ProductWiki & OpenID
I recently stumbled across ProductWiki, a product review service based on the wiki model of users contributing items, writing reviews, and rating products that are on the site. Just browsing around ProductWiki, I really love the interface and the way their model works. You search for items on the site, either with a search field or a drilldown type method (similar to Newegg or Amazon). Once you select a product, you can either “love it”, “want it”, “have it”, or “tag it”… or any combination thereof. They also have links provided for purchasing products via the Shopping.com API.
My favorite aspect is that their service supports OpenID, which I’ve discovered an interest of late. For someone who has so many accounts at various services all over the web, the idea of consilidating authentication to one set of servers is quite appealing. The only other service I use that currently supports OpenID is Ma.gnolia, the social bookmarking service. After digg implements OpenID support, I’m predicting that it’ll really take off. For those folks concerned about security in the land of OpenID (which is a reasonable concern), I would say that I only support OpenID for services that just require a human behind an account, such as digg, del.icio.us, Last.fm, or any of the other hundreds of Web 2.0 applications out there; not for use with eBay, Amazon, or your banking information. My experience so far with OpenID has been a good one, and I hope it continues to improve convenience and accessiblity around the web.
Guide to Hamachi
I’ve recently started using Hamachi (as in, 3 days ago), and I’m now addicted. I haven’t seen such a useful app in years. Hamachi is essentially a personal VPN solution for putting any computers on a sort of VLAN configuration across the internet. You would install Hamachi on any computers you want to have access to one another, create a network with a password, and join the computers to that network. The magic of Hamachi really comes from the fact that it’s a UDP-based peer-to-peer system in which the connections are secured via the main Hamachi server(s). However, the third-party server is only used to secure the connection; no data passes through the Hamachi servers. Dead simple.
Here’s a complete guide on the basics of Hamachi.
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