As the Songbird-produced cartoon to the left shows, even though the browser is still in beta it’s getting stronger all the time.

The latest update, version 0.6 for Windows, Power PC Macs, Intel Macs, and Linux, includes the ability to handle turkey-size music collections greater than 10,000 songs, improved memory management, a metadata editor, improved portable player syncing, support for SHOUTcast, and more.

The code improvements have allowed for smoother scrolling, faster filtering, and just overall better management of music collections of any size. Songbird is well on its way to being a serious jukebox. Other fixes include the previously nonfunctional edit menu joining the land of the living and the introduction of in-page text searching.

Some of the improvements are no-brainers, but it’s good to know that they’ve been addressed.

With all the hoopla over Opera and the upcoming Firefox 3 final release, there’s a good chance that Songbird’s baby beta steps will get ignored, but this has been one of the most promising programs being developed, and v0.6 will only whet your appetite.

Obscura Digital produces interactive video and online installations. I got a tour of the company’s studio recently from its CEO, Patrick Connolly.

In addition to the demo of updated multitouch video wall (see video), I sat inside the 30-foot-diameter dome that Obscura can project anything on to. It’s been used to sell as yet unbuilt real estate, to wow VIPs during events at Google, and to pitch products for AOL and Pioneer at trade shows. Think of it as a new-tech planetarium, but one that projects primarily marketing imagery.

The company also makes much smaller domes, sized for individuals playing computer games.

Obscura’s core technology is its capability to map high-resolution, full-motion video to any surface a projecter can reach, and to manipulate it in real time. If you want to project a cutaway of a car’s working innards onto the car itself, call Obscura.

At the moment, Obscura does not make a consumer version of its technology, and there are no public installations of it. But Connolly told me his company is working on a consumer setup.

Marrying existing commercial projection technology with a wide-angle lens and software on a laptop that lets users easily tell the system where walls and ceilings are, it will be able to project any video, computer display, or static scene into any reasonably sized room. The software will keep straight lines straight even when they’re projected across crazy angles.

A rack of FireFrame image processing units.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

If you have a club or restaurant, though, and want to set up a permanent installation, you’ll need to grab some heavy-duty projectors and one or more of the company’s FireFrame image processor engines to drive them. Each is good for projecting a 4000×4000 pixel image.

As you can see in the video, the company also has technology to make its installations interactive.

As a business, Obscura has a better model than other interactive marketing and advertising companies like Reactrix.

Obscura builds installations on contract for companies that want to make big impressions. Reactrix, though, buys rights to install its displays in public venues and then sells advertising programs for those locations.

While the financial upside on that billboard model is potentially higher, the risk is also much greater, since Reatrix pays rent on its setups even when it doesn’t have income to offset it. Obscura, in contrast, doesn’t do anything for free.

No surpirse: I like what Obscura is trying to do. It’s taking what we generally think of as boxed-in displays–Web pages, videos–and projecting them into our environments.

While existing Web sites are most certainly not designed to be projected on walls or domes, nor shared by multiple stand-up viewers at the same time, the technology is very promising for the future of interactive media. The more of these displays get out there, the more designers will emerge to create immersive and creative applications that use them.

See also:
Gates demos TouchWall computer
Asus takes user interface to the next level

If you’re the type to favor user opinions over editorials, the Firefox plug-in WOT may be the site-rating service for you.

Unlike Grisoft LinkScanner (Pro and Lite), McAfee Site Advisor (for Internet Explorer and Firefox), or the NetCraft Toolbar (for Firefox and Internet Explorer), this extension, published by Web of Trust (WOT), relies on user-generated ratings seconded by Web-gathered statistics to determine key factors of site safety. Trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy, and child safety are the four vectors of participant voting. A lengthened color gradient from green (safe) to red (unsafe) offers five shades of ratings levels instead of the customary three.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Like the other site-rating tools, WOT surfaces ratings on the browser and from within Google and Yahoo search results. There’s also drop-down menu for rating sites from the search results page.

Extra context comes by way of a reputation scorecard that averages total users’ ratings, a link to Alexa statistics, user comments, and spam, fraud, malicious software, and customer service complaints. According to WOT’s Web site, it also garners some ratings from phishing and scam databases.

The extra user information is useful, particularly if you’re a more adventurous Web surfer, and it could indeed help guard users against zero-day security breaches for users who can attribute a compromised site to a malicious software attack in time. I’d recommend the extension as a companion to one of the algorithmic solutions above, but not necessarily as a replacement.

We’ve covered a ton of floor planners on Webware, but none of them have been as cool as MyDeco. The tool throws in the usual assortment of tables, chairs, beds, and other living accouterments that you can price, purchase, and move around in a customizable space.

The tool lets you emulate single rooms or an entire house by plugging in the dimensions and adding walls, windows, and doors. It also manages to give you a 3D view of what those items will look like in that space, not just from the top down like most floor planners. In this mode you can zoom around, or pinpoint any angles using a virtual camera and take snapshots to send to your cohabitants. It’s just plain cool.

