Somewhere around here you’ll find the Archive Team. Image: JOPHIELsmiles/Flickr.

Yahoo has finally decided to shutdown its long-neglected Upcoming.org, a social event calendar website. Under Yahoo’s leadership (or lack thereof) Upcoming.org went from a reasonably popular way to discover things to do — concerts, art shows, conferences and the like — to a ghost town of self-promotion and spam.

Upcoming.org’s creator, Andy Baio, posted his thoughts on the official demise of Upcoming.org, noting that he was most upset about the data being lost. “In Yahoo’s typical fuck-off-and-die style,” writes Baio, “they’re [shutting] it with 11 days notice, no on-site announcement, and no way to back up past events.”

Of course there’s a well known group of people that have made something of an art out of saving disappearing internet data — the Archive Team, headed by computer historian Jason Scott.

The Archive Team has already saved data from the demise of huge sites like Geocities and Friendster, and the group is currently working to backup Posterous, Formspring and now Upcoming.org.

And you can help the Archive Team save all this disappearing data. All it takes is Virtualbox (or VMWare or the like, but Virtualbox is free) and the Archive Team’s ArchiveTeam Warrior, a virtual appliance all set up to scrap and save data.

ArchiveTeam Warrior is dead simple to use and it works on OS X, Windows and Linux. Just install the appliance, fire it up and pick a project you’d like to help archive. Alternately you can go with the (preferred) option to let the appliance decide, which helps the Archive Team prioritize projects. If you prefer it’s also possible to run Warrior on Heroku.

Baio has put together a little video showing exactly what you need to do to get Warrior running. The only real overhead on your end is disk space and bandwidth. So long as you’re using a recent version of Virtualbox, it’s pretty easy to limit a virtual machine’s bandwidth so you can help out with backup and make sure your web browsing doesn’t slow to a crawl. See the Warrior wiki page for details.

OpenStreetMap is improving all the time. Now you can watch it happen. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Everyday hundreds, even thousands, of people contribute small changes, improvements and new bits of data to OpenStreetMap. A new trail here, an updated road there and so on until the result is something which, in many locations around the world, trumps the level of detail commercial maps offer.

Now you can watch those changes happen in real time. OSM Lab, an organization for OpenStreetMap related projects, recently released Show Me the Way, an OpenStreetMap project that tracks and displays OSM edits in real time.

There are two views of Show Me the Way, the satellite view (using Bing imagery) and the live OSM-based overview version. Both offer a strangely hypnotic peek behind the scenes of OpenStreetMap’s contributions.

The code behind Show Me the Way also offers a nice look at how to work with real time data and maps. You can grab the source from GitHub.

Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

TowTruck is an experimental Labs project at the moment (alpha), but adding it to your site for testing takes only two lines of code. Head on over to the new TowTruck site to grab the code. If you’d like to try TowTruck from a user perspective, check out Mozilla’s demo pages.

Originally conceived as a tool to help budding web developers by offering real-time collaboration — in other words a live, co-authoring environment you can use to demonstrate HTML and CSS — Mozilla says TowTruck is also useful for “mentoring, making travel plans, triaging bugs, navigating large sites or complicated interfaces.”

TowTruck also taps WebRTC for some extras like chat and voice chat, which makes it especially useful as a teaching tool.

Here’s how Mozilla’s Ian Bicking (the creator of virtualenv, among other useful Python-based tools) describes TowTruck on the Mozilla Labs Blog:

Do you love using Etherpad and Google Drive (previously Docs) to collaborate? We do too. The potential for that kind of collaboration is one of the great things about the web – except that only a handful of web applications take advantage of that potential. We think that every site should offer simple, easy-to-use, instant collaboration embedded directly on their site.

As a web developer, you simply drop TowTruck into your site and it just works. It provides the full out-of-the-box experience users need to get things done collaboratively. It will also give you the opportunity to extend TowTruck to enrich the authoring experience.

Probably the best way to get a handle on what TowTruck does and how you can use it is to watch the screencast:

TowTruck is not, as Bicking acknowledges in the Labs post, an original idea. Google has its Drive API and I seem to get at least one pitch a month on similar, independent projects.

