FireStatus 1.5 meets Del.icio.us

FireStatus 1.5 is out and it supports saving bookmarks on delicious. If you select the delicious checkbox a second text line will appear to enter tags for the bookmark. You don't have to select the "include url" checkbox for delicious unless you want to send an update to the other supported services. Delicious support also includes receiving bookmarks from your friends on del.icio.us in the usual way with popup notifications.



In the preferences, you have to give your delicious credentials and set the interval for polling for bookmarks from your friends. Be careful not to set interval to less than 30 minutes because you risk being temporarily throttled by the service.



The future
The next feature to be implemented is a list of all updates received from all enabled networks. Popup notifications are popular but if you miss one there is no way to see it, so the plan is to have a list (a sidebar maybe) with the past notifications (maybe the last 50?).

After that the most ambitious feature will be to create a post in your blog with your daily activity on the firestatus supported networks. Blogger will be the first to be supported (I use blogger. That 's why :-))

Download here and more info here.

FireStatus meets urlBorg

The next release (1.2) of FireStatus supports more than TinyURL for url shortening. The new option is urlBorg created by Panagiotis Vryonis a Greek programmer, so we (Greeks as well) felt obliged to add support for his child :-)

The preferences window has been changed to accomodate a new section for url shortening services.For the time, tinyUrl and urlBorg are supported but we plan to add more in the future as well as a fallback mechanism if the selected service fails. Thanks for all the positive comments and don't forget to leave a review :-)

Minor changes ...

Notice the new items on the sidebar of this blog. Newcomers are the Followers widget which display my only follower and FireStatus co-creator and the Blogs I read. I hope the followers list gets longer over time and the blogs I read gets shorter :-) So if you read this blog add it to your following list and I promise I add yours to mine.

Meet Firestatus

... a status update utility for multiple social networks. So, what 's this all about? The story goes like this: You see a cool page on the net and you 'd like to share it with your friends or you just want to update your status, the "Good morning, I just woke up" kind of twit. But your friends don't seem to have reached a consensus about THE social network. So, some of them use facebook, some other use twitter, some use friendfeed and you go on and on and on. What do you do to share the cool link with all of your friends (assuming that you have accounts in all of their networks)? You go to each and every social network page and write the same text again and again ? No. You need a client that can communicate with as many networks as possible and send the update to all. I certainly had that need. However the few clients I had seen didn't do the job exactly as I had imagined. My main problem is that even with multi-network clients I have to write the update and send it separately to each network. Why can't I write the text once and send it to all networks with just one click ? It can't be that difficult. Why don't we create such a client as a firefox extension (we are top engineers after all) ? So I discussed the idea with my friends, XUL and Javascript experts, Panagiotis and Dionysios (the best way to solve a problem is to find the people to solve it for you :-)) and here it is. It took us several weeks because we couldn't dedicate much time to the project but in the process we added friendfeed (instead of only twitter and facebook) and Panagiotis added the notification functionality (it 's a good thing to see what your friends are doing on twitter :-). So now we are waiting for your feedback and we are open to suggestions. We plan to add features like the unread notifications list and of course more networks like linkedin, del.icio.us, etc. Every network with a public API is a candidate. And don't forget to leave a (positive :-)) review here.

What I read and liked on 2008-09-23

Why Isn’t Facebook Making More Money? (Hint: Advertiser Value and User Value Are Not Aligned) - Publishing 2.0
Apart from finding some old friends from high school, I couldn't find any real value to facebook.

What I read and liked on 2008-08-31

Interoperability Happens - The Never-Ending Debate of Specialist v. Generalist

What I read and liked on 2008-08-14

Interoperability Happens - From the "You Must Be Trolling for Hits" Department...

Experience vs Knowledge. They both matter. One of the arguments in the article is that applying in production, the brand new language that you just learned, needs acquiring some experience with it first. I have to add that even picking the next language to study will be greatly helped by experience, otherwise you might end up waisting time learning useless things

Interoperability Happens - More Thoughts on Architects and Architecture

Are you a software architect or a software engineer? Someone that
designs a software system takes into account restrictions like budget,
time schedules and dealines, available staff etc. In that sense his job
is not strictly technical but it also has an economics aspect.
Therefore the word "engineering" seems more appropriate. At least, in
my language (Greek) the word architect has an artistic essence while
the engineer is more technical-economics oriented.