A lady in NY followed the same procedure and ordered a birthday cake over email but here's what they delivered on her birthday - a cake with some HTML icing.

It turned out that she used Microsoft Outlook to send her email but Wegman's email system failed to recognize the proprietary HTML tags of Outlook and hence this goof-up.

This is best explained by an employee of Wegman - "we just cut and paste from the email to the program we use for printing the edible images, we are usually in such a hurry that we really don't have time to check. and if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them."

Also see: Cake Design for Geeks

How Microsoft Outlook Ruined Her Birthday Cake ? - Digital Inspiration

Fix Problems by Reinstalling Windows

As a tech blogger, part of my job involves reviewing software which is so interesting but frequent installation (followed by un-installation) of software programs also tend to slow down the computer.

To deal with this problem, I did a clean installation of Windows last weekend and re-installed all the important software programs from scratch. As expected, the boot-up time has reduced and the computer's performance has improved significantly. Luckily, this task is not as complex as it may sound but here are a few things you should remember before taking the plunge:

Pre-Installation Checklist

1. Get Magical Jelly to retrieve a list of product keys that were used to install Windows and Microsoft Office on your computer. Print this information.

2. Get Belarc Advisor to create a detailed report of all software programs, hotfixes and hardware devices available in your system. Print this report as well.

3. Uninstall all software programs that had to be activated at the time of installation (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office). It's important that you do a proper un-installation of these programs through Add/Remove Programs because simply deleting the folder from Program Files directory will not free up the license on the manufacturer's activation server.

4. Install Driver Max to create a backup of all device drivers currently installed on your system. This will come handy after reinstallation incase you are not able to locate the driver installers on the vendor's website.

5. Create a backup folder on c: (say c:\old_files) and add the following files to this folder

i. Your Outlook pst file that has all the mails, contacts, tasks and other Outlook items.
ii. If you have purchased any custom fonts, copy the relevant ttf files from the c:\windows\fonts folder. c. All documents, Live Writer drafts, pictures, music and videos from your My Document folder.
iii. Backup your custom dictionaries from Firefox, Microsoft Word, Live Writer, etc.
iv. Export all browser bookmarks and copy them to the backup folder.
v. Open your Firefox add-ons window, take a screenshot and paste that image in the backup folder. This is a good way to remember your favorite Firefox extensions.
vi. Export your podcast subscriptions in iTunes as as OPML (XML) file.
vii. Product keys (serial numbers) of all licensed software.

6. If you have a partitioned hard drive (say C: and D:), just copy* the backup folder created in step 5 to the D: drive. If you don't have a partitioned hard disk or if the size of partition is small, install Live Mesh, add c:\old_files folder to your Live Mesh account and wait until all the files are uploaded on to the web. Mesh offers 5 GB of space and it may therefore be a good idea to burn all the heavy files (like videos, music, etc) onto a DVD instead of transferring them online.

*You can copy large folders across drives through Windows Explorer or the xcopy utility.

Re-Install Windows from Scratch

Now is the time to do a clean installation of Windows. This is probably the easiest part. You can either boot your computer from the original Windows installation CD** or, while you are running Windows, pop-in the installation CD and run the setup.exe program just like you would install any other Windows app. Always choose "Fresh Installation" instead of "Repair".

**If you installation media doesn't include the latest service packs, try creating one yourself. Windows XP with SP3 is available as a downloadable ISO while you can slipstream SP1 into Vista fairly easily.

Post-Installation Tips

It can take around 30 minutes (or more) for the whole installation to finish. Now jump to the Windows Update website and let your browser download all the hotfixes, security updates, driver updates, etc. If your computer is unable to connect to the Internet, chances are that your computer doesn't have the proper network drivers. No problem as you can easily get the drivers from the dump that you created using DriverMax utility.

If your display is acting funny or there's no audio, just install the right drivers from the vendor's website (preferred approach) or use your backup media. Once all the patches are installed, Windows Vista users can free up few gigabytes of disk space by making SP1 permanent. Windows XP users may skip this step.

Now turn on the Firewall and install all the other software programs and associated updates in any order. The next important step is to clone your disk image via DriveImage XML (free software), Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. Windows Vista Ultimate also comes with a "Backup & Restore Center" that you may use to create a complete backup image of your entire computer to another drive, external disk or a DVD.

These disk images will come very handy after few months when your Windows PC get slow again. You won't have to repeat the rebuilding exercise as the PC can be easily restored to the original state through these disk images.

Don't experiment on your main PC

If you are tech enthusiast who loves to try new software / browser add-ons, I would strongly recommend that you don't install these software on your main system - instead get Virtual PC (it's free), create a Windows XP / Windows Vista virtual machine and use that environment as your new playground.

