Aardvark - answers to all your questions

We live in an age where we need to Google everything and anything we need to know about. But Google is after all an index of all that lies on the internet. What if you wanted to buy something and didn’t really know where to look for? The internet might be able to help you but its usually not that helpful. Asking your friends might be really helpful, but what if your friends didn’t know either? Most probably, their friends might know. Aardvark does just this. It creates a network of friends and their friends across which you throw around your questions and delivers their answers to you. It’s a bridge between the person asking the question and those who have the answers. It involves extensive usage of the friend of a friend (FOAF) concept which is currently one of biggest trends in social networking. LinkedIn and Facebook already show you friend recommendations based on this concept. But Aardvark has been the first to put it to use in answering your questions. You sign up for a free account with aardvark and then add your personal details(so that your friends can find you) and your topics of interest. Linking it to your Facebook account lets you import your interests from your FB profile. Add aardvark bot to your IM client and you are good to go. Questions on topics of your interest could flow to you and you are free to, answer, pass or refer them to your friends. The conversation happens freely through IM, with the Aardvark bot ensuring that you always know what keyword to type in.  Your dashboard on Aardvark has a list of all your questions and answers, asked and answered. If IN is not your thing, you can even ask questions and answer them on the site or via Twitter. Time required to get answers is around 4 minutes usually, But then it all depends on the question. Many questions might remain unanswered, but most objective questions are answered promptly. Aardvark would do well to bring in a reward system of badges similar to the one found on Stack overflow.  Your questions are not always recognized as questions and you might be required to tag them or rephrase them if Aardvark doesn’t understand them. In spite of these trivial issues, Aardvark is a service which shows tremendous promise and is a must have bot for your IM client. Thanks to @kushmakarsharma for recommending the site.

10 Reasons why twitter has more spam than friendfeed!

1. Twitter is bigger!
   
2. Follower/Subscriber count does not matter on friendfeed.
   
3. The general quality of content on friendfeed is better than that on twitter (ok..I made this up..I don't have any scientific data to prove this)
   
4. To maximize their reach, spammers believe they need followers
   
5. Friendfeed is a content aggregator. Spam bots and ppl would have to be on more than one network to actually utilize friendfeed.
6. Many spammers do not even know of friendfeed, Most spammers just copy what other spammers do. (spammers are not as educated as you think they are!)
7. Friendfeed caters to an exclusive audience, while twitter serves almost everyone
8. Most people on friendfeed know how to combat spam!
9. There is spam on friendfeed. And you can report it (instead of just blocking them)
10. Some spam still gets through, like this blog post..and there's nothing you can do about it.
    

Two Adobe Photoshop replacements

You need to edit an image real quick and you are working either on a netbook or someone else's machine which doesn't have a copy of your favourite photoshop. Or maybe you never had photoshop in the first place.
Adobe Photoshop has become the premier digital one stop solution for image editing and it should come as no surprise that more than a few would have attempted to ride the photoshop success wave with their own clones.

Both these applications would not be able to replace Photoshop for power users. But when it comes to basic image editing, they get the job done quite well!

Posterous - Use your email to post online

Posted via email from thunderror's posterous

Geek Chart - where do you share online?

Geek Chart shows you where you shares most of the content. You can find thunderror's shared content on twitter, stumbleupon, delicious and loads of other web2.0 sites. Geek chart currently supports a select few of these popular sites and makes a pie chart showing where you share the most and the least. Not surprisingly, twitter comes tops my share list. Try out your geek chart and let us know where you share...Just sign up and surrender your usernames with the most popular social share sites. Thunderror's Geek Chart

Tour de Flex _ Helps you learn Flex, in English!

Get your copy of Tour de Flex and jump start your Flex experience. Learn with easy examples. Anyway, its better than looking at your boring HTML help! Oh! You'd better get some AIR before you do that!

Use Open Source Titanium to build your RIAs

1. Average branding. Titanium is a great brand name, but my search on Titanium on Google brings up only one result on the first page which is relevant. Titanium Appcelerator seems to work though!
2. This is something Appcelerator has to do. Write a Wikipedia page. It is after all an open source project which needs users for it to get popular.
3. Get more people to tweet and write about it. We decided to blog about it after getting impressed with the free SDK, awesome tutorials and the wonderful twitter application, Tweetanium.
4. Get more blogs to write about Titanium. Because we really think Lifehacker should have featured Tweetanium. True many have already featured Titanium, like the Readwriteweb blog

Twitter and facebook status messages for the imaginatively challenged

Trying out Generatus Here is what I got: "Thunderror always wears a seatbelt. It makes it harder for aliens to suck him out of his car." Generatus is meant for facebook, but provides satisfactory results with most microblogging platforms, social networking status messages and ensures that your status is as unique as possible. Reduces twitter's block

Nice translator

While browsing the web, we do come across pages in other languages...Google translate is one of the best and has been my friend when I encounter such pages. Yahoo's Babelfish does a decent job as well.. But what if you wanted a lovely web 2.0 interface and just wanted to translate phrases into multiple languages? Support for language auto detect and translate as you type too? Enter Nice Translator...A smooth clean interface with the use of light shades of green makes you want to translate phrases even if you don't need them... That was quite a short post. So, ????? or rather goodbye for now...

StumbleUpon - Without the toolbar!

I remember using this one long back, so I decided to write a post about it...This one is for all of you who use browsers like Google Chrome, Flock and are unable to install the stumbleupon toolbar. A quick introduction, Stumbleupon is the remote control for the web, websites are voted and reviewed upon by users and lets users stumble upon webpages on the internet...based on your interests, search criteria, keywords etc..

Stumbleupon