What sets TowTruck apart is its simplicity for both developers and users. Its focus on authoring, mentoring and learning to code might also give it an in with the burgeoning “learn to code” movement. Whether or not that’s enough to help TowTruck succeed where so many others have failed remains to be seen.

Signing in with Persona. Image: Mozilla.

The Persona project is Mozilla’s effort to tackle online identity management by eliminating usernames and passwords. Instead, Persona shifts the focus away from individual websites and handles the login details for you, using just your email address.

Among the new features in this release are some speed improvements, integration with Firefox OS and, most importantly, support for signing in with your existing Yahoo webmail account.

It’s the latter feature that just might give Persona the traction it needs to convince more big name sites to support it.

Using the new Yahoo email-based sign-in feature you can sign in to any website that supports Persona without creating a username or password — you just drop in your Yahoo email address and you’re done.

Mozilla calls this Identity Bridging and it’s available now for Yahoo.com email users with other popular webmail providers coming in the future. You can try it out on Mozilla’s demo site — click “Sign in”, enter your Yahoo email address and you’re done. To see what it looks like in action, check out the video below:

For more on Persona and the new features, head on over to the Mozilla blog. If you’d like to see what it takes to support Persona on your site (thankfully it’s much easier than OpenID), the Mozilla Developer Network has a good tutorial.

Amazon’s desktop-centric Cloud Drive syncing. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Amazon has quietly joined the ranks of cloud-based file syncing services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The company’s Amazon Cloud Drive — previously limited to a rather primitive web-based interface — now offers desktop file syncing tools like those found in Dropbox.

To test out the new Cloud Drive syncing, grab the new desktop app for Windows or OS X (sorry Linux fans, currently there is no desktop client for Linux).

Once you’ve installed the new Cloud Drive app, you’ll find a new folder on your drive — drop whichever files you’d like to sync into that folder and they’ll automatically be sent to Amazon’s servers. You’ll then have access to them on any computer with Cloud Drive installed and through the Cloud Drive web interface, though what you can do with files in the web interface is extremely limited.

It’s worth noting that the Cloud Drive app requires Java. As our friends at Ars Technica point out, that means users with newer Macs will be prompted to install Java as well (the Windows app comes with Java bundled).

There’s also no mobile apps for any platform (there is an Android Photo app, but all it does is send photos from your phone to Cloud Drive). In fact, while Cloud Drive will sync files between desktops, beyond that there isn’t much to see yet.

Part of the appeal of any web-based sync tool is ubiquitous access, not just via the web but in your favorite mobile apps as well and in that space Dropbox clearly has a huge lead over Cloud Drive.

Amazon offers 5GB of Cloud Drive storage for free, with additional storage available at roughly $.50/GB, which is down from the $1/GB price back when Cloud Drive first launched. That’s on par with SkyDrive’s pricing and roughly half the price of Dropbox. In this case though — at least right now — you get what you pay for. Amazon has the makings of a Dropbox competitor but it still has a lot of catching up to do.

Your calendar, now part of your search results. Image: Google

If you’d like to participate, head on over to the signup page and add your account.

Once that’s done, just log in to your Google account. You’ll then be able to search Gmail, your Google Drive documents and now your Google Calendar appointments directly from the Google search page (or from within Gmail).

The Google Calendar integration doesn’t just add appointments, it also features support for natural language queries. For example, type “what is on my calendar today” and you’ll see the day’s agenda. More specific queries work as well; to find out when you’re meeting someone, just type “when am I meeting” and the person’s name.

Note that the personalized search trial is still only available to U.S. users with @gmail.com addresses (Google Apps accounts are out of luck for now). If you opt in and decide you hate it, you can always go back to the sign up page and turn universal search off.

Google+ Sign-In on Fitbit.com. Image: Google.

Google has announced a new feature for Google+ — third-party websites and applications can now offer sign ins through Google+.

The new Google+ Sign-Ins are essentially Facebook Connect for Google+, allowing you to not only sign-in to sites that support it, but also bring your Google+ profile data with you around the web.

The new Google+ Sign-In service will make it easier to share content from third-party sites (and within mobile apps). Exactly who will see the items you share on Google+ depends on the level of access you grant to an app, but in general you can share data with specific people on Google+, certain circles, or no one.

