If you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve already seen me write that with Chrome, Google’s (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) shiny new browser, so far I like what I’m seeing. Chrome is a lean, mean beast and feels snappier, but haven’t run it long enough to benchmark if that’s the reality (Adrian Kingsley-Hughes offers a SunSpider JavaScript benchmark which shows Chrome on top). And yes it lacks features like plugins/extensions, but I’m sure that is on the drawing board.  This is going to turn off those who want to get in and customize. Also it’s Windows only with Linux and Mac OS X versions coming "soon."

What I like most about Chrome is that they stripped it back and will add what’s needed. Reminded me of how Firefox started out. If they don’t weight it down with too many BS features, Chrome could be a contender someday. In their Chrome intro video they emphasize wanting to move the browser space forward. Since talk is cheap, let’s look at interesting Chrome features:

- tabs that are independent processes. This is huge. Every browser should have this feature. Why have one website crash every other tab you have? Major kudos to Chrome for this feature alone, which they borrowed from the Internet Explorer 8 team but as a user, I don’t care. Hurry up everybody else and get this in your browsers now.

- locate the memory hogs. You can track memory usage by each tab by typing:

about:memory

Is your favorite website a memory hog? Now you’ll be one about:memory check away from finding out.

- no need for two different input boxes (URL and search query): Omnibox for multiple functions.

We’ve seen some creative uses of the location bar but Chrome is on the right track by recognizing that having more than one input form is just eating precious pixel space. Chrome helps utilyze pixel space.

- a useful local homepage. When you first load Chrome it will show your most visited pages. Maybe not the most innovative page on the planet, but different from trying to sell us something or advertise to us.

You can check your browsing history at any time by typing CTRL+H

- Incognito mode. Don’t want to have websites you visit show up in the history? Just open an incognito window. No sites you visit here will show up in the history a la Firefox’s Awesome bar or IE8 InPrivate Browsing.

Others talking about Google Chrome (updated)

• Google employee, Matt Cutts, informative as always helps to allay privacy concerns by sharing when Chrome phones home while Ina Fried reminds us to read the Chrome fine print.
• Walt Mossberg spent the last week with Chrome: "My verdict: Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version — which is just a beta, or test, release — is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later."

Sweetcron is billed as a host it yourself, very moddable lifestreaming service, think FriendFeed only on your own server with mods galore. It is early, frequently updated code by Yongfook based on the open source CodeIgniter Framework. One noticeably missing Sweetcron feature as of this writing is some kind of bookmarklet.

Before heading out to PAX I whipped up a Sweetcron bookmarklet controller but it wasn’t far enough along to show anybody else. With version 0.4 of my Sweetcron Bookmarklet code, I’m ready to share with other Sweetcron users. Consider this post the official place for updates for future versions, so might want to bookmark this page.

Installation and usage is straightforward, just do the following:

STEP 1. Download (unofficial) Sweetcron bookmarklet v0.4 and unzip
STEP 2. FTP bookmarklet.php to: /system/application/controllers/admin

STEP 3. Then login to your sweetcron admin area and visit:

yourdomain.com/admin/bookmarklet

You’ll see a page with the bookmarklet code that looks something like this:

STEP 4. Right click over the "SCBM v0.4" link and drag to your browser bookmarks toolbar.

STEP 5. Now visit a web page, select some text and click the SCBM bookmarklet. A window will popup and allow you to edit the selected content or add new notes, images (image extraction is not automatic) or other HTML. If you are at a page with the meta tags set, these will be automatically extracted and added to the "Tags" section of the Sweetcron Bookmarklet form. Otherwise, you can enter in tags separated by commas. When satisfied with what you want to publish, then click the "Publish Post to Sweetcron Now" button.

