Yesterday saw the official launch of Stickam, a new "multi-dimensional communication tool". Basically, the site encourages users to build social networks using video cameras — mostly of the web cam variety, but also through video blogs that users can post. The Stickam blog has more information.

Stickam users set up profiles, join groups, participate in video chat rooms and share videos, music and photos. All of the user-generated content is rated and open for comments. Each user can upload 500MB of media with unlimited bandwidth for downloads.

One of the unique services that Stickam offers to its community is an integrated player that can handle all of the users' media. The player can be dropped into any blog or static page, so the user can display their Stickam content just about anywhere. Their player can handle AVI, MOV, WMV, 3GP and MPEG video formats, and MP3 or WAV audio formats.

The service is free. Judging from the site's colorful, buzzwordy user experience and the current user profiles on display, it looks like the service is going after the MySpace crowd, roughly the ages of 15-25. Here's the FAQ.

Wired News technical advisor Chris hipped us to an excellent Firefox extension called Down Them All. Once installed, this extension lets you download all of the files associated with the web page you're currently viewing.

You can use the extension to grab images, linked documents, and the source HTML file itself. But the best use of Down Them All in our opinion is the ability to download posted files from audio sites and MP3 blogs. Hundreds of sites post freely available (and legal to download) MP3s, but it's a bit tedious and time consuming to download all of the MP3s one at a time. Down Them All does away with the dull drudgery and lets you grab all the files in one swoop. We visited the French site Dubzone.org to test it out:

Other extensions like Download Embedded and Magpie offer similar functionality. You can also use the popular Web Developer Toolbar extension to grab individual files, though the process isn't as streamlined. If you have the Web Developer Toolbar installed, go to the Information drop-down and choose "View Link Information". You'll be presented with a list of links for all of the files on that page. Everything will show up, including email addresses, but at least you can view all downloadable files in a single, organized group.

It's worth mentioning that you should only be using these extensions to download legal content. Play nice and be safe!

OK, so the big news is that Camino 1.0 has been released. In the tradition of true open source development, the browser is friendly to customization. Here are a couple of pages to visit if you're interested in building some additional functionality into Camino.

CamiTools is essential for just about everyone running Camino. CamiTools adds another preferences pane to Camino's standard set. The add-on gives you the ability to customize the browser's appearance, set memory and CPU usage controls, set user agent string spoofs and more. You also gain the ability to block scripts, images, and Flash presentations. You can even edit the default toolbar search settings.

Hacks can also be applied to Camino through the user.js file. You create this file in the text editor and add various commands to change the way the browser behaves. It's an easy hack that just about anyone can do. Just create the file, save it in your Camino profile folder (~/Library/Application Support/Camino), then cut and paste the sample commands listed on the Camino Hidden Preferences page.

If you're waiting for that one feature you can't live without, fret not. The Camino team is already on track for rolling out major improvements in version 1.1. Check out Om Malik's interview with Camino developer Mike Pinkerton for a discussion of what to expect down the road.

Yesterday saw the release of the first full-grown version of the Camino browser. Formerly known as Chimera (which we reviewed long ago), Camino is the Mac-only browser developed on top of the Gecko engine used by Mozilla Firefox. More than just an OS X version of Firefox, Camino is a truly Mac-native browser, incorporating many of the OS X tools like Keychain password management, Spotlight search, and the Apple address book.

So, what's it like? I've been using it for the past two days, and I'll tell you that this puppy can cook. I'm actually using it to write this blog post. It's like Firefox without the latency. Lightweight and responsive in comparison to Safari. Scrolling and window resizing, in particular, are super-freaking-fast in Camino. It's missing a few essentials, like live RSS bookmarks and support for Firefox extensions, but it's getting there.

Expect a full review of Camino in this week's Webmonkey Radio podcast. Until then, check it out for yourself by downloading version 1.0 at the Camino Project's homepage.

Getting excited about Web 2.0 is one thing, but applying the tech to your site is a whole different bag.

Marcelo Calbucci, blogger of the Brave New World, has posted this argument about when AJAX should and should not be used.

Good AJAX? Sorting large, otherwise cumbersome lists of documents and photos. Bad AJAX? Doing away with submit buttons on comment or feedback forms.

Marcelo's points ring true for the most part. Some developers are using AJAX to pass data lists that aren't really that bulky and hardly ever change. A list of countries (8K of text, only changes every other year or so) is a prime example. He also identifies four things to consider when deciding whether or not to use AJAX: the latency of your DB calls, the bulk of your data, the time the browser spends parsing the data, and the amount of time it takes for the browser to render the result. If the usability improvement outweighs the overhead and the latency, then AJAX is probably a good call.

