When you first install the Flock 3 beta, you’re prompted to set up (or log into) a Flock account which allows you access your favourites and settings from any computer. It’s quite a cool idea but it’s been available as a Firefox plug-in for some time.

In keeping with the spirit of Chrome, the new Flock is very minimalist. Whereas the Mozilla-based Flock (which will be updated as well very soon, although no decision has been announced regarding its future) seemed quite “bloated” and unwieldy this browser has a stripped-down feel with very little immediately on view.

The most obvious feature is the new sidebar (the first sidebar in a chrome-based browser, apparently, which is probably meant to impress us) which creates a stream of your friends’ updates.

It’s probably worth mentioning here that the networks that Flock 3 beta supports have been limited to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr in this version.

It’s also possible for you to create groups of friends, and filter the stream by them, too. Two group titles come with Flock, Best Friends and Co-workers, but the browser leaves it to you to fill them out. This can be done by hitting the Edit button at the bottom of the list, or through the Groups tab on the Flock home page.

Also introduced is a “Talk About This” button which allows you to post a page to Facebook or Twitter.

I’ve had brief flirtations with Flock in the past. The idea seems like such a good one for those Facebook and Twitter addicts amongst us but in the past it hasn’t really worked out as well as it should. Whether this new beta will herald Flock finally living up to its promise is anyone’s guess. If you’re a Google Chrome user who loves the Social Networks then it might well be just what you’re waiting for. It’s not going to tempt me away from Firefox though…

Flocked Up is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

I’m old enough that I can remember watching live pictures of a man walking on the moon. That was a marvel. But to sit and watch football from the other side of the world, played between two countries that my grandparents might only barely have heard of, and to have everyone take it completely for granted…

What really blew my mind was that I had my netbook with me and the pub had wi-fi. I could have sat in that pub, watching football from the other side of the world, typed up a piece about it on a machine no bigger than a largish book and published it, then and there, for the whole world to see. Outrageous.

This is the kind of thing that we shouldn’t take for granted. The wonders that technology has brought to the world, the endless reach of our minds, limited only by our imaginations. Whatever magic and miracles are my grandchildren going to see? Things as far beyond this laptop I’m typing on as the International Space Station is beyond the steam locomotives that my father used to work on.

If we have the skills to make all these wonderful things, I’m inclined to pray to any God that Man has ever worshipped that we find that we have the wisdom to use these skills wisely. And please let me assure you all that that’s in no way intended to start any kind of theological debate, okay…?

Musings On A Shrinking Planet is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Music is, and always has been, a huge part of my life, from my memories of shopping for the latest single by The Sweet or Gary Glitter in the early 70s, when I could barely see over the counter in the record store, to my rediscovery of the delights of guitar-driven songs in the late 70s and spending hours flicking through the L.P. sleeves in their racks.

Something strange was brewing at the end of the 70s. The big rock bands of the early part of the decade had either imploded or OD’d and been if not replaced, at least elbowed to one side, first by the punk bands and then by the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Whether it was the media suddenly picking up on it for some reason or a genuine social phenomenon, I woke up one day in 1980 to find that the music I liked was suddenly popular. Really popular

Amazingly, Top Of The Pops was the regular haunt of bands like Whitesnake, Rainbow and Gillan. Iron Maiden became became the first band to perform live on the show since The Who in 1972. For a few years, until the media tired of it again, the music I loved was everywhere. It hardly seems possible that it’s 30 years now since I first heard and bought albums like British Steel and Ace Of Spades but that’s what the calendar tells me. I’m working with people who weren’t even born when I was enjoying myself so much, which is scarier still.

For some people the 1980s might be the decade of footless tights and puffball skirts, big shoulder-pads and bigger hair but for me it’ll always be about tight denims, sew-on patches, studded wristbands and bullet-belts. We were young then and we made a lot of noise. Older now, certainly. Wiser is debatable. Quieter? Hell, no! Turn it up…

30 Years Since The 80s is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Well, it’s a grand idea and everything. So-called “Wikis” are popping up everywhere on the internet and even on the intranet of companies.

In the same spirit, I’d like to reach out to all you musos out there for whom music is the single most important salve to your sanity. If you’re after information on a band you’re just getting into or want to check what year a certain album was first released then you should maybe check out SoundUnwound.

It describes itself as “the personal music encyclopedia” but it’s really just a giant wiki dedicated to music. It was started by fusing together Amazon’s music catalogue with a bunch of data from MusicBrainz, Mechanical Turk and other sources. Being a wiki, all the entries are editable (and, in this case, subject to editorial approval before acceptance) and if there’s a glaring omission you can create a whole new entry for it.

