We all are aware of Google News Alerts, that nice service from Google News that keeps us sending email alerts on a particular tag/word we specified. Now take that into a new level with Alerts.com. This new service supports not just news alerts but more than dozen types of alerts including birthdays, gas price, corporate press release alerts, forecasts, horoscope, jobs, wake up calls, flight alerts, traffic alerts, hotel price alerts, RSS update alerts, and more. You can set up a to do alert as well.

Aother nice feature is that Alerts.com can send you the alerts through email, SMS, or voice on your mobile phone, home phone, or work phone, depending on how you want it. If you prefer, you can set up a ‘Do not disturb’ time period when you don’t want any alerts.

Currently the SMS and phone alerts seem to be working only in the US, but I am sure they will soon support more carriers globally. Despite this, the service is neat and I am really starting to like all my alerts configured under one service.

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Sure some of the techy among us can install a Firefox addon (Sxipper, Seatbelt)  that will autofill OpenID forms for us, but for the majority, it’s always …oh! what was my ID?

Another concern that I have is that these are not my urls. These are borrowed urls that I have opted out of compulsion in a bid to establish my identity. I didn’t like it. My identity is not Wordpress, nor Verisign, nor myOpenID, nor AOL, or whatever.

At least to address the first issue, we have hacks and plugins with which you can make your website/blog address as your OpenID. I love this concept. At least I don’t forget what my url is, even though after login, I am redirected to my OpenID service provider.

The latest on this is that for those of us who don’t have blogs or websites, we can make our email addresses as our OpenIDs. Email to ID is new neat service that enables this. You can register your email addresses with the service and associate your OpenIDs with the emails. Next time, you need to login at a OpenID-enabled site or comment on a blog, simply enter your email address as a your OpenID. You are not likely to forget your email address, are you?

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EUfeeds is an Alltop and Popurls like site from the European Journalism Centre that aggregates more than 500 European newspaper feeds. The feeds get updated every 20 seconds. There are flags of the various countries in Europe on the site header that you can pick to see the newspaper feeds of that particular country.

For someone who is not familiar to the region, this is one site to get some good information on the top newspapers, and follow the updates from one centralised location if you don’t want to visit their homepages individually or if you are not too familiar with feed readers.

This is a kind of service we can build one for each region - US, Asia, Africa, etc. And will do good too. Any takers?

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Now Polar Rose comes as a new face recognition service that aims to do the guesswork for us. The service, in beta now, comes as a neat Firefox plugin that will show a red flower icon whenever there is a picture of a person on a web page. When you click on that icon, there is a pop-up that displays the name of the person. See picture on the left.

If you are the nice types, you can help by adding the names of people, if Polar Rose fail to recognize the picture.

At the main Polar Rose site, you can search for a particular name and the site will take you to the webpages where the pictures of that particular person you are searching for were marked at. So for instance, if you search on my name, it will take you to my MyBloglog profile page and this blog.

What differentiates Polar rose from other image search engines? This is what its recent release had to say - A search for ‘Peter Jackson’ in today’s image search engines result in various images featuring multiple ‘Peter Jacksons’ plus a number of images not featuring people at all but instead just images close to the text ‘Peter Jackson’. Polar Rose will instead sort the entities to include faces only, and group the individual Peter Jacksons.

I think the service is innovative and definitely has a good chance to make it big, though I would like the flower icon to be smaller, as sometimes, it could be obstructive and on the face. Does it slow down my browser, as it keeps on looking for human faces on websites I open? Common sense tells me it might, but who knows. Till now, I haven’t seen any problem though.

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Socialthing is still in private beta and those of us already a fan of FriendFeed might think Socialthing has no scope of big life. However, when I recently got into its private beta, I was surprised to find a nice feature of Socialthing that FriendFeed desperately requires.

I am talking about Sociathing’s update notification that comes on top of your profile page whenever there is some new update from your friends. We have heard of Friendfeed users refreshing the page periodically to check if there are updates. This update notification feature is one that many would love.

To top this up, Friendfeed can do the updates with AJAX just like in Gmail. That would be lovely.

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The Firefox 3 download site crashed just after 4 minutes of launch in its attempt to set a new world record for the most downloaded software in a day. Friendfeed is abuzz with the discussion around the topic. One’s loss is another’s gain.

Update: On Firefox blog, ‘The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!).  Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. …..’

All the best Firefox.

