Google Chrome. Google’s web browser to be released later today. In comic form. By Scott McCloud. And here are some more screenshots for good measure.

soundamus - web service that provides a RSS feed of new and upcoming albums based on artists you scrobble on Last.fm. Also known as: the most useful mashup of 2008.

There has been a surprising influx of websites offering you ways to create mixtapes to share with friends (or just horde for yourself). From Muxtape to Mixaloo to Mixwit, each offers a different twist on the mixtape craze.

Mixaloo and Mixwit fall into their own category, as they scour the internet for MP3s (a la SeeqPod or Songza) rather than letting users upload their own songs. They also offer a much more graphical experience, and Mixaloo even offers a way for users to earn money by selling mixtapes.

Still, Muxtape is by far the most popular of the three, most likely for its very straightforward interface and ability for users to upload their own songs (unlike the other two which rely on MP3s already available online). Community love can further be seen in the creation of Muxtape Recommendation, a Yahoo! Pipes creation that takes your Last.fm username and returns featured mixes with at least one track by a favorite artist of yours.

It is no question that Muxtape is a fun little service, but where to go from here? The site’s legality is tenuous at best, and the owners seem pretty steadfast on not earning any income from the site. Of course, once the money angle is figured out, the legal angle will be thrust into the spotlight. The RIAA may be holding back for the moment, but any sign of profiting or really widespread popularity will be sure to bring Officer Buzz Killington around.

(Mixaloo and Mixwit are not safe either, but they can at least plead innocence on the basis of not actually hosting any files. Though even they need to be careful, because the music industry is not one to walk softly.)

Well, best of luck to all of these web frontiersman. And while the party’s still going:

http://isnotchicago.muxtape.com/
http://fallingofftheedgeofthearth.muxtape.com/
http://nakedsandbox.muxtape.com/

googleDrive - Drive around Google Maps!

File Destructor 2.0 - Not to be confused with File Destructor 1.0 (which sadly had the manufacturing defect of spontaneous combustion), File Destructor 2.0 provides you with a completely unopenable file. FD2.0 is perfect for the collegiate man or woman looking to get in a few

Interview with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber - A Mix of the Technical, the Artful, the Thoughtful, and the Absurd:

What graphic design is to a visual idea, writing is to a verbal idea. My goal is to craft my writing in such a way that makes it as easy and obvious as possible for the reader to “get” exactly what it is I’m hoping they get.

Obsolete Skills - Such as coding in BASIC, adjusting the rabbit ears on top of a TV, and getting to know your neighbors. Also: obsolete skills, identification of.

Spy Satellite Blast, Caught on Tape - Wired.com has updated coverage on the recent Star Wars-esque shenanigans of the US Navy. In space, no one can hear you scream, but we can definitely watch you explode into a million pieces.

Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies, 1774-2004 - Exactly what it says, starting with myth #1: The Broken Window.

One of the most persistent is that of the broken window—one breaks and this is celebrated as a boon to the economy: the window manufacturer gets an order; the hardware store sells a window; a carpenter is hired to install it; money circulates; jobs are created; the GDP goes up. In truth, of course, the economy is no better off at all.

Wants For Sale - Christine and Justin are a couple from New York City who paint a portrait of something they want, priced to sell at however much money they need to purchase that something. Dinner at Nobu? $152. Financial security? $1,000,000. Sleep? Free.

The Observatory - The Columbia Journalism Review recently launched The Observatory, “a full-time department dedicated to critiquing the press coverage of science and the environment”. Relevant articles are light at the moment, but the archives will grow heartily as time goes on.

Overdub Tampering Committee - For about three years, this group has been downloading recently leaked albums and re-leaking them with some minor additions. A bass line here, a piano part there, and you suddenly have in your possession music that seemed to be legitimate, but was very obviously and cleverly not.

This got us thinking: what if this problem got more insidious, subtle, and widespread? What if there was a network of musicians who got a hold of albums right as they leaked, added subtle yet very much additional overdubs all over the album, and then re-leaked it to the internet?

We imagined a scenario where someone would get in a car with their friend, he would put on the new _____ album, and you would say, “Where’s all the piano parts?” to which the driver would say, “What piano parts? This album is all guitars and drums.” Finally, you would scratch your head and say, “Not my copy!”

Aviary - Still in private beta testing, Aviary is a collection of web applications “for artists of all genres”. You can (will be able to) choose from Phoenix (image editor), Myna (audio editor), Owl (desktop publisher), Horus (font editor), and a dozen others. This is likely to be astounding if it comes anywhere close to meeting expectations.

