Changing the theme of Gmail has been possible with Greasmonkey, the popular Firefox extension, but aside for some exceptions, non-Firefox users couldn’t change the look and feel of their favorite web mail client.

The new themes look really cool and I really look forward to changing mine as soon as this option will be available on my Gmail account.

Technorati Tags: gmail, luca filigheddu, Mozilla Firefox, skin, Theme

Image via CrunchBase

If you spend much time on Facebook and don’t want to switch tabs of your browser too many times, Fmail brings Gmail straight to your facebook account.

It works really well and all your folders and contacts are properly imported. Unfortunately you loose all the ajax features you are used to.

If you want to try it out, just search for Fmail on Facebook. You are also prompted to match your Gmail contacts with your Facebook friends, something I find very useful.

Check it out and leave your comments here. Do you like this approach or you prefer to use the original GMail?

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Technorati Tags: facebook, Fmail, gmail, luca filigheddu

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Google Labs just introduced a couple of interesting experimental features that you can test while performing a search on Google.

I subscribed to all of them and they look really nice.

Keyboard Navigation

Now you can easily navigate your search results as you are used to do on Google Reader. J/K lets you move to the previous/next search item then you can choose it by clicking enter.

Alternate views

This new features lets you choose different views of the search results page. Together with the standard list view, you now have the timeline view, the map view or the info view. In the first one, you will have a timeline which shows you what years are mentioned within the search results and how many results include that year; in the second one you will see a map with locations mentioned in the search results; in the info view you can see specific information related to your result, as shown in the image below.

Accessible view

This new view makes it easier to highlight, read and navigate through your search results. 

Unfortunately you can try only one of these new experiments at a time. I’m trying the alternate views, very useful (IMHO) especially for the timeline one. If you want to give it a try, just go to this page and choose the experiment you prefer. 

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Technorati Tags: Accessibility, Experiment, Google Labs, Google Reader, luca filigheddu, Search

I’m a Linkedin power user and I’ve been using it effectively during the past two years in order to talk directly to top levels executives of companies which could be potential customers of my company.

One of the services they provide is InMail, an easy way to send a direct message to a contact which is not directly connected to you.

I never sent spam, of course, but personal emails to try to engage a potential customer and discuss about the benefits of this or that product we provide. Private, personal, friendly messages.

That said, the worst answer you can get is shown in the box above. It’s not a reply, it’s not a “I’m not interested, thanks”, it’s something like people who hang up as soon as they hear your voice on the phone or people who close the door as soon as they see you outside.

This is not a polite way to use a great and powerful service as Linkedin is. I fortunately received just five of these out of over hundreds InMails sent so far. My recommendation, if you receive an InMail which is not interesting for you, reply to the message or ignore it, but not “decline” it, unless it is really spam. But I bet no one sends spam over Linkedin since it’s a “protected” and trusted environment.

My two cents

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Technorati Tags: Customer, inmail, linkedin, luca filigheddu, Message

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In the last months I’ve been contacted by many people I’ve known/met in the past, from former calssmates or just casual friends known while I was a teenager, to people I was in touch with in the past and whose I lost all contact details and barely remember their names. All of them wanted to add me as friend on Facebook.

At the same time, I found myself doing the same. When I was a teenager I attended some “vacation-like” english language courses in the UK so that I spent more than one month with other guys and with some of them I remember I had a great time (I’m referring to about 15 to 20 years ago).

There are a few questions which lead to this behaviour and those are all about curiosity: what are those people up to now? Are they married? Do they have sons? Where do they work?  How do they look like now?

In my opinion, Facebook is becoming more and more… a, yes, “facebook”, where people finally find an effective way to stay in touch and to rediscover old friends and acquaitances. Who is not happy to think of old times?

Once there was the mail (the real one, with ink and paper), now there is Facebook. Did the questions above ever arise for you?

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Technorati Tags: facebook, luca filigheddu, media 2.0

It basically puts together a couple of parameters from which it calculates your “reach“, “velocity” and “social capital“. Here is adescription of these attributes, taken from their website:

Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence.

Social Capital: It’s essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves.

The last one in particular, Social Capital, could potentially be a very interesting way to measure if someone’s followers are just, let’s say, unknown Twitterers with a couple of followers or “important” influencers and opinion leader themselves. Unfortunately, at first sight, it’s not working very well because some users on top of the list looks like anonymous and not certainly “famous” twitterers.