Update: Finally Firefox is up, around 2 hours after launch time, and running.

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GreatDad - A popular site for advice for dads. Good lists of resources.

DadDaily - A social networking site for dads.

DadStaysHome - A forum for dads to share their daddyhood experiences.

AtHomeDad - A resource and community for stay-at-home dads.

BrandNewDad - A social networking site for new and expectant dads.

Dadosphere - Another social netowrking sites only for dads.

JustDaddys - Another forum only for dads.

The DadLabs Crib - This is a dad’s community at Ning.

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I love this site - Cleepr. It is a clean, elegant, and no-frill search engine for music videos that aggregates content from YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Google Video.

So now instead of visiting various video sharing sites individually, all I do to get a link of my favorite new song that I hear on radio is to search on Cleepr and I am rest assure I will get some good results. From the latest Colbie Caillat’s Bubbly to yesteryears’Johnny Cash numbers, they are all there.

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In no particular order…

Akismet - This plugin that seemingly seem to do nothing visible has protected my blogs from over thousands of spam comments. Need I say more.

You need your Wordpress.com API key to activate akismet. You can get it by registering at Wordpress.com and by going to your profile page.

Feedburner Feedsmith - Sooner or later, you are going to burn your blog’s feed on Feedburner, and when you do that, this plugin will make sure all the default Wordpress feeds of your blog points to the Feedburner feed. For example, http://advocable.com/feed will always point to the Feedburner feed - http://feeds.advocable.com/newposts

Google Sitemaps - Ah! Who wouldn’t want to use Google Sitemaps. This plugin creates that necessary sitemap for your Wordpress blog effortlessly.

Wordpress Mobile Editon - Today, people are increasingly using mobile phones to browse the net, and you don’t want your site to look garbled on their handsets. This plugin displays the content of your blog in a mobile phone screen friendly format that is easy to browse and read.  this is one of those just-installed-and-forget-it plugins.

Maintenance Mode - When you are fidling with the design and layout of your blog, you don’t want your visitors to see you site all crippled. Right? This plugin will display a simple note to your site visitors saying your blog is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and so please try back after some time. You, as the admin, can continue to work and see how your site actually looks like on screen.

Subscribe to Comments - When I comment on blog post, I ask questions and give my views on a particular topic and expect the post author or other readers to reply to my comment. Now since I can’t be bookmarking or remembering all the comments that I keep making, I’d love it if the replies are somehow sent to me. This plugin does exactly that by giving me the option of subscribing to the follow-up comments when I am leaving a comment on a blog. For a blogger, this is a good way to keep their readers engaged.

Wordpress.com Stats - Now there are so many stat providers like Google Analytics, Sitemeter, Statcounter, Woopra, and more, but I haven’t seen any that is quite as nice as this one. Though not quite so comprehensive, this plugin provides all the key stats you need to know about your blog on your Wordpress dashboard itself. No need to add any javascript that will slow down your blog’s page loading.

All-in-One SEO Pack - This plugin is no longer supported but is still one of the best out there to ensure that your post titles, descriptions, and keywords are in place, duplicate content are in check, and other on-site SEO optimisation is done.

Similar Posts - You can use this plugin to display a list of 5-10 or more similar posts below your blog posts. This helps in atrracting your readers to other similar content on your blog and perhaps make them stay longer on your site.

Popularity Content - This plugin helps you to display a list of the most popular posts on your blog based on certain criteria you have set. Displaying such list is important as your visitors know what are the best your blog has to offer.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade -  Wordpress keeps updating itself to new versions every now and then, and who would have the time and patience to delete some folders from the server, upload the newer versions, and take care that nothing is wrong in all these deleting and uploading. And plus the reinstallation. You can escape all this by getting this plugin do the upgrading for you automatically.

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Friendfeed

Desktop Applications

Sobees - You can manage your Friendfeed and Twitter accounts from nice desktop application. You can filter the Friendfeed message stream by the various services, and put the pictures on slideshow.

Twhirl - This is a popular AIR based desktop client for your Friendfeed and Twitter accounts.

AlertThingy - Another popular AIR based desktop client you can use for managing your Friendfeed, Twitter, and Flickr accounts.

Web Applications

Friendfeed Grid - This site shows random Friendfeed users, 20 most subscribed to, and the 10 top commenters.

