Month: December 2006

IM Interop

I must be psychic. This morning I was recalling that Google and AOL have long promised to integrate their instant messaging platforms. This would allow users on Google Talk to chat with their peeps who are on AOL Instant Messenger and vice versa. Low and behold, when I went to look it up I discovered that the expanded AOL-Google deal was unveiled exactly 1 year ago today. So what gives? Perhaps much more than what meets the eye.

Unyte

Co-browsing is the ability to share a web browser with a remote user, and be able to have that user both see what you’re doing and to drive your web browser so you can see what they’re doing. Obviously you only want to do this with someone you trust, but the implications for distance students are great. Most of the virtual reference packages have this capability, but from what I understand they work to varying degrees of success. Right about this time last year I started fiddling with a service called Jybe, and it worked fairly well, though required a toolbar to be installed by both users, and they haven’t updated that toolbar for Firefox 1.5, so I haven’t played with it in a while.

desktop sharing as a skype plugin sounds great for tech supporting relatives, but they implement the viewer as an applet. how stupid is that? they could piggyback on the nice fw-evading skype network, but no, applets.

US Boy Scouts are a sick joke

6 years ago, the Boy Scouts convinced the US Supreme Court that their principles gave them a constitutional right to exclude gays and atheists. Now the California Supreme Court has been asked to look at the other side of that coin — whether the Scouts are a religious organization ineligible for certain types of government aid, including $-a-year leases of public land.

hard to believe how stupid boy scouts are in the us. i never mention my history with scouting when in the us for that reason.