I'm sorry; I simply could not resist covering a service with a name like Zukmo. Apart from the name, there's absolutely no connection between myself and the service. And I must say, the name is just about the most remarkable thing about this service at the moment (which is saying a lot).

It's basically a Web bookmarking service. I can't even call it "social bookmarking" because there doesn't appear to be anything social about it at the moment. You get a bookmarklet or a browser add-on (for Chrome, Firefox or IE). You then click the button when you're visiting a page you'd like to bookmark, and the page is saved. Very straightforward.

One significant difference from Delicious and Diigo is that Zukmo supports only preconfigured "categories". Meaning, you can't just tag your bookmarks - you need to set up categories beforehand, and then select a category for your bookmark.

The site's design feels fairly dated. The copyright starts at 2004 but extends all the way to 2010, which explains the general appearance. All in all, if your name doesn't happen to begin with "Zuk", I see no reason for you to try Zukmo. I still had to cover it, though.

Zukmo is the best-named Web bookmarking service on the planet originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Sometimes you may want to send someone a whole list of websites to look at. Maybe you even want them to look at the sites in a given sequence, like when you're sharing the results of a search for a new car or a vacation spot.

BridgeURL is a fairly elegant service that accepts a list of links, and spits out a single bit.ly link. When you click this link, you're taken to the first website on the list, but it has subtle semi-transparent overlays on both sides. The left one leads to the previous site on the chain, while the right leads to the next site. (They're not semi-transparent on the screenshot because when you hover over them, they turn solid.)

There's also a bottom bar, but it's fairly unobtrusive. There were no banners or pop-ups as far as I was able to see. The only annoyance with the service is that for some odd reason, it forces you to feed it URLs starting with http:// or https:// - meaning, you can't write "downloadsquad.com" or even "www.downloadsquad.com". I have no idea why it's not smart enough to figure out the http:// on its own. Other than that, it's a fairly handy service.

BridgeURL lets you send a tour of several websites in one link originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Coming up with a good domain name these days is akin to finding a parking spot in New-York. Accordingly, tools for finding free domain names abound, and most of them offer some sort of a "brainstorming interface". The idea is to help you come up with a domain name nobody (including yourself) considered before.

Domize is one of the nicer attempts at this sort of thing. At its simplest form, it's a very fast find-as-you-type service for free domain names. As you type each new letter in the name of your domain, Domize quickly checks whether or not that domain name is free for .com, .net, .org, .co, .us and .biz.

But as I said, that's just scratching the surface of what Domize can do. Click Options and you can change the TLDs (top-level-domains, such as .at, .me and others), toggle the find-as-you-type functionality, and change the domain registrar used.

Once you're done tweaking the options, click Advanced to find out what neat syntax directives Domize supports. It actually has its own expression language: You can type something such as [like:cool] to search for synonyms of the word "cool" (coolheaded.net is up for grabs, by the way).

When you finally find a domain you like, hovering over the TLD shows a pop-up with price quotes from several different registrars, usually with significant differences in price. This is a beautiful tool.

Domize offers fast, powerful, find-as-you-type domain name search originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It sometimes happens that a certain word eludes me. I know it exists, I even know what it sounds like or how it begins or ends -- but for the life of me, I can't recall what the exact word is. For situations like these, Tip of My Tongue can come in very handy. To find the word "download," I only had to tell it that it starts and ends with D, has W somewhere in the middle, and means "transfer."

The search is very fast, done on-the-fly, as you type. You can search by word parts (beginning, middle, end), by certain letters which it must have or can't have, or by its meaning (you get to specify up to three synonyms). You can then refine the search by specifying a minimum and maximum length, and even what the word sounds like (i.e, what it rhymes with).

To me, this seems to cover all bases. Even a vague notion of what a certain word is should be enough to hone in on that word using Tip of My Tongue. This is definitely one for any writer's toolbox.

Tip of My Tongue helps you find that word you're looking for originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 26 Nov 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Netflix launches $7.99 streaming-only plan, increases price of DVD plan originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 10:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google's HTML5 e-book begins to appear in newspapers originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Create a real book from your... Facebook originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google's beautiful HTML5 guide to the Web originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I find Google's Autocomplete (or "suggest") feature very interesting because it seems to have spawned a quite a few by-products. Web Seer is a nice example. You feed it with a couple of prefixes, and it polls Google for all of the suggestions for them and then spews out a simple visual representation.

