The time has come again for me to share the top five crunk tracks getting heavy rotation on my iPod. If you like Lil' Jon or the Ying Yang Twinz but don't know what else from the dirty south might tickle your fancy, try some of these tracks.

1. Grillz - Nelly feat. Paul Wall & St. Lunatics
2. What U Drankin' On - Jim Jones feat. P.Diddy, Paul Wall & Jha' Jha
3. Stay Fly - Three Six Mafia feat. Young Buck, Eightball & MJG
4. Stay Fly (Still Fly Remix) - Three Six Mafia feat. Slim Thug, Trick Daddy & Project Pat
5. Turn It Up - Chamillionaire feat. Lil Flip

During the intro for Three Six Mafia's Most Known Unknown, they complain that they influenced a lot of what is popular in hip hop today but don't get the credit. These seems very true to me. I remember listening to tracks like Tear the Club Up and Hit a Muthafucka back in the late '90s in Atlanta before any of the ATL rappers really became hot down south. I'd definitely recommend the Most Known Unknown Hits to any fan of the genre.

PS: I don't like D4L's Laffy Taffy but it is the first song that I've seen have about a dozen people doing synchronized dance steps in a club. So it gets an honorary mention.

 

Since the release of v.1.3.0.38 of RSS Bandit last week, I've read a number of posts like Scott Reynolds's complaint in his post I Love Jason Haley In A Totally Manly Non-Threatening Way. Serious. Totally Platonic where he wrote

Also, RSSBandit devs: What the F? I am using Nightcrawler Alpha, which I love, but ctrl+m no longer marks posts are read. It’s ctrl+q. Ghey. That’s a UI no-no if I ever saw one. Worse than going agains expected behavior, changing previously existant behavior arbitrarily just makes users mad. Still a great aggregator, but I’d like to hear a why on that decision.

A number of people have complained that we changed the keyboard shortcut for marking items as read from Ctrl+M to Ctrl+Q. The reason we made the change was because of a bug report we got which pointed out that (i) Outlook Express and Outlook use Ctrl+Q for marking items as read and (ii) Ctrl+Q is easier to hit than Ctrl+M on most keyboards.

Due to all the feedback we've gotten, we'll be including a keyboard shortcut editor [originally developed by Phil Haack] in the bug fix version of RSS Bandit scheduled to ship later this month.

 

James Robertson has a blog post entitled The $100 notebook where he writes

Here's another breathless story on the $100 (actually, looks like it will be $200) notebook. There's some cool things about this, including the fact that it can be powered by a hand crank. However, there are a number of simple problems too -

• For the truly poor, access to laptops isn't a solution. Access to clean water is way, way higher on the scale
• Tech support. Ok - you hand out a few hundred in some remote village. What the heck do the new users do when there are problems?

This is a pie in the sky solution, IMHO. It's like deciding to hand out cheap cars, and only later noticing that there are no gas stations for the recipients to use. I understand that the people behind this are well intentioned - but laptops are only useful when there's a hell of a lot of other infrastructure supporting them. The well intentioned folks behind this plan need to aim a lot lower.

Attitudes like this really, really irritate me. The same way that there are rich people and poor people in the United States, there are also parts of Africa that are less well off than others. It isn't all one freaking desert with bony kids surrounded by flies from South Africa to Algeria. For example, in Nigeria there are probably more cell phones per capita in the major cities than in most parts of the United States. The fact that some people get to use the latest iPods and iBooks in the U.S. doesn't mean there aren't homeless bums eating less than three square meals and sleeping on the streets in the same zip codes. Yet I don't see folks like James Robertson posting about how every homeless person has to be housed and every orphan found foster parents before we can enjoy iPods and laptop PCs.

If the plight of people in Africa bothers you so much instead of criticizing those who are making an honest attempt to help with your "armchair quarterbacking" why don't you contribute some of your time & dollars. Put your money where your mouth is.

 

There's been a lot of recent buzz about Windows Live Fremont in various blogs and news sites including TechCrunch, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and C|NET News.com. Fremont is the code name for a social market place in the same vein as classifieds sites such as Craigslist. It seems like just yesterday when it all began...

A few months ago, Kurt started a series of meetings to pitch various folks at work about this idea he had for an online marketplace which harnessed the power of one's social networks. At the time Kurt was a PM on MSN Windows Live Messenger and he had codenamed the project "Casbah". The value proposition of 'Casbah' was straightforward. Most people are more comfortable selling or buying stuff from people they know directly or indirectly. The typical classifieds site online does a poor job of supporting this scenario. On more than one occasion, I've wanted to sell stuff when I've moved apartments which I wouldn't have minded selling to a friend or coworker. However listing the items for sale on eBay and dealing with trying to offload my stuff to strangers didn't appeal to me. 'Casbah' was optimized around casual sales between people who knew each other directly or indirectly.

