The shining part is that it is a portable application, so you wont need to hassle with installing the application. It has a capability of searching data instantly, you can also set it to search text within files. The interface is quite handy in terms of using the application as one permanent explorer. The main navigation bar at the top will enable you to quickly navigate through the files and folders, search data, view media files in respective applications, switch views, etc. You can open frequently used folders in tabs to quickly access them whenever you want. Another noteworthy aspect is that it let users save the sessions, so they can open the saved windows without wasting any time. Sessions can be saved from Sessions menu, where you can load and save the session in multiple ways.

You can play audio & video media files in its native player, which is not full-featured but carries ample playback options to get along with. It also includes a simple text editor and image viewer. However, you can always use your favorite application for playing media files or viewing images.

The application is highly customizable, it offers a long list of thematic layouts. Under Tools menu, click Settings to bring up application configuration window where you can change General, Tabs and Display settings. Under Display window, you can switch to different themes for applying the best one out of the lot.

Overall, it is one neat application carrying some enhanced features and options to explore your system without much effort involved. Features like; saving sessions, bookmarking elements and tabbed interface are the most prominent and useful from the rest of features it offer.

It runs on all Windows based OS, we tested it on  Windows 7 x86 system.

Download CubicExlplorer

If this intersection of 3 key social software trends is someday exposed more fully to all 500 million Facebook users and more – the Facebook vs. Google battle could become a fight between Recommendation and Search. Facebook recommendations are in the sidebar for most users today, but they are so powerful that it’s worth betting they’ll be center stage in the future.

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User demographics, audience engagement metrics and syndicated feed subscription are each data plays that can change the way software intersects with users. Put them all together and there may never have been a platform that knew so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made subscription so easy for such an incredible number of people.

What other website do people tell as much about themselves as Facebook? What other website do people connect as directly with people they know in the physical, off-line world? Facebook’s ability to recommend friends that you actually know when you create an account, based only on your email address, is pretty jaw dropping in and of itself. Facebook says the page recommendation is based on users similar to yourself, but these recommendations are surfaced before you fill out your profile information. Facebook is using some seriously magical secret sauce to figure out who your friends might be, then what you might like based on your shared demographics, before asking you anything more than your email, name and age. That’s pretty amazing. Presumably they are pinging 3rd party email databases – but that would be an interesting story to dig into!

All these personal details and connections can be cross referenced to create a rich picture of who you are and what you might like. There have been a lot of behind-the-scenes user tracking and profiling technologies developed over recent years – but what can come close to a system people opt-into and tell all about themselves?

Likewise, Facebook has for years been paying very close attention to the click-through, commenting and update-hiding rates of publishers on its platform. If your application gets a good response from users, for example, it’s allowed to push more updates out over time. If relatively few people click on your links, then applications see their rate of allowed updates lowered.

Organizations, “brands” and other publishers with Fan Pages that people subscribe to (“Like”) have their click-through rates tracked similarly. On the surface at least, it’s a pretty straight-forward relationship between user demographics, publishers you’re most likely to be interested in and who get a lot of engagement from their current subscribers.

The end result is subscribers for publishers on the Facebook platform and subscriptions for users. RSS never caught on with the mainstream, but Facebook updates have. Subscription to syndicated updates from a potentially infinite variety of niche publishers has long been one of the dreams of the internet. This represents an important upgrade from Facebook’s introduction of about 100 suggested Pages to Like in February.

The Google-Battling Power of Recommendations

That Facebook says these recommendations cannot be purchased and are entirely algorithmic is very important. That’s an important nod towards the democratizing nature of the system. Another would be if the algorithm privileged some relevant and high-quality but long tail publishers – not just what’s popular and successful among similar people. It’s hard to believe there won’t be some paid option some time in the future.

Recommendation-geeks have argued that recommendation may someday become bigger, more important and more lucrative than search. Recommendation is like a smarter, pre-emptive search before you even thought to search for anything. The richness of the data that this is based on inside Facebook is truly incredible. This could be how the battle between Facebook and Google plays out: as Recommendation vs. Search. User demographics vs. search personalization. Publisher engagement vs. Pagerank. Now what does Google have to offer against Facebook’s key feature – the Newsfeed people opt-in to get subscriptions (and ads, basically) pushed in front of them, side by side with baby pictures and friend updates, into the indefinite future?

