Talk about a sceptic start to the morning with pun very much intended in the title. I woke up and learned that my name looks like ‘toilet’ when using the Side View Generator.

Is it worse than my 18 year old son’s name Jowlstar from the side which might be clitoris. Or how about a few friends in IRC? Lestat is like defect. Darkmoon = burglary. JohnnyRS = dishonor.  Forser = terror. My lovely wife Kara = fear.  MakeYouGoHmm wouldn’t fit, so I tried the alternate spelling MakeUGoHmm and that looks like omnivorous from the side. I’m not sure how accurate this tool is, especially since names are limited in size, but it made me smile. Hope it does the same for you.

Added this to the list of the 43+ other web generators. Hat tip to Ben Parr.

If you can’t draw — or remain graphically challenged like me (remember CRink = crappy ink) — but always wished you could make a comic starring you and friends look no further than Bitstrips. Using the Flash-based menu allows you to quickly and easily choose different expressions and build your own comic book character. Here’s mine:

I’m sure an artist could do better, my face isn’t as fleshy, but this was my first effort. Creating your character is the start. Next you can piece together a comic by point, click and type, preview, publish and share with friends.

Below is my first comic effort using Bitstrip: ‘Going Hmm bananas’

Don’t gag, but there is also a social function which allows you to add your friends. An interesting approach: when you go to add friends you can make a comic book character of what they look like. This could be fun!

Could be a creative way to reply to other blog posts. I’m a fan of comics and have written about other web comics sites like stripcreator in the past and this one could catch fire because it’s easy to use, intuitive and is one of the few services that makes sense in the crowded social network pool.

Oh, and you know the drill: go ahead and add me as your Bitstrips friend.

We haven’t used Network Solutions for many years for domain searching. This morning I learned what the word frontrunning meant in Mashable’s coverage of a class action lawsuit aimed at Network Solutions and ICANN:

Frontrunning is the practice in which users would look up a domain name via the registration-site WHOIS, and would appear available, but every other internet registrar would show the names as unavailable, and registered to Network Solutions, thus forcing the user to purchase the domain from them.

If what this lawsuit alleges is true, this is a dirty anti-consumer tactic and punishment should be severe.

Remember, this is the same outfit that once upon a time was charging $35 a year for domain registration when others were half or less the price. I’m not going to use this post to recommend other domain registrars, but there are plenty of viable alternatives to Network Solutions. These days you can register a domain for $5-8 per year and some hosting companies offer free domain registration if you pay for hosting with them.

Ever wanted or needed a place to share expiring semi-private files, links, notes with yourself or others? That’s the service drop.io provides.

Just last week in our IRC chat a friend wanted me to look at how a site looked on my Mac. The only problem was my Mac wasn’t logged into the IRC, I was using a different Windows machine. While we discussed a modification to our custom IRC bot that would work — our system was essentially what drop.io already does (and drop.io does more) — we could have simply used drop.io has a place to store the shared link.

What can you use drop.io for?
You can use drop.io to share up to 100MB worth of something per address: files, links, notes. You can even send email to your drop.io address.

drop.io optional features
Using drop.io is simple to use and requires no registration or email address. Optionally you can choose to:

1. name the CODE (minimum of 7 alphanumeric characters) for the drop.io address (drop.io/CODE). The code must not be already taken. You can purchase a code for $7.89 to allow an additional 1GB of space or reduce the code to 2-6 characters, say for example you wanted to have something like drop.io/hmm (that’s already taken by somebody).
2. add a password to your drop.io address to make it more private. Default is no password.
3. define the amount of time for the drop.io address to live from one day to one year. Default is one month. When your drop.io address is about to expire, you can manually extend the time if you want.

You can create one now by visiting the drop.io home page which also serves as the creation page and filling out the form fields: name the drop, password protect (optional), delete drop after time (optional, default 1 month), others can options (view, view & add notes or default: view & add notes and files).

EXAMPLE
Here is a drop.io I created as an example if you don’t want to create your own that contains the default time (1 month), default others can options (view & add notes and files) and has been password protected.

This is not private and you can do whatever you want playing around with it, subject to the drop.io terms of use.

http://www.drop.io/z8u8dyt - code created randomly by the system
optional password created: test123 - you’ll need this code to access the dropio to view what’s there

Since this is open and anybody can do anything with it, including hack the admin password and delete the drop page altogether (I intentionally didn’t make the admin password very difficult to guess, so not meant as a challenge of any kind), you might be best served just creating your own page. However if it hasn’t been vandalized too much, you should see something similar to the screenshot above which contains examples for notes, links, pictures and a recent Hmmcast. It isn’t set so that media can be deleted, so the media I uploaded should be there by the time you read this and you’re welcome and encouraged to add something of your own, if you like. Call this a community test page.

