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Posts Tagged ‘Search Bar’

list.it: Post-It Notes for the Twitter Generation

While furiously trying to organize my digital life this past weekend, I found myself as I often do – with an obscene number of tabs open at the same time while hopping from thought to thought. It was in the middle of this confusing mess that I came across list.it, the self-described “simple, free, open-source note-keeping tool to help you manage the tons of little information bits you need to keep track of each day.”

Put out by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, the browser extention is a “tool to help people cope with information overload and to stay organized” that has since helped me keep track of the common threads of an often multi-threaded day.

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What It Is

The best part of list.it is its simplicity. It doesn’t do much more than keep a list but it does that very well. List.it exists as a sort of frame on your browser that you can hide or show with a hotkey. Even it’s design is perfectly simple, with a text entry box at the top, a search bar in the middle and the individual list items below.

Big Features for a Little App

List.it has all of those things I always find myself wishing an app would do.

There are just four hotkeys to remember: One opens and closes the frame, one searches through your notes, one pops up a quick entry bar at the bottom of your browser and one adds the current URL.

The list items are kept in little boxes, which can be rearranged simply by clicking and dragging. A click on the main area of a note opens it for editing and directly clicking on a URL will open that website in a new tab. A click on the “x” deletes the item.

Information for a Twitter Generation

Now, this isn’t the type of app where you’re going to keep large chunks of text, so the search can serve a slightly different purpose. For techies like us, members of the Twitter generation, the idea of hashtags has become common sense. They work as a great way to keep your information organized, as whenever you do a search, you can click the “+” next to the search box to save that search. Instead of working in a directory structure, you create the structure on the fly.

This might be one of our favorite parts of this little app. While we can use the browser’s bookmarks or services like del.icio.us, we don’t have to spend time keeping our list organized in the same way. There’s no complicated and powerful bookmark organizer. List.it is for parceling off your information into little bites, manipulating them and working with them along the way. As long as you tag your notes along the way, these saved searches act as filters. If that hashtag appears anywhere in the note’s text, it will be displayed when you click on that search button, which is kept just below the search bar.

List.it also allows for synchronization between different browsers by saving your list on a central server, that way you can take your list with you on your netbook or your iPhone. One caveat – we ran into some difficulty while trying to create a user name and password. After installing list.it, there will be an orange triangle next to the text entry box at the top. Clicking on that will bring you to the proper location. Aside from that, we’ve had no other problems, which is always nice to see with an open-source, always in development type of app.

We’d recommend going and taking a look at the extension for yourself. It’s available for Firefox version 3.0 or greater and for iPhone and Android. The video included below gives a quick preview off the extension, but we think using it will really prove it’s usefulness.

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A busy week for real-time search — here’s a list to keep tabs

After scarcely a peep for much of the summer, a handful of the real-time search startups we profiled earlier this year have ramped up their offerings this week. They’re part of a wave of companies that are mining the increasing amount of data shared on sites like Twitter and Flickr to offer search results based on what’s relevant now.

In general, we’re seeing more traction from companies that are trying to distribute their search and data collection technology rather than centralize it in one destination site. One of the older companies, OneRiot, turned on its revenue model this month by selling sponsored search results. (It has a distributed approach, partnering with at least 40 other companies to feed its results into other sites.) Tweetmeme, which has a retweet button that’s seen at least 50 million times a day in addition to a search engine, launched analytics for companies that want to track the viral spread of their content through Twitter.

(Here’s a basic primer on all of the companies for background.)
And then here’s what’s new:

Topsy, which raised $15 million over the summer, released two plug-ins: one for Wordpress and another one for your browser. When people tweet about a blog post, the plug-in will find it and include it as a “native” Wordpress comment at the bottom of the post. The browser plug-in adds a Topsy search bar to the top right-hand corner of a browser so users don’t have to navigate away from the page to search.

Crowdeye, founded by former members of Microsoft’s search engineering team, now lets users tweet directly from the site. Visitors can also track the most popular content from specific domain names like VentureBeat.com (see the snapshot below or click here to test it out).

Scoopler, founded by two recent college graduates who met in the U.K., cut the load time on its pages and added a “Discovery bar” at the top of its page to show trending topics and recent searches. The company also added channels of content, making it easier for visitors to keep track of popular links in topics like technology and sports.

To help publishers and brands figure out how much additional traffic Twitter is driving them and optimize it, U.K.-based Tweetmeme launched sophisticated analytics features. Tweetmeme will break out retweets by geography and show a publisher who their most influential readers are based on how far they drive a piece of content through their social network.

A little over a week ago, OneRiot, unveiled what it believes will be its primary revenue model. It’s selling text ads that will appear alongside relevant search results. The layout is similar to Google’s but OneRiot is selling sponsored placement for content, not commercial goods and services. This is because the company believes that when visitors search for real-time results, they aren’t necessarily in the state of mind to buy products. They’re looking for context or news, unlike in traditional search. Therefore, ads for goods and services won’t necessarily work. Instead, publishers will pay to have their relevant content promoted when visitors are looking for recently published items.

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Lazyfeed Goes Live For Everyone

We’ve been seeing a lot of projects and startups trying to speed up RSS feeds. Today, a service is launching that addresses some of the issues with a different user-interface. Lazyfeed, the realtime interest feed reader that launched last month in private beta at our Real-Time Crunchup, is opening up publicly today for anyone who wants to sign up.

