Google Wave Now Open For Everyone – No Invite Needed

There was quite a lot of hype built around Google Wave, the new communications and collaboration platform from Google, when it first hit the web. During the product’s early beta testing phase, registration was closed and the product was available to a select number of users. Needless to say, initially there was a heavy demand for invites (some folks even sold them and some traded private tracker invites for these) but this soon died down as the hype around Wave decreased. Anyways, if you still have not received a Google Wave invite and is waiting to try out the service, good news is that Google has opened Wave registrations for all users. You can now sign up for the service with your free Google Account.

Earlier on we conducted several Google Wave Invite giveaways and were able to give invites to a considerable number of people. However, we were faced with a huge number of requests and our supply of invites was never enough to meet the demand. If you missed out on earlier giveaways, now’s the perfect chance to create a new account.

Quoting from the Google Wave Blog:

Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave -- simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in.

Signup URL: http://wave.google.com/ and sign in with your Google account

If I remember correctly, new users should receive 25 invites upon joining. In the meantime if you are one of those early adopters who tried out Wave, thought it sucked and gave up, now would be a good time for a re-visit. Wave has several new enhancements and many improvements up its sleeve and it’s actually a lot better than what it was a couple of months ago.

Related Articles

• Google Wave Invite Giveaway 02 – Now With 50 Invitations

Integrate With Your Acrobat.Com Account From Desktop Using AIR App

I’m pretty sire most of you already know about online services provided by Acrobat.com. It’s basically something like Google Docs – a set of cloud based office automation tools which includes file sharing, storage, PDF conversion/creation, online word processing, spreadsheets and even web conferencing. A free plan as well as paid subscriptions are available. The free edition has 5 PDF file conversions total, 3-person web conferencing, unlimited file downloads, online office applications, and forum-based support – this is sufficient for the day to day work of an average individual. Anyways Adobe have now released an AIR app that lets you integrate with Acrobat.com account from the comfort of your Windows desktop. With this app, file download/uploading, opening documents and viewing them online has got a whole lot easier.

Note that you can only upload document file types to Acrobat.com service. For instance, you can’t upload RAR archives or executables. Each file that’s uploaded to the cloud storage is usually opened using an online office automation application. The following online office automation apps are currently integrated with Acrobat.com:

• Adobe Buzzword beta  - Write, edit and comment on documents with your team
• Acrobat.com Presentations beta - Work with others to create stunning presentations
• Acrobat.com Tables beta - Collaborate on data and information typically shared in spreadsheets or simple databases

Coming back to AIR app, it provides an easy way of interacting with Acrobat.com by dragging and dropping files and folders from your local computer directly into your Acrobat.com account, and browsing, previewing, sharing or publishing files easily from your computer. It’s free, lightweight and comes free of crapware.

[Click Here] to sign up for a new Acrobat.com account (Free)

[Click Here] to download the Acrobat.com AIR App from Adobe Marketplace

Facebook Desktop Client From Microsoft Based on Silverlight

Here’s a nice little application for FaceBook addicts out there. It’s a small piece of software based on Microsoft Silverlight that allows users manage their Facebook accounts right from the Windows desktop. What’s special about this app is that it’s developed and maintained by Microsoft itself (we’re not only talking about Silverlight but of the FB client as well). While it’s a very nice looking piece of software with several cool features, keep in mind that it’s still in beta. You will need to install the Silverlight 4 developer preview to run the application. Once installed, you can interact with your Facebook account from the desktop with no browser involvement at all and perform a number of functions such as updating status, viewing or downloading photos, messaging and so on.

First thing you’ll notice about this application will be it’s eye catching user interface with flashy menus and text. This UI gives you easy access to the news feed, status updates, links, videos, events and photo albums and is a pleasure to navigate. You can even customize the layout to change the way items are displayed. The experience would have been even more complete had MS implemented Facebook chat but for an application that’s still in beta this is excellent.

Download

1. [Click Here] to download Silverlight 4 Developer Preview.
2. Once you install Silverlight 4, [Click Here] to download and install the Facebook desktop client application

Find And Preview Actual URL In Shortened Links - ExpandMyURL

Over the past couple of months, URL shortener services such as bit.ly, is.gd and tinyurl recorded some impressive growth. Part of the growth was fuelled by services such as Twitter and with Google (goo.gl) and FaceBook (fb.me) set to enter the competition, this space is only going to get more heated up. There are definitely lots of advantages to using shortened links (save space, track trends, etc) but let’s not forget that scammers and other scum can exploit these to their advantage as well. Most of the time, you cannot see where a shortened URL points to without clicking it – this can be a godsend for those who want to trick visitors into opening harmful web pages, malware, etc. ExpandMyURL is a service that lets you see where a masked link really points to, without having to click on it.

