Techhawking

Zoppr is a Custom Search engine which allows you to create custom Google search engine on the fly, by appending your bookmark page, wikipage, or any other kind of page with lots of interesting bookmarks/links on it. Once setup, google will search only across your bookmarks/links. For example this URL will help you search across an OPML file published somewhere on the internet http://www.zoppr.com/cse/http://share.opml.org/

Dratz asks: Feature or a bug ?

I’m contemplating using S3 for backups. Paul Stamantiou has a script ready to go. The thing which convinced me was this chart Paul showed. For 10GB of space he paid under 3 dollars per month. Thats really cheap…

GMail, Microsoft and yahoo all provide extra storage as well. However none of them have stable company supported APIs to allow users to upload data in this form.

• Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon, kicked off another round of discussions on aggregating, decentralizing and Social network portability in a post called “Thoughts on the Social Graph“. The post is long, but he summarized the problem statement into a few lines..

Users and developers alike are going crazy. There’s too many social networks out there to keep track of. Developers want to make more, and users want to join more, but it’s all too much work to re-enter your friends and data. We need to lower the amount of pain for both users and developers and let a thousand new social applications bloom.

I’ve mentioned this problem in the past as well and feel like this is long overdue. Sites like Plaxo and Facebook have taken a step in the right direction, but its not the solution. As I see it the real solution should be something similar to the XMPP standard which opened up the chat protocol to allow decentralized chat networks work with each other.

Also read

• Feld Thoughts
  

GigaOm has an interesting write up on the commoditization  of the CDN service  and the pricewar raging in the industry. Akamai itself saw a significant stock market drop in the last couple of weeks.

“That burp has come with the increase in the number of competitors, each one trying to cash in on the boom in online video and other digital content. Limelight Networks (LLNW), Level 3 (LVLT), Internap (INAP), CDNetworks, along with new entrants Panther Express and EdgeCast Networks are some of the CDN players currently involved in a catfight with Akamai.  “

CDN is an excellent way of boosting performance and providing PoP in different parts of the world which can benefit by faster content delivery.