links for 2009-01-29

Akoha is the world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Missions might include giving someone your favorite book, inviting a friend for drinks, or buying a friend some chocolate.

All the sites listed in this showcase have one thing in common: they use the great javascript library jQuery in some way. Feel free to get inspired if you Use jQuery too!

The success of Kiva Systems could help teams of autonomous robots gain ground outside the computer science lab.

There were a number of advantages of using jQuery over Flash for the project:
1. Updates were easy
2. Content was Search Engine Friendly
3. Architecture would be naturally layered

Social Media on a Shoestring: How Sharpie engages and Grows Community in a Tight Economy
Susan Wassel (@sharpiesusan) presented from Sharpie and the title of this presentation is no joke.

Amazon WS Tools allows IT administrations and developers to configure Amazon Cloud services through an easy to use GUI. Plugged directly into Eclipse or Aptana, developers can access the "Amazon WebService Perspective"

Available as an on demand service in the cloud or as a hardware appliance, SOASTA CloudTest’s seamless integration of test design, monitoring, and reporting offers everything you need to test and deliver high quality Web applications and services at an affordable price.

Errorlytics is an easy to use service that centralizes reporting and handling of 404 "Page Not Found" errors for your websites. Errorlytics gives you the tools to transparently fix the problems quickly and easily so they never happen again. No more regex writing, no more messing with your .htaccess file for search engine friendly redirects. Errorlytics handles it all, effortlessly. The end results are better user experiences and higher search engine rankings for your websites.

Lingon is a graphical user interface for creating an editing launchd configuration files for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5. You can use launchd on a Mac to launch scripts and applications whenever something special happens or at a specific time or periodically. You get all launchd configuration files in a list to the left so you can easily see all and choose which one to edit.

In December, it was announced that Merb would be merging into Rails 3.0, putting an end to the rivalry between the two communities. As David Heinemeier Hansson put it on the Ruby on Rails blog, "We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive than duplicating things on each side of the fence. Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go."

So within a few hours these 4 Big Twitter users promoted Twitterkeys to their combined 95,075 followers. The result? About 15,000 unique visitors to the original blog post within 24 hours, 60+ diggs, lots and lots of TwitterKeys on Twitter, reviews on 150+ blogs and a nice spike in RSS Feed subscribers…

Don't want to use your browser to use Filttr? No problem! We've made a totally awesome desktop application for you to keep track of your tweets. It's really simple and easy to use, and doesn't throw a lot of bloat your way — just the features that you really need.