Since the launch of Chrome for Mac, it quickly became my favorite browser. Lightweight and very fast, it’s a mixture of ingredients that, in my opinion, make it the perfect browser. Moreover, the availability of  browser extensions help you forget all the additional features you can get with browsers like the popular (but very heavy and slow) Firefox.

All that said, I find myself spending more and more time with the browser than any other app in my Mac, I basically use the browser for almost everything.

Here is my basic toolkit:

Mail: Gmail

Calendar: Google Calendar (in sync with iCal)

Contacts: Google Contacts (in sync with my Droid)

News: Google Reader through Feedly

Twitter: Hootsuite / CoTweet / Seesmic Web

Facebook: Facebook

ToDo: Remember the Milk (in sync with my Droid)

Notepad: Evernote

Chat/IM: Meebo

Can I call Chrome a sort of OS in the OS? Last but not least, Chrome threats tabs as independent processes so you can kill one without having to shut down the entire browser, something other browsers can’t do.

Unfortunately, there are still some apps I can’t replace easily, like Lightroom, Espresso (CSS/HTML editing for my blog), LittleSnapper (screenshots) and a few others. But it’s pretty clear that I’m already using Chrome OS (sorta) and it works very well.

What about you? Would you use Google Chrome for everything?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Remember The Milk for Gmail… for Google Chrome! (rememberthemilk.com)
• Got Milk? Using Remember the Milk for Task Management (profhacker.com)
• Feedly + Google Buzz + Conversations ” Building Feedly (dccrowley.posterous.com)
• 18 Must Have Google Chrome Extensions (maketecheasier.com)

A few months ago the popular service Feedburner, which manages millions of blogs/websites’ RSS feeds worldwide, decided to include all the users following a certain blog on Friendfeed in the blog’s subscribers count.

According to the same principle, since you can push the content of your blog to Google Buzz, your followers on Google Buzz should be considered RSS readers, hence included in your Feedburner ’s readers count. One more reason for this to be true is that Buzz is a Google service, like Feedburner, while Friendfeed is not!

Here is the number of my blog’s subscribers this morning:

I haven’t seen any relevant change since I joined Google Buzz and my current 171 followers on Buzz are not certainly included. What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Buzz monitoring (tins.rklau.com)
• Solving Feedburner Feedsmith plugin problems with Wordpress 2.9 (thewayoftheweb.net)
• Google Buzz: Social Sharing by Google (techie-buzz.com)

As many of you should know, Tweefind is a service launched by my company back in April, that provides a very effective way to search Twitter, showing results based on the rank of the Twitter users.

Today I’m announcing that a brand new version of Tweefind is out, more effective and feature-rich than ever.

The new Tweefind uses many new innovative web technologies in order to offer users a rich experience and providing them with relevant and realtime results from Twitter plus other related results coming from other sources on the Internet. In addition, Tweefind now offers the ability to login into Twitter through OAuth and interact with the search results.

The new retweet feature is supported (plus the old one) as well as the ability to add users to lists.

All that said, here is a presentation that provides an overview of the service and highlights all the new features.

I highly encourage you to use it and leave your comments and feedbacks. Any suggestion is much appreciated. Enjoy it: http://www.tweefind.com

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform (readwriteweb.com)

Since the latest version of Google Chrome (4.x) users have the ability to install extensions and, sometimes, re-use some popular extensions already familiar to those used to the site userscripts.org.

The new website that any Chrome user should bookmark is now http://www.chromeextensions.org/. From that website you can get a lot of interesting extensions but, in my opinion, there are five extensions that are a must have. Here is a snapshot of my Google Chrome toolbar:

Gmail Checker

No description needed… Gmail checker shows the number of unread emails and offers various configuration options. Can be used with Google Apps, too.

Wave Notifier

This is very useful, since I don’t have any other way to be alerted of some activity in my Google Wave account. Shows the number of new waves/replies and you can configure the refresh rate.

Feedly

This is the best one. If you are used to Feedly for Firefox, the Chrome version is getting better and better over time. It’s definitely the best and most effective way to use Google Reader. For more, check my previous post about Feedly for Google Chrome.