I was involved in the early design meetings and although I was enthusiastic about the idea I assumed that like several other meetings about good ideas I'd sat in on at Microsoft, it would go nowhere. To my surprise, Kurt kept at it and eventually a team was put together to ship 'Casbah' which has been re-christened 'Fremont' after a neighborhood in the Seattle area which has an open market every Sunday.

Enough history, let's talk about what makes Fremont so special. About a year ago, I had my Social Software is the Platform of the Future epiphany. One key aspect of this epiphany was the realization that a lot of interesting scenarios can be enabled if the software I used knew who I cared about and who I was interested in. Powerful social applications like Flickr and del.icio.us are successful partly because of this key functionality. Windows Live Fremont does this for classifieds sites. As a user, you can make Fremont a marketplace for just your social circle. This is enabled by harnessing two social circles; your IM buddies & your email tribe. You can specify that your listings are public, only visible to your IM buddies and/or only visible to people in your email tribe (i.e. are hosted on the same email domain such as '@microsoft.com' or '@gatech.edu'). Similarly, you can specify the same on listings that you view. Basically no matter how many millions of people use the service, my college friends and I can use it as an improved version of the bulletin boards in our dorm hallways without having to deal with awkward sales situations involving people we don't know. 

Of course, this is just scratches the surface. This is part of Windows Live which means you can expect a cohesive, integrated experience with other Windows Live properties and perhaps even an API in the future. It's going to be a fun ride.

I've enjoyed working with the Fremont team so far. It's been great helping them to bring their vision to fruition.

 

Charlene Li of Forrester Research has a post entitled Why Microsoft’s classifieds service will be better than Google Base where she writes

I spent some time a week ago with Microsoft discussing their new online classifieds service, code named "Fremont", which is in internal testing now. While the news is out there, I thought I’d provide my take on how this differs from - and in my opinion, is better than -- Google Base. I do this with one HUGE caveat - both of these services are brand new and beta, with Fremont not even available yet.

First, a quick description of Fremont. It looks and acts like a classic online classifieds site. A list of linked categories is on the front page and users can browse or search through the listings. A key difference though is that the listings are turbo-charged - as the poster, you can control who can see them, from everyone to just a select group of people on your MSN Messenger buddy list. If you choose the latter, the next time one of your privileged buddies signs into Messenger, they’ll see a little alert that says you have a set of golf clubs for sale. The categories include the usual suspects - jobs, homes, apartments, cars, and one thing that caught my eye, tickets.

That’s because one of my favorite uses of Craig’s List is to find last minute event tickets to hot shows. I also sometimes find myself in that seller situation - and I would highly prefer to sell or even give away tickets I can’t use to friends than to strangers from Craig’s List. The same goes with clothing - I don’t want to go through the hassle of selling some of used but still very nice clothes online, but I wouldn’t mind organizing an online clothing swap with my girlfriends.

The Microsoft approach reminds me of what Tribe.Net was (is?) trying to do in their effort to socialize classifieds but with one major difference - Microsoft leverages the social network that already exists in a user’s buddy list and address book.

So I look at Fremont and I see a really nice service shaping up. The classifieds interface is familiar - each category has the expected search fields (number of bedrooms in housing, make and year in autos, etc.) and the opening page lays out all of the options in a simple manner similar to Craig’s List’s austere list of links.

Now compare that to Google Base. Honestly, can you imagine your average user trying to make heads or tails out of it? Don’t get me wrong - I love Google Base because of the audacious potential it represents in terms of creating new content for the Web. But in terms of a classifieds service, it will take a lot of application development to get it to the point where the average Joe will be able to use it.

One last point about Fremont - it’s being built on top of the new Windows Live platform, which has as one of its core tenants giving developers the ability to build their own applications. Now this is one of the potential benefits of Google Base as well, but I’d put my chips down in favor of Microsoft actually pulling this one off. Microsoft has a well supported developer network and has come a long way in winning their trust through efforts like Channel 9. Granted, that trust is far from universal but it’s a start.

Unsurprisingly I agree with everything Charlene has to say about Windows Live Fremont. I've been involved with the project to some degree from concept to completion and will be posting some details about the project in my next post.

