The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘bdule’

For a while now, we’ve been tracking a number of companies who are hard at work trying to build the ultimate social networking desktop app. We’ve talked about TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop, AlertThingy, and there are many more especially if you also include the ones that focus only on Twitter (Tweetie, Nambu, Twitterific, etc.).

Another horse in this race that barely gets a mention is Sobees, probably in big part because of the fact it’s only available for Windows users (with the latest .NET framework, moreover), although it doesn’t really deserve to be below the radar this much at all.

We covered the company’s social network aggregator when it entered public beta, and wrote that they were aiming to attract a mainstream audience for their software, which enables users to manage a fairly wide variety of web apps and social networking services from their desktops. It’s a nifty companion that plugs into Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and many more web services, but I’ve always felt it was far too overloaded with features for me to use it on a daily basis.

So I was interested when the company set out to build a stand-alone client for Twitter, Facebook and Twitter Search. And just as they were working on that, Facebook launched its Open Stream API so they made thankful use of it quite rapidly and converted the API to .NET and integrated the stream into the new client. The software is now in alpha and publicly available under the name bDule, and it’s definitely worth checking out even if you only use one of the two services it supports.

Soon, we’ll do a feature-by-feature comparison for all the existing social desktop applications, but for now let me just say Sobees is very much worthy of being included whenever someone talks about Facebook / Twitter clients. As mostly all of the apps mentioned on top bDule is a bit of a memory drain, and at times renders a bit slow, but the UI is really well thought-out (love the different templates you can switch to in just one mouse-click) and it does what it’s supposed to do really well.

Too bad it’s Windows / .NET only, because I’m sure there’s an audience out there that’s looking for just this type of app.

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Google.co.ma, the domain name for Google Morocco’s search portal, was taken hostage by hackers earlier today reportedly for several hours before the problem got fixed (it’s working fine again now). We got a bunch of tips about it, and the situation lasted long enough for lots of people to take screenshots of the website the domain name briefly pointed to due to the hack.

You can find loads of screenshots here and here, but the main domain name pointed to the website shown on top of this post.

There’s a bit of confusion about how the hack was performed exactly, but it appears as if the hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially. The domain was pointed to a different server, and the web page above was shown when people tried to access the search engine. Google apparently at one point automatically relayed visitors from Morocco to Google.com instead of Google.co.ma, but it took a while to get the latter functioning correctly again.

PAKbugs.com leads to a forum where Pakistan hackers hang out, and the names on top of the web page above are all members of the message board. They’re being proud of it here.

This website (in French) claims that this isn’t the first such incident this year, as apparently the websites for Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico were taken hostage by hackers last month too.

(Via ArabCrunch)

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