I am a bit behind with the news at the moment due to work pressures and health issues so this feature introduced by Crossloop is not that new but I am still fascinated nonetheless. Marketplace enables you to use the Crossloop remote desktop software to run your own IT helpdesk support for computer issues that you are proficient in handling.

People can search for you by keyword on the Crossloop main page, depending on what you have specified your skills to be :

People can then browse through the Crossloop profiles (here is mine) of the people who fit the bill and they can pick the person they prefer and you’ll then get an email from Crossloop telling you that you’ve been picked. You can then sit at your end in your comfy computer chair, fix the problem, bill them and go on your way. I’m not entirely clear on when you c0me into contact with the client (Crossloop doesn’t make that clear) but I’m sure it isn’ t that difficult once you get started.

At the moment, Crossloop isn’t charging any fees for sending business your way but that will obviously change in the future. The service will apparently always be free for people looking for PC help so it will probably always be popular for them. Well, it’s free for them in terms of the fact that they never have to pay Crossloop for the referral to the expert. But of course they will have to pay the expert for the advice and the work.

It will be interesting to see what percentage Crossloop will eventually ask for and how they will collect it (Paypal?). Will they go the Skype Prime route and take a really hefty greedy chunk up-front or will they go the sensible route and take a nice slim amount, realising that this encourages users to generate more business and therefore more income in the long term? I sincerely hope the latter.

This is a shot across the bows at places like eLance and also at IT help places like Geek Squad which has a bad rap in the US. Perhaps online ventures like this might start to restore people’s faith in IT support professionals?

I previously covered Crossloop in a Make Use Of article in December last year and for Geeks Are Sexy in November last year. It’s a great application and a worthy addition to your computer.

Technorati Tags: crossloop, desktop, marketplace, Software

photo credit: STML

A new version of Skype - Skype 3.8 Beta for Windows - is out but I’m choosing to hold off installing it.   This is a first for me.   Normally I am first to install every beta version available of my favourite software (I am currently testing the new beta version of Filezilla) and I would be sitting there listing all the bugs and annoying the hell out of the developers!)    But this time….I don’t know.

I suppose I am not inclined to mess up my Skype up right now.  I am using Skype a lot at the moment for conference calls and I have things tweaked and set up the way I want it.   The last thing I want to do is to drop a bomb on my stable version by downloading a beta buggy version which, as Skype themselves admit doesn’t always “behave as it should”.

So when I heard from a lot of people about the tendency for 3.8 to drop a lot of calls or for it to freeze suddenly, I guess I got cold feet.     I can wait.   When I saw the features list, nothing sensational jumped out at me.   It’s not as if they re-invented the wheel or anything.    Most of it is just bugfixes.

Technorati Tags: beta, Skype, Software, VOIP

Hot on the heels of Joost is Livestation, another desktop application attempting to bring television to the PC. Not many television stations have signed up so far to the project but nevertheless it’s looking rather good at the moment.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: desktop, Digg, Software, Television

I am totally obsessed right now with Pidgin. I like how I can integrate Skype into it, in fact I like full stop how extensible the whole thing is. You can skin it, you can add plug-ins, you can make it whatever way you want it. Due to its open-source nature, there’s an active developer community and I am talking to a couple of people at the moment via email and IM about their Pidgin development projects (you can see one of them here).

You see, to me, this is the exciting side of the web - the side that opens up to user participation and innovation. Web companies that don’t offer API’s and developer support are just shooting themselves in the foot basically, because what really drives a product are the users. If there is genuine passion among the users, and innovation with third party addons then you’re going to build a loyal customer base - period. If you shut out the developers and discourage innovation then you’re not really inspiring loyalty are you?

(more…)

Technorati Tags: bot sentry, chat, developer, hotkeys, IM, Make Use Of, open source, pidgin, plugins, shortcuts, Software, spam

A story I wrote for Make Use Of. Digg Alerter pops up a window on your PC desktop when your stories are dugg or commented on. But only the stories that you submitted yourself - it doesn’t count the ones that someone else submitted but you dugg later. You can even tell it to include or exclude stories you submitted but which were subsequently buried.

read more | digg story

The Google Email Uploader is a desktop utility for Microsoft Windows that uploads email from other desktop email programs (like Microsoft Outlook) into your Google Apps mailbox. The Email Uploader preserves information such as sent dates and sender/recipient data, as well as the folder structure used by the other email program. The Google Email Uploader requires a Google Apps Premier, Education, or Partner Edition account.

http://code.google.com/p/google-email-uploader/

Technorati Tags: email, Gmail, Google, import, uploader

You know what’s really better than therapy? Being able to sing along to your favourite songs. With no-one else in the vicinity to hear you and to be able to sing at the top of your voice, strumming an imaginary guitar and playing to an imaginary adoring crowd.

The problem is that to fully complete that Bono fantasy of yours, you need to know all the words to the song and not go “hmm….hmmm…..hmmm” throughout the song. Inventing alternate words is also not the right way to go (although crazy Al Yankovitch has done very well in his career doing precisely that).

The solution - have a small software program that automatically loads up the lyrics to a song when it starts playing. This is what EvilLyrics does.

It is compatible with the major audio players (such as Winamp and iTunes) and when a song starts, EvilLyrics opens a small browser window to give you the lyrics so you can sing along.

Which doesn’t bode well for the neighbour who now has to listen to me belt out Bobby Darin’s “Don’t Rain On My Parade”.

