Just after releasing their latest product – Highrise, 37Signals published this blog post which announced changes to their pricing structure. This was made in response to customer demands, something I highly commend them for.

I was just checking Technorati tonight for details on the blogosphere when I saw Twitter at number #3 for popular searches. I thought to myself this is amazing. I’ve been a registered user on Twitter since it’s inception, although my activity has been somewhat appalling. For those of you that don’t know about Twitter, it is often summarised with the Quip: “Twitter asks the question, What are you doing now?”. It is like a tumblelog for your personal activities and of course you can see what others are doing as well. Alot of users consider Twitter addictive.

When Obvious (Twitter’s Parent) announced recently they were selling Odeo, I thought they would become another bright star fading out in the horizon. I thought of Twitter, but did not expect it to be so successful as a key product to focus on. Many people argue why Odeo flunked, some (including me) blame it on the explosive growth of iTunes – in particular the podcast directory. I guess Obvious are in luck with a new mainstream product.

Prototype 1.5 has finally been released as stable along with a new website. The team have also started a documentation effort to make life easier.

http://www.google.com/calendar. Very impressive interface and features. There also seems to be a natural language feature whereby you can quickly add events. I clicked on “Quick Add” and typed in “Dinner with Jess at 7pm tommorrow night” and it created an event for me at that exact time. All the other Web 2.0 hype seems to be there as well. AJAX, Popup windows, drag, drop and resizing. You can share calendars and send invitations for events too. Have a look.

The Ruby programming language has recently become widely adopted with the advent of key web frameworks and applications. The big player, being Ruby on Rails has wide-spread it’s usage infectiously. I’ve always been a loyal PHP fan – having used it for five years now. I did not want to spend time learning another programming language again. I tried Cake and other popular frameworks but they are still to immature to consider for a large-scale application.

Finally the digg link, (should be close to 1000 diggs) on the front page tempted me to try an interactive hands-on demo. Its too simple, easy and fast. I’m going to test-drive rails soon on a small application and see whether it shapes up to the endless hype floating around. I might even end up hooked. Time is money, simple is good.

All returned search results now have a corresponding RSS page. Great for digg data miners or anyone that wants live keyword-based RSS search results.

read more | digg story

Looks promising, although the critics are knocking it in it’s early stages. Heres my page. If you would like an invite, please leave a comment (with email).

Hey you can write words using photos from Flickr!

Simply enter this URL in your browser: http://metaatem.net/words/MYWORD where ‘MYWORD’ is the word you wish to see displayed using photos.

Heres an example of me: #flickrWords .flickrImg { float: left; }

Robsta.id.au ranks #1 for the search term ‘robsta‘ on Amazon’s A9 search engine.

But apart from that, A9 is a very interesting search engine. US Residents can use a yellowpages feature to get street views of millions of businesses and their surroundings.

The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View”, which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.

Heres how they did it.

Whilst feeling pretty generous I am throwing away six (6) free Gmail invitations.

Free-Gmail-Invites
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-62f3225106-80d8878492-4da0ad40f0
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-62f3225106-f2a37e0559-85635a2c23
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-62f3225106-67787ee405-4d38f2ee80
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-62f3225106-08d6548247-893ab00dc1
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-62f3225106-200ec9e68b-810f139c26
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-62f3225106-daeb610309-e68bd2c949

Go easy on the free invites.