It’s too bad this had to happen under a proprietary platform with privacy problems. These subscriptions people sign up for were turned irretrievably public in the Great Privacy Implosion of last December. The idea of irretrievably public subscriptions is comparable to a requirement that your library book check-out history be printed on paper and nailed to the front door of your house. It’s crazy and anti-social. Then, at the last F8 Facebook developers’ conference, the company changed this policy and allowed users to make their subscriptions private – though they still default to being public.

None the less, I’m not sure there’s ever been a platform in history that knew so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made subscription so easy for so many people.

Get and discuss ReadWriteWeb updates on Facebook here.

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First off, let me say that Microsoft does not favor, endorse, or promote any particular EA framework.  We have had experience with numerous approaches and frameworks, have developed our own metamodel and framework for internal use that guides our strategic planning.  Our consulting organization, Microsoft Consulting Services has many Enterprise Architects among the ranks.

Selected Links:

Nick Malik (me):

• Value of EA (link), (link),
• Functions of EA (link),
• Double Iron Triangle of EA (link)
• Job desc for Business Architect (link),
• EA vs. SA (link),
• IEEE1471 and EA (link),
• measuring EA (link),
• On being relevant (link)
• Multiple interacting teams (link)
• Review of TOGAF 9 (link),

Gabriel Morgan:

• EA vs. SA (link),
• traceability (link),

Mike Walker:

• EATK article (link)

And of course, there’s the Wikipedia’s entry (to which I have contributed) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_architecture

Here are some useful blog posts from some friends in the blogosphere:

Leo de Souza: EA Maturity Model (link)

Chris Potts: Definition of EA (link), Moving EA out of IT (link)

Adrian Grigoriu: Review of Gartner Emergent EA (link)

The site’s value has been hotly debated since its launch with some saying it’s an incredible recommendation service while others say it’s a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Interestingly enough, it was featured yesterday on the New York Times, where that same question was posed to readers.

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Update: Blippy’s Response

Blippy just posted an update on the company blog, arguing that the security breach “looks super-scary and certainly sucks for the 4 people who were affected (to whom we apologize and are contacting), and is embarrassing to us, it’s a lot less bad than it looks.”

You can find Blippy’s full explanation here.

Thanks to a tipster who apparently emailed all the popular technology blogs (see: VentureBeat, Mashable, CenterNetworks for more coverage), there’s a way to enter a simple search query into Google and get back the credit card numbers of Blippy users.

The query is: site:blippy.com +"from card"

At present, this security hole seems to be affecting Citibank-issued MasterCard numbers only, according to the bloggers at VentureBeat.

Blippy proponents will likely argue that the mistake, although quite a large one, was caught in time before major damage could be done. It’s doubtful that any identity thieves have been able to retrieve these credit card numbers quickly enough to cause harm to those affected.

However, the users whose credit card info has been compromised will now have to cancel their cards and be issued new ones – a hassle to say the least. Was the benefit of using Blippy worth it? What if this security hole was only discovered by criminals and not a white-hat hacker-type like the guy who contacted us?

We’ve argued before that people should definitely weigh the risks to their privacy before using services like Blippy, especially since you’re not just sharing info from one private credit card account, you’re aggregating all of them. If Blippy’s infrastructure was compromised, hackers could get all your credit card info and the usernames and passwords you use across the Web, too. (Probably the same one you use everywhere, if you’re like most people).

If that risk is acceptable to you, then by all means, share away. You might find it interesting to see what others have shared too. But when something like this happens, don’t be surprised. Nothing put on the Web is ever really private – as this breach clearly shows.

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However, there’s a small problem with this new, easy-to-use new tool: it’s possible to trick users into liking anything – even pages they’ve never visited!

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“Likes” – A New Tool for Spammers?

