GMail has previously had a plain-text loading screen which usually says “Loading” (and an option to use basic mode if you’re on a slow connection).
Google has silently rolled out an upgrade to the loading screen, which now sports a horizontal progress indicator, along with an option to switch to basic mode (which was earlier limited to when it took a long time to load).
Compfight, is an AJAX-powered website that allows easy and quick searching of Flickr images. It has now undergone a revamp in its design, and looks more modern now, moving away from the sparse interface that was present before.
In my review of Compfight, I had noted that Compfight featured a very minimalist interface with just a text field and a couple of buttons and options (reminding me of Google), hence loading very quickly (inspite of the numerous scripts required for AJAXed search).
Twitter is gaining popularity and thousands of new users are joining every day. With a large audience to cater to, web applications, standalone desktop applications, Adobe AIR applications and Firefox addons are being made.
TwitBin is one such Firefox addon for Twitter. Residing on Firefox as a sidebar, TwitBin can be used to send tweets, read tweets and view public timeline. There is an option to view only public tweets, friends’ tweets, direct messages or replies.
AdSense allows custom styling and various other tidbits for premium publishers who get enormous amount of traffic every month. Most large portals are premium publishers and get such advantages.
However, I recently noticed custom ads on Digital Inspiration, written by Amit Aggarwal, a popular problogger from India. His blogs (on WordPress and previously on Blogspot) receives ~2 million hits per month, and sports custom AdSense units. What caught my fancy was that the traffic levels to his blog are not large enough for a premium account.
Quotably is a newly-launched site that shows you Twitter conversations in a threaded format. Messages are reformatted Twitter messages into threaded conversations, making it effortless to follow actual discussions that are occurring on Twitter.
Quotably Homepage