Another recommendation - do get a cane of compressed air to remove all the dirt from components inside the computer case. Sometimes software may not be the reason behind your slow and slugging PC - the culprit could be the dust sticking on the CPU heat sink.

How to Rebuild your Computer and Reinstall Windows Without Headache - Digital Inspiration

in reply to Three Flickr Plugins You'll Love

Wide Variety of Mobile Phones Supported

Zimbra is already available on a host of mobile platforms such as Windows Mobile, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry. Their latest support for the iPhone 2.0 platform will help to increase their market share. While the iPhone has progressed with its support with email, documents and more, Zimbra is looking to make it easier for its users to stay synchronized regarless of the platform.

Enteprise Capabilities

Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 software provides users with enterprise class features including OTA synchronization of e-mails, calendar and contacts. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 software will allow iPhone users to maximize their business functions on the iPhone. Additionally, Zimbra Mobile for iPhone will enable OTA photo-sync, so photos associated with iPhone contacts will sync with the Zimbra address book as well.

Zimbra has provided numerous ways for uses to access the Zimbra Servia via the iPhone including:

• IMAP / POP - Standards based access to email only
• Connectors - Use Zimbra's Connector for iSync (Mac) or Outlook (PC) to sync address book and calendar; combined with IMAP email it is a completely native UI solution. (Network Edition only).
• Mobile Web Browser - Zimbra Web Client is optimized for Safari on the iPhone; you can take advantage of iPhone's unique browsing capabilities to access your email, address book, calendar and more.

The users interface for accessing Zimbra's services via Safari on the iPhone is gorgeous and efficient. Zimbra makes great use of the screen real estate by providing a plethora of options right from the start. The new interface for the iPhone gets even better with a navigation menu at the top of the screen and important information right below it. This minimizes the number of finger tapping you'd normally have to do with the previous design.

Off to a Good Start

Zimbra is now approaching the same area territory Google is dominating at this point. However, the new Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 is looking to be off to a good start with more than enough features available from the iPhone to keep its users happy. Users can test Zimbra Mobile for iPhone by heading to Zimbra's Hosted Demo page.

LimitNone v. Google, Inc., (Cook County Ct. Jun. 24, 2008).

Last week, LimitNone, a Chicago company, sued Google for trade secret misappropriation seek $1B. LimitNone alleged that Google entered a nondisclosure agreement with LimitNone to review LimitNone's gMove software -- software that helps Microsoft Outlook users migrate data to the Google platform. Google allegedly assured LimitNone that it would not offer a competing product, but after receiving LimitNone's trade secrets and promoting the $19 gMove software, Google began offering a free, competing software package which allegedly used LimitNone's trade secrets. LimitNone filed a speaking complaint, for example:

With gMove priced at $19 per copy and Google's prediction that there were potentially 50 million users, Google deprived LimitNone of a $950m opportunity by offering Google's competitive product for free as a part of its 'premier' Google Apps package

This appears to be an interesting and potentially significant case. I will keep my eye on it and update you as opinions and events occur. For more on the filing, check out:

• Chicago Tribune
  
• Slashdot
  
• Tech Report
  
• ZDNet

Today's news from the more SaaS-y part of cloud-land is that SalesForce.com's platform, Force.com, now integrates with more of Google, in an even tighter way.

The Announcement

The ongoing idea here is to move all the on-premise, enterprise software up to the cloud, which here means the sort of classic idea of a SaaS, backed with middle-ware and programming as you'd expect in business applications. You know, cloud as URL users go to, not cloud as a bunch of virtualized servers you deploy your stuff on.

Put more succinctly:

Salesforce.com just released a Google Data client library for the Force.com platform, enabling access to the full suite of Google Data APIs using Apex code.

The demos we saw this morning were all very interesting, primarily because of their elegant simplicity:

• I need to schedule a sound system install in my SalesForce-based workflow system. Stuff cranks away, and the result is a scheduled item in Google Calendar.
• The accountants really like spreadsheets. We need to re-allocate some funding, so this little chunk of our SalesForce-based workflow system shells out to Google Sheets to let the accountants get their Excel warm-and-fuzies.

As was pointed out many times, while calls between SalesForce and Google were possible up-to-now, you had to do them on your own server. This announcement is all about SalesForce baking that integration to Google apps into the platform.

Threats

Really, this kind of ongoing thing is very impressive. With things like 1.5M users switching from Exchange/Outlook to Google Apps/GMail, seeing a workflow that crosses from SalesForce to Google Apps to schedule meetings, kick off email work-flows (though, we didn't really see any of these that I recall), and otherwise tightly couple business workflows with Google Apps start looking like a very real, here-and-now threat to Microsoft's Exchange and - maybe - SharePoint strong-holds.