It’s possible to search by artist, album, genre or label. The site also comes with such goodies as quizzes (which are fairly basic, admittedly) and the opportunity to create your own “library” at the site, either by importing purchases from Amazon.com or by adding them by hand.

As you may have guessed, importing from Amazon means that this site is an Amazon owned project, which I guess they hope will have the same kind of success as IMDb. For that to happen, it’ll need to catch on with the public, which means you, boys and girls.

Click on over there. If you already have an Amazon account you can use it to log in (it doesn’t have to be at amazon.com – an account at any of the worldwide Amazon sites will do, so you can use an Amazon.co.uk username and password) or failing that you can set up an account on the site itself. Once you’ve had a look around, the “how to edit” page gives you all the help you’re going to need to get started sharing your musical knowledge with the rest of the internet.

Wind It Up is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Either way, you may find this development interesting, it’s been brought to you by MSN and put together by Silverlight specialists Shoothill. It shows the Big Brother eye and you can deep zoom into it to see pictures of the houses and housemates over the ten year run of the show.

“Silverlight technology is ideal for showcasing things like Big Brother, as it allows us to display a large amount of content in a compelling and interactive way,” said Shoothill’s Marketing Manager, Lara Page.

Go take a look now at MSN Big Brother Deep Zoom.

Keeping A Close Eye On Big Brother is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Is this what we necessarily want from our extensions, though? There’s a time and a place, n’est-ce pas? All work and no play, and all that jazz. So what can we find to make Firefox more fun, prettier and just plain cooler?

Personas is a relatively new one to make Firefox easier on the eye. Unlike Themes, which change the whole appearance of Firefox, including sometimes the navigation buttons, toolbars, and menus, Personas just brightens things up a little without moving things around. You can instantly preview them as well, which is a nice touch of cool.

ChromaTabs Plus is also quite fun, allowing you to make each of your tabs a different colour. These lots of these extensions you could choose, depending on personal preference. You pays your (no) money and you takes your choice, as they say!

I realise that this one is straying dangerously close to "productivity" but I had to mention it as I don’t think that it has the press it deserves – Colt. This add-on gives you the option to copy either a hyperlink’s text only or the text and the link, in a choice formats. All with a simple right-click. I love this one. If ever it wasn’t compatible with the latest version of Firefox I’d be inclined to hang back until it was. That’s how highly I rate it.

Fellow Facebook addicts might be impressed by Boost which will let you choose from hundreds of skins for everyone’s favourite social website as well as adding a certain amount of "fun functionality". You can pick and choose which of these functions you enable and leave any that you don’t fancy turned off.

One of the better known add-ons is FoxyTunes. Rightly popular, it’ll let you handle lots of media players from directly within your browser without all that tedious clicking to open the player first. Yes, I know. But it’s the fact that it can be done that makes it so cool, not that it necessarily saves your world from going to rack and ruin.

That’s just a few for you to think about. Every Firefox user has one or two extensions that they wouldn’t be without. So how do you eat yours?

Firefox – Productive Schmoductive! is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Some companies and businesses have embraced this "new" phenomenon wholeheartedly, others less so.

So why should they? Is it really such a big deal for businesses to move into this area?

Humans are generally social creatures. Even if we don’t necessarily agree with the majority, we tend to like to know what they’re doing. Social media makes this easier than it’s ever been before and this is why a company that wants to be successful in the 21st century needs to take heed of what’s happening in online communities.

One good experience for someone at the hands of, for example, a Customer Service department, can easily become known very widely. It’s like people chatting in a Post Office queue, only writ large!

Equally, bad experiences can be shared amongst one’s prospective clientele. Some businesses may see this as a negative thing and shy away from it but just think for a moment – if the business in question has it’s own Facebook page where open discussion is encouraged then they have to spend less time in finding out where problems and difficult experiences for their customers are, and therefore have more time to spend addressing them.

For a company or business to hold it’s hands up and say "yes, we did this badly" or "we understand that you’d like us to improve this" is more likely to garner respect and patience than reinforce a negative view. And once they’re addressing the issues, it’s far easier to get this information out in a manner that’ll be widely read and understood by using social media than by "traditional advertising". People may actively seek out the chance to become part of an online community built around being users of a product (think Facebook "fan pages"), while making a conscious decision to skip past advertising pages in any physical newspapers or magazines they read.

Social media has become more popular with internet users than their personal email and more widely accessed than pornography (apparently!). Businesses will ignore this at their peril.

