Daily Tech Bits

Gmail Playtime

Imagine my surprise when I visited Plurk today and found out that Gmail had some new features. Sign in, click on ’settings’ then ‘labs’ and you get some cool new tools to play with -13 of them to be exact. Quick links, pictures in chat and snazzy new icons are just a few of the goodies on offer. Lifehacker has a detailed review of the whole lot. Enjoy!

In other release news, those who are trying out FF3 but not committing all the way will be happy to hear that Portable Firefox is now at RC2. I can’t wait to make the change as I’ve found FF3 buggier than their previous releases.

Playing With Plurk

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to try out new things, so when I heard about Plurk, I couldn’t resist signing up to see what it was like. Many people suggest that it’s a Twitter clone, and it’s true that there are some similarities, like the 140 character limit for sending status updates. You can follow and be followed (having friends or fans in Plurk). But for me, that’s where the similarities end.

Plurk’s interface is very different. It’s a scrolling timeline moving from right to left, which seemed counter intuitive at first. However, it means that the latest content is always on the left where you read first. You can see all the updates you choose to follow (you can befriend people without getting their updates) in the top window. The bottom window shows your friends and fans and your karma (which is points you get from participating in the site.)

What I like about Plurk is that you can use lots of different verbs to describe your updates (thinks, feels, and so on) as well as a blank one so you can roll your own. You could end up talking about yourself in the third person, or you could behave Twitter style and just say what you want to say anyway. You can also set up an extended profile, MySpace style, but I haven’t done that yet.

A great feature is the ability to reply to a Plurk and see the responses in a drop down window, making it much easier to follow conversations than Twitter. The interface is definitely an improvement, but there’s one thing that’s lacking.

Goodness knows that the search features in Twitter aren’t anything to get excited about, but it’s virtually impossible to find your friends from other services in Plurk. You can add people from email accounts and IM but what I wanted to do was import my Twitter friends. No can do. Instead, I’ve been playing a hunt and click game to get a grand total of nine friends so far.

Plurk also makes it easy for you to group friends into cliques, though I haven’t tried this feature yet. Will I stick with it? I have no idea. I’ve got a lot of good friends on Twitter and unless they all move to Plurk it will probably remain secondary for me. That said, I think Twitter could learn a lot from Plurk, and it’s one to watch.

Here’s my Plurk profile if you want to add me.

Interested In Internet History?

If you are, you may be interested in Vanity Fair’s oral history of the internet. It’s an oral history, because they interviewed lots of people to write the eight part article. It covers:
I: The Conception
II: The Creation
III: The Web
IV: The Browser Wars
V: Going Public
VI: Boom and Bust
VII: Modern Times
VIII: The Last Word

The article features excerpts from the interviews with a tiny bit of context, though as TechCrunch points out, a lot of people have been left out. See what you think.

Plurk Or Twitter?

Everybody’s talking about Plurk and wondering whether this is the Twitter killer.

Who knows? With Twitter more down than up recently, and having to resort to Tumblr to keep users updated on statuses, perhaps it’s time for a new service to take the throne. One thing that Plurk offers that Twitter doesn’t have is the ability to group your friends - something that would certainly make Twitter more useful.

Don’t think that Twitter will give up easily, though. Although everyone’s talking about Plurk, there are still a lot of things that Twitter has got right, like allowing multiple ways of sending status updates.

Cheap, Small And Wireless

The future is cheap, the future is small, the future is wireless.  Small devices that connect to the web are becoming more and more popular, says the Times Online (not that we didn’t know that already.) It cites the Ipod Touch and Nokia 810 as harbingers of the future - and one thing that the future holds is a small, cheap laptop. Chip manufacturers are making chips that give you the same batterly life as a Centrino but need much less housing, while many have been inspired by the cheap laptops sent to the developing world and want to do something equally affordable at home. Who knows, one day you may be able to fit a computer in your Christmas stocking.

Still Got VHS? Convert, Convert!

If you’ve still got a collection of VHS tapes hanging around (if you’re asking what VHS is you probably don’t), then there’s a cost effective way to convert them. For just $250 you can get hold of Ion’s VCR2PC player, which has a USB connection. You can use it for your old home videos, too. As the Gadget Blog points out, it will cost you less than buying all your old videos as DVDs.