Perhaps even Office, though it's hard to think of people switching over to Google Docs and Sheets just yet. Buzzword & co. seems more realistic (Force.com/Acrobat.com integration?) if less big name.

Platform-as-a-Service, Lock-in FUD

As with Amazon, SalesForce has packaged up their general web application platform and productized the use of it in the form of Force.com. From the conversations I've had today, people still think of SalesForce as being strictly CRM - managing the process of getting leads and harvesting more cash out of existing customers.

Indeed, it's not entirely clear why you'd use Force.com to build a sort of stand-alone application that didn't have anything to do with SalesForce.com - as it is now and as it will become in the next 10 years.

In theory, you could build such stand-alone applications, using the existing Force.com platform for cloud-as-infrastructure. But then you'd face the number one thing that makers I've talked with today site: lock-in.

Lock-in is a common enough idea in the on-premise world. It means that you develop your software, relying on a technology that's difficult, if impossible to transition from at a reasonable cost. The first form of lock-in, of course, is deciding what language you're going to write in. More normal forms are relying on a vendor for the platform to run your software on, or in.

Force uses the Apex programming language and - unless I'm missing something - only runs on Force.com. Once you write your application, you're locked-in to always having a relationship with SalesForce.

The question is: is this bad?

Obviously, the open camp would say yes. (Too status quo?) A more pragmatic camp would say yes on the condition that you're building an application from the ground up.

On the other-hand, there's an emerging place where it's just dandy: when you're selling features instead of whole applications.

(The ever-snarkier response to all these fears of lock-in is to ask if it's possible, really, to have it any other way. We'll leave that one as an exercise for the reader - remember to cite at least one example, or 2-3 if you're feeling A+-y.)

Hedging

From what I've seen today, it looks like your best bet for developing on-top of Force.com isn't in building full-blown applications, but either extending or augmenting the general types of business applications that exist in the SalesForce world. Plugins, features, extensions. Whatever you want to call them.

Don't get me wrong here: we saw demos this morning, like Appirio's, that seemed like full-fledged applications rather than just extensions. My architectural question is if this is, long term, a good idea.

There are at least two areas of risk for lock-in here: SalesForce raising their prices and/or another attractive platform coming along that you'd want to switch to, but will have to pay a high price in re-writing time to go to. See the freedom to leave.

If you're going to develop your whole application on-top of Force.com - instead of just parts or providing features/mini-application - the key is realizing that you'll be a Force.com developer. This is not necessarily bad in the same way that's it not necessarily bad to be a Microsoft developer or an Adobe developer.

Open Source in World of aaSes

But why get all hung up on my open source 1.0 biases? The questions for SalesForce, here, are the same ones for the likes of Bungee Labs (who seem to be working on open sourcing) and even the last mile of closed source folks in Flash-land:

• Do the advantages of open source - cost, transparency, and community - apply, even work, to the application layer of cloud computing?
• Do the developers of cloud computing care about open source, or are they jolly to be proprietary?

To me, these questions get down to the scale of your application and the breadth of where you want to take it.

Honestly, I'm not sure how far you could push Force.com as a general platform - I need to check it out more. There wasn't a whole lot of discussion about what Force.com doesn't do, but there was plenty of bandying about of Gartner's application server magic quadrant-ing, where Force.com showed up as most visionary. This, of course, suggests that SalesForce very much wants Force.com to be a generic application platform.

The point here is that the more breadth a platform seeks to have, the more I'd lean towards it being open source as advantageous. If you're just adding in features or building on-top of the platform, classic open source questions seem to matter less.

So there is that weird open question about Force.com: are we really to take it as a general runtime for any application?

ISVs and/or Corporate Developers

There's a whole other open question here as well. As I wrote in Twitter earlier today during the event:

Are Force.com developers ISVs or corporate developers? Writing software to sell, or software to use?

The ISV/corp developer split is one that people often over-look, but in platform plays like this one, it's a key point to nail down.

Pretty much all of the talk was geared towards ISVs (those writing software to sell it, not use it internally). What with the concerns of lock-in being chiefly an ISV concern, though, it seems like Force.com corporate developers would be especially attractive: get the benefits of custom - and customized - applications along with the benefits of cloud-as-data-center.

Clearly, at this stage Force.com needs to attract ISV developers. I'm not sure, however, that they're throwing the nets out for corporate developers as much as they could be.

Anybody Seen Open Source?

Stephen recently talked about Google as being an open source company, which is another fun pivot to look at this stuff on. For me, the nut is:

If it seems as if I'm downplaying the significance of the software here, that's because I am. Because while software is always the foundation, it's entirely possible that the value of the source code from a retail standpoint could be far less than the value of the data that it's used to collect, as Nick Carr argues. If that bold assertion proves to be true, or even partly so, we may yet come to regard these periodic arguments over open source business models as quaint and archaic holdovers from legacy monetization strategies.

