Feed Crier is a new service that delivers feed updates via AOL Instant Messenger. It’s a very simple concept which brings feeds to the world of instant messaging.

To subscribe to a feed you simply send an AIM message to feedcrier with a ’subscribe’ message with the feed URL, such as

subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/gizbuzz

Then as the feed is updated, you receive instant message notifications with links to the feed items. The free version can track up to three feeds and is ad-supported (though in my brief trial of the service I didn’t see any ads). There’s also a Pro service which tracks an unlimited number of feeds, with no advertising and a couple of other features for $4 per month (about £2 a month).

Now it’s a neat little service, but I can’t really see a lot of use for it, unless you are often at a computer without feed-reading software but with AIM capabilites and want to check your feeds. But with loads of web-based feed reader solutions around, the use of Feed Crier, as far as I can tell, is fairly limited.

Still it’s an interesting service and an interesting implementation of RSS/Atom and all the rest and demonstrates the flexibility of aggregation technologies. But beyond an interesting concept, I don’t really see much practical use. I suppose it could come in handy where you can get to AIM but for some reason web-based aggregators are unavailable, or if you desperately prefer to only use a desktop aggregator and then go to use a different machine, but beyond that Feed Crier is only really a small proof-of-concept in my eyes.

The official Zoho blog has announced Zoho Projects, a new online project management tool to add to Zoho’s already impressive product line-up.

Now I don’t have very much to compare Zoho Projects to - I’m not in possession of any desktop project management software. Also I don’t have enough time to do a very in-depth review, so I’ll just review some of the main points about Projects.

What I can say is that from what I have seen, Zoho Projects is very comprehensive project management solution. The feature set is everything you would expect from any other project management application - there are tasks, milestones, calendars, meetings, timesheets, reports, forums, even a documents area where users can upload documents related to the project.

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A senior Nintendo executive has revealed that the upcoming Nintendo Wii console will cost under €250 in Europe (that’s about £170 over here, provided they don’t make the UK pay more). Our US readers will be able to purchase the Wii for $250 (equivalent of £133 and €195) or less, according to the information Nintendo released in May.

Note this isn’t a confirmed price for Europe, merely a recognition that the Wii won’t cost more than those figures. Also, the European price might not strech to the UK and we may end up paying more, judging by what previous console pricing schemes have been like.

However, this still makes the Wii the cheapest next-generation console of the three, and will even rival the last generation machines like the original Xbox and PS2. At the moment in the UK, you can get a brand new original Xbox for about £89 and a brand new silver PS2 for around £99. The Wii is significantly more expensive than the last generation consoles, but crucially, using these figures, it’s cheaper than the Core Xbox 360 system at £199, which should help it.

Another thing we don’t know about is the price of the games. Xbox 360 games range from between £40-50, which is quite a premium (Microsoft make a loss on the hardware and have to make it up through game sales). The Wii console is cheaper to produce, and if the games can beat these prices even by a £5 or so, the Wii will have another advantage.

In a continuation of the high-definition DVD copy protection saga, Slashdot have the story from APC Magazine that all of the 32-bit editions of Windows Vista will be unable to play copy-protected HD video (such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies) at full HD resolution.

What this essentially means is that all machines with 32-bit processors, that means the Intel Core range, the low-end AMD processors and almost all older chips will be unable to play full-resolution HD content and the resolution will be downgraded because of fears the copy protection will be circumvented. Even if you do have a 64-bit capable CPU, you will need to be running the 64-bit edition of Vista to play back properly and full res.
The 64-bit Vistas will feature security protection to prevent code being injected into the Windows kernel; this is security that won’t make it into the 32-bit version. The fear is that on the 32-bit releases, people will install rootkits or other ‘hidden’ programs embedded into the kernel which intercept the HD content and dump it at full resolution, bypassing the copy protection. Supposedly the 64-bit editions will prevent any unsigned code getting at the kernel level where it has pretty much full control over the machine - control enough to alter the copy protection systems.

To play back the full HD content if it’s copy-protected, you’d need a display compatible with the HDCP copy protection standard anyway, but now you’ll also need both a 64-bit CPU (Intel Core 2 range, or the AMD 64 range etc.) and the 64-bit edition of Vista, as well as the HDCP-compatible display. This could also be dangerous for the Vista upgrade market, as people with 32-bit CPUs hoping to upgrade partly to play the HD content might not be so convinced if it turns out they can’t run the full high definition resolution.
Is this going too far? Will consumers really bother to rush for high-definition content if the industry is getting this draconian about enforcing its use? It’s a rights versus freedom argument here, and personally I don’t think it’s worth having something in HD if you can’t be free to play it on whatever you want.

