There have been many pretenders to the social bookmarking throne - Furl and Ma.gnolia are just two - but del.icio.us remained the place to go to see what other people felt was worth bookmarking.  Even Google had a stab at it with the horribly named and feature free Google Shared Stuff.  Nothing has been able to gain the traction that del.icio.us has managed.

However, with the digerati clamouring for the long-awaited release of Delicious 2.0, something of a vacuum has appeared in the social sharing space.  Are Google Reader shared items filling this void?

Shared items have arrived at an interesting time and in something of a perfect storm.  RSS is increasing in popularity and verges on mainstream acceptance.  Lifestreaming services are popping up all over the place (see 35 ways to stream your life on ReadWriteWeb for example) and many of these services allow RSS feeds to be imported.  Every Google Reader shared items page has an RSS feed.  The recent addition of notes functionality allows individuals to add a note to items as they share them from within Google Reader.  Add to this the Google Reader Notes bookmarklet that allows you to share any web page, and all bases seems to be covered.

I see more and more “link blogs” that are the blog author’s re-purposed shared items feed. Services like FriendFeed are full of other people’s shared items.  Other services like Readburner absolutely depend on other people’s shared items feeds.

Yahoo! had better watch out.  If Google Reader shared items aren’t the new del.icio.us yet, it’s only a matter of time before they are.

Will shared items replace del.icio.us for social bookmarking ?  Let me know what you think in the comments.

However, content owners, you need to understand that if you deny people a way to legally access your product simply on the basis of geographic location, they will get it anyway without you.  Once people realise they can get the same content more easily and at a better quality than anything you provide, they may never return to you as a paying customer ever again.

There is a market out there absolutely begging to be serviced. Unclench the fist or it will squeeze out through your fingers and be gone forever.

The WB

Hulu

Adobe Media Player

The Office Season 4 on The Pirate Bay

The Colbert Report on The Pirate Bay

(click picture to embiggen)

Apparently, no one is safe from the Google spam filter.

Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Click through to read the rest of Google dropped the ball on Jaiku at Sarah’s site, Sarah in Tampa.

Woo!

JW FLV Media Player

The JW FLV Media Player is the brainchild of Jeroen Wijering. It is made with Adobe Flash technology and will play not only flv files but any other media format supported by Flash, including our self-hosted mp3. You can get the jw flv media player up and running with a few simple steps:

1. Download the source files for the media player from here
2. Unzip the source files and upload them to your own hosted server. I created a new folder on my account called ‘mediaplayers’ and then created another folder called ‘jwplayer’. Take note of the location of the files as you will need this later.
3. Go to the jw flv media player setup wizard
4. Configure the wizard as desired.  I’ve included a screenshot of my wizard configuration and I’ve kept it very basic. The wizard lets you do things such as change colour, size, add playlists (if you have those set up already), add a stop button - stacks of features all up.  When you’re finished configuring, click the ‘Update and preview code’ button to see what your player will look like and the code you need to cut and paste into your own site.As a quick explanation, the ’source’ option is where you have uploaded the media player files on your server and the file option is where you have stored your mp3.  Also, the ideal height for the slim player is 20 pixels (the default setting) for a single mp3.  Larger sizes are useful for when you have a playlist of tracks you want to display.
5. Copy and past the code into your webpage.  As an example, the code generated from my options is:<embed src=”http://techwhimsy.com/mediaplayers/jwplayer/mediaplayer.swf” width=”440″ height=”20″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” flashvars=”height=20&width=440&file=
   http://techwhimsy.com/31_Ghosts_IV.mp3″ />

Embedded, the final version looks like this: And just to prove how easy it is to change colours etc, here’s another version created with the wizard: If you are having problems with the embed code (for example, the code shows up as standard text in your blog), try removing all the line returns and replacing them with a single space instead. Also, for some reason that escapes me (but you clever bunch out there probably know), you need to have a space between the end of the code and the closing “/>”.

With all the fuss surrounding the will they/won’t they merger of Microsoft and Yahoo, it has been surprising to see just how many cool and interesting things there are buried inside the Yahoo corporation.  There is much more to Yahoo than search, directories, Flickr and del.icio.us.  A quick scan of Yahoo! Everything reveals a whole bunch of stuff from the new social news service Buzz to online video editing with Jumpcut to the Zimbra collaboration and instant messaging service.  However, what is possibly the most interesting to web geeks is the unsung Yahoo User Interface (YUI) and Yahoo Design Pattern Library, both part of the Yahoo Developer Network.