 

In the post Update to Windows Live Mail Beta Imran Qureshi of the Hotmail Windows Live Mail team discusses some of the new features that were just added to the beta. The list of improvements from Imran's post is excerpted below

1. Safety Improvements

We're laser focused in the area of spam and safety with Windows Live Mail and have already made major improvements over other webmail services. Never one to rest on our laurels, we simplified and consolidated the safety experience even more in M4. 

We automatically calculate a safety level for each mail using over eight checks.  The three safety levels are: "Known sender", "Unknown sender" or "Unsafe". You can always click on "Why?" to find out why a mail was marked as such and what you can do to change the safety level of this sender. How much simpler can it be…

(Screenshots: Known sender  |  Known sender (after clicking Why)  |  Unknown sender  |  Unsafe)

Kahuna has already been helping identify Phishing mails to help protect our customers -- now we make them more noticeable so you won’t be duped into clicking on them.

(Screenshots:  Real PayPal Mail  | Phishing Mail pretending to be PayPal)

Oh and if you were one of those people who didn’t like having message  text shown in mails in the Junk Mail Folder, now the default is that message content is not rendered in Junk Mail Folder until you say you want to see it.

(Screenshots: JMF Folder)

2. Fast Search

Vroom, vroom! The new indexed search is fast and it searches message bodies. The UI is the same as M3 but the engine underneath is brand spanking new. We’re rolling it out slowly - not every user will get it right away so be patient.

How you tell if you have the new search engine: If the infobar in your search results does NOT say the following then you have the new search engine:

"Note: At this time, the mail beta searches only the subject and addresses."

3. Spell Check as you Type

Ok this is one feature that turned out better than we thought.  Just start typing in Compose and we’ll check spelling in the background and put red squiggles under words that are misspelled. You can then right-click them and choose from our suggestions, tell us to ignore that word or add the word into the dictionary. 

I know what you’re saying. Big deal, Outlook already does that. Well, we’re the first webmail service I know that does this on the web without installing any software! 

(Screenshots: Spell Check As You Type)

4. Scrollable message and contact list. 

We know you want to see more than 14 messages at a time in the message list. Well now you can see 50 messages at a time.

Why should contacts be any different? In contacts now, you can see all your contacts in one list.

(Screenshots: Scrollable message list   | Scrollable contact list)

5. Configurable reading pane

Now you and I know that reading pane is the best thing to ever happen to webmail. But for some strange reason a few people don’t like it. Well, if you happen to be one of those people you can now turn off the reading pane.

(Screenshots: Configuration options  | reading pane turned off)

6. Resizable panes

Your folder names are long or you like the message list to be wider? Just grab the edges of the panes and resize them to how you like it. Your customization is maintained the next time you login (on the same machine).

(Screenshots: resized panes)

7. Improved Error Message Discoverability

We’ve also made our error message easier to notice by moving them closer to where your eye is, adding icons and changing their color to a more visible color.

(Screenshots: Error message in Contacts)

8. Easier to send mail when you don’t know email address

Admit it. This is how you send mail: You find a mail from that person. You reply to it and then delete the original content of the mail. 

Well if this is you, then Kahuna makes this easy. Find the mail and click on the From address. We start a new mail to that person.

(Screenshots: Clickable sender email address)

Or let’s say you were in contacts to find the email address of some friend. Well, normally you’d copy the email address, go back to mail, click New and then paste in the email address. Well, now you can just drag the contact to the Mail tab and voila, we start an email to that person.

9. Support for browsers other than IE6 & higher

Testers can access all Mail Beta functionality using Internet Explorer version 6.0.   But we know some of you like to use other browsers. With M4 we now also support additional browsers including Firefox, Netscape or Opera. We're still a bit of a work in progress here, so apologies if there are still some glitches (we are focused on making sure core email functionality is solid, but some of the bells and whistles work better with IE6+).

10. Empty Junk Mail Folder or Deleted Items Folder with one click

Lots of users asked for the ability to empty these folders easily. Now you can right-click on them and choose Empty.

(Screenshots: Right-click menu on Junk Mail Folder)

11. Print Messages

Ok, we had this in M3 also but it was hidden in the Actions menu. Now it’s on the main toolbar so you can easily find and click it.

(Screenshots: Print button)

All of these are great improvements especially the Firefox support. I'm trying it out right now and so far so good.

 

These Windows Live services keeping popping up. The general public can now sign up for the Windows OneCare Live beta. More information about the new beta can be gleaned from the blog post entitled Consumer Beta Goes Live! from the Windows OneCare team blog. For those who are wondering what the service is below, the following brief description may help

What it is:

An automatically self-updating PC health service that runs quietly in the background. It helps give you persistent protection against viruses, hackers, and other threats, and helps keep your PC tuned up and your important documents backed up.