UPDATE: It seems this is false, and the Windows Vista Team Blog have an update:

The community is buzzing with reactions to APC Magazine’s article regarding playback of protected High Definition content in 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. However, the information shared was incorrect and the reactions pervading the community are thus (understandably) ill-informed.

The real deal is that no version of Windows Vista will make a determination as to whether any given piece of content should play back or not. The individual ISV providing the playback solutions will choose whether the playback environment, including environments that use 32-bit processors, meet the performance requirements for playback of protected High Definition content.

Well, apparently it will after all.

Apparently, following Dell’s recent recall of many of its laptop batteries, our friend Apple has recalled 1 million iBook and PowerBook batteries, due to a fire hazard issue.

We haven’t seen the exploding iBooks yet (along the lines of exploding Dell machines), but the potential is there, apparently, such that Apple are recalling the offending batteries.

Are Apple and Dell using rubbish batteries or something? That’s two of the biggest laptop retailers issuing battery recalls in a very short period of time. Same supplier, do you reckon?

More from BBC News - breaking news, apparently.

It seems Microsoft’s pledge of going for advertising is not just talk to get the shareholders to believe they’re doing something about Google. Microsoft have just finished an exclusive deal which social networking site Facebook to provide all the advertising on the Facebook site.

Facebook calls itself “online directory that connects people through social networks”, which sounds very much similar to the ideas of Myspace, Bebo etc, but Facebook seems to focus on connecting people through schools and colleges and places of work. Now I’m not really a fan of social networking, so I don’t know whether this is how Myspace et al do things, but I was under the impression that other sites rely less on physical location to connect members (although most services do offer it).

Interestingly, Facebook isn’t exactly a showcase of Microsoft technology underneath. The site runs on PHP, one of the most popular server-side solutions (which is open source). Obviously Microsoft are banking on the Facebook becoming at least a fairly popular service.

This news comes only shortly after Google announced a deal with Myspace to offer full Google search capability and integration throughout Myspace.

Social networking, it seems, is big business.

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Writely, the online word processor acquired by Google, has gone public after a long time as being an invitation-only service following its acquisition by Google.

When it went invite-only, Huw managed to get his hands on an invite, so any Gizbuzz readers lucky enough to have commented on the post there would have been able to use it before today.

Its opening up to the world again presumably means that it’s finished its transition to Google servers. The interesting thing here is something that Raju Vegesna pointed out in the first Gizbuzz Podcast. Writely is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET server-side technology (that is currently Windows-only), and Google traditionally host their stuff on Linux-based servers (and often use Python as their programming language). So if Writely has made the transition to Google servers, are those servers running Windows Server?

A point I made in the podcast was that I heard that Google were planning to get the .NET code to run on Linux using Mono. Mono, for those of you who don’t know, is an open source implementation of the .NET specification (and languages like C#) which works on Linux. So far, it’s only really been used on a few desktop apps for Linux (Beagle search is a good example), and it hasn’t made it big time onto running .NET web applications on Linux/Apache.

So has Google used Mono on the new Writely installation? Interestingly enough, it’s not clear. On most Google pages, they use a web server known only as GWS (Google Web Server?). From what non-Googlers can guess, it’s a slightly modified version of Apache, the de facto web server for the majority of sites (guess what server Gizbuzz uses!).

But as we know, Apache can’t serve ASP.NET pages at the moment, at least not using Microsoft’s tools. So when I loaded up Wireshark, a program which allows me to watch the raw communication between me and the net, I was shocked to discover that writely.com registers as running GWS; supposedly, Google’s Apache.

So this must mean that either Google are using Microsoft’s IIS and just spoofing the world, or they are running a Mono-driven customised Apache. Of course, there’s no confirmation of this, but if they have managed to do it, why hasn’t it been done elsewhere?

And on a completely unrelated note, I will be away for a few days sans internet access (and Huw is away and unplugged as well), so there won’t be any posts for a few days. Don’t worry though, we haven’t given up and I should be posting again by Wednesday.

