I would never use a service like this for my own blog however I do have a project planned for the future that I would use their services for. They are not the cheapest guys I have seen around but witht he services they include you are getting a lot for your money. They charge a retainer of $2000 for 10 hours per month of services. This equates to $200 per hour. Boy am I in the wrong business.

If you want your site to rank in the top of the search engines or to improve your page rank SEO Consultant is the way to go. Once I get my project off the ground or funding for it I plan to contract a company like this. You cannot just expect to start a site and have everyone just know about it without any marketing or search engine optimization.

I was not under the impression it was so easy to buy or sell a business these days. Up until today I never knew there was a market for buying and selling small businesses. I mean I know that you can sell out once your company is large and profitable, however this site I found today shows that you can sell even the smallest business.

If you are searching for a business for sale you should give BiZag a try. It’s a new site that offers a search engine for finding a business to purchase. If you would like to list your business for sale you can do it there as well. While they do charge a fee for listing your business it is quite inexpensive if you do sell the business.

I am not currently in the market for buying or selling a business however I wish I knew things like this existed before I let go of Codebowl Solutions. It was rather profitable and I imagine I could have sold it. Maybe in the future I will be in the market, who knows.

Sites like BiZag may be useful for those who do nothing but start up a site, then try to sell it off as a business. Hosting businesses, Design / Programming businesses and even those get rich quick scheme sites you see out there. I wonder how many people would buy into that garbage.

Programming for OS X takes an approach that I am not quite used to. You spend most of your time pointing and clicking rather than writing code which I am used to coming from a PHP background. I am not yet sure what I will write for my first application, I am actually still going through the new Hilligass book which is quite good in my opinion.

I was a bit skeptical at first however I have been paid for every post that I have included on this site. Will it make you millions? Doubt it. But it will help with the hosting costs associated with running your site. I am sure if all you did was write about PayPerPost topics you could bring in quite a bit of money but that is not how I use it.

You will not see anything on this blog from PayPerPost that I have not used or done in the past. I will not make up stories just to post about something like refinancing your home or 0% interest credit cards.

So far I hope all of the PayPerPost content has been helpful, let me know in your comments. If you run a site, this is a good place for ideas on what to write about and also a good source of income if you push yourself.

The very first thing I noticed is that when I had IRC running but Linkinus closed (detached mode) when I opened Linkinus I had split windows already set. It had been a few hours since I was in Linkinus and I was in some very high traffic channels. The channel windows were scrolling madly for about 5 minutes. It seemed like it was trying to “catch-up” to the IRC buffer. After about 5 minutes I had to close Linkinus, quit IRC and restart it all. The other area of the split chat’s that I feel needs improvement is how you switch windows. Yes you can use cmd+shift+down and cmd+shift+up and you can also click on the topic bar above the channel. However clicking in the channel window alone should change the active window. However it does not work like that.

Another feature that I will touch on is a feature that was released in version 1.2 however it was not getting the use / attention that it should have so they made a point to tell us about it in 1.3. The new /getscript function. This is an AppleScript that someone wrote. If you use this command it will fetch the specified script from the script repository, install it and reload your scripts and plug-ins. For instance to install the netinfo script you would issue the command ‘/getscript netinfo’. Now what if you are lazy, you want to install all the scripts available but do not want to install them one by one. You can issue the command /getscript -all’ and it will download all of the scripts, updating the ones you already have with the latest versions. Personally I think that this should be enhanced. If I want to update all of the scripts I currently have installed I have to do that manually calling each one from what I can see. I would like to see a command ‘/getscript -update’ that will update all of the scripts I currently have installed with the latest versions.

This next feature is more of a style update but it is still pretty cool. If you are using the Whisper style you will be able to see images and YouTube video’s embedded into the chat windows. Whenever you or someone else posts a link, it will load the image or video for you to see. This is nice because you will never have to leave your IRC client to share video’s with other users. If the user on the other end is not using the Whisper theme they will see the normal link that you posted. If you like the look of the Whisper theme and do not like the video or images embedded there is also a version that will not embed the images and video. There was a comment by Jannis Leidel on the review written by TUAW where they state that they wrote the theme for limechat and that it was ripped from that. From what I can see it has in fact been ripped. I feel he has a right to complain and Linkinus should give credit to him for the original creation of the theme. However things are ripped every day. They should feel good that there theme was worth someones time in writing it for another client.

In version 1.3 of Linkinus they also revamped the graphical user interface, enhanced the performance, changed the way auto-completion worked. There are many other features, fixes that were done in this release, take a look at the change log to see them all.

Website developer Aza Raskin has come up with a simple JavaScript solution. It is a small javascript that will create a list of links in an iframe and then decide which site a visitor has been to based on the link color. When you visit sites on the web the links change colors to let you know that the link has been visited. This little javascript will return a list of sites that have been matched as visited. Now this is not a fool proof way but it is the best way currently. There are a few catches. The user has to have JavaScript enabled in their browser. It also only goes based on the browser history so if they clear their history often it won’t pick-up on this.

