which will scan your PC, find your existing applications, and register them as safe. You then won’t see any pop-ups associated with those programs. And to make sure that Comodo doesn’t interfere with installing software, you can use its Installation mode, which will disable certain pop-ups for 15 minutes, so you can install new software without being annoyed.
To use the Internet is to put your PC at risk from spyware, adware, Trojan horses and other malware. Your antivirus program by itself isn’t enough to protect you because it misses many of these malicious programs. This long-time favorite offers a great, no-cost layer of protection.
It does a great job of scanning your PC for threats — including Trojan horses, rootkits and other spyware — warning you about them, then deleting them. It can also put them into quarantine, disabling them but not deleting them, so you can decide what to do about them later.
Even if you already have antispyware on your PC, it’s a good idea to use Ad-Aware as well, because not all spyware scanners find all threats, so using more than one is a good idea.
Your Internet activity leaves a trail — and one far more traceable than you might imagine. This trail includes cache files, browser history, autocomplete information, cookies, typed URLs and more. This means that anyone with access to your PC can easily see what you’ve been doing online. In some instances, even Web sites can gather information about where you’ve been and what you’ve done.
Free Internet Window Washer ensures your privacy by cleaning all those traces off of your PC. Not only will it remove traces of Internet activity, but it will also clean traces of application activity, such as which files you’ve recently opened in Microsoft Office applications. And it works with multiple browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and Opera.
Do you carry a USB thumb drive with you? It makes a lot of sense to do so, now that you can get so much capacity at such low cost. I keep one on a keychain and I’m always adding useful applications to it. The ones I’m getting the most good use out of now are free synching applications, which allow me to keep entire folders on my computers synchronized with my USB thumb drive.
GoodSync is the easiest to use of the various synchronization applications I’ve found. It’s completely free, and now that I have the folders I want synchronized set up, I can keep them in synch on my computer and my USB thumb drive with one click.
GoodSync is actually capable of doing much more than I use it for. You can schedule to do automatic backups, for example, although I happen to use separate backup software for that application. Just like backing up locally, you can also use it to keep local media and FTP sites in synch.
Easy2Sync has a free version of its synchronization application, and for simple tasks it works fine. Easy2Sync’s interface relies on wizards so you can set up rules for synching and synch just the files and folders you want. I found the wizards to be a little more in the way of interface than I really needed, but you may be comforted by them.
Of course, both of these synch applications are good for matching up files and folders on many kinds of devices other than USB Flash drives. The good news is, no matter what you use them for, is that they’re free.
Scheduling meetings is a necessary chore we face in business. Managing multiple person’s calendars and finding a good time to meet involves many back and forth emails. This is especially true when the persons you’re trying to meet with are on another electronic calendaring system.
To tackle this problem, I looked at Tungle last week. Now let’s look at a similar scheduling application: TimeBridge.
TimeBridge’s approach for addressing this frustrating issue comes from research involving personal assistants. In my phone interview with TimeBridge CEO Yori Nelken, Mr. Nelken said the company spent hours interviewing personal assistants to find the insider’s tips and tricks for streamlining the scheduling process. The TimeBridge application is not just a calendar view with all attendees’ free/busy data overlaid on each other. They have built a meeting organization system with some handy add-ons to make it a powerful scheduling platform.
Currently TimeBridge supports two major calendaring platforms: Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and Google Calendar, including Google Apps for Your Domains. The TimeBridge application works best when your contacts with whom you wish to meet ‘connect’ their calendars to TimeBridge.
This is done on the Microsoft side by downloading/installing an Outlook toolbar. With Google, you enter your Google sign-on credentials or you go through a process to give TimeBridge access to your Google Calendar. Most privacy-conscious people will prefer the latter method.
The TimeBridge Process
Connecting your calendar isn’t necessary to arrange a meeting with TimeBridge, it just makes the process easier. For this post, I’ll run through the process assuming no participants have ‘connected’ their calendar to TimeBridge.
To begin scheduling a meeting, log in to TimeBridge and click “Schedule a Meeting”. Next, enter in the participant’s email addresses, your meeting topic and proposed meeting time(s). You can also add an optional conference call number at no charge. Click “Send” and the email invitations are sent out to attendees. You are also presented with an option to schedule a web conference with WebEx.
The recipients get a message with an invitation to pick which of your proposed meeting times works best for them. They mark each time slot with their preferences based on their schedule.