Whatever you added should show up on your Sweetcron page immediately like this:

If you manage to break something or have suggestions/feedback for making this bookmarklet controller better, feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Browser compatibility
The following browsers have been tested and work with Sweetcron Bookmarklet (unofficial) v0.4:

Firefox 3.x
Flock 1.x
Google Chrome (released today 9/2/08)
Opera 9.5x
Safari 3.1.x

If you are using Site Meter for your stats you might want to remove (or at least comment out) the tracking code until they fix the bug that is causing sites not to display in Internet Explorer.

Update 8:19am & 8:57am PST: In the comments Luboš kindly offers a good post on some alternate Site Meter tracking code workarounds that don’t require nuking the Site Meter tracking entirely. This includes an IE7 fix that will allow you to view websites that haven’t fixed the tracking code yet.

When IE7 users visit a site using Site Meter the following error prompt is shown:

When "ok" is clicked this is what happens to the page:

Upon verifying the issue, I immediately disabled the site meter code on our group blog VTOR (Update: I have since added back the tracking portion, without the IE7 offending JavaScript). According to site meter (graph below, gray color) some 43% of visitors to that site can’t get there?! Screw that, goodbye.

We’re also running Google Analytics at VTOR so we can get stats details from that until this issue is resolved, but there goes the transparency convenience that Site Meter provided. I’m not sure our group will want to put Site Meter back after this debacle. This is a serious flaw. Fortunately MakeYouGoHmm hasn’t used the Site Meter code since I learned of disturbing allegations on May 27, 2007, so IE7 browser users can view this site just fine.

This problem painfully illustrates why using third party code carries huge risks.

Sidenote and source credit: I first learned about this issue from Duncan Riley’s FriendFeed message this morning which pointed to a post by him saying the lack of this important story showing up on TechMeme has a bias .  Duncan is miffed because his publication The Inquisitr broke the story and despite several blogs linking to it including Mashable that appears on TechMeme all the time, the story isn’t showing up on TechMeme. I just visited TechMeme to verify that it still wasn’t on the current page or via search. Nothing yet. Gabe Rivera, creator of TM, has commented here in the past, maybe if/when he sees this he will offer some explanation why TM has failed to highlight this important story.

Update 9:59am PST: This story is on TechMeme now.

Now please excuse me why I go write an apology post at VTOR for the 43% of users who couldn’t get to the site because of third party code. I hope they will come back and give the site another try. Grrr, not a good way to start a Saturday morning. Fix this ASAP, Site Meter, this blows!

Update 8/4/08 7:01 am PST: Site Meter has fixed the issue and posted to their blog.

With news that Office Live Workspace — or what we might as well label Microsoft Docs — is now available, I gave it a quick try this morning. Via Microsoft Press Release:

People can sign up for free at http://workspace.officelive.com and will be granted immediate access to the service. Microsoft is also unveiling a number of new Office Live Workspace features, such as an activity panel, notifications, direct links and multifile upload.

The three pane window UI with the middle being the document section is familiar:

I like the simplified layout better than Office Word with the new ribbon but there is one big problem in Firefox that Microsoft needs to fix: you can’t type anything in the note section in Firefox.

This requires loading Internet Explorer to be able to type the body of notes. I’m not going to change my browser of choice to use this instead of Google Docs. Yeah, it’s beta and I’m sure they’ll fix this in good time but it would be nice to see Microsoft release (even in beta) a web app which has major functionality like this working in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer, not only the obvious latter. Silverlight?

Bonus points for allowing to create documents in Office applications offline and save them to the Office Live Workspace with this Office Live Add-in. You can learn more about how to use the Office Live Add-in with the tip that Vista users should install the Office Live Workspace Update for Windows Vista for best performance. Reboot required for that last one.

Curious what others think? (will update)
Michael Arrington isn’t impressed: "It’s a half way approach that still requires the installation of Office and other software on local machines."
Leo Blanco loves the competition: "What I love about all these price wars and cutthroat competition is it pushes companies to enhance consumer experience through low prices or better customer service."
David Chartier at ARS Technica: "Office Live Workspace is a well-rounded tool that removes a lot of the complicated and expensive overhead of collaboration."