Facebook Notifier

Nothing special to be explained here, too. It shows the number of new FB notifications plus the ability to preview them (not working under the Mac version, though).

Google Docs

This extension does a very useful thing: it basically makes the links to any doc available on a certain page compatible to Google Docs, so I can open them straight in the browser. Get it here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Feedly Comes to Google Chrome (readwriteweb.com)
• Feedly for Google Chrome Released (techstartups.com)

If you are an eager consumer of Google Reader, Feedly is definitely one of the best extensions you can ever use in order to get the most out of it. Initially available for Firefox only, the Feedly team started making it available for other browsers. Safari first, then Chrome.

Yesterday I just got my invitation to test the Chrome version and I can say it works like a charm. You just need to install the extension and open http://www.feedly.com/home. In case you are not logged into your Google account, you just have to login in order to start using feedly.

I can’t share the link to the Chrome extension, since the guys at Feedly asked us who are testing it not to do that (and you can understand why), but you can try to get one by leaving a comment to their blog post announcing it.

With Feedly for Chrome, now I can finally switch to Google Chrome on my Mac without looking back.

Today I came accross the numbers related to the countries in Europe where Facebook achieved the best results in terms of growth.

Turkey, a dynamic and fully european (despite what being said in the article) country experienced the best results, while my country, Italy, is number 2.

Some italian friends commented on Friendfeed that this is actually nothing to be proud of. From what I see everyday, many italian friends who use Facebook actively use it for “gossip” (I mean, “let me see what others are up to”) or funny/leisurre activities only, sometimes creating stupid and useless groups or playing with silly quizzes, invading their profile with the results (as stupid as the quizzes…).

Not many Facebook users are fully discovering its potential and many teens are migrating from MySpace and trying to replicate the way they used it. At the same time, not many italian companies are leveraging it for marketing purposes. There is a highly valuable consumer user base available and ready to be hit by strong viral marketing activities but companies haven’t figured out how to get the most out of it yet.

What’s next? The time for big companies to take a closer look at Facebook has arrived and they must quickly activate strong and wise dedicated campaigns to reach this impressive user base that once could be reached through TV ads only (at a very high cost) or, on the Internet, through still and passive banners. Hey, what are you waiting for?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook’s Top 10 Fastest Growing European Countries (thenextweb.com)
• The 10 Fastest Growing European Countries, as Facebook Nears 100M Across Region (insidefacebook.com)
• MySpace And Facebook Top Social Networking Sites For Display Ads … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)

Mashable and TechCrunch are, no doubt, the most famous (and widely read) blogs covering everything about web, tech, mobile and social media. They have been funded almost in the same period (year 2005, more or less) despite one (Mashable) has been created by a young european guy, Pete Cashmore, while the other is born and grew up in Silicon Valley through his local founder Michael Arrington.

For years TechCrunch has been the #1 in terms of “numbers”, although something important happened during the past couple of months, starting a trend that  can be easily found in the graph below:

What happened? It looks like Mashable’s growth has been impressive in the past months while TechCrunch is struggling to keep the same average unique visitors they had in the past.

All that said, I started asking people on Twitter what was their preferred tech blog between Mashable and TechCrunch and I received lots of interesting and sometimes curious responses that helped me to get a better idea on what the main reasons behind the graph above were.

Engagement

According to most people, Mashable’s blog engages their readers more than TechCrunch’s one. Here is an example: I took a look at both websites a few minutes ago. In the homepage, TechCrunch’s most retweeted article was 261 times and most commented one got 60 comments. By chance, Mashable’s article covering the same subject shows 838 retweets according to Tweetmeme, while the most commented one has 113 comments.

In my experience, this is not just a case. When my company releases a new service, we usually contact Mashable first and, if we are lucky/interesting enough, they cover it. When they cover it usually they get lots of reactions on Twitter (impressive!), much more than those anyone could expect. My personal experience with TechCrunch is unfortunately very limited since they never covered any of my company’s services,  but others told me they were very happy about the results (I don’t have numbers, though).