ExpandMyURL is an online service. It’s able to expand shortened links from popular services such as bit.ly and display the actual web address the link will take you to. It’s basically a one click process – just visit the service homepage and paste the link you want expanded in the box. If that’s too much, ExpandURL recently introduced their ‘One Click Expander’ which integrates the service into your browser for better accessibility and ease of use. More information about the one click expander can be found here.

It’s actually a pretty useful service – next time you stumble across that bit.ly link which looks downright suspicious – check with ExpandURL. It’ll tell you whether the link is actually what it claims to be.

[Click Here] to visit ExpandMyURL Homepage

Related Articles

• Shorten URLs From Windows Desktop Using MURL

Google Wave Invite Giveaway 02 – Now With 50 Invitations

Although a lots of folks have managed to beta test Google Wave by now, the demand for invites remain high. Our initial giveaway of 25 free invites was by no means enough to supplement the huge demand and as you can see from comments to the giveaway thread, we were overwhelmed by hundreds of requests. Anyways as promised, the second Google Wave invite giveaway here. Thanks to two of our loyal readers who offered to share their invites with us, we are now in a position to offer 50 more invites to wannabe ‘Wave Riders’ out there: :p

If you still don’t know what it is, Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool with some revolutionary features. It’s viewed by many as a new internet communication platform and ultimately a replacement for the likes of E-Mail, IM, etc. The service is currently in beta and an invitation from an existing member is mandatory for sign up (hence this article).

Coming back to the giveaway, obtaining an invite is very easy. All you need to do is to send us a mail with the following format:
UPDATE: This Giveaway is now over. We have received more than 50 requests. Please do not send any more. Invites will be mailed to the first 50 requests over the next couple of days.

• Send the mail to invites[dot]filenetworks[at]gmail.com
• Email should have the subject “Wave Giveaway 02”
• Message body should have the E-mail address invite should be sent to

Only the first 50 requests will be considered and all mails sent after that will be ignored. Please allow 2-3 days for your invitation to arrive as there may be delays with us sending out invites and internal slowdowns in the Wave invite system itself.

It must be mentioned that this giveaway is made possible by two of our loyal readers/Twitter followers; Omar(@TatesMan) and Cray (@dragonxeric). Out of the 50 invites, only 6 invites are actually from us - rest is all them :p

Once again it’s nice to see folks willing to share their invitations to various sites/services through FILEnetworks Blog. This excellent support from the community was one of the reasons why our last Demonoid giveaway was/is such a huge success. Thanks to everyone who shared and keep up the good work :)

PiratePad – Online Word Processor With Real Time Collaboration

Some of you might have heard about Etherpad, an online word processor with real time collaboration capabilities. Etherpad was recently acquired by Google and big G released the service’s source code to the public on 18th of December. Just hours after the code was made public, an Etherpad clone by the name of PiratePad came online at http://piratepad.net. The new service is hosted by none other than folks at Swedish Pirate Party, a popular bunch among file sharers across the world. PiratePad is identical to Etherpad in terms of features and is still a free online word processor with ‘real’ real time collaboration (as seen on Google Wave).

Using PiratePad is really simple. To create a new document all you need to do is to hit on the ‘Create new pad’ button. To share it, you can either email the unique link on browser address bar or simply give it to your collaborators via IM or any other medium. Once you share it, all the changes you or any other collaborator make to the document will be visible to all shared users in real time, with a zero second delay. Changes made by different users may be identified using an ‘Authorship Color’.

Apart from real time features PiratePad offers decent word processing capabilities including text alignment, under/redo, text formatting, bullets, document import and revision based save. All in all it’s an interesting web app – check it out.

[Click Here] to visit PiratePad Homepage

Wobzip – Extract RAR, ZIP and other archives online

We’ve all heard about WinZip but have you heard about Wobzip? In this day and age when everything is moving online and into ‘the cloud’, Wobzip is yet another web application that seems to have a promising feature. The software lets users unzip/unrar/uncompress archive files on the go, entirely using a web interface. Wobzip currently supports a number of different archive formats including WinZip files and WinRAR files. The next time you are working on a PC that doesn’t have WinRAR/WinZIP, you’ll now know where to go :p.

Uncompressing a file using Wobzip is pretty simple. All you have to do is to login to their homepage and choose the file that needs to be extracted using the ‘Browse’ function. Additionally, if your archive is hosted online, you can use the ‘uncompress from a URL’ function to directly handle the file.

Right now Wobzip supports the following file formats: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZHCHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS. You should be able to uncompress all of the above archive types through the web interface without issues. All files are automatically scanned for viruses upon extraction. There is however one limitation; maximum file size for supported archives is 100MB.

Wobzip is currently in development and testing stages so there may be undiscovered bugs and glitches present (we didn't run into any). The app is free for anyone to use – check it out.

