Pownce is Kevin Rose’s (of Digg.com fame) latest venture. Its pretty much Scrapping meets Mini-Blogging meets File Sharing. Personally, I am not a fan of Twitter and similar services. I am not interested in knowing if my friend is taking a bath or eating breakfast or is getting a massage. In spite of that I see definite potential in Pownce. There are two things that makes it stand out.
Ability to send files to a single person, to a group or to everyone in my buddy list.
Similarly you can send messages, links and event updates to a single person, to a group or to everyone.

Pownce is mainly web based however a light-weight desktop module based on Adobe’s Apollo (AIR) is also available.
I am not going to review it in detail but if you are interested you should check out Mashable and Webware’s coverage.

Pownce is still very young and I expect a lot more from it in the future. If you want to try it, just leave a comment here requesting an invitation. Make sure that you provide your proper email address, Pownce doesn’t like temporary email providers. I have six invites left.

P.S. : Thanks to The Witness Exchange for inviting me to Pownce.

Last week I had reviewed a new search engine called Spock. Spock allows you to search for people and people related themes. You can read my review here. Spock is a very impressive service with a lot of potential. It was one of the 12 new and promising startups showcased Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session.

Spock is still in closed beta. However, I have 100 invites to give away. If you are interested just drop a comment here. Just make sure that you use your full name and real email address while commenting.

Reinvigorate is a new free web analytics service. It offers everything that a standard website metrics service provides, but it offers so much more.

Reinvigorate sports a very clean and well organised web interface, that’s not only functional but also fast. Let’s have a look at various reports offered by Reinvigorate.

Traffic : Reinvigorate displays the number of page views and the number of unique visitors on an hourly, daily and monthly basis using tables and graphs. The screenshot below demonstrates some of the graphs offered by Reinvigorate.

Traffic (Graphical)

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Consider this situation. You have just downloaded a file from a little known website. And although your antivirus didnt detect anything malicious you suspect that the file may be a rogue file. And since no antivirus software has a 100% detection rate (many popular AV software have a detection rate of below 90%) it is possible that you are right. What should you do?

Thanks to web-services like Jotti’s Malware Scan and Virustotal you can now get your file scanned by multiple antivirus engines. These services allow you to upload any file and get it scanned by several antivirus softwares. Virustotal scans every file using 30 antivirus engines where as Jotti checks every file with 18 antivirus engines. However most of the time Virustotal servers are overloaded and you are made to wait in queue. If the file isnt deemed clean by all AV engines then it’s safe to assume that it is clean (unless its a 0-day exploit).

Last month I recieved an invitation from Diogenes to share my opinion on blogging and related matters on his blog - Quassi Fictional. Quassi Fictional has been running a series called The Fine Art of Blogging for quite some time. Bloggers are invited to share their opinion on blogging and related matters. So far more than fifty bloggers (including me) have contributed to the series. You can view the full list here. Be sure to check out all the posts and if you have a blog you are also invited.

Spock is a new (vertical) search engine with a difference - it’s a people search engine. According to Spock press release thirty percent of all internet searches are people related, and this is the market they are targeting. Like other search engines Spock employs bots that crawl the web looking for people related information. According to its CEO Jaideep Singh it has so far indexed more than 100 million people.

I have been playing around with Spock for last couple of days and I must say I am extremely impressed. It presents the search result in a very well organised manner which ensures that you are able to find the information about the person quickly and easily. Below is the search result for famous Indian author and film maker Satyajit Ray.
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Ever since Facebook opened itself up and released an API to programmers, there has been a mad rush to take advantage of Facebook platform. Tons of new apps are being added everyday. To those who don’t know - Facebook is a social networking website. Recently it opened itself up to 3rd party developers giving them access to its functionalities. Facebook applications are essentially widgets that can be added to enhance your social networking experience. So far several hundred Facebook applications have been created. Obviously I haven’t tried them all. However, among the ones I have tried my top five Facebook applications (in random order) are :

HotLists : Hotlist is based on the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words. Use icons to display what you like - be it companies or television shows or movies or music or celebrities. I prefer this to using simple text to list out your preferences.

Graffiti : Let your creative juice flow. Instead of just posting simple messages on the wall you can draw them using this application. This can be loads of fun and is a nice way to kill time.

Last.fm Music : Last.fm is a website that tracks what songs you listen to and suggests music based on your music taste. Not only does the last.fm widget display recently played tracks it also allows you to create custom (tag based) radio station. It also displays your top artists for the previous week.

You can also use the Last.fm Plus application. It doesn’t have last.fm radio but provides a lot more options as far as displaying statistics is concerned.
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We already have several web based Office suites. Hence, it’s only natural that someone would come up with web based web-design tool. Here are three web-based web-design tools.

Synthasite : The newest kid in the block is Synthasite. It sports an advanced tabbed interface that is very similar to desktop based solutions. It offers a rage of templates to get you started. Synthasite is widget based and you need to drag and drop widgets to create your website. Currently not many widgets are available but that is again due to it’s young age. Synthasite is in early technical preview stage and there are many quirks. It also made Firefox unresponsive on a couple of occasions. Also note that the content created during tech preview may be lost when newer versions are released. South Africa-based Synthasite has ambitious plans. Expect a lot of new features in the coming days.

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