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During today's F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of new products and features for Facebook, including a new collaboration with Microsoft. With Docs.com , Microsoft's FUSE labs just launched an online document editor and viewer that connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features for third-party sites that Facebook announced today. Docs, for example, allows users to share documents with their Facebook friends, edit them collaboratively and discover documents that their friends have uploaded to their profiles. Sponsor Creating Documents in the Cloud and Sharing them With Your Facebook Friends With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn't working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running. In addition to being able to create and view documents, Docs.com's Facebook integration will also allow your friends to discover these documents (if you choose to share them). You can also add a new tab to your profile page that shows all the documents you have shared with your friends. This also means that you can use Facebook to discuss these documents in public, just like you would discuss any other status update on the site. Attacking Google There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs . Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service's collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft's products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software. It remains to be seen how many people in an office environment will really want to connect their documents to Facebook. For students and other Facebook users who aren't using this tool in a corporate environment and just want to share documents with each other, however, this looks like a great solution. Discuss
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Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs
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You're looking at what might be the first published cartoon created on an iPad. (Certainly the first one published on ReadWriteWeb.) From the moment rumours about an Apple tablet got serious, I was eager to learn whether it could be a vehicle for actual cartooning. Much of the buzz wasn't promising, suggesting the device would be geared more to consumers than content creators. Sponsor Yet even a device as small as the iPhone has shown remarkable potential with the advent of software like Brushes , which produced artwork good enough - admittedly, thanks to a very talented artist - to become a New Yorker cover . So when Steve Jobs made his Jan. 27 announcement, I was hoping against hope to hear that the device might be a worthy competitor to my beloved (but heavy and unwieldy) Cintiq . In retrospect, that was wildly unrealistic, but I was still disappointed not to hear words like "pressure-sensitive" or "stylus". Yesterday, thanks to the heroic early-morning efforts of my wife , I got my hands on an iPad of my own. And after seeing what my daughter did with Doodle Buddy, I quickly installed Brushes and Autodesk's SketchBook Pro - two drawing apps for nominal grown-ups. After a little experimentation, I landed on SketchBook as my tool of choice for my first experimental cartoon. Still, I had a problem: my big ol' meaty index finger, which is not only a terribly imprecise drawing tool but also a very effective obstacle to seeing just what it is I'm drawing. I quickly found myself hankering for the fine-grained control of my Cintiq's stylus. That was when I remembered the Pogo Sketch ... and discovered it was sold at the same Apple store that sold us our iPads. The Sketch is a slender stylus ending, not in a thin nylon tip like a Wacom stylus, but a soft kind-of-rubbery material that does the same capacitive magic as your finger. And in conjunction with SketchBook Pro, it seemed to mimic pressure-sensitivity. (That's important to many cartoonists, who like the dynamic feel of a line that changes width as they draw.) Most important, it allowed a degree of precision and control I just can't get with my finger, and it allowed me to draw the cartoon you see here. I can't say it's the same quality as cartoons I draw on the Cintiq or with pen and ink... but it's infinitely better than anything I'd achieved on the iPhone. And to me, at least, it holds the promise - as I get a little more practice - of becoming a truly portable sketching, inking and coloring solution. I can see it coming in handy for liveblogging, rough sketches or, on the road, an alternative to more desperate measures . How about you - if you're planning on getting an iPad, will you be using it mainly to read, view and hear content, or will it be a creative outlet, too? And if so, what are you going to make? More Noise to Signal. Discuss
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Cartoon: iPad: Content Reader Or Creative Platform?
