John Ludwig and I were discussing that hassle of installing plugins like Password Composer on every one of the six or so machines that we manage between home and work.

This touches on the general issue of roaming browser state. The browser enables applications that roam from machine to machine, but ironically doesn’t do a good job of roaming its own state.

One day you’ll be able to set up your web browser on one machine and have exactly the same experience on any other machine—the same bookmarks, the same cookies, the same plugins, the same preferences, etc.

A9 is heading in this direction with some of their toolbar extensions, but it creeps me out a little bit to have Amazon hoarding that information about me. I think I trust either Microsoft or Mozilla more.

Would I pay for a universal browser feature? No. Would I choose one browser over another, or one OS over another because it? Very possibly.

Passwd Composer solves the problem of creating unique passwords for different sites, so that a compromise of one site doesn’t lead to all of your logins being compromised.

Password Composer combines a master password with the site name (using an MD5 hash) to generate a unique password for each site.

Sounds great, but if it were too cumbersome too use it wouldn’t have value. The magic of password composer is a Firefox extension or IE Bookmarklet that makes the master password functionality just a click away.

Google Local guys, if you are listening:

The beta Mobile Google local results are much better for mobile devices than the PC pages, but still are not truly mobile friendly, at least for a device like the Blackberry. The overview map at the top of the page takes up too much precious “above the fold” screen real estate, for example, and there’s too much white space between hits.

Nonetheless, a promising start.

There is a beta version of Mobile Google Local available now.

This was first mentioned in SearchEngineWatch as a UK only feature, but US addresses work as well.

These results may well be good enough to get Berry 411 out of the content reformatting business for yellow pages results; Berry 411 can focus purely on being a very convenient front end. I’m going to try plugging it and gather feedback.

I especially like the mobile friendly Google maps.

RIM Road: News: BlackBerry Demand Accelerates: “Research In Motion (RIM) signed up its one millionth subscriber five years after introducing its first BlackBerry wireless handheld. Ten months later, last November, the company eclipsed that record by notching up its second million users.

Today, after only another six months, the vendor reports the addition of yet another million users. That’s three million subscribers for a platform that existed below the radar of most consumers and analysts for most of its history.”

If your version of the Blackberry OS has issues running the full version of Berry 411, you might want to try Berry 411 Lite. This omits some address book integration but is otherwise fully featured.

Answers.com has introduced a mobile version of their reference search service, and I’ve plugged it into the Berry 411.

mobile.answers.com provides mobile friendly reference information. So if you’re out and about and want to read a company profile for Oracle, or find out how many times the Patriots have won the Super Bowl, you’re all set.

Answers.com is added as a link at the top of Google search results. In addition, you can type “answers foo” to go directly to the answers.com page, which, incidentally, is:

foo
A popular name for a temporary file, function or variable, or an example of same in documentation. Often used with “bar” to create “foobar,” which is a variation of FUBAR. FUBAR came out of World War II and means “F***ed Up Beyond All Repair.”

I am pleased to see increasing numbers of services introduces good mobile versions of their services.

Beautiful Soup is a beautiful Python parser for HTML and XML documents; it has an easy to use and expressive API that allows you to combine hierarchical expressions with regular expressions on attribute.

Version 2.1 has just been released, check it out.

Jobster has the good fortune to work with two top notch VCs, Ignition Partners and Trinity Ventures.

Their portfolio companies are great places to work, so I thought I’d do what I could to make it easier for readers of my blog to learn more about job openings in their portfolio. If you’re someone I know, I’d be happy to provide a referral for these positions.

Using SearchMe, I built a form that searches the job openings in all of the Ignition Partners portfolio companies. I’ll be creating a similar form for Trinity’s portfolio shortly.

Search Ignition Jobs.

In the sidebar to the right of this blog, you can search my network using Google– instead of the entire web, you can search just the web sites of my most trusted friends and colleagues.

I constructed that form manually, but I’ve now built a simple web tool that automatically generates these forms for you, making it easy for anyone to construct their own specialized search forms on top of Google.

General purpose search engines are really bad at things like finding trustworthy reviews for specialized equipment. But if you’re an expert on a particular topic, like digital photography, you probably know the best places to find reviews. My hope is that SearchMe and tools like it will make it easier for bloggers and site authors to share that expertise and add an editorial voice to Google.

For now, I’m calling the tool SearchMe:
Try SearchMe

The tool is pretty simple right now– just enter the sites you want to search and past the generated HTML into your web site. One enhancement I plan to add is the ability to host the form on my site for those who can create links but not post arbitrary HTML.