As you can see from my last entry, I am very much into SNS (or social software) these days.

Seeing announcements of new SNS almost every two weeks, I started to think where all these SNS should be headed.

For the time being, I am somewhat enjoying the mix of various Social Network services, but in the long run, I believe they will turn into this: an address book application.

Believe it or not, Japan is the country for SNS, Social Network Service(or Social Software).

Long before there were orkut or Friendster, we had a service like Yubi-toma (since ’96) and Kanshin.com (since 2000).

And since February 2004, we have started seeing announcements of new SNS almost every two weeks.

Let me present to you some of my favorites.

TLA Systems has announced DragThing 5.1 is now available.

the press release states:

This is a major new release, with dozens of new features including:

• New dock window styles like metal and translucent black.
  
  
• Completely rewritten preferences and dock storage code, with docks now
  
  saved as separate files, and support for XML exporting and importing.
  
  
• Much improved Desktop Trash, with many new options including displaying
  
  the number of items in the trash.
  
  
• Full control over how Exposé affects your docks and the Desktop Trash.
  
  
• You can display the version number of docked applications as part of the
  
  name or icon.
  
  
• Improved contextual menu previews, including support for Adobe InDesign
  
  and plain text documents.
  
  
• Powerful new AppleScript support, including "every" and "whose" keywords.
  
  
• New Traditional Chinese language support, with thanks to Rick Chen.
  
  

Besides all these great new feature, you can also use it to solve the skelton icon problem ;-)

日本語はこちら

************************************************************

It was false alarm

Thanks god, it wasn't virus after all!

I am so glad I could solve it so quickly thanks to James Thomson who has just release DragThing 5.1--another entry about that later.

After a simple restart of "Finder", using DragThing of course ;-), my generic icons have turned back to normal icon.

James explains:

Sometimes, the "IconServices" API gets confused I think and returns the wrong icon.

James think it is a memory corruption problem.

A few mystery still remains ...

1. the icon
   
   I haven't seen this icon before and can't figure out where it come from. I thought it might be a virus because it kind of looked evil and malicious ;-)
   
   
2. Excel icon
   
   even after the restart of Finder, the Excel icon remained as skelton icon. After "Get Info"> choose icon> hit "delete" key, it became normal Excel icon. So the icon was just pasted over the Get info window but by who?
   
   
3. PowerBook not restarted since yesterday?
   
   James think a simple logout should have also solved this problem. Because I have a AirPort (AirMac) problem, I think I have shutdown my system at least once this morning. I wonder why my icon didn't get back to normal then.
   
   

Maybe the answer to 2 & 3 are... I also had a memory corruption problem because I was too busy and sleepy.

Anyway, if you have any icon problem just logout and log back in!

************************************************************

I haven't confirmed this yet.

I am looking for reports and information from others (not by mail but by comments or trackback here).

Since last night, I started to see some skelton-like icons on my desktop as seen below:

日本語はこちら

I received an e-mail from KwMap.net. And I am glad I didn't select it and pressed the junk mail button(*1).

I have some works I have to finish in a hurry. So I am writing this entry as a memo to myself; I will update this entry later with more of what I want to say.

KwMap.net - browse the Keyword Map of Nobi.com

*1) I do it w/o reading to about 400 e-mails I receive everyday, SPAM has made a very useful communication tools called e-mail useless (at least for me).