Here's something nice to have a look at as the year 2005 comes to end. I came accross this list of the 50 greatest gadgets in the past 50 years on PCWorld recently.

There should be a lot more gadgets joining this list in the next 50 years I think. It's also interesting that Sony has 7 presences among those 50! Good job Sony!

So you've probably heard of TradeMe and you might have heard of Zillion but have you heard of 2tradeit ? I never have but saw it today on the sponsored links of my blog. Will check it out and post about it again sometime soon.

John Downs a 4th year Comp Sci and Psychology student in 2006 will be the next Student Ambassador for Auckland University and has recently started blogging. If you follow the NZ.NET student list you may have read his introduction of himself, but if not you can see it here

Please drop by his blog and say hi. I'm sure John will be a great successor for the previous Auckland Student Ambassadors.

Welcome to blog world John, hope to see you blogging more soon.

I've just come accross a blog post by John Rivard a developer on the VS Team. The post explains why Visual Studio 2005 does not support older versions of the .NET Framework. See it here

Was just reading about a new tool released by Microsoft Research; SNARF; this tool integrates with your email client in order to allow you to sort (social sort) your email based on how often you send or receive emails from contacts. Sounds like a nice idea to me, will try it out now.

To get it go here

And for the article on PCWorld about it, see here

Will post my experiences soon...

Ferrit is now online at last. Initial rumors (at least the ones I heard) were that it will be an alternative to TradeMe. But it doesnt look anything like TradeMe yet. It looks more like a supersized online shop to me - not a bad idea either - perhaps with more products available for sale it could kick off well.

Only think I dont like from my first impressions is that they site display is a bit too busy.

Update: ok, I've just registered an account with Ferrit to check what benefits members get, well the main thing is that you can create a list of items you like and then get redirected to the store whom the product belongs to so that you can buy it. The list is also handy if you want to share it with friends and family (perhaps the reason for this is for people to find Christmas gifts ...etc for others) again not a bad idea.

What I find interesting is that you cannot checkout items into a shopping cart and pay for them and get them shipped to you, so it seems ferrit is more like half an online shop. I expect another benefit of the registration is being spammed  by the retailers participating in Ferrit (hopefully this wont happen!)

Update 2: Just refering to that last paragraph above, Ferrit will be introducing sales and more in later phases of Ferrit. Tim posted about this before here

Microsoft is now developing RSS into making it a two way street. I firstly read about this on Ray Ozzie's (MS CTO) blog here and now just found an article about this on PCWorld.

"Microsoft is extending the popular RSS 2.0 Web syndication format to make it "multidirectional," allowing it to be used for synchronizing information such as contacts and calendar entries across different applications, the company says.

Web sites that support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. When content on a site is updated, the RSS feed informs the subscriber, often with a summary of the updated content and a link to it."

See the full article here

Today while I was looking at some books in Whitcoulls, I came accross the following book and surely it got my attention!

I guess it should be an interesting read but I don't think I would buy it, maybe will look for it in the library. Anyone read it? Does it tell much that tech aware people wouldnt know?

More info about it can be found here if you are interested.

I just read that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's CTO has started blogging. It's nice to see senior people at large corps like MS blogging.

I'm sure his blog will be an interesting read. See it here and here is a little bio of Ray.

I previously blogged about my first impressions on Windows Live here

Well so far I've been very happy with it - kudos to the Windows Live team. The reason I like it so much is that it puts together several things that I do every day.

But what I would REALLY like to see made available (my Windows Live Christmas wish list) is:

The ability to integrate any email account to the page and not just Hotmail or Windows Live Mail Beta.

I really dont think this is very hard to achieve, and would love to be able to plug-in several email accounts into it.

The next other thing I wish would happen is Image Search, I occasionally find this feature very handy in Google when working on some projects and looking for specific images ..etc

So Sean I know you mentioned that you are trying to convince you're family to have Windows Live as their homepage. Well here's a promise from me, if any of the above features on my wish list become available, I promise to have www.live.com as my homepage