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Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, turned me on to Snackr with a post from earlier today. Snackr describes itself as being an RSS ticker. It provides a constant river of news on your screen. Built with Adobe AIR, it is compatible across all platforms and looks really slick.

Snackr sits on one of the four sides of your screen and scrolls through recent posts from sites which are input either by hand or by loading an OPML file. A nice added touch is that if there is an image in the post, it is included in the scrolling entry. There is a quick shortcut for minimizing the ticker in case it gets in the way and you can literally throw it around the screen. If you just grab Snackr and fling it in the direction of an edge of the screen, it will transform and stick there. Just try it to see what I mean.

Clicking on an entry brings up the full version of the post, readable and scrollable in the slide out window. This application becomes really useful when you narrow your feeds down to your mid to high priority ones and limit the items that it displays to a maximum of somewhere between 2 and 5 days old. If you have anything older than that, the posts start to become stale and irrelevant.

Snackr may be a distraction for some and overwhelming for others, but I really like having this extremely relevant river of news glide by on my screen. As Marshall mentioned, it’s a pain to remove feeds if you have a lot of them that you need to unsubscribe from after importing an OPML file, so a batch remove feature would be a great addition in the future. Additional features, such as indicating new items in the river and the ability to change themes, are things that would make sense for future releases, but Snackr runs really well and is very functional, especially for a first release.

Snackr is was written by Narciso Jaramillo, who is a product designer for Adobe Flex and previously worked on version one of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

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Snackr drenches your computer in a river of news

I do appreciate the Google-simple start page.

Of all the meeting time brokers I’ve seen, Presdo is the most peculiar. Which means it’s worth checking out. Unlike other apps I’ve covered (Timebridge, Jiffle, Tungle, Timedriver, etc.) Presdo’s strength is not that it automates the selection of meeting times that work out for attendees (it doesn’t), but rather that it helps script the dialogue that’s usually a part of the back-and-forth in setting up a meeting.

What makes this service peculiar is that it does very little that you can’t otherwise do through e-mail and Web surfing. However, it packages everything up so nicely you might not notice.

You kick off a meeting by typing into a plain English description of what you want to do, such as, “Get lunch on Monday with Joe,” or, “Set up book club meeting with Jack, John, and Claire at Sparky’s Diner.” Then you get a screen showing what the system thinks you mean. It guesses at the times and dates, and you enter in missing information like e-mail addresses. It also helps you find and map locations for meetings.

Presdo is smart, but not brilliant. You have to hold its hand after you first tell it what you want.

Once your meeting is set up, the system e-mails the other attendees with your plans. They can propose new times and places. The whole back-and-forth is captured on your event’s dedicated page. Once everyone buys in to the plans, attendees can pop the meeting into their calendar (Outlook, iCal, Yahoo, or Google).

I found setting up test meetings in Presdo quite easy and almost fun. But I’m also left scratching my head. Presdo, at the moment, doesn’t give you any real insight into when it would be good for you or anyone else to meet, meaning the thorniest part of setting up a meeting–choosing a time–is still completely manual. Nor does the clever location finder link in to a service like OpenTable for restaurants or Fandango for movie tickets. And the natural-language starting gate for Presdo is cute, but it’s not smart enough to obviate the need for you to carefully check its work on the event page that it creates once you type your plain text.

I like the idea of new, pure interface for scheduling meetings. And Presdo does do a nice job of keeping your e-mail free of hard-to-follow messages about meetings. But I want much better integration into other calendar-related services before I start to use it.

See also: IWantSandy and ReQall (review)

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Presdo schedule helper: Clever, but not enough

I’ve heard of death by a thousand cuts, but never cursors–that was until Firefly, a less-than-practical approach to letting your site visitors communicate with one another in real time. The service lets everyone see each other’s cursors live as they zip around the page and lets them chat with one another via text. To strike up conversation, just start typing and a chat bubble will form above your cursor. Everyone’s public chats are stored in a little queue, and frequent users can register to have their information and chat history saved to view at a later date.