As Arnab Nandi, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, recently discovered, it’s simple to create a like button for a page you’re not even on.

Using the wizard provided by Facebook, you can create a button for any URL you want and embed it on your site.

Why would anyone want to do this, you ask? While no self-respecting webmaster would want to deceive a visitor to their site, says Nandi, an “enterprising spammer” certainly would. By tricking site visitors into “liking” something by mistake, spammers could immediately place their links into that person’s News Feed, a feed seen by all of that person’s friends. And since an average Facebook user has 130 friends, even tricking a handful of people into doing this gives the spammer access to hundreds, potentially thousands, more people.

Nandi already coined a word for this new hack: “News Feed Spam.”

And yes, it will exist.

How the Button Works

Creating your own evil like button is incredibly simple, as we’ve demonstrated below. Nandi uses the “safe for work” example of “liking” the Britney Spears site in the example on his blog, but we know that our readers don’t want that affiliation in their News Feed for even an instant, so we created a much safer example for you to try by using our own Twitter account as the “like” target. (Really, we promise!).

Although you can remove the “like” from your News Feed after clicking, when you “like” something on Facebook, the affiliation is now attached to the Open Graph API. That means that your “like” data is associated with your profile, even if you remove it from showing in your News Feed.

In any event, all we did was fill in the necessary info into Facebook’s wizard and we got code for the button below:

(NYT readers, visit the original site for the demo).

If you click that button, you’ll see that you just “liked” ReadWriteWeb’s Twitter account, not this post or this website.

So the question now is this: did Facebook make the “like” button too simple? Should the button display more info about the target of the like so you know what you’re getting into? Will this problem become so widespread that people begin to fear “liking” things across the net? What do you think?

Image credit for original post: Zazzle

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Now they have released Amberjack 2.0, which allows easy creation of On-Page Tutorials. Users can navigate with bubble arrows, keyboard right/left or mouse click left/right. Text bubbles explain page elements to your visitors. You can also use HTML and CSS knowledge to customize the bubbles as you like. Embed a video is also possible.

You can have a look at the source here. However, we have to wait a bit longer, in order to get more tutorials and documentation of Amberjack 2.0.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://amberjack2.org/
License: LGPL

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Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

Google, AT&T, General Electric, Intel, The Climate Group and the Natural Resources Defense Council and others will hold an event tomorrow titled "Power in Numbers: Unleashing Innovation in Home Energy Use.”

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“By giving people the ability to monitor and manage their energy consumption, for instance, via their computers, phones or other devices,” the group wrote in its letter to the President, “we can unleash the forces of innovation in homes and businesses.”

Substantial challenges stand in the way of widespread smart-grid innovation. We highlighted a write-up by green tech reporter Katie Fehrenbacher last year that discussed the foot dragging going on in the world of local utility providers. (Why Smart Grids Could Be Slow to Beat Web 2.0) Fehrenbacher argued that utility companies don’t get it, are afraid of the costs, and are thus unlikely to offer the kind of “real time” data delivery that could serve as a foundation for eye-opening innovation like we’ve seen from the networked world of the Internet.

Fehrenbacher wrote last year.

Many people (myself included) have painted a picture of how the consumer piece of the smart grid could develop into a real-time, two-way communication network that looks a lot like the Internet. In that world, consumers would be able to see variable pricing change in real time, while smart meters and energy management devices read and visualize energy consumption data every second, leading to changes in consumer behavior. The ultimate vision of that landscape is that real-time energy data unleashes innovations and applications that we haven’t yet thought of, which will deliver substantial behavior changes.
Well, that’s the outcome for which entrepreneurs and innovators are hoping. The reality is that the consumer piece of the smart grid will look very different for many years to come.

Perhaps a large coalition of organizations can prompt meaningful government support that will engage with these and other obstacles to energy data innovation.

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You are welcome if you want to share more useful web apps that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at  smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter , follow us on Google Buzz and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.

YourAM

YourAM is a web based solution. There is no software to install. YourAM is built to automate your appointment management so that you can simply focus on your core business. This can be used for busy individuals or large organizations that need to automatically track, organize and manage appointments.

