Rumors are that the Del.icio.us revamp is coming out very soon. Del.icio.us, by Yahoo, is now four years old, and one of the first social bookmarking sites I remember using.

It is based on bookmark sharing. If you find a site you like, you ‘tag’ it - add it to your del.icio.us account, and connect it with certain keywords you think are relevant to your bookmark. Your bookmarks then go public, and that way the del.icio.us site aggregates every bookmark and sorts it according to its current popularity.

I used del.icio.us for a long time to improve my web productivity, because I can use my bookmarks anywhere with this handy Firefox add-on.

The delicious team is working hard on improving tagging and bookmarking. They are also implementing a new search engine (speaking of that - del.icio.us could be a search engine on is own)! The beta preview is sadly invite-only.

In my opinion, Delicious.com (new domain there, nice) is going to become even better. It’s a fast, small and simple site, which has all the power of Digg, or Reddit, in a much more practical way (you can even use it with an iPhone).

There’s a new product in town that I’m very excited about, called Spicebird.

It was made by a very inovative startup named Synovel, based in India. It’s not even out of Beta (0.4) yet and has already reached 10 thousand downloads. I don’t know about you, but that is a lot - in comparison, I’ve got trouble getting more than a few hunded visitors per day!

Spicebird is actually a heavily modified Thunderbird, Sunbird and Xmpp4moz (IM add-on) stitched together to form the ultimate collaboration tool, something a bit like Microsoft’s Groove.

Of course it is released under open source licenses - a tri-license, to be exact. In short, it gives you a great deal of usage freedom and a price of 0$.

I found Groove to be very interesting and was dissapointed that there is no solid opensource alternative, and that’s why I think Spicebird is a great app.

The ‘front page’ features a tabbed interface, where you may add, delete and rearrange widgets of your own choice: a clock, a calendar, an rss news feed, upcoming events agenda - by being opensource I expect Spicebird to have gazillions of widgets by the end of this year, if it gains enough popularity. And that’s what I’m waiting for. Don’t forget why people still use Firefox 2.

For now, it’s got an e-mail client, a calendar and an instant messenger. You can also use it to read RSS feeds. If you’re to lazy to download it, check out the online demo video.

In conclusion, I find it to be a great idea with a lot of potential. The opensource community has already proven that it can produce tons of neat and useful apps, but what it lacks is some serious software for bussineses, just like Spicebird will soon become, in order to spread into this demanding market.

What are your thoughts on Spicebird?

I always hated web operating systems. First I tried the icky AjaxWindows, then YouOS which doesn’t seem to work, and after a while I read a Swedish article about the Xcerion operating system (from Linköping, I believe), still in development.
What I despise most is that they used a closed-source model on a web-app. You just don’t do that nowadays, if you are not Digg, god-damnit!

I mean, I’m no expert, but when every single one of these companies starts developing a whole set of Ajax apps, they’ve got a lot of work (just imagine how much work goes into developing an office suite, an instant messenger program, or a file manager), and in the end they’re still just competing websites. And who wants to work so much to get a competing website, come on!

And that’s when I discovered EyeOS.

With an online operating system, you can use your own apps, settings, documents, anywhere, any time, on any computer.

EyeOS is being developed by the EyeOS core team of the EyeOS Project company. While the main developers are the most involved people, EyeOS’ opensource model enables the community to contibute their own improvements.

Version 1.5 of EyeOS, nicknamed ‘Gala’, was released just recently. Now EyeOS has a basic Office suite (Word processor, Spreadsheet, Presentations etc.), Net tools (Browser, FTP), Personal apps (Calendars and the works!).
Of course this is not everything EyeOS has to offer, check the homepage for the complete list.

You can install EyeOS on your own server, or like me, get a free account @ the EyeOS project’s server.

A shout out to all the cool people at EyeOS!

After wasting an hour optimizing Firefox to no avail - for some reason it is reluctant to show Central European characters, I surrendered and downloaded the new Opera browser 9.50 beta, codenamed ‘Kestrel’. Being a productivity freak, I need my browser to be completely synchronized at all times. I’ve heard of the new bookmark syncing feature in Opera, which is coming with the new release, although it’s still in beta. What the heck, I tested it - and it looks very good. I encountered a few problems with site rendering (especially phpBB2 forums), and the browser crashed a few times in Leopard, but otherwise it works great, it is still the same, good ol’ Opera.

The bookmark sync option is a huge web productivity booster. Since I use 4 different operating systems (I dual-boot a PC and a MacBook), reconfiguring browsers is a real pain-in-the-[insert body part here]. I used to install Foxmarks on each Firefox browser, but I always had problems with at least one installation, if of course the Foxmarks server was up at the time.

Bookmark Synchronizing with Opera 9.50b works through the my.Opera account server storage space, which you can get for free when you sign up . The syncing feature is very cool: it syncs with all of your installed and linked browsers, even on your freaking mobile phone. It is called Opera Link.

Staying with Opera for now. We will see if the stable Firefox 3 with Weave will have a chance at converting me back.

Still looking for a good Pagerank checking tool though…

Many of you probably don’t use a Unix Operating System (Linux, BSD, Mac OS X). Some of you may not even know about KDE, the second most famous desktop enviroment the opensource community has to offer. Throughout the years, KDE became a very customizable and stable DE, with all the bells and whistles you can dream of.

Since its final release, KDE4 (not KDE 4.0), the Great Leap Forward by the KDE community, received praise, more praise, and also a whole lot of critique coming from this desktop enviroment’s fans.

We’ve all seen the uber-cool Plasma effects, the glassy theme, the great videos and the framework, Dolphin, the new filemanager and last but not least, the Kicker, which you still cannot customize properly.

I’ve already tested KDE 4 on my PCLinuxOS desktop, and I still feel it’s not ready for everything. The guys at KDE have certainly made a great deal of improvements, but there is still a lot of polishing to do: I don’t like the toolbar in the upper right corner, I miss Konqueror, hate the clock in the tray.

In conclusion, I would personally be much happier if the KDE group released KDE4 6 months later. The hype was there, and while KDE lived up to a lot of expectations, it did not exceed them. I’m still staying with my 3.5 with Konqueror and a pretty lousy gray theme with Plastik and Compiz Fusion. While we wait for the 4.1 release, let’s take a look at a video:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmSNv0bQy8M 250 250]