One of the service’s greatest assets is that it’s highly engaging when you’ve got a good small crowd together. However, I can see it getting totally out of control when more than about 10 people are on the screen at once. The little bubbles dissolve after just a few moments, and you’re left with whatever the chat history catches–not exactly user friendly if you’re trying to keep up with several chats at once.

Like some of the distributed commenting systems that have popped up over the past year (see Disqus and Intense Debate) Firefly requires the site administrator to install it. The service is in private beta for now, but you can sign up to get it on your site here. Tech personality Leo Laporte has it installed on his Twitlive page, where there were about 70 people using it when I came by about a half an hour ago. Many just had the page open and were not chatting. To see it pitched by creator Billy Chasen (without a working demo) you can also check out Centernetworks’ video of it from the NY Tech Meetup this past Tuesday night.

Chat with others using nothing more than your cursor on any site that's got the Firefly plug-in installed.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Firefly lets everyone talk over your site

WujWuj is a badly named, yet really simple to use group gifting service. The aim is to let you gift a single friend with one or more items from Amazon.com and spread out the payment over a group of friends. It’s not a new idea–Fundable and FromEveryone do this. As do HomeSlyce and ChipIn, which manage to tack on general purpose fund raising as well.

What might be WujWuj’s greatest asset is that it handles multiple gift giving with some basic intelligence. You can add as many presents to the list as you want, and it’ll send out whatever it can based on what you and your buddies scrap together before the giving cutoff time. This means you don’t need to raise your entire amount as long as it covers items on the top of the list.

Add items you want to gift into a big list. Others can pitch in to get the items, which are shipped out. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Creating a list and inviting people to contribute is a snap. You can add items by searching through the built-in Amazon search engine. It’s not as fast as hunting for gifts on Amazon’s site, but if you’re looking for big name items you’re likely to find what you’re looking for on the first pass. When it comes time to invite others to get in on the purchase you can either knock out contacts one at a time or slurp them from your address book on a handful of popular e-mail services.

The invite to pay (and go to the party) goes out in the form of an event that has its own special landing page. As the creator you can add all sorts of content like photos, a video from your digital camera, along with related links. It also shows a progress bar with how much money you’ve raised, as well as which gifts have been met with enough cash to get them. If your cohorts want to pitch in there’s a small fee which goes to pay for the transaction–unfortunately as a donor you can’t pick which item/s you want your funds to go to, which I’d like to see amended.

Things I don’t like about the service include the taxes and additional fees. In most states, buying electronics from Amazon means whatever you’re buying is tax free. I added an iPod touch to my WujWuj gift list, which tacked on an extra $10 in tax to the purchase price. There was also a mystery $23 “service charge” despite WujWuj’s claims that it’s making money only in transaction fees and whatever love it gets back from Amazon for being an affiliate store. Not cool. For that I wouldn’t recommend using WujWuj, despite its ease. You’re better off simply using a money pooling tool like ChipIn (which links up to your Facebook buddies) and separate Web 2.0 event planning app like Socializr and MyPunchbowl.

[via SimpleSpark]

WujWuj makes group gifting easier, at a price

Google is hosting a media circus, or “Factory Tour,” at its Mountain View campus on Monday morning. Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, will be speaking. At other events I’ve heard her speak at, she’s given good overviews of the directions Google Search is going. The other scheduled speakers are:

Google's Marissa Mayer

(Credit: Dan Farber / CNET)

• Carter Maslan, from Google Maps
• R.J. Pittman, GM of Search Properties (formerly of Groxis)
• Johanna Wright, Google Search product manager

I’ll be liveblogging my observations on the event, and we’ll have follow-up and analysis afterwards. The talks are scheduled to start at 9:30 A.M. Pacific Time, but I may go live a few minutes early. Google will also be streaming video from the conference, and we’ll post the link to it here. My advice: Pop the the Google stream into a separate window if you want to hear the raw propoganda. But watch the liveblog for my jaded and cynical perspective on what they’re saying and what it means.

Check back here Monday morning, or sign up for an e-mail reminder using this widget:

If you have questions you want me to put to the Googleheads, add them in this post’s talkback, or e-mail me.

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Google to host ‘Factory Tour’ Monday morning