Programming Blog

Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform that’s a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers have released a slew of gadgets and features, including the Social Bar, Recommendations, and Comment Translation. One of the latest to join the fray is ClackPoint, a powerful new gadget that integrates realtime text chat, voice conferencing and basic document sharing with Friend Connect.

The gadget works as you’d expect. Clicking on the ‘Call’ button will activate your microphone, and your voice can then be heard by anyone else in your chat room. Alternatively, you can dial in from a phone to one of the site’s dedicated lines (hit the button in the upper right hand corner for a list of numbers). There’s also a standard text-based group chat.

As far as sharing goes, you can participate in a group-edited notepad, import PDF slides that can be viewed by other chat members, and quickly send out a poll to everyone else in the chat room. You can try out the gadget for yourself here.

While the gadget could probably be used in a business setting, I suspect most businesses will stick with products like WebEx for their serious calls. That said, this would be perfect for more casual group meetings where real identities are still important (for example, a meeting discussing plans for your childs’ soccer team). For more, check out the Google blog post introducing the gadget. You can also find a full directory of gadgets available here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

People on the internet aren’t always very nice. While some adults may be tough enough to wade into the snark-infested waters of YouTube comments and other particularly nasty online fora – many children could use a helping hand coping with it all psychologically.

Enter Firefox for CyberMentors. It’s a new custom browser made in partnership with the popular anti-cyberbullying organization Cybermentors.org.uk. It’s a good looking option for parents.

Sponsor

The browser puts users one click of a button away from a live chat with adult staff and other children concerned about cyber-bullying, some of whom have been trained as mentors by the organization to offer personal advice in private chats. It’s a very active site and the 13 year old mentor I chatted with in testing the service was very well spoken. She told me that a majority of the young people she had chatted with sought advice about off-line bullying, but said that she frequently gives advice about online trouble as well. She had been trained in her UK school as an anti-bullying mentor and seemed like she would do a good job helping other young people.

In addition to easy access to chat with trained anti-bullying mentors, the browser also offers one-click access to a media sidebar where kids can see the latest news videos about anti-cyberbullying efforts.

We haven’t been able to figure out what happens to the sites that get reported as inappropriate through the browser, but maybe the CyberMentors staff finds the site owners and gives them a wet-willie.

People who already have Firefox installed may also get a browser plug-in that offers all the same functionality as the stand alone anti-bullying browser.

Disclosure: The author was bullied a lot as a child, but before the internet existed. He considers having a job as a blogger now a form of revenge. You know who you are! May you be plagued by spammy Facebook apps!

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Flickr lets you post image links to Twitter.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Yahoo has released a feature that lets people post Flickr photos to their Twitter accounts.

The Twitter2Flickr feature requires that you enable Flickr as an approved application that can tweet under your username.

Then, when you click the “blog this” link above a photo at Flickr, you’re presented with the option to twitter it. The tweet will come with a “flic.kr” shortened URL.

Flickr has a large number of users, and its use is amplified by the fact that other sites can make use of Flickr data through an API (application programming interface). The Twitter integration is a modest example of Yahoo’s attempt to make its sites less of a walled garden by working better with other Web properties.

A Twitter search for Flickr photographs indicates that a lot of people are making use of the integration, which had been in beta testing since earlier in June.