Shot across the bow of Google or fart in the wind?
If you don’t own or use Office — and keep in mind that a lot of people, particularly business, do — there isn’t much to see here yet. However, for those who work in and around Office it’s nice to see Microsoft make this available. We have one Office suite for our online business while in our offline business we’re using OpenOffice. Will this make me go out and buy another Office license? Not yet. You?

For some reason the folks at twitter.com removed the hyperlinks on @names from the message stream (Update 1:30am PST: It’s a bug, says one of the developers that they are working on fixing). These hyperlinks were useful because they led directly to the profile of the person being spoken to/about.

Those who use third party Twitter clients might not have noticed, but I’ve seen several friends mention missing this feature and wondering when or if it would be added back. When the names aren’t hyperlinked, it makes it an extra step or two to get to the person’s Twitter page. Here’s what a message page looks like without the names hyperlinked:

Today, I took some time out and created a tiny little Firefox extension called Twitter Link (TL) which will add those links back. After installing TL here’s the same page with the missing hyperlink back:

This would have been ideally suited for a Greasemonkey script, but I decided to make it standalone for those who don’t use Greasemonkey. Twitter Link v0.1 adds the text “TL” to the status bar so you know it’s enabled. I’ll probably remove that in the next version though. TL will ignore email links and it only works on twitter.com at this time. I thought about leaving it open to work on any site with @name since it ignores linking email@address.com, but could easily enable that in TL v0.2 or later if others wanted it.

What happens when twitter.com adds back the hyperlinks? Just disable or uninstall the plugin from the TOOLS->Add-ons menu. Feel free to leave any comments/feedback about the plugin below.

Just wanted to take this moment to thank StumbleUpon (SU) for helping me to discover thousands of hmm-inspiring pages. I doubt many readers haven’t at least tried SU and I’ve found a good amount of material to write about here using the service.

Whether or not you like serendipitous surfing, SU helps you explore (possibly) unchartered web waters. That’s a good thing.

Google tried to copy, comes up short
For those using the Google Toolbar, in April of this year they released a similar stumbling-type feature as an add-on button by clicking the dice icon which hasn’t caught on yet. Perhaps because there is more to SU than stumbling sites. You can form and/or participate in groups. I started the Blogs ‘R Us group at SU years ago and it now has over 1,400 members. Conversely with the Google toolbar all you can do is bookmark the page.

One strength of the Google Toolbar over SU is the ability to create your own button add-ons, so it would be possible to add more SU social-type features. Would be nice to see StumbleUpon add some sort of API/plugin structure to their toolbar.

History
Back on January 18, 2004 I joined the site StumbleUpon, then a Canadian startup, today owned by eBay. Unlike Skype which has less synergy with eBay, you’d expect StumbleUpon would have more auction-related functionality. Stumble auctions button at least? Not yet. Also missing is the ability to add Stumble-thru to your own site. Matt created a random posts Wordpress plugin but that’s not related to the page you’re on (there’s a good idea for an improved SU-type Wordpress plugin).

After taking nearly four years to thumbs up 2,500 pages, I’m reflecting on how I’m still using Stumbleupon today. Customer (yes, I sent them a few bones for sponsorship, have you?) longevity is one of the greatest compliments for any product/service. I know a lot of webmasters like SU because they get extra traffic from people stumbling their pages, but the wave of webmasters and bloggers selfishly filling SU with too many subpar blog posts has damaged the quality of the service somewhat over the last year. No offense to bloggers who use SU non-selfishly, but I liked using SU better when it wasn’t used by as many bloggers, when it wasn’t part of eBay.

With that said, the good still outweighs the bad with this service. Thank you again, Stumbleupon.

Update 3:45pm PST: After an hour or so of dice button pushing in the Google toolbar I reached this screen:

That’s right, there’s a limit to the number of dice searches in the Google Toolbar. I’ve reached a wall with keywords in StumbleUpon before, but that’s never happened with the “all” category.