My take-away is one of those oh-so-clever nonsense phrases I like typing up: commodification itself has been commodified.

The Crazy Notion of Paying for Software

SalesForce's pitch, demos, and all that are, of course, compelling. The web is compelling and anything built on-top of it looks like magic compared to on-premise software. The promise to developers, on-top of the technology, is that this is the kind of software you could make quick money off of (something SalesForce doesn't quiet beat the drum on enough).

It'll rattle plenty of open source people - I'm reading the comments in my head now - but that's never been a huge strength of The Promise of Open Source: you've always gotta weasel out some way to make money, or just be happy with small amounts of money while you wait for The Big Buy Out.

And in this age of iPhone applications, it seems we're slowly creeping back to a notion that a generation of developers - myself included - seem to have lost: you might have to pay for software, and maybe that's OK. You might be able to even make a living off the novel concept of people paying you for the code you write. Pay you directly for the software itself even: not with ads, the VC funding-then-acquired-cash-out loop-hole, support/training/consulting, or nuthin'!

I know! Shocker!

Disclaimer: SalesForce paid my travel and expenses out to Tour de Force here. Adobe is a client, as is Microsoft.

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About Tripwolf

Upon login, you're taken to Tripwolf's main page where you can immediately begin a search using the provided search box or you can click on one of the tabs to access other areas of the site like the galleries (photos), travelers, journals, guides, or the soon-to-be added "trips" section.

On the left side are links to your personal info - your personal galleries, your trips, your profile and messages, etc. There's also a handy scrapbook feature on to which you can drag-and-drop places you find on tripwolf when doing travel research. That scapbook can be shared with friends via email, or, with one click, transformed into a PDF that you can download and print out as your own sort of personalized travel guide.

Content Galore!

Tripwolf's investor and content partner is MairDumont, a European provider of travel information who offers a range of printed publications for tourists. MairDumont's involvement with tripwolf allows them to provide content for the site, including destination information and photos. The combination of this high-quality content along with that which is user-gen gives tripwolf a more professional feel while still retaining the fun of a social network. It's also nice because there's a lot of content to explore right away - currently over 200,000 points of interest have been cataloged - so you don't have to wait on a userbase to do all the work for you.

When you come across a destination you want to update with your own info, a wiki-edit feature lets you upload your own photos, add and update places, add facts, reviews, and more.

The Facebook App

Thanks to facebook integration, you can easily find who among your friends is already on the service and invite others to join you. You can also add friends from LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac address book, orkut, and Xing.

On facebook, you can use the app to search destinations, keep track of your favorite places, and view what your tripwolf friends are up to.

Get In Today

The site goes public on July 1st and, at that time, they will be adding a way for you to book trips. An iPhone application will also soon follow. However, ReadWriteWeb users don't have to wait until July - you can go ahead and join now the private beta now by clicking this link. (Feel free to add me after you do.)

On Sunday, Fred Wilson wrote on his blog "A VC":

"The other day I saw my oldest daughter get an invite to a party on Facebook, she accepted it, and then went to look at her accepted invite page. It was her social calendar, every party she plans to attend in the next two months is there. She noticed she had another event that night and then switched her acceptance to tentative. She uses Facebook the way I use Outlook."

Although the comment was in the context of a data portability discussion, there was something about this particular excerpt that was striking. Facebook as Outlook. You've heard older corporate execs describing how they "live in Outlook." Well, it's the same with the young digital natives - they just live in Facebook instead. And whether it's a walled garden or not, it doesn't matter to them - all the data they care about is flowing into Facebook. Who cares if it flows back out?

So what makes Facebook so invaluable to them? On a mission to find out, we turned to Twitter of course. But since Twitter's crowd is early adopters, we needed to find what the college kids thought, too. The combined answers gave us our big list (below).

How to Make Facebook Useful: Part I - Use Facebook's Features

Use Facebook Email: Here's an answer that speaks profoundly to the generation gap. For some, Facebook email isn't useful at all, while for others, it's one of the most important features. For even some of the hip early adopters, Facebook messaging (Facebook email) is thought to be this almost inconvenient feature: why should I go to Facebook to read that email? Why can't you just EMAIL me or send me a tweet? The issue is that it's all about what network you live in. For some it's an email inbox, for some it's Twitter, and for others it's Facebook.

For true Facebook'ers, though, real email is for business only. Using Facebook (and MySpace) is how you talk to your friends. (The frightening implications of what this means to an I.T. department that is charged with email archiving for compliance purposes and yet doesn't block Facebook.com is a subject for another article!)

