Google announces OpenSocial API
Are you a Facebook member? Did you join MySpace for some of your friends don’t have Facebook accounts? There’s a solution, and it’s called OpenSocial.
OpenSocial is an API for social networks. There’s nothing new about APIs, but the Google is taking a flying leap by standardizing the different APIs of different social networks into one API. You might ask: “Why Google?” Actually Google is just developing the OpenSocial API, but it’s not an idea Google had on their own - they have a couple of influential partners in the social web business: hi5, MySpace, Ning, Facebook and Xing, just to name a few.
I can already hear some people moan about Google doing it - but in this case the fear-mongering that Google will soon know everything about us doesn’t seem quite eligible. To quote one of the social networking companies’ CEOs that was giving a demo of an OpenSocial app at the Google Campfire One: “This is Flixter working directly with MySpace. [...] Google doesn’t control the data in any way” (Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixter, approx. 55:00 on Campfire One: Introducing OpenSocial on YouTube)
I can’t wait to see what developers are going to do with OpenSocial - would be nice, if Google got everyone together using OpenSocial.
[via Kaffeeringe]
Postponing mails
Have you ever postponed a job one of your buddies sent you via mail and forgot it? Here’s what I do.
I often get that kind of emails saying “Hey, can you quickly do this and that for me?”. Usually, I can - but I don’t want to - at least not immediately. So what I do is, I postpone it and happen to forget it once it’s out of the first page of my GMail inbox. But there’s quite an easy way to prevent this from happening using a neat feature of the GMail web interface called labels. Labels are best described as virtual folders, or if you know iTunes (smart) playlists. The mails are not being moved from the inbox, but you can tag them with something.
I created myself two labels, one called ‘finished’ and one called ‘postponed’. Whenever I read a mail and consider the work attached to it to be finished I apply the label ‘finished’ to it, whenever I postpone some work I apply the label ‘postponed’. That way, I know at a glance in my virtual ‘postponed’ folder that there’s work left.
How do you manage your mail? Any suggestions on mail management? Tell me using the comment function.
Ubuntu successfully updated
I did it! I managed to update my Ubuntu 7.04 installation to the new 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”.
I did have some broken sources in my /etc/apt/sources.list which happened to make the automatic update fail. I was using a 3rd party repository for compiz-fusion, which stopped the update process. After running #aptitude upgrade and #aptitude dist-upgrade manually and removing the old compiz-fusion version from the 3rd party repository, however, the update completed successfully.
The new Ubuntu “Gutsy Gibbon” doesn’t look that different, unlike we know it from Windows updates… it’s basically the same system, just some packages have been updated. Probably the most significant update is compiz-fusion, which is now enabled by default, if your graphics card supports it and provides some neat desktop effects that make work fun again. You can choose between two levels of desktop effects, the basic one (with few effects) and the extended one (with a lot of effects). You can, however, adjust the plug-in configuration in detail if you choose to do so, which will probably provide you with the best suite of effects.
If you don’t know, what I’m talking about, check out some YouTube videos on Compiz-Fusion.