Latest Posts from Download Squad

The folks at ZURB have just released Bounce, a nice little tool which lets you take notes on websites and then share the URL with friends or colleagues. Bounce is basically a dressed down version of Notable, ZURB's full featured website feedback tool for teams.

The user interface for Bounce is dead simple. Just input the the URL you want to take notes on and in a few seconds Bounce will deliver a screenshot of the URL. Here you can take as many notes as you wish, input your name (which Bounce uses to label the screenshot with your notes) and press save. A public URL is then served which you can email or post to Twitter and Facebook. As you scroll over the boxes you drew on the screenshot, your notes will appear.

Bounce is free to use, no registration required -- and with no software to download or steep learning curve, it makes for a great little tool for development teams to get contextual feedback on their web projects.

If you're part of the development team for a website project, it's important to keep tabs with all parties involved. It's necessary to get everyone's input, track progress to date, and synthesize the feedback so that the project can progress to completion. Some projects are straightforward and easy, while others can be insane at times. Either way, Notable is a great app to help streamline the process and keep the job on target.

Notable is a slick, online website collaboration tool that allows teams to get contextual feedback quickly from all of the team members. The app allows you to capture visual, code, and copy portions of a website and then annotate with your feedback, which you can then share with members of your team.

The app lets you capture Web pages three different ways: via a Firefox plug-in, by uploading images from a computer, or capture by URL from Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer. There's also an iPhone app that allows you to take screenshots and upload to your Notable account for note sharing.

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Thanks to a tip from Stuart we learned Google Health is now being integrated into health search results. For instance, if you Google search "hay fever," the top search result is Google Health. The health content is provided by A.D.A.M., an online provider of health content that is physician reviewed for consumers.

Taking the number one spot for themselves, Google is making their move to be the source where consumers get their online health information and potentially dominate health search. I guess if you're Google, organic search results are whatever you want them to be.

It appears Google's strategy in tying health search results with its Google Health product, is to be the top dog of consumers electronic medical records systems. There are other contenders, such as Microsoft's HealthVault for instance, so this is certainly going to shape up to be an interesting power struggle to say the very least.

About Google Health
Google Health is an online medical record system where you store your health information using your Google account. You can build your health profile and import your medical records from hospitals and pharmacies. You can also share your health records with others in your online care network. Google's privacy policy states they won't sell your health information or make it accessible through searches on Google.com (that's nice to know) and only the user controls access to their health information.

Thanks Stuart!

Our esteemed editor emeritus, Grant Robertson, tipped us to a not so well-known security breach at LinkedIn that allows you to re-engineer your work history to reflect, well whatever you want it to. The way it works is: after you get a recommendation, you can go into your profile and edit the title of the position you held -- say.. lowly intern -- and change it to CEO, just for kicks. Then you edit the name of the company to one that you make up, and voila! Now you have a recommendation for a job that didn't exist at a company you made up and your referral (the person who recommended you) is none the wiser.

Yah, sure that's what people do on their resumes all day long. But the issue here is, the person who referred you is an unwitting accomplice to your puffery. Unless they take the time to review your profile every so often, they will never know you changed their recommendation to a bogus job with an inflated title.

Solely for the purpose of illustrating this issue (ahem), I changed my title from blogger at Download Squad to Editor in Chief at World Comics, a company I just made up. Unfortunately, Grant who referred me when my information was blogger at Download Squad, might never find out. Of course, if he did, he could withdraw the recommendation outright. It would be more secure though if LinkedIn directly alerted people of edits made to the position and company of the person they recommended. And I don't think the weekly LinkedIn Network Updates email counts because does anyone really read them?

One way to assure your recommendation on LinkedIn doesn't get misrepresented is to write the person's title and company within your recommendation. That way you will have assurance your recommendation will be aligned to the position and company you are writing on behalf of and won't get "misused" down the road.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to search for interstellar dust particles. They're the tiny particles that measure only a few microns (one millionth of a meter) in diameter and hail from distant stars that are now floating in space. They are the only matter from other stars that reaches our solar system. Impressive huh?

If you are successful in locating one of the particles (in all there are 40-100), as its discoverer, you will get to name the particle and be named as co-author on any scientific paper mentioning the discovery of the particle. Henceforth, you will be a Master of the Universe to friend and foe alike.

This is the grandaddy of all time wasters, because even though you "waste time," you are being productive while doing so. If you're successful at your mission, you really become a recognized Master of the Universe, which is not just a meaningless virtual title.

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Payvment, the e-commerce app that allows you to add a PayPal shopping cart to your website and launch a Facebook storefront, announced a new feature for its Facebook app. Retailers can now offer special discount pricing and incentives to fans of their Facebook Pages. Payvment calls this feature, Facebook Fan Incentive Pricing.

Now, retailers can induce people to become fans of their Facebook page by luring them in with special "fan only" pricing. The concept is hardly new. Nearly all stores extort offer member rewards or member discount pricing; this is just a natural extension of that trend. It also allows Facebook retailers a new way to collect fans.