"If I'm talking to any friends it's through a social network," said Asheem Badshah, a teenaged president of Scriptovia.com. "For me even IM died, and was replaced by text messaging. Facebook will replace e-mail for communicating with certain people." (excerpted from CNet)

Use Facebook Events: You don't need an online calendar to plan your schedule - Facebook has an Events app built-in. Here you can manage your events, see your friends' events, and even see when people's birthdays are. Your use of this feature is another telltale sign of which generation of Facebook users you fit into.

Block App Spam: Facebook finally added the "Block Application" option. Whew!

Go Mobile: With this application, you can use Facebook when you're on the go. You can upload photos and notes from your camera phone (mobile@facebook.com) straight to Facebook. You can also receive and reply to Facebook messages, pokes and Wall posts using text messages, or use your phone's mobile browser at m.facebook.com. To actually use the app, activate your phone here. Don't forget to also add Facebook Video so you can also send in your mobile videos to video@facebook.com, too.

How to Make Facebook Useful: Part II - Get Things Done

If you're really going to take advantage of all Facebook can do for you, then you have to find a way to do everything you need to do right in Facebook. Some of these tools (below) can help:

Check eBay: A great example of how the info you need flows into Facebook, the eBay app lets you check on your eBay auctions...and, in true social spirit, those of your friends as well. You can even just comment on auctions without even needing an eBay account.

Use Paypal: Just bought something on eBay? Might as well add Paypal too.

Upload Your Resume: Use an app like Professional Profile to post your resume on Facebook. It also lets you sync your LinkedIn profile and recommendations. There are also official apps from LinkedIn: LinkedIn Contacts and My Linked Profile, too.

Create a Business Card: The business cards app helps you create a custom business card that can be attached to your Facebook messages. (It's email signatures 2.0!)

Use Zoho: Access all your Zoho Office files in Facebook for free. (An unofficial app exists for Google Docs).

Share Files: Who needs Pownce when you can share files in Facebook? Add an app like Box.net or DivShare to do so.

Use Blackboard: Ugh. We know you don't want to, but you kind of have to, so you may as well add Blackboard Sync to Facebook. (Online assignment system for college students).

Make a To-Do List: Some people just love lists. Task Manager can help you GTD.

Use a Calendar: Need a more traditional calendar app? Try this one from 30Boxes, or one of these unofficial Google Calendar apps. Or you could just sync Facebook with any other calendar, both online and off, with fbCal.

How to Make Facebook Useful: Part III - Bring Web 2.0/Social Tools Into Facebook:

No need to leave the comfort of Facebook's walls to use the social web - you can just pull the social web into Facebook. Some of the most popular Web 2.0 applications are available as Facebook apps.

Use FriendFeed: No need to go without your daily fix of lifestreaming. The early adopter crowd loves this one.

Use Flickr: Take your pick from 100 applications for using flickr on Facebook...or just use the official one.

Use Twitter: Post to Twitter and make your latest tweet your Facebook status.

Use Upcoming: Plan your events via Upcoming and see events taking place in your area, too.

Get Movie Recommendations: Get movies reviews via Flixster so you know whether to rent that flick or see it in the theaters...or not.

Get Restaurant Recommendations: Use Bizzlr to get recommendations for where to eat. (our coverage)

Share Books/Book Reviews: Depending on personal preference, you may like Shelfari, Visual Bookshelf, Goodreads, or Bookshare.

Find People: Use Spock's people search app to find anyone, anywhere.

Link to Other Profiles: With As Seen On, you can link your Facebook profile to other social media profiles.

How to Make Facebook Useful: Part IV - Bonus Content!

Make Firefox Better: You can find great add-ons for Firefox with Rock Your Firefox.

Search the Web & Share: Think Microsoft should put Live Search in Facebook? They just did.

Reading the Daily News Facebook-Style: No need to go off-site to get the latest news - customize your own morning paper with Zine.

And More!: Check out our series from last July to get ideas for other Facebook apps for Work, Utilities, and Media.

(Special thanks to FriendFeed user Susan Beebe who supplied a lot of great suggestions!)

But why is American Express doing so badly, and dragging down the Dow so much? The proximate cause seems to be a downgrade by UBS analyst Eric Wasserstrom, who's worried about credit losses.

I can confirm that these might well be a problem. For the past few weeks, I've been annoyed by phone calls from American Express; when I answer them, I'm told by an automated voice that someone who may or may not have used my phone number in the past needs to call them back urgently. Today, I finally got around to calling the number given, to see if I could take my number off their list. And what did I find?

"Thank you for continuing to hold. Your call is very important to us and will be answered by the next available representative."

In the end, I was on hold for about four minutes before I started talking to a human. And this is the line that American Express devotes to people they desperately want to hear from, and who presumably owe them significant amounts of money.