Meetifyr

Sometimes you just want to know which night in the next few weeks is best to meet up with friends. You don’t need a intergrated lifestyle tracking solution you just need to know when people are free. Meetifyr is the worlds simplest online shared calendar. You create a calendar, add your name and availability then send the link round to your friends to see when they’re free. It’s really that simple, try it if you don’t believe us.

BetaEasy

BetaEasy is equally useful for web sites/applications as well as for classic  desktop applications. This service helps you to built your own community of users who will cooperate with you and contribute to your website/software improvement. All feedback is collected in one place, priorities are clearly identified, feedback is turned to improvement. It’s really easy to get started.

Springnote

Springnote is a great way for you to create notebooks for ideas, interests, multimedia, projects, and documents. It allows you to create pages, to work on them together with your friends, and to share files.

Preceden

Preceden is a free web 2.0 timeline visualization tool that lets you you make simple, powerful timelines for just about anything. This is perfect for autobiographies because our timelines lets you organize your life’s events into layers like relationships, location, education, jobs, etc. By organizing events in layers, you can see exactly how the important events in your life overlap.

Reddynote

Reddynote is a clear and comprehensive work platform, where all your tasks are being listed. Only a quick look on the platform allows you to see your status, tags (keywords) and progress of every single task you have.

CalendarFly

CalendarFly is the next generation free scheduling solution. CalendarFly is uniquely suited for school systems, sports teams, families, and any other organization because it automatically maintains and updates the schedules of teachers, administrators, coaches, parents, and students–making it easy for all of them to connect in real time and real places.

Bill4Time

With Bill4Time, you will always know where you money is going and how your business is performing. Monitor employee progress, client activity, unbilled time, and everything else you need to successfully manage your growing practice.

HiTask

HiTask is a friendly and easy-to-use task management system that anyone can start using right away. It is designed to satisfy both sophisticated followers of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology and anyone who just needs a quick and easy tool to manage their everyday tasks.

Needtomeet

You can use Needtomeet’s free and simple calendar to find a time that works for everyone. It will help you to see everyone’s availability at a glance. It is simple no-fuss way to find a time for your event. You dont need to download anything, no registration, and best of all, it’s free for everyone.

MakeSomeTime

Tracking time has never been easier. Keep your times organised by clients, projects and tasks with MakeSomeTime. This is super easy and having simple user interface. No clutter. Just what you need to get your work done.

Fileshare HQ

Fileshare HQ is a great place to store and share files. You can upload files using the easy web admin, or you can use FTP and load direct to your account. You can use FileShareHQ from the web, or with your favourite FTP client, to upload files and share them with the team, clients or friends.

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Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that “the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless.” There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in.

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The proposed change was first written about by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, who called it Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For.

Here’s the language Facebook used to describe the draft policy:

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy.

That sounds downright creepy. It’s nice to have one-click access to your Facebook info if you decide to share it with other sites – that’s what Facebook Connect does – but the prospect of having that information automatically shared when you show up on another website seems like an idea that won’t be well received by users. There’s a big difference between opt-in and opt-out “data portability.”

Schnitt says: “People love personalized and social experiences and that’s why Facebook and Facebook Connect have been so successful. We think there are some instances where people would benefit from this experience as soon as they arrive on a small number of trusted websites that we pre-approve.”

In that interview, Schnitt also acknowledged that business reasons, like pageviews and advertising, were part of why Facebook was transforming away from privacy as well. We asked if this new opt-out Facebook Connect was the first step in a Facebook Ad Network, where your profile on Facebook is used to target ads that Facebook sells on sites all over the web. Schnitt told us, “this has absolutely nothing to do with advertising.”

Do you buy all that?

Do you trust Facebook to select trustworthy websites to automatically share your data with when you browse around the web? If you don’t trust Facebook’s judgement, you will be able to opt-out of exposing that data. But by default you’ll be sharing it.

By default, you’re sharing more and more these days, with more and more people. Perhaps that’s because of your love for Twitter and reality TV, but perhaps its because of Facebook’s cultural and commercial agenda.

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