Since its birth a few years ago, my Firefox addon BetterSearch has been a fun project. People were using it and seemed mostly happy with it, as they could see a thumbnail of the search results on their favourite search engine before actually clicking through. Good times.

BetterSearch screenshot

This was made possible by displaying preview thumbnails from various sources, such as Amazon’s Alexa service and several others. These thumbnails had to be bought from them, which was financed by money I made as an Amazon affiliate. When BetterSearch would find an Amazon product in the list of search results, it would not display the Amazon.com thumbnail but the actual product image, along with the price, average rating and related information. When a user would click through, and buy stuff from them, I (as their affiliate) would get a few cents.¹

This worked out well. It paid for server, bandwidth and thumbnails, and yes, I’ve made some extra money from it. Not much, but a bit.

Then, around end of 2008, Amazon changed the terms of their affiliate program — all of a sudden, what BetterSearch (and several other addons for different browsers) were doing wasn’t allowed anymore. No more tagging of so-called “organic search results”. Oh noes! The Amazon partner program-related code had to go.

This put me in a somewhat tough spot. On the one hand, I liked my addon, and I know a lot of people were using it on a daily basis. On the other hand, it was just a side project, and the only source of income to counter the costs had suddenly dried up — and to be honest, as much as I like BetterSearch, it’s nothing I was willing or able to invest lots of money in just for the fun of it.

But luckily, the company of a former co-worker of mine was looking for something like BetterSearch. They were interested in buying the addon, and we came to an agreement.

What does that mean?

It means BetterSearch, the Firefox addon, is now owned by Abakus Internet Marketing. They will continue to develop it, they will run its servers, pay for the bandwidth and the thumbnails — in a nutshell, everything BetterSearch is theirs now.

For the end user, not much will change — apart from a vastly expanded number of available thumbnails, that is. Firefox will update the addon whenever there’s a new version, the way it was before. No need to manually install or adjust anything.

What’s not part of the deal

No user-related data was passed along. First and foremost, BetterSearch didn’t collect any user data. But of course there’s always the case of the thumbnail server logfiles. Everytime a thumbnail is requested, it’s noted in a server logfile, along with the user’s IP address. (That’s the modus operandi for pretty much every server everywhere on the internet. Ask your local geek about the details.) Since I don’t care about this stuff, these logfiles were deleted on a daily basis anyone looking at them.

Either way, these server log files were not part of the deal.

The future

I think the addon’s future is a bit brighter now as it was a few months ago. Now there’s someone with sufficient resources to maintain and further develop BetterSearch. To me, that’s a good thing. :)

Over the last few years, I have always wondered why there was no site that would allow me to track my progress in World of Warcraft. Sure, there’s the WoW Armory and sites like Raptr, but all these places take more of a “your char right now!” approach which never came close to what I had in mind. And those that did go into the direction I was thinking didn’t click with me.

But what exactly did I have in mind? This is where it gets a bit complicated. I was looking for a site that would automatically keep track of my characters for me, make daily snapshots, let me upload images and notes… Give me a timeline of their progress… In short, something that would allow me to document the “life” of my toons. Maybe something that would give me a bit more, with “more” still being a very diffuse idea.

Anyways, I always felt this was strange there was no such site, as I believe there’s an audience for that. So many people do invest so many hours, so much energy and money into the game, I can’t possibly be the only one wanting.

I ended up firing up TextMate and starting to code, and only a short while °cough° later, I had something I deemed good enough to release as a beta.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you CharPool.

The site does exactly what I’ve described a few paragraphs ago, but it also throws in (in my opinion) funky Twitter support, whereas you can tweet in the name of your characters, and these tweets will show up on the chars timeline, together with your achievements and screenshots etc. It also has feeds.

There’s also a page which shows you the WoW-related tweets of your guild mates and also of the people you are following on CharPool. The guild support is still rather rudimentary, and at the moment is mostly just a hint at things to come. Again, it’s Twitter-based, because I’ve read somewhere on AOL that it is what the “cool cats” are “digging” right now.¹

So, I am having plans for CharPool. Big plans. But it’s still in its infancy, there’re a few rough edges, and I’ll need testers to take a look, poke around, and give me feedback. Preferrably WoW players, because, you see, without active characters the site is rather pointless. :)

I’ve opened up 250 beta slots which are given away on a “first come, first serve” basis. I’d appreciate it if you could take a look if WoW is your cup o’ tea. If not, maybe you know someone who is a player? Then you could pass him a note.

Thank you very much in advance.

A few weeks ago I was talking with Mike about carefully choosing gifts for our loved ones, about how to select the right things for the right people, so that come holiday season joy would be brought to them. We were discussing this arduous task at great lengths, using big words and long sentences, reflecting the importance of the outcome and the process itself.

I believe our conversation started when the phrase “I need some random Christmas crap” was muttered by one of us.

So obviously, I am not the only person having this particular problem. I am part of a larger group. But this knowledge is no real consolation. What to get family and friends to show them our affection? Each year the same questions arises, like a clockwork, and each year we’re more or less at a loss.¹

I wish there was a way to simulate long browsing sessions in a mall in a very very very condensed way, to allow for picking out gifts — while at the same time taking my very high-importance, hectic lifestyle into account. Oh, and if there was some soothing music, favorably some sort of Easy Listening, to sweeten the experience, that’d be great.

As it turns out, I had to build this simulation myself. I’ve decided to call it random.li, which, incidentally, also happens to be its domain! (I know, what are the chances?!)

Here’s a screenshot.

random.li grabs a number of different items from your favourite Amazon store, in your selected price range, shuffles them, and shows them to you in a 3×3 grid, along with the prices. You won’t even see their titles!

We’re talking about fast-paced, crack S.W.A.T. team-style gift finding. Shiny? Check! Affordable? Check! Bag it, we’re done!

Clicking an item (or hitting the related keyboard shortcut) will bring up some details: its title, what it is etc. A click on the details display will open its Amazon page in a new window.

It’s all rather simple, and I’ve tried to keep the amount of clutter low (yes, the music player in the lower left corner is an essential for me). There’s no registration, no wishlist, no shopping list, no learning curve to speak of. Go there, pick a store, your price range, maybe finetune the categories to search in, that’s it.

Well, have a look if you’re in the market for gifts. Maybe it’ll work for you as it works for me! Comments are welcome, and I’ve also set up a FriendFeed room for support issues.

If you like it, feel free to use the handy “Bookmark” button at the bottom of the random.li site to post the link to your favourite bookmarking / social networking / web 2.0 site, like delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter and whathaveyou. I might even send you a cookie if you do!

Cheers! :D

The short story is: not going to happen.

I’ll be shutting escaloop down in about a month or so. It was a nice toy and a fun experiment, I’ve used it to get into Ramaze, but I have neither the time nor the energy to work on it any further.

I recommend moving over to FriendFeed or Lifestream.fm for all your lifestream needs. I am sure there are many more such services, just look around. :)

If you should choose FriendFeed, look me up if you want.

Brings no new features to the table (sorry) but compatibility with Firefox 3.0.* and Flock 1.2.

Enjoy! (The new version should also appear on AMO soon.)