The way I see it, one of two things is going on here. Either American Express has more or less given up on collecting its past-due credit-card loans, and is making only the most desultory attempts to reach out to its debtors, relying on automated phone messages and understaffed call centers. Alternatively, Amex really does care about reaching these people, but there are so many past-due debtors that the credit card issuer's systems have become overwhelmed.

Either way, I have sympathy with Eric Wasserstrom.

Whitman then told me she only went on the eBay job interview so the headhunter wouldn't get mad at her. After one look at Omidyar's bare-bones Web site, then called AuctionWeb, she sarcastically told me: "I remember sitting there thinking, 'Oh this is just great.'"

Hopefully, before long, I'll get to see what the new guy, John Donahue, is like.

Meg Whitman, the chief executive of the internet auction giant eBay, is preparing to retire, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Whitman has led the company since before its wildly successful I.P.O. in 1998, and she navigated eBay through the aftermath of the tech bubble burst even as competitors fell by the wayside.

The Journal cites people close to the company with the information that Whitman is completing her succession planning and will likely make a formal announcement in the coming weeks.

These people also say that John Donahoe, the head of eBay's auction business unit, is the leading candidate to replace her. Donahoe, who was previously managing director for the consultancy Bain and Company, was recruited by Whitman to join the company in 2005. The two previously worked together at Bain.

Whitman's departure would come at a critical point for eBay, as the Journal notes. The auction business, which flourished for years, has reached a point of more stagnant growth. That business makes up about two-thirds of its $6 billion in annual revenues.

EBay pushed aggressively into new lines of business, with mixed results. It has expanded internationally and made smart acquisitions, such as the internet payment service PayPal. But last year it was forced to write down $1.4 billion from its purchase of the online phone service Skype.

Whitman is highly regarded by her peers and has made her mark as one of the most successful female chief executives in history. It's unclear what Whitman will do next, although at only 51, it's unlikely she'll disappear into retirement just yet. In 2005, Whitman interviewed with the board of Walt Disney to replace Michael Eisner as its chief executive. But she withdrew her name and maintained her commitment to eBay.

Investors were clearly not pleased with the news of Whitman's imminent departure. In pre-market trading, eBay shares fell 8 percent.

I just realized that I am jobless today! (Yesterday was my last day at PodTech, tomorrow is my first day at my new job, I'll have a post at midnight Pacific Time tonight about that).

Speaking of PodTech, Rocky and me kicked butt right until the end. We have a ton of videos going up on ScobleShow this week (my last video, which includes a really fun interview with my first girlfriend runs on Friday).

The first of the Retrevo Gangs, which features Fred Davis, one of the founders of Wired Magazine, among other things, are now up too. Fred's one of my favorite people in the world has such a great outlook on life and always inspires me.

Speaking of inspiring me. Yesterday was my son Patrick's 14th birthday. Damn, I can't believe he's almost in high school. Two more years and he'll be driving. Help us all! We'll do some Qik videos from MacWorld today together and tonight we'll be on Apple Universe Live together.

I love jobless days hanging with my favorite Apple fan (that'd be Patrick).

See ya later.

My "friend" Dave Nolastnamesogoogledoesntindexme recently asked me if I have seen any moves toward private hierarchies of relationships. Specifically he (and I) want to categorize my "friends" into a hierarchy that I get to create. One example set might be (lover, buddy, friend, acquaintances, met once, jackass, enemy). This "friend set" should be user customizable and private.

My head starts to hurt when I think about this across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Plaxo, Outlook, Gmail, Bebo, Dogster, Shelfari, ...) What a mess.

While I'd love a consolidation layer across all my social network (e.g. I want "one Dave Nolastnamesogoogledoesntindexme object"), I know I'm not going to get that anytime soon. So - I'll just settle for being able to create my own special unique proprietary private "friend hierarchy" within each social network tool.

NewsGator's desktop feed readers previously cost about $30 each and faced some commoditization through feed reading software bundled with modern operating systems, office suites, or competitive open-source solutions. Windows client FeedDemon needs to compete with feed reading capabilities built-in to Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 or open-source clients such as RSS Bandit. Apple client NetNewsWire competes with Mail.app in Leopard and open-source freeware such as Vienna. NewsGator Inbox competes directly with Outlook 2007.

NewsGator differentiates its desktop client offerings from the competition through the NewsGator Online hub. Each client filters its requests for feed data through the centralized online service and synchronizes each user's list of subscriptions, read/unread items, shared snippets, and more. NewsGator plans to use the extended user base available via its free clients to fine-tune relevancy and other metrics available through uniquely identifiable attention data.

[B]y using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone. And that's a good thing - both for us and for you.

Each desktop application can also sync with a local activity hub NewsGator is selling within enterprises. They hope free tools will infiltrate corporate America to generate new sales leads and internal advocates for bigger licensing fees.