What it does for you:

• Runs quietly in the background, providing anti-virus and firewall protection

• Updates itself to help you keep ahead of the latest threats

• Runs regular PC tune ups

• Provides one-click solutions to most problems

• Makes back-ups a breeze

• Lets you see the status of your system at a glance

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a beta?

Beta is geekspeak for “not finished yet.” A beta product is something we are still working on and invite regular users to test out. We’re asking you to check out Windows OneCare Live beta and let us know what you really think—good and bad. That way, we can make the final product the best it can be.

Does it cost anything?

Nope. The beta version of Windows OneCare Live is free, though the final service will be a paid subscription.

What if new viruses or other Internet threats come out?

Windows OneCare Live regularly updates itself based on emerging Internet threats. So you can have better peace of mind.

I've had some interaction with the OneCare folks as part of my day job and the definitely are working on building a compelling service. Give it a try.

 

The reviews for the most recent release of RSS Bandit have begun to flow in and they've been very positive. Below are excerpts from various blog posts and official reviews of the release.

Heinz Tschabitscher writes in the About.Com review of v1.3.0.38 of RSS Bandit

Guide Rating -

The Bottom Line

RSS Bandit is a nice and very capable feed reader that lets you browse news in an organized fashion. Its flexibility, virtual folders and synchronization abilities are great, but it would be even greater if it integrated with Bloglines in addition to NewsGator Online.

In his post Trying out, and loving, the new RSS Bandit Kevin Briody writes

Dare Obasanjo and team released the latest version of RSS Bandit (aka “Nightcrawler”), and I’ve got to say I’m really digging it. It is easily as fully featured as FeedDemon - my current reader - synchs with Newsgator, and has a few extra bells and whistles to boot. See comments to posts in a tree-menu drop-down is handy, and being able to customize the fonts and colors for browsing feeds is a lifesaver on the eyes.

All told, very cool. I’ll run Bandit and FD side-by-side for a while, but I may have myself a new reader.

In his post RSS Bandit rocks! Steve Lacey writes

Dare Obasanjo has just released the new version of his aggregator, RSS Bandit, and to put it bluntly, it completely rocks.

For the past eight months, I’ve been using my own home grown aggregator Katana. I wrote Katana as an experiment in C#/.Net programming and because nothing else out there did everything I wanted an aggregator to do.

Now, RSS Bandit has come forward in leaps and bounds. My favourite features?

• The "River of News"/Newspaper view when clicking on a feed rather than the an article.
• Great feed discovery.
• Tabbed browsing.
• Performance. This release is way faster than previous releases.
• Support for folders. This is a key one that many other aggregators miss.
• Newsgroup integration.
• Style. Somewhere along the line, RSS Bandit got sexy…

If there’s one thing it’s missing, it’s the ability for comments to appear in the article window, inline with the article itself. I really like this feature in Katana. I’d also like some form of visual notification (article/feed in italics for example), that there are new comments available.

Other than that, I think I’m hooked. The “River Of News” view has accelerated my blog consumption.

In the post entitled RSS Bandit 1.3.0.38 on the Microsoft Show's blog it states

Dare Obasanjo released RSS Bandit 1.3.038. At first I was hesitant to download it wow, am I glad I did.

This time around RSS Bandit handled my large amount of feeds much better than prior releases (the last one I played with was .31). Huge performance boost – and my machine is not a low spec’d machine. Prior releases it would take forever to go through them all which in comparison FeedDemon blazed through it. Not this time though…RSS Bandit did great!

One feature I never really appreciated before: RSS Bandit has a folder to show feed errors. In comparison FeedDemon lists you know on the feed that there is an error but having a list is handy especially since I have monitor a lot of feeds for various purposes.

Speaking of errors, RSS Bandit used to give me errors when the feed was working. I am not getting the same amount or “wrong” errors. Yes, the occasional unable to connect which is standard with all readers. RSS Bandit is much more accurate now. I think that is why I appreciate the feature now. Since the feeds in the folder are “really” unavailable, I can better manage problem feeds.

I also love the threaded view – it really helps me keep track of the conversation, which I’ve admitted I have a problem with.

Playing with it a short time, I’m impressed with the improvements. Excellent work Dare!

In his post New RSS Bandit released Robert Scoble writes

Dare Obasanjo announces that a sizeable new release of RSS Bandit is now available. I downloaded and installed this and it looks great. This is a free RSS News Aggregator and is my favorite of the free ones out there. His post explains what’s new, but I really like that it synchronizes to NewsGator now.