On the contrary, others like TechCrunch better since they are “less noisy”. The comments below is from a Twitter user who asked to remain anonymous:

“I’ve never dealt with Mashable. Part of my issue with Mashable is how they use Twitter – they promote all their posts all the time”

I have to say that I always come accross new stories by Mashable on Twitter and Facebook first, way before opening my feed reader. No doubt they are doing a great job by leveraging social media in a very effective way.

People

People at Mashable are usually perceived as “more friendly” than those working for TechCrunch. I say “perceived” meaning that this is the impression people got regardless of they meet them in person or not.

I personally never had the opportunity to talk to Mike Arrington (despite I met him at the first edition of The Crunchies) but I still remember that when I first met Pete Cashmore (you know where? He was in “incognito” mode at The Crunchies too he said:”Oh, you are the guy at LucaFiligheddu.com”… Can you believe this? Don’t know if Pete remembers this but I do.

Others report more interactivity in social media tools like Twitter. I can agree on this. While I exchanged many tweets with many Mashable bloggers, those with TechCrunch ones are (in my case) rare. Even worse, I had the opportunity to read a realtime argument between my friend Florian Seroussi and TechCrunch columnist Paul Carr who (reading all the tweets) I can’t say was that friendly with Florian… (just my personal opinion, of course)

Personal Interests

This is quite interesting. Some people told me via Twitter that they don’t rely on TechCrunch too much since they are tightly linked with all the most important VCs in Silicon Valley. They mean that sometimes you can’t really know if a positive review about a certain product/service is written because that service is “really” good or just because there are strong personal interests behind it (and its success).

Personally speaking, I don’t agree with this point, I remember I always read explicit disclosures in their posts. Moreover, this can always happen for any blog, everyone has interests in something and this is a very old and well known problem that affects journalism in general. Last but not least, everyone who pointed out this did it by a DM/email to me and asked not to being quoted. Matter of “personal interests”?

Conclusion

I have to say it is pretty clear that my little poll conducted among a little user base (my 2200+ Twitter followers) led to results that reflect the trend in the graph above. It looks like people prefer Mashable better for many, different but interesting reasons.

Now it is your turn: what do you like better? What is your favorite tech blog? Please leave your comments here or tweet it!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Yeah, Blogging is Hard (markevanstech.com)
• Is Publishing Stolen Twitter Documents Fair Game? (inquisitr.com)
• TechCrunch Now Number Two Tech Blog As Mashable Surges (financegeek.com)
• Silicon Alley Insider: TechCrunch Now Number Two Tech Blog As Mashable Surges (businessinsider.com)
• Move over Techcrunch, Mashable is now Bigger than you… (thenextweb.com)

How many times do you find yourself sending tons of documents as email attachments? Sometimes those are docs that don’t need to be modified anymore, other times you are dealing with multiple people modifying the same document. Result? A real pain…

In the past weeks I started using Google Docs more and more and I can confirm that the overall experience in terms of collaboration capabilities is much better than sending/receiving attachments continuously.

1) No More Attachments

Storing your docs in the cloud with a service like Google Docs lets you easily share them without the need of sending them as attachment. No more big files sent to your contacts, less pain.

2) Easier Collaboration

No more document merging, no more crowded revisions in the same doc, but you can simply work on the same document, at the same time, seamlessly. You can see who is viewing the document and modifying it and immediately interact with them. Cool, right?

3) Revision History

Every change you make in a doc is tracked and you can always get back to the previous version. You can also easily compare two versions of the same document to review/remind the changes you/others made.

4) Quick Search

If you use Google Docs, you can easily find a certain doc through their powerful search engine. You can also save the most common searches and easily reuse them later. Wonderful!

5) Virtual Folders

While you don’t really need to use folders since every document is easily discoverable through search, Google Docs recently introduced them. They basically work as labels in Gmail and you can easily in create groups of documents. I find them very useful to group documents about the same clients.