I don’t think it’s really a perfect way to simulate the effects of moving actual furniture, but in about 10 minutes I had put together a pretty slick looking pad. Like I mentioned before you can actually purchase items you like through the tool’s sister site, although it’s based in the UK, meaning if you don’t live there you’ll have to track down the local counterparts.

Furniture juggernaut IKEA has its own tools that are a little similar but they’re separated into kitchen, bedroom, and office, and must be downloaded and installed on your machine. In that regard, MyDeco’s got the upper hand since it will run right in your browser as long as you’ve got Flash installed.

Related:
Floor Planner helps to plan your pad
Best4c does quick and slick charts
Gliffy, the online Visio killer

[via Delicious]

Create your pad in 3D with MyDeco's floor plan tool. Whether or not you can afford the ritzy additions is another thing.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Spickr is a strange take on the browser sidebar. These creations usually require you to install a small extension into your browser that will give you a new menu on the left or right side of your browser (see Yoono, gDocs Sidebar, et al). Instead, Spickr’s solution is to run everything inside top and side IFrames that contain a slew of links to various news and entertainment sites. Clicking on any of those links will load it up inside your browser while the Spickr interface remains.

Built in are a few tools like a Delicious bookmark viewer that opens up your saved bookmarks in the canvas while allowing you to hop back to open others. There’s also an Add This sharing tool integrated in the top corner along with a search tool that replaces the one in your browser. It’s the only way the service gets its cash (the same way your browser does), but it’s also in there so you can do a search without getting jettisoned off the Spickr interface.

Competing link repositories like Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop and Original Signal have had similar efforts for a while now, however, both of those let you see headlines and small scraps of stories. Spickr’s approach is simply the links and a simple way to come back to the directory in case you get lost. It ends up being a great way to explore new sites you may have never heard of. My only qualm is the categorization, which is all over the place. The tech section in particular has subcategories that I think could be done a little better. That said, there are in excess of 400 sites, which is quite a bit to sort through. Hopefully, in the future users will be able to help edit and shape the categories and even get rid of sites they don’t use.

The screenshot below really doesn’t do the service justice. You can give it a go with this page by clicking here.

Spickr lets you surf a large directory of categorized sites quickly and easily without leaving the directory. And there's nothing to install either. (Click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you insist on chatting with Facebook and Gmail buddies outside a browser window, then it’s worth taking Gabtastik for a spin, though as far as instant messaging applications go, the most interesting thing about Gabtastik is the technology.

As a Site Specific Browser (SSB) app based on Mozilla’s Prism project, Gabtastik, which released a Windows beta this week, tethers the Web chat ecosystem to a desktop application. From this standpoint, Gabtastik is a success. The Facebook chat and Google Talk GUIs are spot-on. The essential problem is that the chatting isn’t very interesting, and the program doesn’t do much beyond keeping each site’s proprietary chat actions and experience intact as is its nature as an specific, no-frills mini browser app. But good luck multichatting with contacts from both Facebook and Google–you’ll have to switch between the two interfaces each time, an either/or prospectus that doesn’t lend itself well to an unobstructed workflow and is worsened by the weak message notification system.

If Gabtastik can manage to create a unified interface with tabbed chatting, intuitive notification, and program preferences, and then integrate that with Meebo, Yahoo Messenger online, and Trillian Astra–whenever that comes out–it’ll at least have a shot at gaining traction as a niche multinetwork Web chat client.

Gastastik for Mac has also been reviewed.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Leggio: Once Twitter stabilizes, what is next on your plate?

Stone: Our first priority is reliability, and getting that nailed is no small feat. But there are a lot of new features that our users have been asking us for. We are listening.

Q. What is the most requested feature?

A. Grouping has consistently been high on the request list and is high on the list of what we are considering. We’ve been giving it thought and examining how people have been using Twitter for a while so we can best approach that feature. People have their work contacts and their friends, and they want to be able to follow and update separately.

Q. Some third-party applications, such as Summize, are providing intuitive search functionality for Twitter users. Will you look to bring in or partner with some of the third-party application developers to improve this feature?

A. I’m not sure we’re looking to bring in any third-party application features. But tied into search improvement would be more location-type stuff. We have location in the interface, and there is very simple work that can be done to allow people to better share that. We also want to connect it to individual posts. When I see a Twitter update, I look to see if it’s text or Web; if text, it colors it in a different way. We want to find a way to better convey contextual information.

Q. I’ve seen some concerns pop up lately about the combination of Twitter bots, spammers, and URL redirection sites (a la TinyURL). Are you concerned about an infiltration of malicious links into the Twitter feed? Have you considered creating a way to post smaller links that allow users to preview the originating URL?

A. User security is absolutely a concern, and we’re working to make the interface safer, in that regard. We are looking into other ways to display shared links, for example noting whether a link goes to a picture or a video or some other media element. While more of a feature, this could help in addressing some of the risks with the URL redirection.