Summary

NewsGator's move to free is an interesting risk for a changing business. Competitors such as Attensa do not have a similar strength in the desktop client space, and NewsGator will continue to worry about Microsoft shipping an update to SharePoint that could shake up their enterprise market. In the mean time thousands of consumers will be able to download quality software for free, and the small desktop clients can continue developing cool new features funded by enterprise usage.

Update: Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon, shares his thoughts on the freebies on his blog.

If you're self-employed or thinking about it and you live in the U.S., one of your biggest concerns is likely to be health insurance. Most people in the U.S. about 60% according to the National Coalition on Health Care get health coverage through their employers.

But the health insurance outlook for the self-employed is not as bad as you might think. If you are reasonably healthy, you might be surprised how cheaply you can arrange coverage, especially if you choose a high-deductible health plan. And now that health insurers are looking for growth beyond their bread-and-butter large group policies, you could see even better rates as those insurers compete for your health coverage dollars.

The Wall Street Journal reports (behind the subscription firewall, unfortunately) that insurers are turning their attention to the individual insurance market as the large group plan market stagnates:

[Insurers'] core business selling group plans to large employers is stagnant. A Bain & Company analysis of the health-insurance sector shows that total commercial health-insurance enrollment has been flat at around 174 million people since 2001. In response to rising costs, employers have steadily pared back benefits, and the percent of businesses offering health insurance has fallen to 60% last year from 66% in 1999. Since the 2001 recession, the number of contractors, part-timers and small-business employees has grown two to six times faster than the economy overall. In contrast, traditional workers the full-time company employees that provide the insurance companies' bread and butter have declined 0.6%. As a result, profit pools in corporate-funded health plans are shrinking.

So what does that mean for you? It depends. It depends on what health issues you and your dependents have, what state you live in, and even what coverage you've had in the past, because some legal guarantees only kick in if you don't drop coverage for too long.

If you are looking for health insurance on the individual market, here are a few tips to guide you:

• Find a good health insurance broker. A broker who's knowledgeable about individual policies in your area will be able to help you find just the right health insurance plan for your situation. They can easily check rates at multiple insurance companies, inform you about laws that might apply to your situation, and counsel you about your best course of action.
• Consider a high-deductible health plan with a health savings account. These plans feature high annual deductibles but allow you to establish a health savings account to which you contribute pre-tax earnings. Because of the high deductibles, the policies are usually quite a bit cheaper than regular policies. And the health savings accounts have a variety of nice features, including long-term accumulation of savings and tax-free interest if you don't use up the money in the account. It's a great way to save for future health expenses while keeping the lid on current expenditures for your insurance.
• Don't drop coverage. Besides leaving you at risk for financial disaster should you have health problems while uncovered, it also means that if you later get coverage through an employer or other group plan, the insurer may not have to cover pre-existing conditions. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) says that if you maintain coverage without a significant break (generally defined as 63 days or more), a new group insurer cannot exclude pre-existing conditions, although an individual insurer may be able to, depending on your state's laws. Always maintain coverage, even if you do so with the most bare bones of policies.
• Consider COBRA health coverage continuation only as a last resort. The federal Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act provides for continuation of group health care coverage for up to 18 months (or longer if you are disabled) after you leave a job. Although it will cover you if you have no other options, it is time-limited and often very expensive. Do use it to keep unbroken coverage if you need to while waiting for eligibility for another plan, though.

For more advice on health insurance for the self-employed, check our open thread where readers shared their experiences. And let's hope that America's next president takes decisive action to help those who cannot obtain affordable health coverage for themselves and their families, even as we each (I hope) find the coverage we need for ourselves and our families.

Share/Send

The new upgrades from web based RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines are tempting but none of them still match the desktop based FeedDemon. Let's see 10 features in FeedDemon that sets this software apart from most of the competition coming from online news readers.

1. Personal Techmeme - FeedDemon has an in-built meme-tracker that shows all the popular news stories within the RSS feeds that you have subscribed. It's something like Techmeme or Megite but only for the feeds that you have chosen.

2. Visual Themes - If you have subscribed to a Flickr RSS feed, you would want that to look more like a Photo Album than plain text. With FeedDemon, you can define different visual styles for your subscriptions so that doubles your joy of reading RSS feeds.

You can also read feeds formatted in the style of a Newspaper.

3. Real Time Watches - CES 2008 is happening a tons of blogs are live-blogging the event. I am not much interested in gadgets so I have created a new watch for CES in FeedDemon.

If there's a news story in my subscription that contain keywords like CES, it automatically appears in the Watch bin and I easily skip it. At the same time, I like to read every story that mentions Matt Cutts so there's a watch for Mr Cutts and so on.