Flickr: Photos from the decapitator - Find billboard with image of person’s or animal’s head. Replace head with bloody stump. Guerilla artfare was never so much fun.

It seems that it’s another week, another holiday. In honor of reinventing yourself if only until your motivation runs out in a few days, naked mix is on hiatus until Wednesday.

But I am not leaving you stranded for these few days. Instead: SeeqPod playable search, a new search engine coming out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Use it to crawl the web for multimedia (read: mp3s) that you can arrange and view in a playlist. Search on the left, listen on the right. Register and you can save playlists for later experimentation.

There you go. My New Years resolution is to let you do the work this time, but like any resolution, it’s bound to fizzle, so I’ll be seeing you in a few days.

Happy New Year!

Last week, meebo.com released a Firefox extension (add-on, plugin, whatever) which integrates the meebo.com service into the Firefox sidebar. A nifty little webcomic can be seen on the meeblog post, or in the announcement box when you log into meebo.

Before I go any further, let me explain what meebo is.

From Wikipedia:

Meebo is an in-browser instant messaging program which supports multiple IM services, including Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, and Jabber and is based on the free and open source library libpurple created by the software developers of Pidgin. The goal of the project is to combine the multiple-network connectivity of Trillian and Pidgin (formerly Gaim) with the in-browser availability of AIM Express.

As the article says, meebo is basically AIM Express, but with the ability to connect to other IM networks (Yahoo!, Google Talk, etc.) in addition to AIM. The interface is much nicer, and some extra features are available if you sign up with a meebo account (conversation logging, account management), but the analogy to AIM Express is accurate enough if you’ve never used meebo before. (But similar or not, if you’re away from your home computer and still use AIM Express to chat, what the hell is wrong with you?)

When I discovered meebo a year ago, it was love at first sight.

Various competitors exist, but I’ve never had a reason to switch (and I imagine the same goes for users of the other services). The layout is a virtual desktop, with IM windows you can move around, resize, minimize, and so forth. On top of that, you can pop-out the buddy list and IM windows so they act like pop-up windows (and thus mimic even more a regular desktop application). These features give meebo the seamless feel of a desktop application, which is surprising given it runs in a browser.

Of course, there are limitations, albeit pretty insignificant ones. Font family and color choices are limited to 11 fonts and a palette of 20 colors; even when popping out the windows, the main meebo page needs to be open; the buddy list automatically orders buddies and groups alphabetically, with no ability to change the order. Considering meebo is an internet application, not a desktop application, these are really more annoyances than limitations.

But the new Firefox extension only adds to these annoyances.

Although the extension allows you to login and view your buddy list in the sidebar, a meebo.com window still needs to be open. The ability to stay connected without having meebo.com open is being worked on for future versions of the extension, but it remains a significant drawback for version 1.0.

In my mind, this absolutely negates the usefulness of the extension. The main reason I have not switched entirely to meebo (since AIM 6.0 pretty much got rid of every feature I liked from earlier versions) is because meebo.com has to be open to use the service. It is definitely a pet peeve, but I just can’t get over it.

The other big annoyance is that the sidebar buddy list does not show groups. Instead, it shows all your online buddies in alphabetical order with no futher organization. People have groups for a reason, so to lump all buddies into a single list seems pretty thoughtless. In my case, I have to scroll past about 20 phone numbers — you can send text messages through AIM — before I even get to a screen name. For all intents and purposes. that means my buddy list is constantly off-screen.

As it stands, the extension is pretty much just a way to automatically sign into the service. However, the service itself and the extension seem to be targeted toward different users. Installing any program, even an add-on, is prohibited in many work and school settings, so I assume the extension is meant for people who use meebo at home, and even more so to people who want to use meebo as their main IM program. At-home users are not going to be interested in an extension that really only exacerbates the service’s shortcomings.

Thankfully, these are easily fixed annoyances.

Without these annoyances, the meebo extension becomes vastly more usable. Instead of opening AIM or Yahoo! Messenger (or even Trillian or Pidgin), users could simply open Firefox. And given the development team’s track record, I am hopeful that an updated version of the extension is in the very near future. The team has always been quick to respond to user feedback, and I don’t see this situation being any different.

A meebo extension is a great idea, and opens the door to a huge range of possibilities, but the meebo team will have to step up their game in order to utilize those possibilities. With version 1.0, I am left wondering, “What was the point?”

More suggestions for future versions: added fonts, Opera extension, ability to reorder groups and buddies, automatic pop out, better way to reconnect after dropped network connections, separation of buddy lists by screen name.