So what businesses or companies can you think of who have grabbed this opportunity and use it well? Or others, who have either ignored it completely so far or failed to grasp the chances it offers them?

The World Of Socialnomics is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Global Mail Exchange is a German based company founded in 1997 and their webmail is based on Qooxdoo, an open source AJAX web application framework. If that is as much of a foreign language to you as it is to me then you are probably more interested in why you should consider GMX than the mechanics of how it has been built.

Once you go through the simple registration process, GMX starts to come into its own. One of the beauties of the system is the simplicity of the Mail Collector. You can draw all your email accounts together into the GMX interface and combine them all into one inbox or keep them separate.

Although GMX will select its own mail as the default for sending, all you have to do is click a drop-down box to select any of your email accounts you choose. And it works! Unlike some offline email clients that have trouble connecting to outgoing email servers, GMX sends your mail quickly and seamlessly. Replying and forwarding are as straightforward as you could wish and with 5GB of storage, you’re not going to have to clean up any of your inboxes too regularly. The Spam filter is effective without being too aggressive and all the emails filtered through GMX are virus-scanned, even if they are imported from another provider.

Going above and beyond the simple email provider framework, GMX becomes an online office centre with its fully featured Address Book and Organiser. It would be nice to be able to colour-code events of different types in the Organiser but that is a minor quibble and it is in the pipeline, apparently.

As a bonus, we get another 1GB of file storage space online too. It’s not overly generous but it’s certainly handy and you can store any type of file you want.

You now get an option to pick different colour schemes for the interface but as their logo top left remains defiantly blue, it seems a little pointless. You can also add “widgets” to the Home tab of the interface to add features. I picked a clock, a task pad and a Facebook Wall widget that lets you keep up with your friends statuses without actually going to Facebook, which is a nifty little thing for use at work! And speaking of Facebook, you can log in to GMX using Facebook Connect if you wish.

So, provided you have a reliable internet connection, GMX will provide all the features necessary to manage your life on your home computer.

Although something like Outlook has far more features, unless you are actually working in an office environment (where your employer will pay for the software) do you need all the bells and whistles slowing down your system? Probably not. GMX is likely to give you everything you need.

GMX – The Online Outlook Killer? is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

One of the difficulties of online multiplayer gaming, using a portal, is coaxing your friends and family to sign up for a particular service out of the thousands that are available. Even more unlikely is the chance of stumbling upon someone you already know in order to challenge them with online games.

The best aspect of social gaming on a social network site is that your friends and family are probably already members and as many networking sites open up their back-end systems through easy to use API – taking advantage of them for social gaming is on the rise.

There seems to be no distinct formula for games either, with a range of member demographics on offer, pretty much any game genre from short lived casual games to massive online pervading worlds are reaching out to provide something for everyone.

Already, diverse games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Bejeweled Blitz, are undergoing huge increases in popularity simply because they are so accessible and the friends network is already established.

The future for social networking is in gaming – social gaming.

Social Gaming Leads The Way For Social Media is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology

Espresso – An espresso is a shot (or two if you order a double) of smooth, often strong, coffee presented in a small cup. An espresso is good for a quick mental boost when you need to push on for the last surge of gadget shopping.

Latte – A Latte is usually a shot of espresso in a medium, or large sized, cup which is then filled with freshly steamed milk – often it is finished with a foam top. A Latte is great for an early morning start checking your electronic mail.

Americano – An Americano is a shot of espresso topped up with hot water. It’s ideal for periods of casual gaming where you need a regular brain boost and a drink that’s going to last past a few sips.

Cappuccino – A Cappuccino is usually a shot of espresso with varying amounts (depending on retailer) of freshly steamed milk and it usually has a heavy layer of foam, and cocoa powder sprinkles, on top. A Cappuccino typically stays hotter longer than most so is ideal for those times when you’re raking through an application store looking for a new download.

Cafe Mocha – A Cafe Mocha is often a Latte with a twist. The twist is usually chocolate (around one third) inside the drink, and it is sometimes dressed up with marshmallow, cream and flakey chocolate on top. Cafe Mocha with it’s “all dressed up” feel is ideal when you are busy social networking online.

Espresso Macchiato – Espresso Machiato is supposed be a shot of espresso with just a dash of milk however, these days, it’s often sold as a “mini latte” and it quite often has a little foam on top – it’s ideal when you only have a few minutes to look up directions to the next place on your mobile maps application.

Mobile Computing – It Helps To Know Your Coffee is a post from: eggnchips.com - cracking good technology