Ping.fm is now open beta to the public

The fun and extremely useful service is now open to public beta.
As some of you may know, I am a member of 67 social networking services, that means 67 online profiles that I have to maintain regularly, Do you you how hard it is do do so? You probably do.
That was until I discovered the best tool of 2008 in my opinion, www.ping.fm and until September 2nd, it was an invite only beta service.
Well now it’s open to the public, still in beta, but open to all.
What is Ping.fm?
Let’s say you have multiple online profiles, like me, you might want to update all of them almost everyday.
Before Ping, I would manually go on my twitter, facebook, plurk, pownce, linkedin, tumbler, identica, brightkite, freindfeed, jaiku, plaxo, bebo, hi5, kwippy, xanga and rejaw to update my status, sometimes twice a day for each one.
After I got my special beta invie code and signed up with Ping.fm, set it up, I can update all the above and more in one shot, whether I am updating from web, phone, email or IM, it’s all in one shot, life became way easier
Now here is the best part: (Warning! geeks content follow)
Ping was built with open API calls, meaning if you hire a nerd like myself (And you can!) to set it up with your blog or RSS feed, guess what? You know it. More organic exposure. I even setup some of my affiliate feeds to go there immediatly and I can’t tell you how much I love getting those extra commision checks in the mail.
Ping.fm is more than just status update, you can even setup your wordpress blog so you can blog through Ping.
I advice everyone to get an account (Now that it’s open to all) and enjoy everything Ping offers.

Update: I have some Brightkite invites, comment on this article and I will email you an invite. (Hurry I only have 10 invites and I will send it to the first 10 commenters only).

Google’s Chrome: A new era for web browsers

Yesterday, Google released the beta of their new open-source web-browser Chrome. A Google blog post from the previous day contains an explanation of their design philosophy behind it, together with an introductory comic strip, which explains matters a lot more. I’d encourage people to check it out (well, the comic at least).
Basically, it seems this browser is different from others in that
rather than the browser session being the ‘main unit’, processes are split
down by individual browser tabs. As far as I understand this means
that, for example, a crash or slow script or page in one tab shouldn’t crash or
hang your other ones. Which would be convenient! The flow of the tabs
is also supposed to lead to improvements in security as they are
restricted in what they can see and do (e.g. communication between
tabs) more than in other browsers. I suppose we will have to wait and
see what impact this has on the browser world. As it’s an open-source, I think something really good may be scooped up by future versions of
Firefox and so on.
I also read that Mozilla is not worried about the announcement and that CEO John Lilly said: They feel that they can make a better browser by starting from scratch–advances in browsers are good.

UPDATE: Download Google Chrome here.

Skype Prime announced major improvements

2 Days ago, Skype announced some major improvements to their Skype Prime service. To explain what the service is, I will simply say that it’s a service that will enable you to charge for voice consulting calls. The way it works, someone will call you, for a service that you have experiance in, they will pay you on a minute based (you set the price) and you get paid through PayPal, and that’s all.
The changes are made to the directory where your services will be listed. Now they have an all new advice and services directory, it’s now fully searchable so it’s easy for customers to find you.
A new rating system, the higher your customers rate you, the higher you will appear in any search results.
They also advertise for it more now so you will start getting more calls.
To start listing your services go here, download Skype and install it (Skip this step if you already have Skype), when you’re online, go to the account menu, click on Skype Prime and follow the easy steps to setup your services. Good luck

ALL NEW: Paypal button factory

My good friend Damon Williams (one of the top developers at PayPal) have just announced the new PayPal button factory.
For those of you who don’t know what PayPal is, (I have a couple of videos and a couple of posts coming up soon) PayPal simply is a safe fast way to accept money online.
Before I go any further, I have to say that as I am writing this, this new improvement is only available to developers and will be available soon at PayPal.com, however, since I am a certified PayPal developer, I took a look at the new very useful enhancements on the new button factory, and I like it a lot (specially the first 2), here are the new option from Damon’s blog post:

- Multiple drop-down options per button (e.g., Size,
Color, etc), and we’ve removed the limit of having just two optional fields

- The ability to set price by options (e.g., $8 for
medium t-shirts and $10 for large)

- Inventory tracking and management capability

- Simple button customization (e.g., add credit card
logos, make a smaller size, etc.)

- The ability to track profits and margins by products

- Save commonly created buttons

- Easy-to-use encryption

- And much more…

I hope all of my fellow nerds like it.

The DEATH of del.icio.us!

Well, it’s not really dead, but if you type it in, it will redirect you to the all new delicious.com (Or delicious 2.0 as some may call it).

Today, del.icio.us (a Yahoo! company) launched their new interface with a lovely and user friendly interface (redesign). An update that me and millions of delicious community users have been waiting for.

And the official site for it is www.delicious.com. Why they have changed it? Here is why:

They’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.  Of course the old del.icio.us domain and all its URLs will continue to work.  Also note that the domain change requires a new login cookie, which is why everyone has to log in again.

From their blog, they have also updated the following:

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another user’s public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn. Check out their  “What’s New” page for an overview of the changes, or watch the animation video above that summed it up nicely.

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