Technorati Tags: evillyrics, Freeware, itunes, lyrics, music, singing, Software, songs, winamp

Well it didn’t take me long to get tired of the Google Talk / Twitter combo. I still love Google Talk and Twitter but I felt that Twitter was slowly hi-jacking my GTalk application with its fast moving updates. Despite its benefits, Twitter really is a catch-22. To keep updates under control, you need to be selective with your contacts but to get the full benefit out of it, you need to have as many contacts as possible.

This is where using GTalk became problematic - the updates were coming in so thick and fast that I had to eventually turn off the notification window - which resulted in me missing important IM messages from business clients. My girlfriend also got tired of Google Talk constantly opening flashing orange windows and she often shut Google Talk down - which cut me off from clients. Third of all, the flashing orange windows were wrecking my concentration and productivity. But I need Twitter constantly on to network. So in the end, something had to give.

For the past few days, I was testing some alternative Twitter programs and I was unsure which one to go with. But it was Amit Agarwal’s post today that made me settle on TWhirl. It runs on the Adobe AIR platform and I am a big fan of AIR. I have previously posted on other AIR platforms such as DiggTop and the Google Analytics desktop app. I also use the Pownce desktop AIR app on a regular basis.

One of the big advantages of TWhirl is that it only collects updates from Twitter every few minutes (a maximum of 60 requests to the Twitter server per hour). This means that updates come in much more slowly so it becomes easier to read each update and ponder it / respond to it before the next update comes through. This took a lot of getting used to at first (in fact it was so slow that I was convinced it was broken!) but now I am totally hooked on the idea. My desktop has calmed down and I no longer feel compelled to frantically speed-read all of the updates that come in.

Some other excellent positives about TWhirl :

• No beeping or other notification noise unless you ask for it. I currently have it set only to beep if I receive a direct message or reply.
• No flashing windows.
• TWhirl can be kept on top of all other windows. So I can work in the browser and have TWhirl updating to the right of my screen at all times.
• You can specify the size and style of the font on the interface. So if Arial doesn’t float your boat, change it to something else.
• You can make the interface transparent so you can see your browser window underneath it.
• You can see the photo associated with each Twitter account. It’s really nice to be able to put a face with a name.
• Multiple-account management.   If you’re a “super-Twitter” and maintain several accounts, you can easily switch between them in TWhirl.

The program does take a bit of getting used to though. For example, normally if you want to find out the details of a Twitter you are not currently following, you would use the command “whois :”. But in TWhirl, this doesn’t seem to work too well. Instead, it’s faster to just click on the Twitter username and the details will be instantly displayed in the window. What I found neat about this is that by typing a username into TWhirl, it will show you the last 20-30 updates that person made. So you can see right away if that person is worth following. Google Talk didn’t give me that functionality.

Another thing - which will eventually become annoying - when I was using Google Talk, my Twitter contacts were basically portable. When I was at a computer - any computer - I could log into Gmail and the integrated chat window would open up with Twitter updates. So wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I could log in and keep on top of Twitter. But now that I have moved to TWhirl, I would need to rely on the other computer also having TWhirl - or use the Twitter webpage instead. So a portable TWhirl for the USB stick would be nice at some point in the future.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, AIR, application, desktop, TWhirl, Twitter

I came across this little interesting tid-bit while surfing. It appears that Paypal is developing an application using the Adobe AIR platform to “perform simple desktop-based sales reporting and analytics for PayPal power users through the use of transaction search and retrieval APIs, as well as AIR’s built-in SQLite database.”

It’s not yet available for public testing but I can’t wait to see it when it is available. It sounds very interesting and I would love to give it a test-run. I use Paypal frequently and anything that securely brings it to the desktop without compromising account security can only be a good thing.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, AIR, desktop, paypal, Software

I was reading the blog of fellow Make Use Of writer Karl Gechlik today and he profiled a really great tool that is now on my PC. I was looking for something that would activate my screensaver at a moment’s notice. I normally have the screensaver switched off by default as it irritates me when it kicks in without warning. But then again, I want to be able to have it on standby in case someone comes to the front door. You can see the monitor screen from the front door and if I am working on my money-laundering spreadsheets or hacking into the CIA computers, I want to be able to cover it up at a moment’s notice, if the Feds are coming to kick down the door.

So enters Tooler which does exactly that and more. This is an executable standalone program which means you click it and it runs right away. No installation is needed on your PC so you can easily carry this about on your USB stick.

The menu gives you a variety of shortcut options :

Just choose your shortcut location (the desktop is normally a good place), choose the action of the shortcut and then press zee little button to generate zee little shortcut.

The standard icons for the shortcuts are pretty boring so you can spice up your icons by using IconsExtract which finds all the icons on your computer so you can use them for other purposes. To change the icon, just right-click on the shortcut you just made, choose “properties” then “other symbol” then navigate to the new icon’s location. Choose the new icon and save everything.

One note though. The “Eject CD-ROM tray” and the “Close CD-ROM tray” didn’t work for me because my initial CD-ROM drive broke and when I bought a new one, I changed the location of it in my hard-drive. Tooler doesn’t seem to be able to find the new CD-ROM drive location and instead it tried to open an old CD-ROM drive that was no longer there. I tried changing the location of the CD-ROM drive in the target box of the shortcut but it wouldn’t let me. So it looks like I need to keep bending down to manually open and close the CD drive instead of having a lazy shortcut to do it for me!

One feature I found really useful though was the ability to add keyboard commands to the Tooler shortcuts. So I can either activate the screensaver by clicking on the icon, or I can do CTRL + ALT + S instead. Works perfectly.

Technorati Tags: desktop, Freeware, icons, iconsextract, screensaver, shortcut, Software, tooler, Windows