After the attendee marks their preferences, a message is sent back to the meeting organizer where he/she finalizes the meeting time, based on everyone’s provided availability.
Finally, all attendees receive an email that contains a meeting notice that can be placed on their respective calendars.
Upon finalization of the meeting, the originator is presented with a link to schedule a reservation (if needed) with OpenTable - an online restaurant reservation service.
About TimeBridge
Mr. Nelken said the company received funding in December of 2005 and began operation in January 2006. Their team of 24 has seen their usage double over and over about 4 times. They are targeting growth amongst users, rather than engaging CIO-types and IT shops. TimeBridge has forged a relationship with Google and are providing Google a foot-in-the-door with enterprise customers who are looking at Google Calendar as a possibility for their organizations.
To monetize the product, they have a very innovative approach. The optional conference call service is a revenue sharing agreement they have set up with the calling service providers. This gives the company the opportunity to provide customers with a no-advertisement (and potentially annoying) call service and on the back-end, TimeBridge makes money too. Additionally, the optional web conference option when arranging a meeting is an agreementw with WebEx whereby TimeBridge gets a fee for the new-users sign up.
Following the typical web 2.0 web service model, Nelken stated at some point they will have a premium package, but basic functionality will always remain free.
Conclusion
Tungle required a download and install of an IM-ish application that showed you your contact’s availabililty. I like that TimeBridge is an Outlook add-in bar, keeping me within Outlook during the scheduling process.
Another interesting feature with TimeBridge is the ability to show your free/busy data on your website and/or social network. You can register with TimeBridge and get either a widget or embed-able HTML code that you can use on any website. This might be advantageous for a busy person to show their free/busy data directly on their website for all those who want to schedule a meeting with them.
TimeBridge creates a process for meeting scheduling that is easy and conducive to how meetings are set up in the “real world”. The optional services makes scheduling meeting resources painless. Their integration with Google Calendar is a plus, however I’m waiting for them, like Tungle, to support iCal on the Macintosh. Nelken assured me an iCal application would be released in the near future.
The ink was barely dry on yesterday’s announcement of the new iPhone SDK before I started seeing announcements from developers that they’d be porting their applications to the newly-opening platform. Among applications of interest to web workers, at least Twitterific, OmniFocus, TypePad and Adium have announced their intent to produce native iPhone versions - and I haven’t made an exhaustive survey.
Of course, now that we know the SDK is out there in the wild, we can indulge in uncontrolled dreaming. If you’ve already got your iPhone, which applications are you hoping to see ported to do your work? If you don’t, which ones would tempt you to plunk down the money?
We’ve coveredRemember the Milk before to help you manage your lists and tasks. However, Remember the Milk and similar services require registration and a little bit of configuration. What if you’d like to have a reminder sent to you at a certain date/time, sans all the registration headache?
This is where a new site called YourLi.st comes into play. With YourList, you enter in a title and summary of the task, then set up whether the event needs has recurrence. In my testing, setting up a reminder generates an initial e-mail confirming the reminder.
On their front page, the site pledges to not re-use or sell your email address, but I’d recommend using a disposable email address if you are concerned with getting spammed by the new service.
Also, check out the bookmarklet if you want to quickly create reminders easily in your browser.
“Strong passwords.” That’s one of the mantras of online security, along with looking for SSL connections and using unique passwords for each site you register at. But do you know how strong is strong? If you need some help evaluating the security of a password you’re planning on using, try the Microsoft Password Checker. In addition to being an AJAX tool - so that the password you’re checking never actually leaves your own computer - it includes tips on creating good passwords.Of course, if you’re really using unique passwords for every site, you’ll also want to implement some sort of password-management tool, like the ones we’ve reviewedin the past. The best of these utilities will even generate unique, strong passwords for you. Use water to run your car!
We’ve reached a point where free online file storage space is no longer a distinguishing feature; anyone who bothers to look around and sign up for various services can easily find dozens of gigabytes of space on other people’s servers without paying a cent. Some providers have been trying to stand out from the pack with extra features. But newcomer Openomy has a different strategy: they’ll give you a gigabyte of storage and a way for you to build your own features.
Specifically, Openomy has implemented a REST-based API with (at the moment) Ruby language bindings. Anyone can write an application that gets authenticated access to files stored on Openomy, then perform operations like uploading, downloading, and tagging. If you’re a developer looking to add online storage to your own applications, this gives you a potential way to do that without running your own disk farm.