Here’s Google’s description of the actual sign-in process:

If you sign in to Gmail, YouTube or any other Google service, you can now use your existing credentials to sign in to apps outside of Google. Just review the Google+ permissions screen (outlining the data you’re sharing with the app, and the people who can see your activity), and you’re all set.

Google+ Sign-Ins aren’t just for web apps either — Google is pushing them for mobile apps as well. Starting today, when you sign in to a website with Google, you can install its mobile app on your Android device with a single click.

Google is also claiming that, because you can choose who to share things with, that it will mean less “social spam.” The Google+ Developer Blog even calls out Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing by name, saying “Google+ doesn’t let apps spray ‘frictionless’ updates all over the stream, so app activity will only appear when it’s relevant.” Of course one person’s “relevant” content is another’s spam, so take that claim with a bucket or two of salt.

Items you share from sites and apps using Google+ Sign-In show up as a slightly different “interactive” post in your friends’ Google+ stream. Clicking on these items will lead them to the app where they can listen to or buy or review the item you shared.

If you want to add Google+ Sign-In to your site or app, head on over to the new developer site and read through the documentation.

Under Construction. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age may be the best Tumblr blog we’ve seen, posting screenshots of old Geocities pages for a nostalgic look at the early web, back when everything was “Under Construction.”

For a brief time in the early ’90s Geocities was the web. And, for all its shortcomings, Geocities did nevertheless usher in much of what makes the web great — that anyone can create nearly anything.

The One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Tumblr project is part of a Geocities research blog by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. The Tumblr portion consists of automatically generated screenshots from the massive torrent of old Geocities homepages rescued by the Archive Team back in 2009. For posterity’s sake each post also carries the original URL (which obviously goes to a 404 page) and the date the page was last modified.

With Geocities long since deleted from Yahoo’s servers, browsing through One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is as close as you’re likely to get to a trip down Geocities memory lane.

Image: Mark Rain/Flickr

Further complicating the matter, services routinely, and quietly, update their terms so that even if you did read the ToS that existed when you signed up, you might need to reread it several times over the course of using a service.

But now you can use Docracy’s new Terms of Service Tracker, which does the hard work for you. The service is essentially a GitHub for ToS agreements — a way to see changes over time and keep track of earlier versions. Docracy’s ToS tracker compares versions and highlights the changes so you can quickly see which rights your favorite services have recently subtracted from (or occasionally added to) their ToS agreements.

Whenever Docracy detects a change to a site’s ToS, it’s posted to the site. There’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to, though currently it’s a firehose feed of everything, with no easy way to filter by sites you care about. Docracy also says it will be tweeting changes that are “interesting, scandalous, or just plain funny.”

While ToS agreements may be confusing, users are beginning to take more of an interest, as evidenced by the outrage surrounding Instagram’s ToS changes. Instagram is hardly alone in that regard though. Docracy has a few other highlights, like Squidoo, which removed some comedic language from their policy, but also “removed guarantees that they would never spam their users or disclose personally-identifying information.” And then there’s Geico, which recently decided maybe it will save your data and sell it to third parties. Unfortunately there’s really no shortage of examples. Check out the site for the latest changes.

If your favorite service isn’t in the list, let Docracy know, the site is still expanding its coverage. And for those who would like to know more about what a ToS agreement means, check out ToS;DR, which we covered earlier.

This is not an Octocat. Image: GitHub.

The change means that you can easily get to a list of all your Gists by heading to https://gist.github.com/<username>/.

Gists, which started off as a simple way to dump and share snippets and short pieces of reusable code (something akin to the older Pastebin), were recently upgraded to be full-fledged Git repos behind the scenes. That means Gists are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as Git repos, complete with diffs.

Now that Gists are considerably more than just Pastebin-style code snippets, it makes sense to offer users a quick and easy way to get to their Gists from anywhere thanks to a memorable URL.

The newly personalized Gists come with an automatic URL redirect. So if your Gist used to live at https://gist.github.com/4731290 it will now be redirected to https://gist.github.com/luxagraf/4731290. As some GitHub users point out on Hacker News, there’s a flaw in GitHub’s system that means anyone can register a numeric username and cause a Gist to redirect to the wrong page. Hopefully GitHub will fix that in the near future..