FriendfeedLinks - This site displays the most popular links of Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Embed - The official Friendfeed widget displaying your updates for your blog’s sidebar. See my widget on this blog’s sidebar as an example.

Mobile Phones

Moblf - Moblf is the short form of Mobile Life, a new tool that you can use on your mobile phone to connect to your Friendfeed account using SMS.

FF to Go - You can read/write on Friendfeed on your mobile phone using FF To Go.  (UPDATED, June 4, 2008)

Wordpress Plugins

Friendfeed Activity Widget - This plugin display a nice widget for your blog’s sidebar that will display your latest updates on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Comments - Adds a Friendfeed comment section on your blog’s post pages that will diaply the comments you have received on Friendfeed on that post, with a customisable Friendfeed comment box for readers to comment to Friendfed directly from your blog.

Firefox addons

MySocial 24×7 - This is a Firefox addon that you can use to manage your Friendfeed updates and see your friends’ message streams from your browser sidebar.

Shareaholic - This is a Firefox addon that allows you to share a webpage to many services including Friendfeed. It also supports digg, del.icio.us, facebook, foxiewire, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, magnolia, mixx, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, streakr, truemors, tumblr, twitter, and bzzster.

Yahoo Pipes

Most Comments on Your Content - Find people ranked by who have commented on your updates the most number of times.

Friendfeed Minus Twitter - This pipe creates a RSS feed of your Friendfeed friends’ message updates withour the Twitter updates.

Scripts

@reply - This userscript adds the @username when you reply to someone in the comment.

Friendfeed 100 - View 100 items on the Friendfeed homepage.

Friendfeed 50 - View 50 items on the Friendfeed homepage.

Friendfeed Easy Unsubscribe - Creates a unsubscibe link to an user’s profile page.

Friendfeed Evermore Expander - this script sxpand the ‘5 more…’ link on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Filter Icons - Filter the services on the Friendfeed feed using this script.

Friendfeed Filters - You can filter Friendfeed using this script by creating your own group of friends.

Friendfeed Who Are You - This one adds a ‘Who are you?’ link on Friendfeed user profile pages and when you hover over a name, there is a little popup window displaying the details.

Friendfeed Pagerization Fixer - Fixes the Friendfeed pagerization.

Friendfeed Read Later - This script allows you to mark items to read later.

Friendfeed Reshare Any Link - Reshare any link on Friendfed to others service suing add2any.com

Friendfeed Remove Read Links - You can remove read items on Friendfeed using this script.

Friendfeed Show Domains - This script displays the domain names of shared links.

Friendfeed Show Names - This shows the full name of any user on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Tabs - You can customise Friendfeed tabs using this script.

Friendfeed TinyURL Resolver - You can preview the tinyurls that shoe up on Friendfeed with this script.

Friendfeed Tweak Refresh Rate - You can change the refresh timings of Friendfeed using this script.

Friendfeed Hiding The Oldies - You can hide entries older than a week on Friendfed using this script so that you can maintain a cleaner and lesser load on your broser.

Friendfeed Put Alert Thingy To Bed - When you update Friendfeed from AlertThingy or Twhirl, you can change the ‘via AlertThingy’ or ‘via Twhirl’ messages to something else that you want.

Friendfeed Sticky Search - Create sticky notes on Friendfeed using this script.

Friendfeed By Service - This script adds list of icons of sites like Twitter, Flickr, Picassa, Delicious, etc. on top of your Friendfeed page. when you click on any of these icons, the messages are filtered accordingly to that specific service where they come from.

Friendfeed Show Likes - This displays the list of ‘Likes’ for any entry.

Friend feed Easy Unsubscribe - This cript adds an unsubscribe link to user pages on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Twitter Client - This script adds a ‘reply on Twitter’ and an interface for sending Tweetsto your page.

Hacks

RSS Feeds from Friendfeed Search Results - Search for anything on Friendfeed and get an RSS feed on that search query.

RSS Feeds for User Comments and Likes - As the name suggests, use this hack to get the RSS feed of any user’s comments or likes on Friendfeed.

Export OPML file of Subscribe To Users - You can use this hack to export the opml file of the users you are subscribed to on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed on Gtalk - You can update to Friendfeed from Google Talk using this hack.

Google Blogoscope Hacks - A collection of hacks including how to zoom in the small the profile picture sof the Friendfeed users you are subscribed to on your subscription page, Friendfeed Search for iGoogle,  and how to change Friendfeed colors.

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