In the Top 5 - Reach we found some well known names:

1) Jason Calcanis

2) Ewan Williams (Twitter’s CEO)

3) Chris Brogan

4) TechCrunch

5) Guy Kawasaki

Other famous bloggers / internet opinion leaders can be easily found in the Top 50, like Loic Le Meur (7), Robert Scoble (10), Mashable (11), Kevin Rose (14), Jeff Pulver (20). There are many others, you can take a look by yourself at this link.

Ok, what about me (I don’t consider myself a heavy Twitter user) ?

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Technorati Tags: Kevin Rose, microblogging, robert scoble, Social Media, twinfluence, twitter

What to say? Simple, smart, useful. Try it out at http://useqwitter.com. Praises to Eoghan McCabe, another smart irish entrepreneur.

BTW, take a look at the “smart” tag line at the bottom of their webpage…

Technorati Tags: luca filigheddu, McCabe, qwitter, Social Media, twitter

Image via Wikipedia

Opera has been under my radar for a while and I have to say I never sticked with it completely. I tried an old version a few years ago but the latest announcement of Opera v9.6 made me download it again.

Another reason that led me to test it out is that I experienced very bad performances with Firefox 3 on my Macbook recently, which easily hits over 700MB of RAM usage after a few hours of heavy tabbed browsing.

The result? Guys, Opera 9.6 really rocks. Performances are comparable to Webkit’s and the number of advanced features available is impressive.

Like Firefox, you can add a lot of third party addons and widgets which make your browser experience even better. Highly skinnable, a light but powerful RSS reader and email/newsgroup client is integrated, too. For example, look at how the Twitter widget looks like… nothing less than other powerful clients.

Another interesting advanced feature is the support for mouse gestures. You can easily perform many common operations without leaving your mouse, by just performing some easy gestures.

In addition, for users familiar with Google Chrome, a “speed dial” with thumbnails of  the most used websites is available.

Is it enough to make you switch? I’m currently using it and have to say I’m really impressed and I regret I haven’t tried it before. And, if you have a Mac and you are looking forward to try the Google browser, it can look like Chrome too!

To get more information about the new Opera 9.6, check the changelog out at this link.

Technorati Tags: browser, luca filigheddu, opera

This is a clear sign that something huge is happening and that there is no doubt Facebook is more and more going mainstream.  That said, I started looking at this phenomena from a different standpoint: is Facebook capable of behaving like an operating system? If you look, for example, at the new Facebook iPhone application, everything you need from an operating system is there: messaging, IM, applications, microblogging, presence, live feed, photos, videos…

In my opinion Facebook could potentially be used for 99% of your time as a central dashboard from which you perform any activity on your computer and your mobile phone, but there are five important features that are currently missing.

1) Address Book - I mean the ability to add people in your “Friend’s List” regardless of whether they are subscribed to Facebook or not.

2) Mail Client - Currently Facebook’s messaging service is rather poor and is not ready to become a fully functional mail client. What if Hotmail would be integrated into Facebook? After Live Search, another move to better integrate Facebook with Microsoft’s services.

3) Documents - If I were Facebook, I would buy a service for online documents management as Google did a couple of years ago with Writely which was the basis for Google Docs. This application, together with the powerful mail client mentioned above, would be a killer feature for me.

4) Web Browser - It would be great if I could open any web page from within Facebook itself, leveraging its powerful sharing capabilities. A wordpress/typepad/… blog editor? A Wordpress.com Facebook application is available already, but a similar app for personal wordpress installations is still missing.

5) Calendar/PIM - 30Boxes is already offering it and it seems users like it (about 24.000 monthly active users) even if it’s still a little percentage of the whole FB population.

What do you think? What should Facebook add to become a real operating system? Can we expect to see a new mobile phone “F1” sometime soon? I look forward to your comments.

Technorati Tags: facebook, Google, Google Docs, iphone, luca filigheddu, operating system, Web 2.0

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Facebook released today a new feature (rumored some months ago) which lets users search the web through their Facebook global search box by integrating Microsoft Live Search.

This is a major feature which will leverage Microsoft Live Search engine and bring it to their enormous user base. Moreover, as AllFacebook.com highlights, the implications in terms of revenues for Facebook are going to be very important, becoming the most important bridge between users and Microsoft search engine with the additional ability to show ads which are relevant to the user’s profile.

I guess Facebook is deploying this new feature across its user base slowly, as usual, since on my account I’m still unable to get access to this feature (UPDATE: after some refreshes, I can see it now). In any case, I bet this will become the major news in the following hours.

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Technorati Tags: facebook, live search, luca filigheddu, microsoft, Microsoft Live Search, Search