About the admin features
When logged in as the admin to your drop.io created page, you can perform the following additional functions:

1. Destroy drop - this dumps the whole page and all the contents including files, links and notes
2. Change the following:

Drop Address
User Password - that’s the test123 in the example above
Admin Password
Drop Expiration - change up to one year from the current date
Other Users Can Add - change the permissions for the drop page
Other Users Can Delete Media - by default only those with the admin password can delete media
First Page Displayed - by default this is “Media View” shown in the screenshot above. Other choices: chronological view and interactive view

3. Upgrade Drop to Premium - as mentioned earlier, if you pay $7.89 you can upgrade to allow changing to 2-7 code names and expands the storage from 100MB to 1GB of storage space.

Summary and thoughts
drop.io has a very clean, user-friendly design. No advertisements were seen anywhere on the site which leaves me thinking the entire business plan is based on hoping/planning enough people upgrade to premium. Nothing wrong with that if there’s enough demand. With the abundance of free web space out there these days, but not the convenience of a service like drop.io, they might be onto something.

I also didn’t see any API, bookmarklets or widgets. Seems like a natural to have at least a bookmarklet for adding stuff to one’s drop.io space. Maybe that’s one of the features you get if you upgrade to premium or coming in the future?

Among a sea of web-based services drop.io stands out as being one of the more useful ones. I like it and bookmarked and will probably use here and there.

Patrick Gavin leader of the crew behind ReviewMe, Text-Link-Ads and more at MediaWhiz, just sent me a private invite to their first ever cost per click (CPC) program Shoppingads. I signed up for use on our group website and we’re checking it out. Early thoughts: the UI is similar to Google Adsense code generator and uses JavaScript for the ads. You heard that right, it’s compliant with the Google God’s advertising wishes.

The signup form requires the basic information and right now the only payment option is by PayPal. Next month Patrick indicated “other payment options” will be available. Minimum amount earned before payout is $50 which is more/different than how they do ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads.

The easy to use generator allows ad creatives in the following sizes:

728×90 leaderboard
468×60 standard banner
336×280
300×250
250×250
234×60 half banner
180×150
160×600
125×125
120×600 skyscraper
120×240 vertical banner

You can choose the keywords for the ad or use the “Automatic Popular Keywords” feature. We’re trying that to start. Seems like the ads are sort of targeted. These ads aren’t contextually generated so you can run them alongside Google Adsense.

Shoppingads offers an automatic webmaster referral affiliate program too, but none of the links in this post are using these links. Nice feature having each ad that displays carries a link that will pass along webmaster referrals as well, so if some webmaster visits your site that is displaying ads and signs up through that you’ll earn 5% of all revenue generated by that webmaster for six months. 30 day cookie on all referrals.

Consider this a preview, not a review, since I have no idea how well Shoppingads will perform. You can see the ads running in the sidebar at the group blog I participate in: VTOReality.com.

If you’d like in to Shoppingads private beta since I don’t have any invites, just drop Patrick Gavin a line. If you’re already in one of the other programs he runs you might have an invite code waiting there automatically like we did. BTW, I checked with him directly before publishing this and those of you with access are allowed to blog/Twitter about this, despite the text of the email that says: “Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited.”

Looking for a single place to keep track of what you’re doing on the following sites: Amazon, Flickr, Google Reader, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Netflix, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Yelp, a single RSS feed, del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, iLike, Last.fm, Pownce, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and Zoomr? Then FriendFeed, currently in private beta, might be of interest to you.

FriendFeed (FF) Developer Brett Taylor kindly sent me an invite to FF which seems more useful to me as an aggregated activity tracker than as it’s being promoted: a social network aggregator and twitteresq automated system. Before anybody asks, I don’t see any way yet to invite anybody else and share the love, am I missing this option somewhere, Brett? You can request an invite on the FF main page like I did if you’d like to check this service out before it hits prime time. My invite arrived within a day. If you want to friend me, go ahead, I don’t bite.

(not too hard, anyway)

From a technology standpoint, I’ve been impressed so far with how fast FF stays updated. A refresh during the writing shows music I listened to less than 10 minutes ago. Geeks have to appreciate the amount of pinging going on behind the scenes. Whether or not FF can scale, time will tell. Also, FF smartly doesn’t make new entries for each new song listened to unless you have activity elsewhere in between songs. Example of last.fm entry:

listened to Van Halen – Good Enough, Van Halen – Amsterdam, and 10 other songs on Last.fm
8 minutes ago

There is an optional Facebook application that will include your FriendFeed info automatically which could be an easier way to update those in your friend’s list on Facebook what you’re doing online.