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Currently, your contacts live in address books that are distributed all over the Internet and your desktop. Because of this, chances are that you have numerous address books on the web that are often "inconsistent and disjointed." Contacts , a new Mozilla Labs project, wants to put an end to this. The Contacts addon creates a local database for all your email and Twitter contacts that can then be used by your browser and any website that supports Contacts' API. Sponsor Thanks to this, you can now import all your Gmail contacts to the local database and use this contact info to autocomplete forms anywhere on the web. You can also import data about your Twitter friends and if you are on a Mac, you can import your local address book as well. Contacts will also import avatars from Gravatar whenever they are available. Lots of Ambition Beyond Autocompletion This email autocompletion feature is really just a first step for Mozilla, though. The real mission of this tool is to give users more control over their own data - a mission that is also very much in sync with what Mozilla considers its own mission to be these days. When you import your contacts database on most websites today to check if your friends are already online or to invite them to the service, you have to trust this service that it will keep this data private. Once more sites implement Contacts directly into their services, however, you will be able to control exactly what data a third-party site can access and retain control over this data. The current version of Contacts consists of four pieces: a browser-based database that syncs with your address books. Contacts uses the Portable Contacts format to represent this data in the database. a generic importer system that allows developers to create importers for desktop and web-based address books an email autocompletion feature a Javascript API that third-party sites can use to access all of your data (with explicit permission and the ability to filter the data) Give it a Try After installing the addon, you can test both the autocomplete and the tool's export features here . Discuss
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New Mozilla Labs Project Wants to Give You Total Control Over Your Address Book
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Twitter
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For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We've moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com ? For that, there's Brizzly , a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two. Sponsor The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you're clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that - embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter. Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn't offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it's limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that's as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs - all the standard stuff you would expect. As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called "News". Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a "permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about," it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be "integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide" the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting. Discuss
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Brizzly Releases iPhone App
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Springpad , a rival to Evernote's popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it's a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn't want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant. Sponsor Evernote vs Springpad: the iPhone App While Evernote is, at this point, still the more robust product when it comes to supported platforms -the company offers Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Blackberry versions in addition to a platform-agnostic "web clipper" - Springpad is starting to catch up. Along with the numerous enhancements launching today, the company now offers their own "web clipper" browser bookmarklet (previously in beta) along with an iPhone application for mobile note-taking and reminders. Like Evernote's iPhone app, Springpad's app (iTunes link) lets you input text or snap a photo, but it also integrates a barcode scanner which takes advantage of the phone's camera in order to record and save a specific product. In addition, the iPhone app lets you browse items by type in case there's something you want to remember, but don't have it right in front of you. This is ideal for adding things like restaurants or movies - the sort of things that come up in conversation ("You really should rent this movie - it's great!") but are later forgotten as we return to our busy lives. The Smart Web Clipper Knows What You're Bookmarking Also new today is the web clipper. Now out of beta, this bookmarking tool lets you save anything you see on the Internet to your notes. This can be a product, a restaurant, a book, a movie, a recipe, a wine, a business or just a simple bookmark of a page which you can choose to annotate if desired. What's different about this tool is the way it uses semantic technology to understand what it is that you're saving and offer relevant links to other information when you view it again in Springpad. For example, after adding a recipe, you'll be provided with "quick links" for actions like "add to shopping list," "search for coupons," "send to me" (an email option) and "print recipe." You can also add your own notes or personal tags (e.g., "March dinner party") if desired. The App Store: Do Something with your Notes Springpad users also have an included app store that helps you do things with the items you save. Although not listed among today's updates, this is arguably one of the company's standout features which should appeal both to new users or those switching from Evernote. Instead of just providing a searchable repository of notes and saved items, Springpad lets you add apps that help you actually do something with the items you collected. There's a wine notebook for those who want to record wine reviews and selections, a weekly meal planner for recipe snippers, a movie tracker for film aficionados, a travel checklist for vacation planning and even a blog post planner for scribes like us. And there are dozens more, too. Additionally, later this year, Springpad will launch an API for developers who want to build their own apps for this directory. More of What's New: Sharing Tools & a Smart Quick-Add Bar Other new features today include social sharing option which lets you post to Facebook and Twitter, a personalized email address for sending in thoughts, notes, itineraries and confirmation numbers, and a smart "quick-add bar." This bar lets you type in anything into Springpad's web interface to receive a list of suggestions from across a number of web services and the publicly shared notes from other Springpad users. If you find yourself always coming across suggestions from particular users, you may want to "friend" them on Springpad. The friending model used here is one that mimics Twitter's involving one-way connections betweens followers and "followees." This makes Springpad more social than Evernote without the pressures of having to accept or reject requests like on Facebook. As of now, Springpad has a lot to offer those interested in a web-based and mobile note-taking application. However, you may find Evernote to be a slightly more stable service. We ran into a couple of slowdowns when using Springpad's website today. In addition, the suggestions displayed in the quick-add bar aren't as speedy as your typical search engine's autosuggest feature is. However, if you're looking to do more with your notes than simply collect them, Springpad is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Evernote. It's no longer a mere note-taking app - it's more of a digital assistant...and who couldn't use one of those? Discuss
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Springpad Takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner
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