I am going to look into integrating this into my site maybe in a wordpress plug-in so that I can show only the relevant badges to my visitors. Obviously I would have a default list of badges to show just in case the script was not able to detect any of the sites. If you would like to get the script to use on your site be sure to visit this blog post.

While they do not yet offer the instant messaging which is a huge drawback for me. They do offer integration into MySpace and Facebook. The integration seems pretty good. Although it is not something that I would use on a daily basis. It allows you to quickly see who has messaged you, your top friends based on comment / message activity etc. Again this is not something that I would use on a daily basis so I will not go into too much detail about it here.

After signing up for the service there were a few drawbacks that I noticed immediately. I will cover those further down, first let’s focus on what they offer and my overall thoughts of the service. Fuser is a portal where you can add your e-mail accounts so that they are in a centralized location. This is key to anyone who does much traveling at all because it allows you to check your e-mails from anywhere, whether they are Pop, Imap, Gmail, etc. Having everything in one location is very nice. The inbox they developed is not like any other sites that I have seen thus far. They seem to be using Java for the site along with ASP.NET for the back-end. It really does not matter to me what technologies they use so long as the site is fast, easy to navigate, easy on the eyes and well organized.

While Fuser offers e-mail in a centralized location I feel they are lacking quite a bit. I do not see a way to import your contacts from other services like GMail, LinkedIn, etc. In fact I do not see a way to have a contact list at all. This is a big drawback. Why would I want my stuff in a centralized location and not be able to have all of my contacts right there with it? Ok so back to the e-mail in-box interface. I do not like the fact that there is no preview pane like Orgoo and almost every desktop e-mail clients have. When you click on a message you should see the body of the message load in the window below the message list. In Fuser currently you have to click on the message to see it open up in a new window. This just adds more complexity and more tasks for me to do when I simply want to read a message. There is more clicking involved as it takes a double click to open it and a clicks to scroll down the message and a click to close it. It would be much easier on the user if you could just click on the message and see it in the same window. I did receive an e-mail from Eric Wu that was clarifying the contact list issue. Below is his response

Oh, one clarification. We do automatically import all contacts from the accounts that get set up, but it’s not evident at first glance since we haven’t built the contact manager feature yet. What this means is that when you’re composing a new message (or adding addresses to a forward or reply) you can start typing the address or the name of the person and we’ll auto-match the address based on your existing contacts. This feature should look very similar to the way Gmail matches contact addresses to strings being entered into To: fields.

When first loading up the e-mail in-box it seems to take a few seconds to load. Now this would be fine if I were on a 3mbit cable connection but I am on a 20 / 20 mbit FIOS connection. If the in-box is slow on my connection I would hate to see how slow it is on a typical cable connection. Overall I currently do not like the interface that Fuser offers. It seems to be scattered about and not really well thought out.

One thing that they do offer is the ability to integrate Google Apps. This is a big plus for me since my work uses Google Apps for their email server. It was nice to be able to add my work account and have it right there with my personal stuff. When trying to add my MySpace account at first I was getting unknown errors from the site. It would not allow me to add my account. I sent the Java Console log over to Emily and she was having the technicians look into the problem. Today however I got it to add the account. I am not sure if they fixed the issue or if the issue was that my browser already had a cookie set stating that I was logged into MySpace.

The staff over at Fuser have asked me to be completely up front and honest about their service in this review. I have done so. I do not find this service to be that “great” at this time, however what they do offer for features seem to work and work well. Aside from being a bit sluggish (I think this is due to using Java) everything seems to work good. I have not tested the Facebook integration and do not plan to since I do not use Facebook. I love how they have the header columns in the in-box but this is not a service that I will be using. Things they could focus on for future features would be IM and an address book. I would also like to see them get away from Java, it’s really not the best technology to use these days. I would also love to see the ability to add RSS Feeds somewhere so that you can have all of your news updated right there as well.

Another thing that I see being an issue is only if you have a lot of e-mail / social networking accounts. The way they have the in-box setup is to have a horizontal bar above the in-box that lists the accounts side by side. You can click on each account to see messages from that account, you can turn all accounts off and only turn on those accounts that you wish to see at that moment. While this is a very nice feature I think that if you have multiple accounts it will either break the site design by overflowing the area meant for them or it will wrap and look bad. I think they need to figure out another method for dealing with this type of functionality.

If you are looking to get your e-mail and social networking stuff I think this site would be a good fit for you. However if you are looking for a more robust feature set there are other sites out there that have these abilities. I have also been told by the Fuser staff that they are going to be undergoing a re-design of the site. This re-design will include a preview pane that I have been stating they are lacking. I hope that the re-design also offers a better and easier site to navigate. I will be posting another review once the site is updated with the new design and the new features that they plan to integrate. For now I will stick with Orgoo and see what they offer in the near future.

It is extremely easy to setup your IM or e-mail accounts for use on Orgoo, the interface is nice and easy to navigate. The entire design of the site is easy on your eyes so you will have no problems staying on the site for a while. There are no obtrusive flashing banner ad’s or anything like that.