Is FF useful to others?
I’m curious if this would be useful to friends and family? The problem I have with FriendFeed is it’s an all or nothing proposition with the individual entries/updates inside sites you add and that sort of firehose probably wouldn’t be useful to even my closest friends online. Before shelving the service, I’m giving it a serious try this week. Maybe there is some value in sharing a raw activity stream with others online? The concept fascinates me.

You don’t need Facebook to follow my FriendFeed, you can find that at friendfeed.com/tdavid. I also added the widget to my TD Goodliffe VTOR author profile page. The widget color scheme sort of fits the VTOR design colors nicely.

Suggestion: more focused activity tracking
Must admit from a productivity standpoint, I find activity trackers helpful in managing time. Maybe FriendFeed when it launches should/could (or will) focus more on that instead of being a web service aggregator. You can make your web service activity private if you want and choose what services to add to FriendFeed, so you can control what others will see. There is nothing stopping people from going to the individual sites if you are sharing it there though, so FF is just making it easier to allow others and yourself to keep track of what you did recently.

If FriendFeed was tied into something that could keep track of the time spent using different services that would be another handy optional feature. Maybe something like SlimTimer, or perhaps less technical by just calculating a generic — configurable, even better — amount of minutes for each task tracked. This way us web working types can see where time is going. Some tasks like music playing in the background via iLike or last.fm may not contribute to a loss in productivity, but others might.

More than one RSS feed, please
FriendFeed only allows adding one RSS feed, which means that you’d need to use something like FeedBlendr to combine multiple blogs you post into one feed to share through FriendFeed. One bummer about having only one blended feed is that you can’t separate the blended feeds into categories of multiple feeds. Say for example, I wanted to have one blended feed for technology blogs on FriendFeed and another blended feed for personal blogs. Can’t do it with only a single RSS feed. If they increased the number of RSS feeds to say 5 or 10 that would be plenty.

Overall, FriendFeed provides some useful functionality. Doubtful I’ll be using the social functions like commenting on aggregated entries very often. I need less places to check for comments, but do enjoy the ability to check for a quick aggregated snapshot of what I did with the services included for the day. Maybe that will be of use to some readers as well. What do you think?

Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) has a new bookmarklet that you can drag to your Firefox bar to share sites to a page on their site. Just click on the bookmarklet to add a page you are currently browsing. You can also share the page with friend(s) via email and a custom message or submit to digg, reddit, delicious, Facebook, Furl or Social Poster (who?).

Here’s my Google shared page . Here’s how the page looks with a test link from here:

Stats fans will note that the page shows the number of views. I’m starting to amass a bunch of these type of public shared pages and here are two I use regularly:

StumbleUpon - view sites I like and dislike and add to the service. Been using since January 2004.
Del.icio.us - my online bookmark repository. I mark most things public. Since April 2005.

I also share a fair amount of links in our IRC chatroom with our IRC bot and that’s all archived in XML on the server. Probably should take a little time and make those links shared publically somewhere, either on one of these third party services or on a page. Wonder when there will be an API to add to this list, Google (hint, hint)?

Blogoscoped is calling this a “social link sharing service” perhaps in part due to the feature that will also show you shared items from people in your Gmail contact list? I have a pretty good sized Gmail address book and so far nothing is showing on this page. Will have to test this with friends and update once I see how that works.

Hmmcast #159 mp4

Since Google improved upon their Gmail spam filtering and auto-deletion, I haven’t had any problems with the 2.8 GB (and growing still, right?) storage space allotted, but that doesn’t stop the Google Giants from offering additional storage to others who might need or want it — at a fee.

Using Google Purchase Storage you can buy up to 250 GB of more storage for $500 a year. 6GB will set you back 20 bones a year.

Microsoft Live Skydrive
Microsoft has also released a beta of Live Skydrive which offers 500 MB of space for free to store and share files.

Pictured above, when I first logged in with my @live account it showed me as having “no name” and even after I updated the profile, I still had no name in Skydrive (bug?). So I switched to my established .NET account, the artist formerly known as Passport, navigated back to skydrive.live.com, accepted the terms and there I was, complete with my dusty Live Spaces profile.

Using Skydrive is straightforward. Just upload a document, picture or video from your hard drive. File size is limited to 50MB per file which could be a problem with videos. Today’s Hmmcast demonstrates how easy it is to upload a video and add it to your blog.

As Read Write Web notes, the online storage scene is a crowded field. I think Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft will be more successful than most the established smaller players simply because of who they are. People who already have an established Picasa photo account or Live Spaces blog will be more likely to want to acquire more storage in those applications than seek out a third party option.

500MB isn’t very much space for video which is currently the only thing I use for storage outside our web hosting and Libsyn gives me 250 MB of fresh space every 30 days to add new videos for $120 a year. Same deal on bandwidth (no additional bandwidth charges).