Instead of signing up for a long list of blogs and news feeds, all you have to do on Lazyfeed is type in a topic and Lazyfeed will show you the most recent posts and articles with that tag from the one million blogs that it now indexes. (This number is up from 100,000 blogs at launch). Headlines and excerpts containing that tag appear in the main window, and if you want to follow that topic, you can save the tag in a column on the left. As you save more tags, your interests appear as a list, which reorder themselves according to the latest posts.

So instead of a list of blogs, you have a list of interests, and Lazyfeed goes out and discovers content for you around those interests. For any given tag you put unto the search bar at the top, it also supplies you with related tags just underneath that you can click on to explore further. If you don’t like a particular blog, you can remove it from your results. Another new feature since the private beta launch is that you can now share any post on Twitter, Facebook, or email.

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Spreezio Helps You Cut Deals With Local Merchants Online

When Todd Chipman, co-founder of San Jose, CA-based Spreezio, noticed more and more merchants were going out of business where he lives and works as a result of the recession and other factors, he started thinking about ways to make shopping locally more social and personal for both buyers and sellers.

Spreezio is the startup that came out of that idea, and today Chipman is announcing that he’s not alone in thinking it’s a good one.

He has just managed to sway Rich Garwood, a President of Verizon Wireless, into leaving the company he spent 20 years working for and joining the fledgling company as COO. Enough for us take a closer look at what they’re building, even though the service is still in alpha and only expects to hit public beta sometime next month.

Spreezio basically wants to make it easier for shoppers to make deals with local merchants.

Here’s how it works: you sign up as a shopper, and browse Spreezio’s product database – over 35 million items strong according to the company – to find what you’re looking for, using the category icons or search bar. Once you’ve found a corresponding item, you can indicate how much you’d be willing to pay for it or what percentage of discount you’d expect in order to get you to go out and buy it from the merchants who can supply it. After some fine-tuning, you can send out your deal proposal to the merchant(s) Spreezio will locate on a map, and once they get back to you accepting or rejecting your proposal, you can decide if you want to make a short trip and purchase the item(s) either way.

All in all, it’s a solid idea: shoppers tell merchants what their buying terms are simply by clicking a couple of buttons on a web service, while local sellers get qualified leads and still be in a position to negotiate. Spreezio touts their service as a cure or anti-dote for the economic recession, which is evidently a bit over the top, but if it manages to get the necessary traction (which is going to be their main challenge) it could well be a big help for a lot of local merchants struggling to stay in business.

And you can could a good deal on that flat-screen TV you’ve been wanting to buy, too.

Demo video:

Oh, and you also want to see this:

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Listen: Google Launches An Audio Search Engine For Android

Hear that? Google has just unveiled the latest addition to Google Labs, and it’s sure to crowd-pleaser for Android users. Dubbed Google Listen, the new project is an Android application that lets you quickly search through web audio content, which you can then directly download or stream to your phone. The app also acts as a podcast manager, allowing you to subscribe to audio feeds and download new content over the air.

Using the app is simple: you head to the search bar, then enter whatever it is you’re looking for, be it a specific podcast or a more general term like “tech”. Google will pull up the most relevant podcast and audio clips scattered across the web, which you can begin streaming immediately. If you’re interested in multiple matches you can build a queue, and Listen will automatically begin playing from your subscriptions once it reaches the end of the playlist. At this point the app is indexing “thousands” of content sources in English only, but Google intends to expand to other languages. The site’s FAQ also hints that it may index video in the future as well.

Here’s how Google describes Listen in the company’s blog post:

Listen quickly finds podcasts and web audio relevant to your searches, lets you stream over-the-air or download for later, and subscribe to fresh content from your favorite feeds and searches. In short, Listen helps organize the world of audio information and makes it easily accessible anytime, anywhere.

For now, Google Listen is only available on Android. This may be because the app is still early in development, but its omission from the iPhone may also stem from the issues Google has recently had getting its applications approved for the App Store — in the last few months, Apple has rejected a native application of Google Latitude, and also banned all Google Voice apps. Even without the recent controversy, Apple may well have smacked the app down for competing with iTunes’ podcasting functionality (other apps have been rejected for this in the past).

Whatever the case, Google has a sense of humor about the devices it plans to support. Oh Newton, we hardly knew ye.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Latest Google Chrome Beta Is “30 Percent Faster,” Supports HTML5, And Is Prettier Too

Google just released a new beta version of its Chrome browser for Windows PCs. The company claims that it is 30 percent faster than the current stable version of the browser (based on V8 and SunSpider benchmarks).

What may be more significant, though, is that this is the first version of Chrome that adds some support for HTML5, including video-tagging capabilities. The latest Firefox 3.5 beta also adopts HTML5, which allows for all sorts of cool things inside Web video like links and other interactive elements. It lets you treat video more like a Webpage. Along with Google’s acquisition of On2 today for its video codec, it looks like Google is getting behind open video in a big way. (Read this post from last year for more on the evolution of HTML).

The new Google Chrome beta is also prettier. Those themes we’ve been telling you about are now fully incorporated. And the new beta also improves the New Tab and Omnibox features.

When you create a new tab, Chrome shows you thumbnails of the sites you visits the most often (just like in Safari). These act as automatic bookmarks. Now, you can rearrange the thumbnails in any order you like by dragging and dropping them, or you can pin one down so that it doesn’t move even if you don’t visist it as much as other sites.

The Omnibox is Chrome’s all-in-one address and search bar. As you type words in, it gives you drop-down suggestions, which now have icons distinguishing between search results, bookmarks, and Websites.

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