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This week there were no real concentrations of news sources, stuff was all over the place. The only common thread is that some stuff was just out there. Must be the calm before the holiday season starts in earnest.

Mozilla Raindrop
The Mozilla Foundation announced that they're planning to re-invent the way we work with our email inbox. Ars Technica had a great look at this innovative new approach to email and messaging:

It's important to understand that Raindrop is not a conventional desktop client application like Thunderbird. It's a Web application in the sense that you run it as a background service and access it entirely through a browser.

Ok, who's next then. First it was Google with Wave, now Mozilla.

I attack the darkness
And speaking of Google Wave, it looks like a bunch of D&D aficionados have figured out a way to use it to help them play traditional Pen & Paper Role Playing Games:

So what is the literary style of a Wave RPG? Whatever you want. This is what’s quite brilliant about it. From the most verbose freeform RPG to the most dialog-starved combat-heavy story-less RPG, you can have it here on the Wave. No problem.

The post goes on to describe how and why Google Wave is really a cool and logical platform for RPGs. Ars Technica also has a great piece on GW:RPG - Interesting, to say the least.

A new (common short form of 'Richard') Tracy watch?
Perhaps, except it's kind-of a hybrid read-only Blackberry, but it launched this week. Gillian Shaw took a look at the details in the Vancouver Sun earlier this week:

The inPulse started as a team project when Migicovsky, 23 and a graduate of Sir Winston Churchill secondary, was still in university. He came up with the idea while he was biking over cobblestoned streets in Europe and worried he'd lose his new phone in the canals he was biking along.

Are some Facebook and other social games scams?
Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch) seems to think so:

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

Frankly, I'm not a big fan of games running inside a browser's social media platform. There's too much that's unknown about the data that's being exchanged between my computer, the host social media system, the advertisers, the game developers etc. But, many people do enjoy this type of game, but it never hurts to be informed about what's going on in the gaming environment.

Third OS launch in two months
Hot on the heels of Apple's Snow Leopard and Microsoft's Windows 7, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) made it's official debut amid a little fanfare, at least amongst the Linux crowd. Future Shop's Techblogger Tris Hussey touched on it here earlier this week, and Ars Technica has a pretty good review of the alternate (and free) operating system:

This is the eleventh release of Ubuntu since the project's inception five years ago. The distribution has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity in the Linux desktop ecosystem and has attracted a considerable audience. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, touts the new release as its best yet and says that the latest improvements will take the Ubuntu user experience to the next level.

I'm burning my install CD as I write this

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Your Turn
So, did I miss anything? What online story really got you going this week? Link to it in the comments!

Message Edited by bgrier on 11-01-2009 01:10 AM