I can definitely see the advantage in something like Amazon’s S3 storage for sites and services that need to scale up to huge audiences and/or offer gigantic files and have been keeping that in mind as a way to minimize hosting costs.

But don’t forget your web host
If storage is all you need and not a bunch of bandwidth to burn, consider contacting your website hosting company. We added an extra 80GB drive to one of our dedicated servers a couple years ago and the hosting company just gave it to us — for free. Normally they would have made it a one time charge of 100 bucks which included mounting to the dedicated box. I’m guessing that same hundred bones would get more like 200 GB+ drive today. No additional monthly fee, no hassles, just extra storage added to your website.

You can have this storage space placed in non-public areas if you want private online storage space.

Don’t laugh, I can think of a couple legitimate uses for the fake name generator. It’s not only name, fictional data is randomly generated containing the following fields: name, address, zip code, email address, phone number, mother’s maiden name, birthdate, credit card number and social security number (remember, all bogus info).

For developers needing dummy data to test their program, they offer free bulk generation in seven different output formats: MySQL, MsSQL, CSV, tab and pipe delimited, EXCEL and HTML table.

Don’t want to use your real name blogging and elsewhere online like Thomas Hawk? No problem, you could be Jewel B. Day, George Smith, Bobby Clutts or Marie Daggett. I’d rather read a comment here from Wayne Stallworth than Anonymous (another good possible usage). Need a pen name for that great novel you’re writing? Now you know where to go.

Added to our growing Hmm generators list.

Historically as a webmaster it’s been inefficient dealing with the invite-only system many of these new websites are employing.

You write about a service that’s in invite-only status and have a few invites to pass around. After your friends and family what do you do with the leftover invites? If you post that you have invites on your blog then inevitably the comments area will fill up with people stopping by and saying they want one. That’s cool, that’s the web working.

But.

Most of these people from my experience only stop by for the invite and then are seen nevermore. In one case the number of “send me an invite” comments after it was stated several times the invites were gone got so bad that comments needed to be closed altogether. I love sharing and that makes up a great part of this blog, but having to tell people who stop by so briefly that they can’t even read the post and comments that we don’t have any more invites to share is a time waster for both of us. More importantly, it puts the burden of distributing and thus promoting a site on the webmaster, not on the site/service. At least if a site is going to make us part of their marketing department, they could make it an affiliate program and pay us for the work.

The existing process makes me feel like we’re being used.

Some people might not have a problem feeling or being used, but I do. Frankly, my enthusiasm in a new website / service wanes considerably these days if it’s setup as an invite-only deal. I’m not talking about private invite-only situations, I’m talking about public invite only distributions. I realize there are some legitimate reasons a site might want to go invite-only, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in too many cases. I’ve seen a disturbing trend develop, what about you?

This morning Thatedeguy was first to tip me off to the service InviteShare, followed by TechCrunch. That’s just the order of how the posts came in my RSS reader but maybe Techcrunch was first. I gave them both links for writing about the topic, but no link for InviteShare after I learned that they are already trying to auction away their site on Sitepoint (picture above). A number of TechCrunch commenters are annoyed as well. What’s the deal, guys, are you just using Techcrunch (and other bloggers) to pump up the sale price of your service and then dump on the highest bidder?

After seeing this, I don’t care how useful this service is or isn’t, this gives me a very sour taste in my mouth.

If you’re site/service is so new that it’s in invite-only, why are you auctioning your site? Or even thinking about selling your site, if that’s the story here? You haven’t even launched yet. I’m surprised that Arrington hasn’t updated his post to point out the site is trying to pimp itself and using a “front page listing on TechCrunch” to increase its value. Talk about leading your readers down a potential dark path, Mike. Shane does tell his readers that it can be bought in a “by the way…” at the post end but doesn’t seem to have any problem with this concept. I can understand being duped and writing a post about the site before you learned these details, but now that you know what they are doing at least update your posts and make readers aware of this important sidestory and how you feel about what this means for how your reader’s information might be used.

Unless of course you want your readers to sign up for something and then have their emails sold to the highest bidder. I’m not saying InviteShare are spammers or intend to do anything nefarious with your information, but that doesn’t mean whomever buys their service won’t be. A lot of ifs, ands and buts here, but I’ve been around the web too long not to be more cynical than the average bear. Just what we all need, more spam.

Unless InviteShare drops the auction and plans to be around a month from now, I’ll continue searching for a service without baggage like this to better deal with the invite situation, which I still believe is a scheme in and of itself, no thanks to Google and others.

Update July 21, 2007 5:02pm PST: TechCrunch ended up buying InviteShare in the auction for (the rumored?) price of $25,000. So they contributed to making the price even more expensive, Mike admits. At least TechCrunch won’t be putting this one up on the auction block write away and it already has more buzz than Edgeio.