Industry news

Web forums may seem like an unexciting idea given the increasingly public and real-time nature of Web discourse. But the aging medium still has some tricks up its sleeve.

One recent entrant to the Web forums game is Lefora, which launched around this time last year. This week, the company is introducing its follow-up to that, called Talki.

Unlike Lefora, Talki is not a forum system designed to be integrated into just your site. Instead, it's a distributed chatter box that can be placed in on a single page or post, as well as on the site of anyone else who embeds it. In other words, the discussion is not limited to one community or content creator.

"With Talki we're targeting a different demographic," Talki's co-founder Paul Bragiel told CNET on Thursday. "We're not going after super hard-core forum users that want to mod the hell out of everything. It's for the 'hey I have a blog, and it's a very big audience, and I'd like to have my users talking to each other,' or 'hey I'm a large media entity and I want to have a couple big sites and put them up very quickly.'"

Bragiel says the company was contemplating creating a "lite" version of Lefora but what came out of development was too different of a product to have in the same brand or category. "Working on Lefora we realized that there are these two types of users that want forums. These hard-core users who wanted to tweak every single option...and then we saw these people who have Web sites or commerce sites and who wanted something clean and simple, but not necessarily with all those features."

The result is a stripped-down version of a forum that's still quite similar to Lefora but one that requires less set-up. For instance, Talki can be set to automatically detect the look of your site and change its coloring to match. And on the user end, people don't even need a Lefora account--they can use Facebook or Twitter to log-in instead.

The one challenge it faces though is competing with existing commenting systems, something Bragiel said he thinks Talki can peacefully coexist with. "Comments still thrive off of a stub--the main page. Somebody reads an article and it's always the editor of a site. And then comments kind of come off it," Bragiel said. "Here, this is a purely main-to-main discussion. So anyone can go out there and create their own discussion...and everyone has control to do this."

As for the moderation of these discussions, that's still something needs to be managed by the creator of the Talki widget--at least for now. Bragiel said that Lefora users and customers have been asking the company to offer a moderation service, especially on the enterprise side. "We've thought about it," Bragiel said, "I've never been a big enterprise guy myself. Every single company I've done has been consumer-oriented."

On the business side of things, Talki is free to use but caps off the number of forum topics that can be created, as well as how many recent topics can be seen. Forum creators can pay for one of several premium service tiers that allow for unlimited topics and replies, as well as things like custom branding and live customer service.

Update at 10:25 p.m. PST: I've removed the embedded Talki widget from this post, as it was causing some users to experience problems reading the post. If you want to give it a spin, you can tool around with one of the company's example forums here.

Update at 10:50 a.m. PST on April 25: The embedded widget is back and after the page jump. It wasn't playing nice with one of the widgets on our site, but it works now.

See also: Tangler which has been kicking around since 2006.… Read more

Document-sharing site Scribd has a new trick up its sleeve that will make whatever you're viewing on the site a little more public. That is, if you feel like broadcasting your reading habits to the world.

The new feature is called Readcasting, and it's an evolution of the social-sharing options found on most sites. You can set the site to post your reading activity to Facebook and Twitter. That's pretty standard, though. Not standard: once you've set your log-ins for each network, there's an option to have Scribd automatically share what you're reading with … Read more

Have you always wanted a scanner, but held back because of size and cost? Do you have a Mac and a digital camera? Then good news: Prizmo for Mac offers a good enough solution to let accomplish most of your scanning needs without the extra hardware.

The $40 software, made by Belgium-based Creaceed, has long been offered as an alternative to the pack-in software that often comes with flatbed scanners. Its latest version sports three handy features, one of which can turn your digital camera into a very powerful text-archiving tool.

The first new feature is camera tethering. This lets you attach a tether-ready SLR or point-and-shoot to your computer, then have the app automatically import the shot as you take it. There's not a whole lot of user dialogue here to let you know your camera is attached. In my test, I simply connected my Nikon D90 (which does not feature USB mass storage support) and began taking photos, and it did the rest.

Users can also grab photo files from their hard drives, or from a camera that's attached in USB mass storage mode, although I found the latter a little jittery when trying to browse for a single file on a crowded memory card. The app would only let me see the top 40 shots or so, and I couldn't scroll down--a problem I didn't have when browsing the same set of files from a USB-powered memory card reader.

To go along with the tethering feature is curviture correction; this lets you fix warping due to the natural bend of pages. The tool itself is simple to use, but lacks some much-needed automation. You can, for instance, only work on one page at a time, so if you've snapped both pages of an open book, you have to open each one individually. This isn't a huge dealbreaker unless you're trying to archive something large, but it does slow things down.… Read more

This may very well be the beginning of the end for the paper game manuals found in console games. Game publisher and developer Ubisoft on Monday announced that it would no longer be shipping them in its future console titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

In their place will be an in-game manual that provides the same types of information about controls, game credits, and other legal information. This is the same kind of offering Ubisoft's been doing with its PC games since last month. According to the company, the first console title to feature such a … Read more

Google put out a pair of small, but useful Gmail updates on Thursday that make it both easier to use and more integrated with the company's free Calendar service. Notably, both have skipped a trial through the service's "labs" section, and gone straight through to the final product.

The first is drag-and-drop attachments, a feature which lets you drag files from your desktop machine right into your e-mail message to have them begin uploading. It works the same as the system Google implemented in its Wave service for photos and other media types. It also has … Read more

Evernote has pushed out a useful update to its premium service that adds a few more reasons to spend the $5 a month (or $45 a year) fee. Premium users now get double the storage on the size of notes, which has jumped from 25MB to 50MB a pop.

More impressive though is that the service is finally getting versioning control. Versioning is something that's especially important in word processing. If you're working on a particularly large piece of work, you might very well cut out portions here and there that you wish to bring back later on. … Read more

When we first looked at geo-centric Twitter trend-tracking service Trendsmap it had one notable shortcoming: It was unable to drill down to an accurate city level. The good news is that this is about to change.

With the inclusion of geo-location as part of tweets, sites like Trendsmap will be getting a whole lot more detailed. Though even now, getting enough geo-tagged tweets has proven to be a challenge.

CNET met with Trendsmap's lead developer is John Barratt on Tuesday, who explained that while the geo feature has been live on Twitter for some time now, people just aren'… Read more

A blog post by Adobe Flash platform evangelist Lee Brimelow has brought more fire to what's become a very public fight between Apple and Adobe over the inclusion of Flash and other Adobe technologies in Apple's portable devices.

In it, Brimelow highlights the differences between the two companies, and compares Apple's recent decision to bar third-party APIs from app development to a game of chess, where Apple is using developers as "pawns" in a "crusade against Adobe." He goes on to say that he plans not to purchase another Apple product until someone … Read more

Rumors that Bing was to be the default search engine in an upcoming iPhone OS update can continue to be filed in the rumor bin, at least based on the developer preview release of OS 4.

Bing is still nowhere to be seen in the iPhone's Safari app, or anywhere else in the preview version of the OS. Besides Google, which remains the default search engine, the only other option remains Yahoo.

It's still possible that the Apple/Microsoft deal could be under way though. And if that's the case, it could just as easily make it … Read more