G.ho.st stands for Global Hosted Operating SysTem and is one of the more ambitious computer in a browser window options I’ve checked out to date. Registration and use of G.ho.st is free and comes with 3 GB of space. You’ll need to confirm your email address before being able to login.

G.ho.st looks like a desktop and has similar functionality except one major downside: everything happens in a browser window. While the maximized browser is about as stripped down as one can get, I still feel like I’m working in a box. It just doesn’t feel right to me. What about you?

Other Annoyances include:

- the g.ho.st browser is really a proxy to other websites and thus some sites don’t display properly, including this blog and any other that blocks hotlinking through proxies.
- the URL in the browser window not changing when I clicked on pages which negated the use of copy/paste of the location bar, something I use frequently

Remember FTP in Windows Explorer
One neat thing I discovered while using g.ho.st — or rather rediscovered because I keep forgetting that the functionality is there — is the ease by which you can use FTP in Windows Explorer. Hold down the Microsoft key and press the E key to launch Windows Explorer. Then type:

ftp://YOUR_G.Ho.st_username@g.ho.st

After entering in your G.ho.st password you will be able to drag and drop files from your real desktop to your virtual one. Try this with your web hosting FTP account. It’s a handy way to use a basic FTP editor when you’re on a Windows box without any other kind of FTP, but beware that passwords are passed in plain text. Use web folders instead if you’d like a secure connection.

In summary, G.ho.st reminded me what features I like and use on the desktop and how a virtual desktop doesn’t give me enough reasons to use regularly at this time. Maybe in the future when the quirks are worked out and we can move outside the confines of a browser. I’m curious what readers think of G.ho.st and virtual desktops in general?

This morning’s reading led me to pcmag.com and I noticed the McAfee SiteAdvisor (Hmm SiteAdvisor review grade: B+) label turn from green (good) to yellow (warning). I right clicked and looked at the site details to find the following:

After entering our e-mail address on this site, we received 28 e-mails per week. We had some difficulty unsubscribing.

28 e-mails in a week? That’s extreme, I wonder if the SiteAdvisor bot got caught in some kind of loop? Seems like I get a bunch of those E-Week emails (rarely do I read them, do you?) which I’m pretty sure originate from the Ziff Davis / PC Mag camp. I used to be a fan of PC Mag but one too many ads and questionable renewal tactics sent me packing. Still have a subscription to their download utility service which at 20 bones a year for all utility downloads is a good deal versus $7.97 per download.

Several reviewers in the SiteAdvisor comments indicate that these emails are opt-in and that it can be hard to unsubscribe is confirmed. I don’t see many yellow label warnings for bigger, established sites like pcmag.com. Have you seen other bigger sites with yellow or (gasp) red labels?

On a somewhat related note, our blogging group has been waiting awhile for SiteAdvisor to kick out a report for vtoreality.com. Anybody know how long this process actually takes? That site remains stuck in the gray (not yet rated) status which in some cases makes me as wary as seeing yellow. Every site older than a couple years we operate including Hmm that I checked is showing green. Might want to check your sites and see if you’re green, not so mellow yellow or dead red.

Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Onetime.im — in beta as of this writing — is a Firefox add-on that allows you to chat using multiple Instant Messaging networks. Support will be “available soon” for AOL, ICQ and Yahoo. Note the domain, .IM which stands for the Isle of Man. A bit of a developing trend in the instant messaging area I learned with others including meebo.im, web.im (Yahoo), pidgin.im (formerly GAIM), portal.im, coccinella.im and imo.im. At nic.im you can register tdavid.im for 45 pounds a year. td.im is available for a whopping 495 pounds a year! Pass on both accounts.

Perhaps Oneteam.im biggest competitor in the browser space meebo has the all important dot com where oneteam.com leads to a foreign website that isn’t related. Major bummer. Suggestion #1: use an .im domain name where you actually own the dot com. Most people are going to associate your business with .com, not .im.