Marcelo makes an interesting case that certainly deserves more discussion.

[link via digg]

Here's a must-read for developers: Nate Koechley's excellent article published at the Yahoo Developer's Network outlining the new paradigm for cross-browser development. Nate has applied a graded scale to the concept of progressive enhancement. Basically, browsers can be graded on their levels of support for various elements, then placed on a tiered scale. It's a useful way of identifying the different capabilities of the more than 10,000 browser configurations on the web.

Nate's three-tiered approach is helpful for categorizing tried and tested modern browsers with solid support, antiquated browsers, and experimental browsers with support for new or rare technologies.

Also included with the article is a reference chart which clearly shows that Firefox supplies the highest quality experience for all platforms. If you want to read more about progressive enhancement for the web, check out Steve Champeon's Webmonkey article on the future of web design.

Opera Software, the little browser company from Oslo, Norway, is going the extra kilometer to make their core users happy. With last week's release of Opera 9 Preview 2, the browser's development team started a blog to keep track of weekly builds and their day-to-day goings on. Interested users can subscribe to the blog and receive notifications whenever new builds are available.

Weekly builds aren't as stable as technology previews or public betas, but they do address bugs and provide fixes on a step-by-step basis. The first weeklies for Mac and Windows were released today, so go get 'em.

The Songbird player, developed by a small company called Pioneers of the Inevitable here in San Francisco, is an integrated media player slash web browser. On the surface, it looks like a full-featured audio player (meaning it looks like iTunes), complete with playlist management and a slick UI. But there's also a web browsing component. The end result is a browser that downloads, plays, and manages your audio files. Putting all of this stuff into one interface is a bit of a dream come true for web music junkies.

Songbird is built using the Mozilla browser engine, so it has all of the same functionality as Mozilla, including support for XUL and extensions. Songbird also excels as a media player. It can handle MP3, MP4/M4a, FLAC, WMA, Ogg, AAC, and several other audio file types. The FLAC compatibility makes downloading and listening to live shows from Archive.org that much more pleasurable.

One of the cooler features is the web-page-as-playlist function. Songbird automatically recognizes whether or not a web page has any linked sound files. When you visit a page with playable sound files, Songbird will build a little Web Playlist at the bottom of the browser window where you can immediately experience the music on offer. You can also set Songbird to watch sites that regularly post tracks, then update your playlists as the tracks go live.

Songbird is available for Windows right now, with OS X and Linux/Unix versions available soon. They also have a blog.

CodeCon 2006 kicked off today in San Francisco. We saw presentations of Daylight fraud prevention, LocalHost, and SiteAdvisor.

The after-party was thrown by BitTorrent, Inc. at the cozy spot next door, Loft 11. I snapped some photos of some of the faces in the crowd...

The crowd at Loft 11.

Andrew Loewenstern (L) from BitTorrent talks to Mike Freedman (C) and David Mazieres (R) of Stanford's Coral peer-to-peer content distribution project.

Wes Felter, the man behind one of our favorite blogs, Hack the Planet.

This here is Len Sassaman, one of the founders of CodeCon.

That's it for now!

The annual CodeCon programming conference starts today and runs all weekend here in San Francisco. The conference, founded by Bram Cohen and Len Sassaman, is in its fifth year. More than just a geeky product showcase, the event gives hackers and programmers the opportunity to demonstrate their newest creations and field questions from a live audience.

The applications presented at CodeCon often ride the bleeding edge of P2P, data handling, and communications. We'll be attending some presentations at the conference (view the full schedule). Two applications that we're really looking forward to checking out are iGlance and LocalHost.

iGlance is described by its creator, David Barrett, as an "open source push-to-talk videoconferencing and screen-sharing" application. David conceived the project while he was traveling. He found that he was missing out on several key elements of real-world communication with his coworkers. Basically, iGlance brings many of the social habits of working in an office environment to remote workers. On the fly collaboration, impromptu brainstorming sessions, and other types of employee interaction are made possible through whole-screen desktop sharing, VoIP, and always-on video chat buddy lists.

LocalHost — created by Tom Jacobs as part of an honors thesis at Melbourne University — is a distributed, open file system that's shared with BitTorrent. Users can create folders, move files, and download anything in the shared directory by using the Azureus BT client and DHT. Tom encourages us to think of LocalHost as a big, shared network drive. It's decentralized, so there's no server bottleneck. The file system is maintained by all of the computers sharing the files within. Also, LocalHost prioritizes files and folders based on popularity, so files that aren't being shared are eventually dropped.

Look for photos and reports from CodeCon later today right here on Monkey Bites.