Chris Pirillo » fluid

Yahoo and Twitter are Going to Share!

Chris Pirillo — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:36:38 +0000

It’s always nice when people share, right? Therefore, it stands to reason that it’s also nice when websites share. Yahoo and Twitter have entered into a deal that will allow content-sharing across both sites. This move is excellent for the floundering Yahoo. Yahoo and Facebook entered into a similar deal a few months ago, making it easier for users to share Facebook status updates and other information on Yahoo or share Yahoo sports scores or Flickr photos on Facebook.

The partnerships with Twitter and Facebook will take effect later this year. The partnership with Twitter will allow users to take material from both sites without having to leave either one. Specifically, users will be able to access their Twitter feed on Yahoo’s sites, update their Twitter status and share content from Yahoo in their Twitter feed, while Yahoo search and media properties will include Twitter updates.

What are your thoughts on these partnerships? Will this change the way you “do” social media? Or, will it have zero effect on your daily life?

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Yahoo and Twitter are Going to Share!

Social Pains or Social Panes?

Chris Pirillo — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:11:42 +0000

Social Pains or Social Panes?

I don’t know where this is going.

All I know is that what I need on a typical day is a quick overview of what’s happening on Facebook, Twitter, and now Google Buzz. Having three tabs open is impractical – and I simply can’t stand third-party apps that either (a) suck or (b) suck.

I’ve always found that the mobile (iPhone) interfaces for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz were fine and dandy – quite usable, really. The problem is: you can’t load the iPhone versions of Google Buzz and Twitter in a desktop browser without first spoofing your agent (which has to happen on the client side).

My original idea (and I’m still looking for help to get something like this accomplished) was to have a single Web page that would automatically load these three networks with their iPhone interfaces into three columns (using the IFRAME tag, assumedly). This is allegedly impossible to do without some kind of user intervention – which is to say, you can’t easily spoof a browser agent from the server side.

The solution? Maybe create a Google Chrome plugin. After all, both Chrome and the iPhone version of Safari are based on WebKit. This way, the spoofing could happen automatically from within the plugin – and it could run just about anywhere.

Given that I’m nowhere near a developer, I was left to my own devices. I created a Fluid.app instance of something that was previously a “pane” in the ass. Why not use Mozilla’s Prism? It’s nowhere near as configurable, and Gecko isn’t WebKit. ‘Nuff said. This was my solution for a problem *I* was having.

And so, I made Social Panes and sent it to a few friends to see if it’d work on their Macs as well. I actually have a better name for the app, but am holding onto it until I see if either a Web page (without plugin) or various browser extensions can be built.

It’s not perfect, mind you – but I did my best.

Unzip the contents of this download.
Move the “com.fluidapp.FluidInstance.Social Panes.plist” to /users/[username]/Library/Preferences
Open Safari and authenticate http://hahlo.com/ to your Twitter account (if you’ve never done so). NOTE: please use Safari, specifically.
Double-click “Social Panes” and you should see three panes & a drawer open up. The drawer is a bonus – FriendFeed.

The reason I chose Hahlo over mobile.twitter.com is simple: Hahlo is more full-featured and doesn’t log you out of other Twitter sessions when you’ve authenticated with it.

Again, I wish something like this could be accomplished from a Web page that didn’t require a plugin or download to work properly. Sorry. If someone else can pull that off, I’d be interested in talking about extending this idea.

Moreover, if you can improve upon a standalone binary, I’d be interested in hearing from you as well. This version was cobbled together as a fully-functional prototype (and is far from perfect).

Oh, and I’m not going to provide support for this app – so don’t ask me support questions. :) After all, I just did this for free (and if you wanted to send me a donation, it’s a different story).

Social Pains or Social Panes?

What is Mozilla’s Prism?

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:26:55 +0000

What is Mozilla’s Prism?

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There are probably millions of applications that you can install on your computer, no matter what operating system you use. There are billions of web pages found online, many of which are services. What if you wanted to run a web application as a desktop app? It’s possible to do, you know. I’m going to tell you about a couple of different ways to make this happen.

First off, we have an application that was recently launched by Mozilla – Prism. No more wading through web browser windows and tabs just to read your email or check your Facebook feed. Prism apps run directly on your desktop and can be accessed just like any other application.

So why would you want to use this? There are many reasons. It’s a time-saver, for one. When you have a lot to do, every extra step takes away more time you could use elsewhere. Using Prism takes a step or two out of each equation. It can also be more stable. Even though the web browsers of today are usually fairly stable – they DO occasionally crash. Elminate that problem completely by running your applications right on your desktop. You can even configure these things to run when you start your computer, instead of waiting to connect to the Internet and loading a web page.

You don’t even need to have Firefox installed to run Prism!

If you run Mac OS X, I have another recommendation for you. Fluid is similar to Prism – but a whole lot more. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies. Use Fluid to run YouTube, GTalk, Flickr, Basecamp, Delicious, .Mac webmail, or any other WebApp as a separate Mac desktop application.

Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a little tiny window where you specify the URL of a WebApp you’d like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, specify a Location and an Icon, click ‘Create’ and you’ll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you’ve just created.

If you have other recommendations for other cool desktop or web services, drop me a line! I’ll share them with the world.

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What is Mozilla’s Prism?