Oneteam requires registration which was trouble-free and accepted the + in my email address. They might consider adding OpenID.

You’ll be sent a standard validation link email. After clicking through it’s time to login. My first login on a test Windows XP SP 2 box was met with the unfortunate message:

Suggestion #2: fix this error message. I wasn’t too concerned because the email address given on the review request was from process-one.net, so I connected the dots, but some (many?) new users will be put off by this message. Once logged in a gigantic window opens that I immediately resized.

Suggestion #3: keep IM windows small like the Skype UI and respectful of screen real estate. From here my experience with Oneteam.im was mostly downhill. It doesn’t feel like much more than a prototype in its current form and I decided to list the things it needs to become a complete and usable beta. But before getting to that, I invited a friend of mine, Lestat, to check it out and see if he drew similar conclusions. Here’s a bit of our conversation inside a oneteam.im chatroom.

More suggestions for Oneteam.im
One of the first things I do with sites is update my profile. I like to change the default avatar image — usually something nondescript — with a picture. That leads to suggestion #4:

#4: Fix the avatar upload function with the profile. I tried uploading an avatar picture in JPG and GIF format. Neither was accepted. I was able to update my profile.

#5: Make it a lot easier to add a contacts from the oneteam.im chatroom. With a right mouseclick there should be an option to easily add the contact and yet there isn’t. When you click on the add new contact button in the upper left corner, the two options are Jabber or MSN but nothing for Oneteam? I asked my friend to try adding my Jabber ID and he said it didn’t work. The easiest part of using an IM service should be adding existing and new contacts.

Adding insult to injury, as part of the review I was given contact details to add (an email), but no instructions how to add the contact. Was this a Jabber ID? Or MSN? Those are the only two gateways currently supported as of my review.

#6: Turn off the sounds on the Oneteam.im chatroom by default. While you can easily click on the gears and uncheck the box, that ding sound whenever somebody types a new message in the channel gets old fast. Just start with sounds disabled.

#7: On the Mac OS X Firefox, Oneteam.im tells me I need to use Firefox. Huh?

#8: All new windows launches should open with buttons visible. Some default window sizes don’t contain all the form elements visible on initial load. For example, when I load the add contact window I have to expand the window to see the ‘add’ and ‘cancel’ buttons.

#9: 12 browser validation errors. Lestat took this screenshot using the Firefox add-on Firebug on his Windows XP SP 2 machine:

Overall thoughts
I’m not going to leave a grade for Oneteam.im in its present condition as of this writing like I would with other reviews. It’s just way too early to grade in its condition. Besides looking for suggestions to improve their interface, they mention Meebo and I’d say Oneteam has a long way to go to be as simple to get into as Meebo. They might have some cool features once you get connected, but if it’s not fast and easy to jump into, people will move along and try one of the other zillion IM solutions out there. I realize the browser IM space isn’t too crowded yet, but the IM space in general certainly is. I wish Oneteam.im luck as even if they fix all the things I mention, they still have a lot of work ahead of them to get noticed.

A final suggestion and I mean this positively not as a slam: perhaps it would be better to blend the Oneteam.im feature into another less crowded space.

Hmmcast #116 mp4

Day 3 of the navel gazing continues and this time I’m really digging the dirt by sharing what’s happening in my garden. Warning: there is some serious birds and bees action happening in today’s Hmmcast. Safe for work? Yes, but barely! Watch out for the poison ivy!

Mentioned in the Hmmcast
- The Firefox add-on Search Status new version 1.19 is useful for seeing the rankings of not only your own sites but third party sites for Google (green), Alexa (blue) and now Compete (fuschia) too.

- Viva Pinata

Behind Hmmcast #116
Today’s episode didn’t didn’t quite make the 4:20pm launch time although the timestamp reads 4:20 for continuity, just FYI. I’ll be updating with a third party video viewer (Google Video or YouTube) as soon as that is processed. In the meantime, you can download the mp4 with the link at the top of the post.