The few drawbacks that are keeping me from using the service full-time are quite important to me. Even though they are minor annoyances they seem to really get to me. First it will allow you to add almost any e-mail account, GMail, pop, imap, .Mac, etc. You can have each e-mail account have it’s own named folder for it’s virtual in-box or you can have all accounts go to your in-box. The first annoyance comes from the global in-box. There are no column headers to state the To, From, Subject, etc. If there were what I would really like to see is an account column so that i can easily see which account the email is from probably just a user@domain account name or a custom account name like My GMail. There is also no way to currently re-size columns, I would like the ability to make a column wider. If there is a message with a really long subject line it would be nice to be able to widen that column to read the subject. It looks like in the future they plan to allow removal of messages from the external server when the messages are downloaded but for right now all messages will remain on your server. When it comes to GMail this is not a problem but for pop accounts this can turn out to be a problem. Unless you have the server set to purge messages that are older than a certain date you might find that your pop mailbox will become full. I really hope they integrate this feature soon. When typing up an e-mail there is no cursor icon to let you know where the cursor is. I also cannot click somewhere in the text and insert other text or change current text. I am not sure if this is a compatibility issue with the browser I am using or not. It very well might be since I am using FireFox 3 beta. Another issue I found with the e-mail portion of this service is that when you send an e-mail it checks the addresses to see if they are in your contact list. If they are not it gives you the ability to enter a first and last name for each contact. You then check the check boxes and click the Add button for the contacts you wish to add to your list. I did this for 3 contacts that I sent an e-mail to and it seemed to work. That is until I checked my contact list. The contacts were not in my list. I did not see the new contacts in my list until I logged out and then logged back in. I am guessing this is due to their ajax front-end not refreshing the contact list every time you load the tab. One final issue that I just found is that if you click on an e-mail it will load the body of the e-mail in the body window. You cannot use the arrow keys to scroll through the e-mail body. I tried this and all it did was change to the next message in the list. At first I thought this was because the message list was the most active window in the application. However I clicked the message body window about 15 times in a row trying to make that the active window and then tried to scroll with the arrow keys. When I did this the first key press did scroll down in the message body but it also changed to the next message.

The second annoyance comes from the buddy list in the IM client. You cannot alias a username so that you can remember who they are more easily. You also cannot drag a contact from one group or another, and I have not found a way to edit the contact so that you can move it from group to group. It seems that whatever group they were in when you added your accounts that is the group they will remain in unless you use Adium or some other IM client to make the changes. Also every time you log-in all of your IM groups are expanded, it would be nice if it would remember which groups were collapsed and expanded the last time you were logged in. I usually only have my work related groups expanded during work hours and everything else collapsed. This is a minor annoyance but it’s still there. I have also noticed that it is impossible for you to add a Google Talk account that is not a gmail related email address. The company I work for uses Google for their mail server and my address is a castlecomm.com address. When I attempted to add this IM account it would not let me put the domain name in the username field. When I used the username jcrawford and my password it rejected it.

Orgoo also offers a video chat which I cannot review here because I have not tested that feature of the site yet. Personally I rarely use video chat so I am not sure that I will ever use this feature.

Orgoo also manages your contact list and allows you to import your contacts from sites like GMail, LinkedIn, and others. The issue I have found with this is that in the past I imported my GMail accounts into my LinkedIn account. When I choose to import my GMail and LinkedIn contacts into Orgoo I ended up with a ton of duplicates and had to purge my contact list manually. I would have thought they had some sort of handling for duplicates whether it be merging records or skipping duplicates all together. I was wrong. While purging my list I noticed that it was a bit slow. I would select about 40 contacts at a time and then click delete. The message that my contacts were removed was instantaneous, however it took a good 2 minutes for the contact list to actually refresh and have the contacts removed. This could be in part because I had upwards of 300 contacts in my list due to the duplicates.

The search feature for searching your IM logs and e-mail messages seems pretty powerful. However the issue I found with this is that when an e-mail message is found in the search results when you click on it the message will not load in the message window. You have to go back to your inbox, find the message and click on it to see the message contents. The From column (remember no header for the column) also seems shorter than in the in-box, long names will show in the in-box however search results will truncate the From name and currently there is no way to re-size the columns.

Orgoo also claims to have a powerful spam engine that will remember users actions when they mark messages as spam, however I have not been using the service long enough yet to review that feature. This feature takes time to gain a memory based on the users actions.

Overall I would rate this service a B+ however if they integrate more features and make it more usable I would love to use this service on a daily basis. I don’t know how many times I have been looking for an e-mail on my workstation to find out that it downloaded on the laptop. I also have been annoyed when I set the laptop to leave all messages on the server and when I get home have to sift though tons of e-mails that I had already read on the laptop while on the road. This service would be very handy for me since I have a lot of e-mail / IM accounts and love the idea of a central location for them all. Keep up the good work and if it becomes more usable you have me as a user.