The Mac mini looks good because the front is completely minimal. Unfortunately, that makes the front completely useless, and a pain in the ass if you have it set up where you need spelunking gear to get to the USB ports. Enter the unfortunately named Hang With Mi, which lets you mount your mini anywhere and adds four USB 2.0 ports to the front. Downside is that it needs its own power source, but the overall neat and convenient factor definitely adds up to the $50 pricetag. [macessity via Unpluggd]

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Adobe, Google and Yahoo are about to make it easier to build rich multimedia websites in the Flash file format (SWF) without sacrificing any “Google juice” (and, um, whatever the Yahoo equivalent is). Both search engines have been developing ways to fully index Flash content without requiring any extra effort from a website owner. […]

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Slide and Vh1 excel at making products geared towards America’s lowest common denominator. The first makes SuperPoke, a popular social network app that lets you send text messages saying you’ve done “stuff” to your friends. The latter produces reality show classics like “Flavor of Love”, “Rock of Love”, and “I Love New York”. […]

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Microsoft (MSFT) has extended the availability of Windows XP nearly as many times as it has extended the ship dates of Windows Vista and Office 2007. The company had planned to cut off XP sales through the retail and original equipment manufacturer channels on Jan. 30, 2008, one year after the Vista’s debut. But the poor reception given the new OS and “feedback” from XP advocates, gave it pause to reconsider. So Microsoft adjusted the deadline to June 30. Which makes today XP’s last on the retail market.

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Could Ross Levinsohn and Jon Miller reinvent Yahoo? What about OpenTable’s Jeff Jordan? Or various and sundry Google or Microsoft execs?It could happen.That specific scenario of putting someone like the two former Internet execs in charge of the troubled Web giant is one of the many being bandied about, as Yahoo shares tumble and the company heads toward a potentially ugly annual meeting everyone involved desperately wants to avoid.In fact, Yahoo’s board and major investors are talking today about various options for the company, including Yahoo’s receptivity to a sweetened deal with Microsoft and also other ways to pull the asset-rich company out of its stock doldrums.

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The lucky and meticulous bastards at DP Review have gotten a hands on preview of the D700, and nicely round up the differences between it and the 20 percent beefier D3 besides the ones we already pointed out:

•No rear info panel (now on main LCD)
•95 percent coverage, 0.72x viewfinder (to D3’s 100 percent, 0.7x)
•Smaller battery, plus uses D300’s MB-D10 battery pack
•Expanded Function button options (macro for any camera menu item)
•Less robust shutter (150,000 cycles, like D300)
•Single CF slot
•Minor menu and control differences

To save $2000, some heft and bulk, they’re all little sacrifices I’d gladly take. [DP Review]

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Pluribo is a Firefox plugin that displays short summaries of product reviews on Amazon.com. Pluribo scans through reviews customers on Amazon have left and automatically creates a one sentence summary that is somewhat akin to a Zagat review. While Zagat uses human editors to compile its reviews, though, Pluribo is fully automated. Right now, Pluribo only works for the electronics section of Amazon’s store, but the developers are planning to expand this to the rest of Amazon’s offerings soon.

Here is a typical summary that Pluribo created for a SanDisk MP3 player: “This has been on the market for a while. Although there were objections to the software, users are happy with the low price, product support, and battery. If you don’t care about the software, it has potential.”

Besides summarizing the reviews for a specific product, Pluribo also compares those reviews to other products in the same category to see where the reviews for this item were different. Pluribo will also give more weight to reviews that were considered ‘helpful’ by other Amazon customers. Pluribo keeps most of this information in the background. However, when hovering over a keyword in the summary, a small pop-up will display a list of relevant phrases Amazon’s customers used to describe the item, as well as some more of the statistical data Pluribo used to compute its summary.

In testing out Pluribo, it consistently displayed accurate summaries of the actual user comments - a testament to how well the developers have tuned their algorithm to at least this limited range of product categories.

Pluribo’s overall execution is quite seamless and Pluribo does not slow down the load times on Amazon, as it only gets to work after the page is fully displayed.

However, Pluribo seems quite restricted when it comes to what items it will display reviews for and for which it will just display a ‘coming soon’ message. Right now, it only works well for MP3 players, GPS navigation systems, and digital cameras. It also seems to work best for products that have been reviewed at least 30 times.

Also, it would be nice to see Pluribo start pulling in reviews from other sources besides Amazon’s own customers. The fact that it only works as a Firefox plugin is also going to limit its appeal to technically savvy users for the time being.

Overall, Pluribo is a fun and (when it’s working) useful plugin - though for the time being, its a bit too limited to be of real help. It’s real potential is only going to be realized once the developers get out a version that works across all of Amazon’s offerings and maybe even expands beyond Amazon to include other online stores.

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No, the XPS 2.0 from Skyhook is not a tie up with Dell despite sharing the same namesake as the latter’s notebook range - instead, XPS 2.0 is a “next-generation hybrid positioning system.” It doesn’t just rely on Wi-Fi, but will incorporate data from GPS satellites and cell phone towers as well, ensuring you will never, ever get lost again despite being in an urban canyon that is often the bane of satellites and towers when it comes to triangulating your position. The XPS 2.0 service is meant for handheld devices, but Skyhook has yet to announce any deals with big phone chip makers. Well, with more and more cell phones featuring A-GPS these days, it would be interesting to see which niche XPS 2.0 resides in.

Permalink | Comment | Uberbargain | Uberphones

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The Mac Mini is already so small, you’d be surprised at the number of creative places you can stuff it in without disrupting the visual flow of a room. Instead of letting your Mac Mini sit/lie in an undignified manner under a pile of books, why not pick up the “Hang With Mi” Mac Mini Rack? This allows you to mount the Mac Mini anywhere you like, offering the added bonus of a front access 4-port USB 2.0 hub. After all, with the plethora of USB toys/gadgets available these days, USB ports are as essential to any self-respecting geek as an unlimited number of handbags and shoes are to a well-dressed lady. This unique Mac Mini rack will retail for a shade under $50.

Permalink | Comment | Uberbargain | Uberphones

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Get this: Yahoo’s merger talks with Microsoft collapsed because the software giant wasn’t fully committed to them. This, presumably according to the same folks at Yahoo who would have us believe the company didn’t learn of Microsoft’s offer of $33-per-share until Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s kiss-off letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

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TripSay is a new travel social network that is currently in a private beta (the first 25 Rev2 readers who e-mail (info@tripsay.com) info (at) tripsay (dot) com with “Rev2″ in the subject line will get be able to obtain an invitation.) Based in Finald, the service targets frequent travellers and enthusiasts alike who can share their experiences, plan their trips, group with their friends and make new ones, and do a number of things that are related to travel.

The signup proccess is a …

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Ning co-founder joins board of directors of the social-networking site.

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The feature that Mashable’s Stan Schroeder has been “waiting for his whole life” launches today: it’s an iPhone version of FriendFeed. The announcement was made earlier today on FriendFeed’s blog, and there isn’t much difference noticable from the regular web version - just a specialized interface, a few more gradients, and more readable type for […]

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Todd / Netflix Community Blog:
Profiles feature NOT going away  —  For users of Profiles, I have good news to report: we will keep the feature with no plans to discontinue it.  —  We were persuaded by the well-reasoned, sincere responses of loyal members who very much value this feature.

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Bret Taylor / FriendFeed Blog:
FriendFeed iPhone interface  —  We just launched a specialized iPhone interface for FriendFeed.  When you visit friendfeed.com in your iPhone browser, you will get the new interface automatically:  —  For all of you without iPhones, you can check out the site at http://friendfeed.com/i.

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