The YUI is a collection of cross-browser controls and utilities written in Javascript that are intended to be used in developing rich internet applications (think AJAX and DHTML).  It is freely available under the BSD licence for anyone to use in commercial applications or otherwise.  Included in the YUI is a collection of Cascading Style Sheets including a comprehensive style sheet providing a large range of different grid design options for page layout.  The YUI has too many cool things to list here, but some of the cooler applications include a rich text editor, calendars and drag and drop utilities.  The YUI is quite a technical collection and is essentially a giant repository of server and client side code.

The Yahoo Design Pattern Library is a practical application of the industrial strength code in the YUI.  The patterns are an attempt to offer comprehensive solutions to a wide-range of interface design problems and pull together different pieces of the YUI code.  There are design patterns for navigation options (things like tabs and indexes), calendars, page layouts and slideshows.  Like the YUI, the Design Pattern Library is free to use by all comers and is licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution licence.

To keep up to date on new additions to both YUI and the Design Pattern Library, keep your eyes on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog at http://yuiblog.com/blog/

Note: as far as I am aware, no part of techwhimsy.com uses either YUI or the pattern library.  Now that I know they exist, there’s a very good chance some of the features will make their way into techwhimsy v2.0

Over the last few months, Sarah has quickly become one of my favourite tech blogger so of course I jumped at the chance to provide this guest post.

NIN does it again. Are you watching, Thom?

Trust Australians to take a frivolous and whimsical web service that was starting to take itself too seriously and get really immature with it.

:D

Bless each and every ███████ one of you, you █████!

• your profile ‘auto-filling’ when you join a new site
• exporting details of your social network contacts to an external contact manager
• easily migrate blogs between different service platforms
• easily moving photos from one web service to another (eg from Flickr to Zooomr)

(more examples of possible use cases for data portability here)

There is no denying that data portability is a hot issue amongst the tech community. There is the Data Portability Project, Google’s Open Social initiative for widgets/gadgets/apps in the social networking space, uber blogger, PR machine and the loudest echo in the chamber Robert Scoble avidly pushing data portability at every turn before accepting that there are roadblocks to data portability and the recent announcement by Yahoo! that it is rewiring its network of internet properties for social graph and data portability. However, all this is for the geeks and the techies. What about the real world and real, normal people who don’t live and breathe this stuff.

Do normal people care about data portability? As always, when it comes to finding out the opinions of the tech savvy but not tech obsessed, I turned to my wife, who although she spends a lot of time online, she is very far removed from the echo chamber that many people find themselves in. She couldn’t tell you how much Google spent on buying the latest start up, or who Jason Calacanis is, what Twitter does, who Duncan Riley is angry at this week or any of the other things that fill the pages of Techmeme on a daily basis.

What my wife can tell me is what normal people (ie not early adopters) think. Her extensive network of online friends, although from large and varied backgrounds with wildly different views on many things, share a common thread - they use the internet as a tool, not as a game, or a money making machine or as a way of life.

I asked my wife, “Does anyone care about data portability?” I then had to explain about ideas such as exporting your Facebook contacts to Outlook, or moving photos from Flickr to Zooomr, or shifting a Blogger blog to Wordpress and so on. The blank, uncomprehending stare slowly became more focused as she began to understand what I was trying to say. “Outlook? Why would I want to do that? Flickr? Don’t most people just keep a copy of their photos on their hard drive anyway? I know you can move from Blogger to Wordpress fairly easily. [.....] did that and it worked fine” and so on.

Data portability. Do normal people care? Probably not. Right now, it just doesn’t affect them. Normal people don’t hop from web service to web service. Normal people don’t seem to have extensive collections of media online and even if they did, they’ve still got the original files floating around. Rudimentary services that work more or less good enough already exist for the bigger services, especially where there is a commercial imperative to make importation easy.

Is data portability important? I believe so. However, until data lock in has an impact on the online experience of the slow adopters, no one will really care.