I'd like to thank everyone for all the positive feedback. We definitely have more goodness planned over the next few months and will add some of the features requested above. There should be a bug fix release within the next 30 days to take care of any fatal edge case bugs which weren't found until after the release and will add a few more translations to the mix (e.g. Japanese & Russian). After that, our focus will be on the Jubilee release.

 

From TechCrunch we learn RSS is Now Integrated into Yahoo Mail and Alerts. This is a great addition to the service and something I'll definitely be trying out in my Yahoo! Mail account once it is available. I wonder if they'll provide an API to allow desktop RSS readers to synchronize their state like Bloglines and Newsgator Online do?

The following is an excerpt from Michael Arrington's post on the announcement

Yahoo gathered a small group of bloggers, press and others at Sauce in San Francisco tonight to announce the launch of two new RSS products. They have integrated an RSS reader directly into Yahoo Mail Beta, and are expanding Alerts to include RSS feeds.

These are significant new products, aimed squarely at new and mainstream RSS users. The service is not live as of the time I am posting this. I’ve added a screen shot picture from the live demo.

Mail

Yahoo has deeply integrated RSS into the Yahoo Mail beta experience. Directly below the email folders are “RSS folders”. Clicking on the top folder show all posts in a “river of news” format, meaning all posts for all subscribed feeds are listed in the order they have appeared in feeds.

Each feed also has its own folder, allowing the user to read feeds individually (more like bloglines).

A post from any feed is treated exactly like an email - any post can be forwarded as an email or dragged into a folder and saved. All of the great AJAX functionality already working in Yahoo’s Mail beta works with the new RSS functionality as well.

Adding feeds is straightforward - include the feed URL or choose from a number of popular feeds.

 

Danah Boyd has an excellent post entitled Attention Networks vs. Social Networks which tackles some of the issues we've faced while designing Social Networking for Windows Live. She writes

The vast majority of online social networking tools assume that users are modeling friendship and thus if you're friends with someone, they better damn well be friends with you. As such, they use undirected graphs and you are required to confirm that they are indeed your friend.

Well, what about fandom? Orkut actually put the concept of fan into their system, but in order to be someone's fan, you had to be their friend first. Baroo? I've noticed that Friendster introduced fans, although it is not consistent across the site; the system decides who is celebrity. I can be a fan of Pamela Anderson but i cannot be a fan of Michel Foucault or Henry Jenkins. While i can understand that the former is clearly a Fakester, the latter is actually a real academic with a Friendster Profile that i genuinely admire (far more than Ms. Anderson). Even on MySpace where bands have a separate section, i have to add them to my friends; i cannot simply be fans.

The world is not an undirected graph and very little about social life online is actually undirected. Many social relations are unequal; they are rooted in directional graphs - fandom, power, hierarchy. So why do we use undirected models?

Of course, there are many systems that have directed graphs. I can read blogs by bloggers who who don't read me; blogrolls are directed. I can have friends on LiveJournal that do not reciprocate. I can subscribe to del.icio.us feeds of people that i admire without forcing them to do the same. I can make a Flickr user a contact simply so that i can watch their photos. I do all this because i know the world is not undirected.

Part of the problem is that we've built a model off of social networks instead of attention networks and there's a very subtle difference between the two. Attention networks recognize power. They recognize that someone may actually have a good collection of references or be a good photographer and that someone else may want to pay attention to them even if their own collections are not worthy of reciprocation. Attention networks realize that the world is not an undirected graph.

There are many good reasons to use attention networks in systems instead of social networks. Do you really want to force people to get permission to subscribe to public material of someone else? Do you really want to put people through the awkwardness of having to approve someone that they don't know simply because one person respects the other? Of course, the awkwardness of social networks does not disappear simply by having directed graphs. Reciprocity is still an issue whenever the networks are performative (visible as a statement of connection). This is most apparent in the blogging community where people feel insulted that they are not included on the blogroll of a blog that they read regularly.

This is a pretty good summary of some of the key issues folks like Mike and myself had to work through when building our Social Networking feature set. There definitely is a key distinction between attention networks and social networks, unfortunately a lot of social software applications have conflated the two. Even worse, thanks to the proliferation of social networking tools, many users have difficulty adjusting to dealing with attention networks. An example of this is the awkwardness Danah describes when people become upset because they aren't on your blogroll and vice versa.

I definitely have a lot of thoughts in this area but I'd like to wait until we've shipped before touching on this topic in more depth.