The screenshot above shows a snippet of the output for "should they" versus "will my cat." Perhaps that's not the best example because these two searches aren't fully comparable; when I tried "can he be" versus "can she be," I got some more comparable results, such as "be so cold" for the guys and "be so heartless" for the girls (ouch!).

It's a Flash app, so if you happen to be taking part in the crusade against Flash, it won't work. But on the bright side, where it does work, it's very fast. There's no Submit button or anything like that - it's completely live and on-the-fly, with the graphic updating right as you type.

Web Seer lets you visually compare Google Autocomplete results originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Facebook does a Mashup with MySpace, syncs 'likes' across services originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Not everyone uses Google Reader; some people (a dying breed, perhaps) like to consume their RSS feeds locally, using a desktop feed reader. Firefox has long had a Live Bookmarks feature that gave it some of those "desktop feed reader" powers: Live Bookmarks understands RSS, and it can always show you a list of a website's most recent headlines.

RSS Live Links brings just that sort of functionality to Google Chrome, along with a nice extra feature: instant notifications.

Whenever one of the feeds you've subscribed to updates, you get a nice sound effect (a human voice going "Boing!"), the icon shakes, and an unread count appears. When you then click the icon, you can see a list of the unread items in each feed, and hover over them to see a preview. Naturally, clicking an item opens it in a new tab.

This is a powerful add-on; it has a very rich configuration interface, with no less than 20 different options (I counted!). You can also configure the color scheme, select one of several different notification sounds, and customize it in a myriad other ways. Slick!

RSS Live Links for Chrome lets you monitor news feeds in real-time originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gravity attempts to be the Pandora of the Web originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google branches out into machine-curated high-fashion with Boutiques.com originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

When Microsoft launched IE9, they sponsored a number of interesting demo projects to showcase its hardware acceleration and HTML5 support. I posted about one of these projects some time ago - A Rough Guide To The World.

The Endless Mural is another such showcase project. It's a drawing application with a twist: as you make gestures and draw lines across the canvas, fractals bloom in your wake. That means your gestures serve as a rough outline that the application uses to render a ton of abstract-looking "glyphs" that spiral, explode, and do all sorts of crazy things.

You're not going to draw anything coherent with this, but if you like abstract art, it's certainly fun. It's also surprisingly fine-grained. When you click the Draw menu, you get a selection of four different "gesture behaviors," such as swarm, burst, spiral, etc. You also get to pick from twelve different artwork sets (used for the glyphs drawn on the canvas), and each of those has four possible color variations.

When you're done expressing your inner artist, you can save your work and add it to the site's namesake, the "endless mural" itself. That's a showcase of all of the art created with the site. When you view a drawing in the mural, you can hit Play and see a complete animated playback of how it was created.

One of the things I like about the project is how tasteful Microsoft's sponsorship is. There is no huge IE9 logo plastered all over the page, and you won't find an irritating banner exclaiming "best viewed under IE9." In fact, I've used it with Chrome, and it worked beautifully. The only evidence of Microsoft's support is in small print on the front page of the site: "made possible by the generous support of Microsoft and Internet Explorer 9." That's very nice.

The Endless Mural is an abstract HTML5-powered drawing canvas originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Digg now has a staff-picked Breaking News section originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Twitter connects with Apple's Ping for easy music sharing originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

SugarSync ups free storage to 5 GB, now allows any number of connected devices originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Twitter Tuesday - Are Twitter location check-ins coming soon?

Twitter Tuesday - Are Twitter location check-ins coming soon? originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google News enhanced for Android, iPhone and Palm Pre originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Sure, you can always just google "15.2 feet in inches," but really, where's the finesse in that? Where's the excitement -- the feeling of turning a knob, cranking a machine, and getting something done?

In other words, if you're seriously bored and feel like using a more tricked out tool for your conversions you could do worse than this little Conversion Tool. The strangest tidbit about this tool is that it is hosted under a real estate marketing website. From what I gather, they cater to Americans who wish to buy property in France (hence the need for unit conversion).

The tool itself looks quite slick, and as far as I can tell (after rummaging through the source code), it does not seem to use Flash at all. It offers conversions between a fairly limited set of measurement units - you get just six weight units, two temperature units, and six length/distance units. It's fairly basic, but it's an interesting design nonetheless.

Conversion Tool lets you easily convert length, temperature, and weight originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 06 Nov 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.