Category: Web services

Mint is pretty much the behemoth of personal budget management. But it's also a tad complex, and it's very American. If you happen to live outside the US, you probably won't be able to use all of Mint's options. Sprouty is no Mint-killer; it doesn't seem to have any such aspirations, either. It's a very, very simple budgeting application that feels intentionally international: I could not find a ...

Scraping is a technique whereby a website or tool extracts select information from another website. For example, when you type a difficult word into Google and instantly see a definition for that word from some Web dictionary, that's because Google "scraped" that information from the dictionary. The term (and practice) has some negative connotations, because scrapers can be used to steal blog ...

Gmail's very useful voice calling service is even more useful now, with the addition of call recording. The call recording feature enables you to save your Google voice chats without using any additional software. For incoming Google Voice calls only, you'll see a button to start/stop recording right in your call window. Call recording might be great for doing interviews, but it's not very ...

Facebook and MySpace held a joint event today to announce MySpace's new Mashup with Facebook feature, which can sync all of your Facebook "likes" to MySpace in one click. MySpace will be getting Facebook like buttons, rolling out across the service starting today. Interests on MySpace will also be linked to relevant interests on Facebook, and MySpace will use your Facebook data to recommend ...

Third-party services have been experimenting with various ways of measuring Twitter reputation for some time now, but it turns out that Twitter has its own internal scoring system, and every user has an official reputation score. Twitter hasn't made the algorithm -- or the scores themselves -- public, but former CEO Evan Williams told the Web 2.0 Summit that the scores factor into Twitter's "Who ...

ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter has just signed an agreement with Gnip, a social data streaming service, to offer half of Twitter's total message traffic for $360,000/year. That is, if you want to analyze Twitter data, you're going to have to pay Gnip for the privilege. With this move, Twitter is effectively outsourcing the "tweet analysis" business. The tweets sold via Gnip are not for display ...

Twitter has been teasing users with an analytics service for some time, a way to track the vital statistics about your tweets and the responses they get. Well, Twitter Analytics has entered a small invitation-only test phase, and the first screenshots are starting to dribble out. Mashable has two screenshots, one showing a "timeline activity" page, with your follows and unfollows over time, ...

Hey, Twitter fans! Before we jump into this week's cool apps, there's a bit of gossip hanging over the Twitterverse, and I don't think I can sneak by without mentioning that the Twitter founding team of Ev, Biz and Jack is now back together after Jack Dorsey's return to Twitter. Jack was one of the original creators of Twitter, and he served as CEO when the company launched. Later, Evan ...

Yahoo has just launched Mafia Wars and FishVille, two games developed by Zynga, the company best known for FarmVille and its other games on the Facebook platform. In the past few months though, Zynga has shifted away from being tied exclusively to Facebook and has launched its games on Windows Live Messenger, MSN Games -- and now Yahoo. Mafia Wars and FishVille will appear in Yahoo ...

With Google calling out Facebook last week for trapping your contacts, it seems like a perfect time to offer a solution for rescuing those Facebook contacts and their email addresses -- sorry, still no phone numbers -- and exporting them to Gmail or your other address book of choice. To do this, you'll need a Yahoo! account (Mozilla's Asa Dotzler says a Windows Live account works, too). It's ...

Google Hotpot is new a social place recommendation engine built on Google's existing Place pages. Up until now, Places have been rated and reviewed based on outside sources like Yelp, but Hotpot lets users rate local establishments using their Google Profiles. After you've entered a few ratings, Hotpot will use your tastes to recommend other places you might like, sort of like a Netflix for ...

A rumor has started making the rounds across the interwebs, and it has something to do with Google possibly launching a fashion shopping site. Apparently, it all started with a tweet from an "anonymous New York fashion PR", according to Frockwriter. That tweet was the cause for a lot of coverage in itself, until it was made public that many people in the fashion world had been invited to a Google ...

Zoho -- the popular Web-based office suite -- has added another component to its customer support offerings. In addition to Zoho Assist, their Java-based remote assistance app, the company is now offering Zoho Support, a full-featured help desk application. Support packs tons of essential features, from managing customer requests and contracts to maintaining tasks and contacts. There's also a ...

Digg has announced that it's adding a Breaking News module to its service. The module can be seen on the right side of the Top News, My News and Upcoming pages on Digg. Right now it shows five stories at a time, with one of them being highlighted as a Hot Story. The new section will also allow Digg to aggregate stories on a particular topic. Unlike the rest of Digg, where users control the ...

Apple's Ping social network, built for sharing music preferences with your friends via iTunes, disappeared from everyone's radar right after it launched. It might be getting a second wind now, though, thanks to a partnership with Twitter. Ping now lets you discover and add your Twitter contacts, and share your Ping posts as tweets. Here's how it works, according to Twitter's official blog: ...