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Hot on the heels of contenders like the iTunes Music Store and Google Video, Amazon are reportedly working on a video store named Amazon Unbox. This is unconfirmed by Amazon, but a blogger recently got lucky and took screenshots of the service in action. At the moment the service looks like it will launch in the US, there’s no promising it will come to the UK or anywhere else and as it’s unconfirmed, no word if/when this service will go live.

The service looks like it’s going to feature a downloadable video player (which presumably uses some kind of DRM, and is Windows-only). The video player will presumably allow playback of purchased video and the homepage screenshot seems to reckon that the service will also allow TV and portable device playback.

Available in the store (from what I can read into the screenshots) will be Hollywood films, TV shows and archived sports events.

What’s also interesting is that we’ve got no way of knowing how exactly this content is going to be delivered. BitTorrent would be good technically, but unlikely because of legal issues, and standard web transfer (HTTP) is unlikely to be used because of inefficiency, insecurity and technical limitations with some files over 2 GB.
Considering the amount of work that appears to have gone into this service already, it’s unlikely just to be a passing idea by Amazon so it looks like, the US at least, are in for a new way to buy and download movies.

I track the RSS feed for the Windows Vista page, and recently Microsoft added two new items - a piece about how Vista “makes backup and recovery simple” and another about the Windows Vista Sidebar.

That’s funny. Apple recently previewed ‘Time Machine’, a feature of their upcoming OS X Leopard release at their Worldwide Developers’ Conference, that allows easy backup. And they have already got an implementation of widgets/gadgets in the form of Dashboard as well. A greeting from ‘the PC’ from Apple’s ads, who featured at the WWDC, said “Widgets, gadgets. Completely different…” and said “we could use some help [on Vista]“.

Am I meant to believe that this is a coincidence that the two features Apple are making a buzz about suddenly get pushed to the top of the feed for the Vista site (in their Windows implementations of course)?

Is Microsoft really feeling the pressure that Apple is putting on them by pushing out new features very quickly? We all know that the Mac OS X and Windows release schedules are vastly different. As Steve Jobs pointed out in his keynote, in the last five years Apple have got out 5 major releases of their flagship OS. He also said that in this time, Microsoft had done nothing.

Well, that’s not strictly true considering that in that time we’ve had things like the Windows XP Media Centre editions and things like the Tablet PC editions. Arguably not major upgrades, but certainly Microsoft have been doing more than nothing.

Vista will be big compared to XP. The feature list is quite big, but it’s underneath that’s taken a lot of the development time. The Tiger to Leopard upgrade will sport a few more features, but it won’t be anywhere near the transition from XP to Vista. Neither will there be as many architectural changes. (Contrary to Mr Jobs’ boastings, Tiger on Intel has been in the works for a lot longer than 210 days, with OS X’s predecessor NeXTSTEP having support for multiple architectures for a long time. Yes, OS X moving to Intel was a big step, but nowhere near as big as he made it out to be).

Apple like to release often with less features, and Microsoft haven’t done so recently; the history of releases like Windows Me may well have put them off rushing a big release, but it’s more likely that things just took longer than expected and Vista went from interim OS to major upgrade.
But coming back to my point - is this Microsoft showing that Apple is a serious competitor (apart from the odd disgruntled Windows user)? Apple certainly have lowered the barrier to going Mac, with low-cost machines like the Mac mini and support for Microsoft’s OS on the hardware, switching to a Mac is more enticing than ever. Plus, with Vista not scheduled to launch for the Christmas PC-buying season, are consumers becoming aware that they will end up with an out-of-date OS within a few months?

I guess only Microsoft’s internal strategy people know why these topics were bumped to the top of the feed. Of course, it could be a complete coincidence, but for me personally, this looks like an admission from Microsoft that Leopard really is a big contender to Vista. Now all we have to do is wait and see if hoardes of Wintel users suddenly become Mactel users instead. It’s unlikely, but more likely than it ever has been and looking ever more likely all the time.

Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open source strategist, has posted on his blog saying that open sourcing Java is “an ongoing process”, but it appears it is one that has started and now is gaining momentum.

In an informal breakfast in London, Phipps said that Java would be released under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licence, and hasn’t ruled out using the GPL. This could mean widespread bundling and usage in Linux and other free software operating systems, because using an OSI licence will hopefully ensure that the Java licence will be compatible with the operating system licences.

What I think would be interesting as well is whether Microsoft take the opportunity to reassess their stance on bundling Java.

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