Blogging

If you’re looking to find a place to crash in a foreign city and have tried solutions like Craigslist or AirBed & Breakfast, you’ve got to check out Roomorama. It’s a peer-to-peer rental community that lets visitors find a cheap, low-key place to stay, and gives renters with some extra space a chance to make some cash.

Like AirBed & Breakfast, people with some extra space can put their place up on the market. If someone’s coming into town during the dates you set as being available, they’ll have the option to book it. Once you approve the booking, the payment goes through Roomorama’s system (which uses PayPal) and the traveler gets a confirmation.

As a traveler you can sort out listings by all kinds of factors, but my favorite is the simple matrix of amenities. You can click to highlight the things you want, like Wi-Fi, parking, laundry, and the all important hot tub. It’ll filter the results in real time with every click, and if there’s not something that matches up with what you’re looking for you can opt to make it a request. If someone’s been on the fence about listing their place they can then claim your request with their offering. If an agreement is met you can book it on the spot.

Roomorama is currently limited to New York City with other cities to come. In the meantime, you can list and request rooms in different cities using the aforementioned shout-out system that does the matching for you.

[via Delicious]

Related: Rent your house or couch by the day with AirBed & Breakfast

List places for others to stay or find a place to crash yourself with Roomorama, a hotel service of sorts that cuts out the middle man.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Read more from the original source:
Couch surf or rent your basement with Roomorama

WebMynd is a Firefox extension its developers hope solves a common web problem: finding again that which what you’ve already found. WebMynd adds two very useful functions to your browsing: site-by-site recording of where you’ve been, and integrating your history (plus Delicious bookmarks) into specific Google searches.

Webmynd finds what you’ve found.

The site-by-site recording creates a timeline view of your browsing and a photo browser-like display. Want the site you found Friday after lunch? Rewind useing the Reel view. Looking for the site with the purple logo thing? The Grid view is good for your visual memory. Since you might not want a record of every site you visit, WebMynd lets you add sites to a permanent “do not record” list and zap specific site records.

There’s a small performance hit using WebMynd - on the order of 100-200 milliseconds for complex site. WebMynd keeps your last 30 days worth of history.

While WebMynd’s visual recorder is nice, I like every more the way it merges a relevant list of sites you’ve visited into each search you do in Google. You can also use WebMynd’s to view Delicious bookmarks.

Webmynd merging Delicious into Google results.

In September, WebMynd will add Yahoo BOSS search results, a cleaner merge into your Google search results and other improvements, say its developers.

WebMynd is free. It will make money from premium services, not ads. Co-founder James Brady says while there are plans to offer a subscription plan for users who want WebMynd to remember their web history for longer than one month but privacy demands mean no ads: “There are no line items, and we have no plans, to mine the data in any way not directly related to improving the user experience.”

Continued here:
Don’t lose what you’ve found: WebMynd

If you’re wary of using silly things like calendars to keep track of to-dos and reminders, Resnooze is worth checking out. This tool lets you schedule in weekly, daily, and monthly reminders to do something. Every time you get said reminders delivered to your in-box there are three simple options to get rid of it, or be reminded yet again–either a week or month from then.

Used reminders are set up in a small queue where you can tweak their frequency or get rid of them entirely. What’s nice is that it will automatically register you for an account the first time you make a reminder, making it easy to come back later to add and remove planned reminders.

For now, Resnooze is limited to e-mail nags, so if you’re looking for a more intrusive solution you might want to use Google or Yahoo’s calendar tools, both of which include mobile SMS and instant-messaging reminders, although neither has the option to “snooze” a reminder for a later date.

[via Kim Komando and Delicious]

To set reminders, you just drop in what you want to remember and at what frequency. Once it's been made, you can go back in and edit the dates.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Read the rest here:
Resnooze puts helpful nags in your e-mail

Yahoo has revamped Delicious, saying the site for storing, describing, and sharing Web site bookmarks is faster, easier to use, and has better search abilities.

The updated look to Yahoo's Delicious Web site for storing, searching, tagging, and sharing bookmarks. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Yahoo)

The speedup comes from a new server system that’s snappier and more reliable, Yahoo said on its Delicious blog on Thursday. “You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of 5 million users,” the company said.

But for me, half the productivity gains will come from a rebranding of the service. No more will my fingers trip over my keyboard trying to type “del.icio.us,” the old name of the service, because Yahoo now is calling it just plain old Delicious. (And conveniently conforming with CNET’s ages-old spelling in the process.)

“We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of ‘del.icio.us’ over the years (for example, ‘de.licio.us’, ‘del.icio.us.com’, and ‘del.licio.us’), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends,” Yahoo said. The name change also means users will have to log in again.

The older Delicious limited descriptions of bookmarks to 255 characters, a cap that gave some appeal to rivals such as Ma.gnolia, but the new Delicious raises it to 1,000 characters. However, the Firefox plug-in I’m using to tag sites still imposes the 255-character limit.

Though Yahoo is working to unify its profiles, Delicious accounts are still separate from those at Flickr, Yahoo Mail.

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in June.

Here’s Yahoo’s official word on the changes:

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable…

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another user’s public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.

Go here to read the rest:
Yahoo gives Delicious more speed, fewer punctuation marks

In an era of aggregators, YokWay is a very pretty sharing service. Much like Delicious or FriendFeed, the idea is to discover new content based on what other people are sharing. YokWay’s appeal is much like that of Digg, with popular stories hitting the front page and getting rated and commented on by other users.

User-submitted content is split up into different buckets, with books, music, videos, and photos. There’s also a restaurants category that turns the service into something like Yelp, where users can microblog about their culinary experiences. To aid in that, each story is geo-tagged, letting you see where it’s coming from right on a Google map.

There are several ways to populate the site with content. You can record a video using Seesmic, or simply write in some text. Pulling up an item like a book or movie that you’ve seen uses Amazon.com and Yelp’s directory, so other users will be able to click on it and buy it right away, which is part of YokWay’s business model.

If you want to band together and populate your news to a specific channel, YokWay has interest groups called “circles” that you can subscribe to or create your own. Oddly enough, these cannot be privatized to keep random YokWay users from joining, which is a real shame if you’re trying to use it as a link-sharing tool in a small team. For that, Delicious or FriendFeed offer a might tighter closed gate approach.

Ultimately, YokWay came off to me as a less compelling experience than FriendFeed or Delicious if only for the lack of people using it and tie-ins with other services. As a link-sharing service among friends it’s very streamlined, but with no private rooms, mobile application, or bustling front page with high story turnover I’m left wanting more.

YokWay is currently in private beta. You can sign up here.

YokWay lets you create, join, and monitor interest groups of shared content. In this case you can scope out photography shares from around the world and view them on a map.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

More:
Save and share stories with friends using YokWay