All that said, I’d like to point out a missing feature I would love to see: I’d like to keep a synced copy of my docs in a folder of my computer, a feature that could be very useful in many cases. What do you think? What about a service that combines Dropbox with Google Docs?

Anyway, I highly recommend to use Google Docs or great alternatives like Zoho, you don’t realize what are you missing until you try them. Or, you can experience Microsoft Office directly on the Web with the new upcoming Ms Office Web Apps.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Register/Signup for Office Web Apps Beta Invitations (techie-buzz.com)
• Internet censorship at your local library (chinaherald.net)
• Google Docs Adds Features Including Making Many Crawlable By Search Engines (seroundtable.com)

First of all, I would like you to reply to this question: how many contacts you deal with and in how many online “places”? My answer: GMail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

Well, what about a service that keeps track of all those contacts, consolidate them into a unique contact list and lets you see what’s happening around them at a glance? I mean, LinkedIn updates, Facebook messages, emails, Twitter updates, mail attachments, blog news and so on? What about if you can have multiple views and see what’s happening around a company instead of a contact only? If you like this scenario then Gist is for you.

Here are their principles:

There will be more information, in more places and it’s growing at an increasing rate

Systems will need to evolve or be created that help users harness the power of the information

Success in business is driven by strong relationships, both in quality and quantity

Companies who can quickly respond to customer demand are successful

Can’t agree more and Gist worked hard during these months to try to make you deal with the points above in a very simple and effective way.

Gist has been in private beta until last week, when they opened it to the public. I joined Gist in January and I have to say they improved it a lot during the past months.

When you start using it, the dashboard could seem a bit too crowded and you don’t actually know where to start. Fortunately, as soon as you start playing with it you quickly realize you are in front of a very powerful contact management tool that could potentially change the way you manage your contacts and become an integrant part of your daily job.

Using it gives you a better idea on what I-m talking about, so please join them and start using it immediately. I found it a bit slow these days, maybe because they opened to the public. Your comments are appreciated, as usual.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Gist Filters Your Inboxes Contact by Contact [Aggregation] (lifehacker.com)
• Gist Launches: Sync Social Media Data With Email Connections (mashable.com)
• Gist opens up, adds noise and friends filters (news.cnet.com)
• The Relationship Economy: What’s Web Got to Do With It? (slideshare.net)
• Salesforce and Gist – CRM Gets Social (networksboise.wordpress.com)

Back in May I have been contacted by a new startup that wanted to bring a new and powerful way to experience web search to every internet user. Now the time has come to take a deeper look to this promising search engine.

The main value proposition of DeepDyve is offering tools and services to go beyond the way we use to make searches through the traditional search engines, trying to go deeper to find websites, articles and “content that eludes most conventional search engines” (to use their own words).

The interface is very clean a simple and search results come up very quickly. Here is how the interface look like for the search keyword “iphone”.

You can get more results “similar” to one of those displayed by just clicking on “more like this” or you can also save one or more results. Users also have the ability to highlight a text and immediately perform a new related search.

Another interesting feature is the ability to refine your search by limiting its scope to specific areas of interest. Here is what I mean:

Some results can be opened within DeepDyve, too, like those coming from Wikipedia or from other specific blogs/websites. I find this option particularly useful, isn’t it?

Last but not least, if you want to bring the DeepDyve experience to your blog, you can install a widget that offers to your readers the ability to get realtime related search results or to highlight specific words/text from your blog posts and perform a search. You can find related articles to the content of this blog at the bottom of the sidebar and if you highlight one or more words inside a blog post, you’ll get the ability to perform a search through DeepDyve.

In conclusion, DeepDyve offers a great experience to any user who wants to make their search experience better. What they are doing is definitely challenging, but I guess there could be a lot of opportunities for them both in terms of expansion and exit strategies (by the way, they just raised $375K to boost their service). What do you think? Is there space for another search engine?

Related articles by Zemanta

• DeepDyve launches tools for more powerful web site search (venturebeat.com)
• DeepDyve’s Free Search Tools Enhance Patient Community Sites (healthcontentadvisors.com)
• DeepDyve raises $375K to boost search results (deals.venturebeat.com)