[Click Here] to visit Wobzip homepage

20 Free Google Wave Invites – Giveaway 01

If you thought we were only handing out invites to private torrent trackers, you were wrong. While we were all busy trying to get Google Wave invites sent to our personal E-mail accounts, one of my fellow editors was kind enough to register FILEnetworks contact email with a wave request from Google. Not only the account got activated but we’ve begun receiving invites too. Since it would be a terrible waste for the invites not to be sent out, we though of giving them away for free via the blog. Right now we only have 20 remaining – more will be given away as we get them.

While everyone’s been busy trying to ride the Wave, here’s a little reality check:

(I found the image on Digg  - through this link. Credit to original author whoever that might be)

I’m not saying the service is bad but I really do feel sorry for the idiots who traded What.CD (and other private tracker) invites for this. Google are very good at building hype around a product (remember Gmail invites sometime back?).

If you want an invite, just post your email as a comment to this article. Keep in mind we only have 20 invites. First come, first served :)

Note: It may take a while for your invite to arrive – It says “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.” on the Invites Wave.

Silverlight based subtitle search engine from Sublight

About two weeks ago we posted about Sublight, a desktop software to automatically download matching subtitles for downloaded movies and TV shows. Developers of Sublight have come up with a new project, this time a web application developed using Microsoft Silverlight. The web based version of Sublight acts very much like it’s desktop counterpart (but with some limitations) – it’s primarily a subtitle search tool/downloader that is fully online. So what makes it different from hundreds of similar services already available?

Unlike most Subtitle search engines and repositories out there, web based version of Sublight does not make users go through several pages to download a subtitle. Searching, selecting and downloading can all be done via a single interface, without interruptions. Languages can be filtered and options are available to optimize search with information such as year, season number and episode number (for TV shows), etc. All in all it’s a good alternative to those who dislike installing additional apps to fulfill simple tasks such as subtitle search.

Note that you’ll need the Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin for this to work. Also keep in mind that this is a very early version of web based Sublight – bugs may exist.

[Click Here] to visit Silverlight powered Sublight

[Click Here] to download desktop version

G.ho.st – Online operating system and virtual desktop

Buzzwords on the internet these days are Google’s Wave and Microsoft’s Bing. However this post is about neither - we are going to talk about a somewhat lesser known but really cool web application; G.ho.st or Ghost (Global Hosted Operating System). G.ho.st is basically a virtual computer which comes complete with an operating system, a desktop, file storage and even applications. Unlike traditional operating systems, G.ho.st does not reside on a single PC – it resides on the internet, accessible to the user via any computer with internet access or even a compatible mobile phone.

As you can see from the above screenshot, Ghost’s interface is similar to that of Windows Vista. It has a start menu, a desktop with icons, a control panel, an E-mail client, RSS readers, games, multimedia players and tons of other features. There are links to several dozen web applications such as Google Docs, Zoho apps suite, Meebo and ThinkFree. The service offers gigabytes of online storage (you get additional GBs when you invite friends to the service) and even file sharing.

If you are a person who’s on the go, this web application can be immensely useful. Imagine that you are accessing the web from an internet cafe or a public computer at work - with Ghost, all your files, applications, settings, bookmarks, RSS, E-mail, etc will be available to you at the click of a button. Given below are some of the major features of this free service:

• Access your desktop, files, apps and settings from any Internet browser
• Desktop and apps run without the need for installation or updating
• Customize your desktop and choose from 20+ available languages
• Share or publish your files directly from the G.ho.st® DriveG.ho.st® has chosen the very best available storage service for your precious data - Amazon Web Services
• Read, write and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations using G.ho.st® integrations with Zoho, directly from your G.ho.st® Storage
• Edit Google Docs, sheets and presentations stored at Google from within G.ho.st®
• 15GB professionally hosted and backed-up disk space
• Many file types can be viewed or edited online with a simple double-click
• Upload and sync your documents, photos and music easily using the G.ho.st® Upload Download Utility, Sync program or FTP
• Manage your e-mails, calendar and contacts with the Web's leading collaboratoin suite
• You will receive a yourGhostID @G.ho.st email and can retrieve other emails as well (using "POP3")
• Manage smart shortcuts called Tagged Things to Web resources - webmarks (URLs), files, photos, videos, music, products
• Single sign-on to other services such as Google Docs using My Logins
• The G.ho.st® Virtual File System shows you G.ho.st® Drive files, Google Docs files and other Web files all in one place
• Yes G.ho.st® runs within the browser but also contains a browser of it's own! Whichever computer you are on, the G.ho.st® Browser will have your history, your webmarks, and your "cookies" so that other sites will recognize you

How to sign up and access the service

[Click Here] to access to G.ho.st homepage. You can either sign up for a free account using the ‘Sign up’ button or instantly check out the service using the ‘Guest account’ option.