To activate Payvment's Facebook Fan Incentive Pricing, current retailers can enable the feature within their storefront settings. Current fans will see the special fan price, and visitors to the storefront, who are not yet fans, are prompted to become a fan in order to receive the special fan price.

Conventional wisdom has it that Facebook has the potential to be a shopping mecca. After all, with 400 million people on Facebook, you could say that it's a decent size marketing opportunity. Right now, however, shopping on Facebook is more of a novelty. There's no storefront directory, and the product search on Payvment is just not that good. Perhaps social commerce is a foregone conclusion. If that's the case, then right now we're in the amoeba crawling onto land stage of the evolutionary process. It can only get better, right? The main question is when?

A special shout out to our tipster @RussHogg who told us the entire 137 year archive of Popular Science Magazine is now available for online free browsing. You can view the entire collection's issues as they appeared at time of publication. It's definitely fun to go back in time and view cutting edge science throughout the years.

Right now, you can search by inputting key words in the search box, however they plan to roll out a browse-by-issue cover interface in the future with more advanced features for searching. Popular Science partnered with Google to make the archive possible.

Thanks @RussHogg!

FillAnyPDF is a free online, SSL encrypted PDF form editor that allows you to upload your PDF form so that others can fill it out and even sign it online. While it's marketed as a replacement option to the fax, the appeal and practical uses are probably broader than that. Small business, non profits and volunteer groups who have limited resources and lack techie know-how now have an easy way to collect information online for projects as they come up.

FillAnyPDF offers the ability to send forms via an email link, HTML link, or to embed the entire form in HTML on your website. As the forms are filled out, the data collected can then be emailed to you or you can access the data when you log in. Users don't have to register to fill out the form which is another nice feature. The interface is simple and while it is ad supported, the ads are non obstructive. You can easily search your forms using tags.

Still in beta, FillAnyPDF is developing upcoming features such as hosting FillAnyPDF software on enterprise users' servers, group sharing and collaboration, etc. Trusting an unproven start up with financial information or personal information like social security numbers isn't something I would be comfortable with, but for basic information collection, I think FillAnyPDF is a strong option to consider.

It's hard to picture life before Photoshop, but yes, some 20 years ago, Photoshop did not exist and photo manipulation was a matter of darkroom editing techniques and using complex sequences such as burn, dodge, fade, mask, which when used in Photoshop is a snap. Tomorrow is the 20th Anniversary of Photoshop, but the celebration is taking place around the world today.

Now that Photoshop is used as a verb in the English language, and probably countless other languages for that matter, it's easy to take for granted how much it has transformed the publishing industry and how it's editing tools allow us to view an alternative reality. It's probably reasonable to suggest that most published images are digitally manipulated in some way - models to look thinner, colors to be more intense, composition to appear more visually appealing, etc. The question becomes what is real, and what is fake?

Photoshop has had an interesting journey from its early days as a simple display program to a sophisticated digital image editing application with over 10 million users worldwide. Using its suite of tools, you can retouch images, add textures, crop images, build layers, add text and basically do everything to create stunning results. Adobe offers several levels of Photoshop, from the free, online image editing app, Photoshop.com, to the advanced CS4 Extended, recommended for film, video and multimedia professionals.

If you want to join Photoshop's birthday celebration, there's a number of links for you to visit, below. If you want to comment on Twitter about the anniversary, add the tag #PS20. Additionally, Adobe TV has an excellent video, Startup Memories, to commemorate the impact Photoshop has had over the years and gets the original developers together to discuss the creation of the software.

Photoshop Facebook
Photoshop Twitter
National Association of Photoshop Professionals

Happy birthday Photoshop! Here's to at least another 20 more years!

What's the magic sauce that makes something go viral on the internet? Why do some things end up being more viral than others? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania tackled this question by data-diving into The New York Times list of most emailed articles over a period of six months, August 2008 to February 2009. The tipping point they found was awe - "the emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self."

Controlling for factors such as article placement within the paper and emotionality (positive and negative) among many others, the researchers found awe inspiring articles are most emailed, as are practically useful, emotion laden and positive articles. Surprisingly, longer articles, articles written by famous authors and those written by women are also more likely to go viral. This data contrasts with conventional thinking that brevity is king in holding readers' attention. Also, there seems to be a never-ending supply of negative headlines whenever you read the news, yet the research shows most stories shared are the positive ones.

The study surmises we share content for a variety of reasons, sometimes self-enhancement (see how smart I am, I sent you this way before you even knew about it) or to generate reciprocity, but also to deepen connections with others.

I decided to test the findings employing my own unscientific data comparison by looking at YouTube's top five viral videos of 2009. The Susan Boyle one I can see, but the others, not so much (David After Dentist, JK Wedding Entrance, New Moon Movie Trailer and Evian Roller Babies). The study did show surprising content is more viral, so perhaps the roller skating babies, and the unique wedding entrance explains those videos popularity. In any event, according to the research, awe is key to going viral.