Geekblok

As some of you know, I’ve been messing with Fire Eagle for some time now already (I was lucky enough to get an invitation) and yesterday I noticed the site went public. That means you, yeah you, can sign up now too.

But what is and does Fire Eagle? Not a whole lot to be frank. It’s basically a broker for your geo-data. It can share your position on earth with a number of other services, like wikinear (see previous post).

I do applaud the initiative of Fire Eagle though. It’s a Yahoo! application and for a change, they didn’t simply buy a company. Nope, they’ve created this themselves! I’m happy to see this and hope the other big players will do the same: be creative, invent new stuff (knol is not innovative at all, to me).

Since the launch of Fire Eagle, quite a few websites have joined the effort and use the API provided. That includes Pownce. The application gallery is growing and I’m really interested to see what other websites will join and be created, inspired by this functionality.

With a plethora of social websites, it’s hard to keep track of everything. And like with all itches, people will try to make money out of it and come up with sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream, etc.

But what if you want to build something similar yourself? You’d have to download all your RSS feeds, combine them and most likely filter and sort them. Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy!

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BOK surprised me with an invitation email about a website I never noticed. The small mail suggested that I should check it out and maybe write a little about it here, due to absence of BOK this weekend.

So I did check it out and had no clue what to expect. The sign up was easy enough and after a few seconds, I was looking at my online “notebook” hosted by Evernote.

I’ve seen such dump sites before and they never really seemed to interest me for more than a minute. I know Joffie has his own wiki at home for dumping notes, and I have CVS and SVN software installed on my home machine(s) so I don’t really need this either. But then I found out it also offers text recognition within images. Now that’s something my `grep` can’t do, so this might be nice! Time to explore the service after all.

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MySpace is probably the biggest in the world and Dutch social networking site Hyves went over five million members last Wednesday.

So why another new “social”? Well… because this one is antisocial: Bugroff.

Guess this opens some opportunities for Web 3.0, heh-heh!

Web2.0 is all about reflections and rounded corners, or so it seems. We’ve seen how to make reflections online before, so now it’s time to get rounded corners without Photoshop or GIMP.

The website RoundPic does this for you, and does it quite fast too! First you upload an image, or give them an URI to download and and click later, you have rounded corners. Woohoo!.

Let’s see the results. I gave them a photo of the Insomnium concert I recently attended and within a few seconds, the metal band was a little less frightening, with rounded corners.