theInfor

I didn’t spend that much of time reading blogs about Windows Live Messenger, but I do have been using the new messenger, which has already left the “butterfly” family that caused lovely Leah Sniffed like a child I have to say a bunch of new features have come and are coming along with this new version are all very impressive (at least sound like that).
1. The first new feature that everyone will get to know at the first place is the new version allows users to define their own favorite color for messenger panel.
2. Another new feature is the Unified Contacts. I’d better refer to what Jen conclude in an email and posted by Marty.
Unified Contacts is a new feature of Windows Live Messenger that combines your Windows Live Mail address book with your Windows Live Messenger contact list. Unified Contacts makes it easy to interact with all the people that are important to you using Windows Live Messenger, even if you don’t have an Instant Messaging address for them. In Windows Live Messenger, contacts from your address book automatically show up in your contact list with a grey contact card icon next to their name. They cannot see your status and you cannot instant message with them. You can add and edit address book contacts in Windows Live Messenger, including entering a birthday or phone number. If you have the appropriate information entered, you can email and call these contacts using Windows Live Messenger.
3. I didn’t notice users now can name their contacts nicknames. Then you won’t be bothered if your contacts so annoyingly keep change their IDs that sometimes you don’t have any clue: Who the hell is this productive ID-poet again?! After obtain the power to set a nickname, you can ignore all the following ID changes and, maybe, just name them ID-poet 1, ID-poet2, etc? LOL
4. Wow, finally, we can send offline messages and don’t have to send emails instead when either you or your contacts are (appear) offline!
5. And what? PC-Phone call? I hope Microsoft can take over the huge potential market in China which Skype just be deprived due to those telecommunication companies shameless monopolization. Come on, rock and fight for people’s sake!

Sometimes when I was doing bits of image design work, I always want to search some images for further work as rough materials according to the contents. I have clear mind myself about what these images that I need should be like, such as a green eye or a people standing by certain gesture. Of course, I can “Google” it with terms that can represent the images characteristic the most. However, the fact is publishers of those images don’t always name the picture in similar ways; a facetious photographer could possibly name a picture of a beautiful female’s eye as “am I a sexy man in that little heaven?” Undoubtedly, Google wouldn’t send that picture back to you no matter what term you are using except ones like “heaven”.
So, as an alternative for searching images without considering what names of the images are, the sketch image search become available online from retrievr. It let users to draw a rough sketch on the drawing panel they provide, and then perform a matching between what the user just draw and what it has according to its index. Currently the index is mainly based on some of Flickr’s images. And as announced on the introduction page, the application is still an experimental service. However, it can work very well if the rough sketch supplied by users is drawn properly. The most important two factors that impact application’s performance are colour definition and shape of the sketch. I actually made some experiments, some of the results turned out to be very satisfying. For example, by just drawing a Cambridge blue dot on the panel, seconds later, I get several beautiful blue eyes shining on the page, whatever the images names are! I also draw a red heart-shaped pattern with little black dots added on it, and an image of strawberry came out just as expected!
But there are limits of the application. Here is some introduction from the site:

One thing to keep in mind is that retrievr doesn’t do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you’re drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won’t get you one back (except your index only contains images of chairs). The same holds for corporate logos, icons &c.
It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors.
Another thing to know is that there’s currently no way to specify the aspect ratio, so you have to rescale the image in your head (things that are close to the borders of the image you’re thinking of should be close to the borders of your sketches), but that’s really more of a missing feature of the drawing flashlet than an inherent problem. Sometimes it also helps to remove detail instead of adding it.
Personally, I see retrievr more as an “exploration” tool than as a “search” tool, and it seems to work very well for that.

Anyway, the publication of this site may mean a milestone in image search history. I hope the technology can rapidly grow up.

What a shame (-_-!). A new Chinese website named dingr turned out to be designed (layout, icons, and functions) almost the
same with one of the other famous web 2.0 website digg. The application is good and impressing; however, we are expecting new
versions of the application rather than that with just a replacement of interface language, English to Chinese or whatever.
Duplication is worth nothing! What makes the Dingr standing out by now is the language user base, the fact that tens of
millions Chinese internet users make our “internet” activities localized in the language specific world. We are not dully
learning new techniques, but how come we are always dully coming up with new ideas?! Instead, when a new application is
published and earning high reputation, the first thing pops up in our heads is: copy it!
Comparing with the wide spread of digg, which has already be integrated with many other different web applications, I am
wondering when and how our own web applications, especially the dingr starts its next step: copy again or find its own way?