Amazon has expanded its Wish List feature to include not just items on the site, but any page on the web. The new Universal Wish List as it’s known offers a bookmarklet for adding any web page to your wish list.
The bookmarklet works a bit like some of the price tracking services we’ve covered, such as OfferTrax. When you’re on a page with an item you like, just click the bookmarklet and Amazon will attempt to grab a thumbnail image and allow you to enter a price, title and description.
When you view your wish list on Amazon the outside items are displayed as links to the external site with a thumbnail preview.
The really useful part is that the new Universal Wish List feature feeds right into any widgets you might be using — so now you can bookmark any item and pipe it straight into your blog or other page so all your doting admirers can buy it for you.
Of course on the creepier side, the feature gives Amazon even more insights into your shopping habits, but if that doesn’t bother you, the new features certainly do make begging, er, tracking your material desires quite a bit simpler.
If you’ve been around the web for a few years, chances are good that you have an old Friendster account. I receive birthday emails and spam friend requests about once a week. (Yes, I could change that in the notification settings, or even cancel my account).
I’ve often wondered what could be keeping the Friendster servers up. The answer: the world’s largest continent. Asia, especially the Philippines, has been good to Friendster, who is by far the largest social network in Asia.
Something new must be brewing, because the company just raised $20 million according to the New York Times, and has a new CEO who formerly ran the South Asia region at Google.
You may be thinking that Friendster is stuck back in 2004 with your profile. That’s not so. The site has a developer platform with 450 applications, and has joined OpenSocial. No, Friendster doesn’t look as good as Facebook, and the apps feel even spammier, if you can imagine. But at least Friendster hasn’t just been treading water.
The last line of the NYT blog post might have more to say about why Friendster has secured some more funding. The company was granted a patent in 2006 for its work with organizing people’s relationships. Apparently there are more patents on the way for the one-time innovator. Now that there are other similar services, some like Facebook and MySpace with big money behind them, Friendster might be seeing dollar signs.
One of the things I enjoyed about the Us/ing video was Wesch’s seeming boundless optimism about hypertext and he has the same enthusiasm for YouTube (and the participatory culture of the web in general).
For instance, while many might dismiss YouTube as navel-gazing self indulgence, Wesch has no such problem and seems to delight in even the most trivial of videos, which is, frankly, refreshing.
So here’s your Friday does of fun. Plus this might be the only time you’ll hear a Library of Congress audience rocking out to Numa Numa.
What would your favorite small open source project do with a sudden influx of money? Imagine you donated $5000 to a project, where would the money go? Less scrupulous developers might spend the money on Mountain Dew and Twinkies, but more likely the money would just sit, doing nothing. Why? Because it takes time to spend money, and in the open source world time is in short supply.
In fact, it isn’t easy for small open source projects to spend money responsibly. If it was we wouldn’t have huge organizations like the Apache Foundation or the Django Foundation, which, among other things, are charge with distributing money where it’s needed.
But smaller projects are often caught off guard by money. The scenario posited above really happened. Developer Jeff Atwood donated some of the ad revenue from his blog to an open source project he liked. Atwood didn’t attach any strings, if the devs wanted to blow it on cocaine and whiskey they could, but the money is still sitting unused.
The lead developer responded to Atwood’s follow up e-mail saying:
The grant money is still untouched. It’s not easy to use it. Website hosting fees are fully covered by ads and donations, and there are no other direct expenses to cover. I thought it would be cool to launch a small contest with prizes for the best plugins and/or themes, but that is not easy because of some laws we have here in Italy that render the handling of a contest quite complex.
What would you suggest?
Atwood posted the question and kicked off a flurry of comments with suggestions ranging from hiring technical writers to improve documentation, to hiring graphic designers to work on the UI, to using the money to fly the developer to a conference of some kind.
Whatever ends up happening to the money, it raises an interesting point: smaller open source software projects are large built on donated time, not donated money. As Jon Galloway tells Atwood
Open source teams, and culture, have been developed such that they’re almost money-agnostic. Open source projects run on time, not money. So, the way to convert that currency is through bounties and funded internships. Unfortunately, setting those up takes time, and since that’s the element that’s in short supply, we’re back to square one.
Of course the other side of the story is that money can buy time. Indeed the vast majority of open source development is funded by corporations who have the resources to pay full-time employees to work on improving projects like the Linux kernel. But smaller projects, like the one in this case, don’t have many interested corporations and get by time and skill donated by individuals.
Short of starting a foundation to handle these sorts of tasks (which itself requires more money than most small projects have), what would you like your favorite open source project to do with a sudden windfall?
Attention web designers, developers and all around webmonkeys, A List Apart needs your input for their 2008 Survey For People Who Make Websites. The survey, which ALA started last year, attempts to track and analyze information about webmonkeys’ (I believe ALA refers to us as “web professionals”) backgrounds, skills, work, salaries and more.
If you’re a web developer and want to be counted in what is one of the only surveys of its kind, head on over. All the data is collected anonymously and goes toward painting a more complete picture of the industry.
As ALA says, “we hope that making this data available will have a positive effect on best practices and employment, and will enhance public understanding of, and respect for, our profession.”
Last year’s survey captured some 33,000 responses and, as with the previous version, this year’s data will be released in raw, anonymized form for anyone to mash and play with.
Amazon has expanded its Wish List feature to include not just items on the site, but any page on the web. The new Universal Wish List as it’s known offers a bookmarklet for adding any web page to your wish list. 
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