Read the rest of this interview on ZDNet. Topics include the recent outages and the possibility of Twitter becoming a paid service.

News Corp.’s MySpace is set to release a major redesign next week, company representatives said late Thursday evening. The site doesn’t look that different; it’s still clearly MySpace. But a number of features have been revamped to improve user experience: namely, the homepage, navigation tools, profile editor, search features, and the MySpaceTV player.

A formal release is set to go out on Monday, and the first new features will show up on the site on Wednesday.

The redesign effort has been under way for more than six months, with the goals of appealing to a broader demographic and letting users interact with the site more (i.e. keeping them around), and has involved in-home studies for testing purposes.

The relaunch of the homepage proper has been kept somewhat under wraps, likely because a “major” advertiser is set to take over the site when it debuts. But MySpace has been liberal with the details of most of the other new improvements. They’re not particularly revolutionary, but should still do a thing or two to combat user experience complaints on the social network.

The MySpace profile editing tool, for example, has been modified so that HTML expertise is less of a prerequisite. A sidebar lets users browse through themes and alter them with a color palette, rather than hard-coding changes.

The new MySpace profile editor. Note the sidebar to the right.

(Credit: MySpace)

The improved MySpaceTV player, with improved navigation.

(Credit: MySpace)

The MySpaceTV player, which technically competes with YouTube, has been improved to support high-definition video and improved full-screen mode as part of the Flash 9 release. The embeddable player now has internal search as well as a way to view the top MySpace videos; it’s still playing catch-up with the likes of YouTube, but it’s still a big improvement.

One of the most heavily altered sections of the new MySpace is search; now, MySpace members will navigate through a set of tabs to search personal profiles, music profiles, the entire MySpace site, videos on MySpaceTV, or the Web as a whole. The site has also worked with the Lucene open-source search engine project.

Doing a music search on the new MySpace

(Credit: MySpace)

MySpace’s chief rival, Facebook, is also set to unveil a redesigned profile page in the near future; developers on its application platform are already testing it out. MySpace’s redesign does not appear to alter the experience for developers who are building on its OpenSocial-compatible platform.

MySpace additionally has a data portability project, “Data Availability,” on the way.

I saw CrowdSpring present at a recent Under the Radar conference I was moderating. I like the service a lot, because it simplifies the process of licensing creative works, and it levels the playing field so anyone can play. What it does, in a nutshell, is let people who need design work done put their requests up on the site. Then creatives compete for the jobs.

It sounds familiar, doesn’t it — like TaskMarket, Elance, and other task boards?

It’s not. CrowdSpring has a radically different cashflow model. It works like this: If there’s a job you want done — say, the creation of a logo for your startup — you post that on the site. And you pay CrowdSpring in advance, before any contractor has even seen at your req. Wait, it gets better.

ID8 needs a new logo. Can you do better than this?

The creatives who want to earn the fee don’t go through the process of marketing themselves to you to earn the right to work on your project. Rather, they do the work up front, submitting their work, in public, to the job page that’s on the site.

Once you pick the work you like, rights to it transfer to you and the artist gets paid.

Let’s review: Clients pay for their work up front. Artists do the work before they have the contract. CrowdSpring collects the float.

It’s the ultimate in weasel economics. But it works. Check out some of the closed jobs on the site - the quality of the work is quite good, there’s a lot of variety to choose from, and customers are paying bargain prices.

I wouldn’t recommend CrowdSpring for complex jobs or secret projects, but it’s a good tool for simple creative tasks. And if you find a contractor you like on the system, you are of course free to hire them for a longer engagement.

I hope, but am not convinced, that CrowdSpring can stay as good as it is today. An existing and larger task market, like Elance, could add a CrowdSpring-like assignment option, giving designers and clients exposure to a larger selection of business partners. CrowdSpring does have two things going for it, though: First, a purity of purpose that shows itself in a simple and easy-to-use marketplace. And second, there are apparently people out there willing to do creative work based only for the hope of getting paid. I’m wondering now how many other new businesses can be built to leverage this desperation.

You love this story and you want to Digg it. Or maybe you want to put it on Reddit. Or maybe you’re just in love with Delicious and feel like saving the story there. We’re open to anything, but we don’t always know your tastes.

The same goes for a lot of sites, which is where Add to Any has created a really smart sharing tool that will read your browser’s mind instead. Well, actually it will just give your history a once over to do the heavy lifting. Based on where you’ve been the most, relevant sites for sharing will come up in the very top of the menu. If none are there you can also expand the menu downward to choose from one of the 200 other sharing and bookmarking sites.

It’s not unlike other competing services that do the same thing (ShareThis and Add This), although it’s the only one of the three giving people targeted sharing options based on what they’re probably using. In case you’re wondering what happens if you’ve got your browser history turned off or are working off a public computer, the top of the list will just revert to the dozen most popular sites by use.

I’ve embedded the widget below. Feel free to give it a spin.