3. Delete Dinosaurs (Inactive Feeds) - FeedDemon shows a list of RSS feeds in your subscriptions that are not updated in the last 2-3 months so you can safely unsubscribe from them. You also get to know about feeds that are in your reading list but you rarely read them - probably that can be deleted as well.

4. Desktop Alerts - Like Particls, FeedDemon can show desktop alerts as new stories arrive in your favorite feeds. The software itself can stay minimized in your system tray and can check for new content in the background.

5. Windows Live Writer - If you are a blogger and use Windows Live Writer for posting stories to your blog, FeedDemon can make you more productive. You can right click an item in FeedDemon and send it directly to Windows Live Writer for publishing or copy the entire story to the clipboard.

6. FeedDemon Download Manager - If the RSS feed has enclosures (say you are subscribed to audio or video podcasts), use the inbuilt download manager in FeedDemon to download episodes to your desktop. No need of iTunes.

7. Reduce RSS Stress - RSS is not like email - so you don't have to read everything. If there are too many unread stories in your reader, this new Panic Button will allow you to mark all those items as read which were published say more than 48 hours ago.

8. Offline Reading - If you plan to read your RSS feeds on an airplane (or any place that has no Internet connection), FeedDemon can prefetch all images and links for you so the feeds remain accessible while you are offline.

May also prove useful when the hotel is charging exorbitant rates for Wi-fi access.

9. Shared Items - Like the shared items in Google Reader, Newsgator has a similar feature called Web Clippings where you can share your favorite news stories. Each clipping folder has a separate RSS feed syndicated through Newsgator Online. Great for creating Tumblr style blogs.

10. Discover Your Favorite Feeds - You don't have to tell FeedBurner about your favorite feeds - it automatically detects and sorts feeds in your subscriptions that get your maximum attention. Similar to Trends in Google Reader.

Resources: FeedDemon Home, Nick Bradbury

What's missing ? FeedDemon is tightly integrated with Newsgator Online which is good but not so popular as Google Reader or Bloglines. If there was a way to make FeedDemon work with Google Reader, nothing could beat that combination.

Related: FeedDemon Review [v2.0]

Why FeedDemon is Better Than Google Reader and Bloglines - Digital Inspiration

That's old' news (well, 24 hours is an eternity on the blogosphere, right?)

Why did it happen?

From an email that Scoble posted on his blog, it appears Facebook considered what he did (run a script to scrape some data) a violation of its Terms of Service'.

That opened an impassioned debate and discussion across blogs and social networks. It's because Scoble has a huge following.

Yes, Robert Scoble is a blogger with influence.

He is tech-savvy enough to know what he did was not explicitly allowed under Facebook's ToS. Indeed, he seems to acknowledge that he's trying to push against the walls.

In a comment, he said:

That's part of my job to see how good their terms of service are, and how well enforced they are.

In a later comment, he tries to justify the action by asking:

How about this? Can I write down your email address and put it in my address book? So, why am I allowed to write down your phone number or email address, but my computer can't take it out of Facebook and put it into Outlook for me? Or another program or service I'm using?

Ethical conundrums interest me. They also leave me flummoxed at times.

Let's take 2 familiar examples.

Example #1:

You go to a library. There's a reference section. It has books you are NOT permitted to borrow and take home.

Is it ok to try and borrow' them when the librarian isn't looking? To say you're testing the security features of your library'?

And then rationalize it by saying: Well, I can read the book there at the library, so why can't I take it home?

Example #2:

You have visiting cards in your desk at home. Cards you willingly hand out to contacts and business prospects. One day, you leave home forgetting to lock the front door.

Is it acceptable for anyone you might have given your calling card to in a social or business setting to now walk into your home, pick up a card and leave?

Hey, they just might be testing your home security features, or trying to teach you a lesson that it's unwise to leave home with your door unlocked (that's bad practice in a busy city, and it is actually helpful to teach you that lesson in such non-threatening, non-dangerous fashion).

Now my question

Is it RIGHT?

More so, is it right for a person with INFLUENCE to do such a thing?

Why would the rules be different online?

Facebook has policies. I'm not saying they are right. Yet, you agree to their ToS when you join the service.

And when YOU feel it isn't suitable to the way you think, feel and act, you blatantly try and violate said ToS - and justify it by fallacious logic.

Ethical?

Or not?

Influence thrives on integrity. Integrity is what happens when NO ONE is watching.

It has nothing to do with getting caught'. It has everything to do with the way you act.

Ends justify the means is one way of looking at it (more about teleological ethical theory here).

But influence carries greater responsibility. You are in the goldfish bowl - and hordes of others are peering in at you. Taking direction from what you do.

Including when you KNOWINGLY break a ToS.

And when you justify it with spurious reasoning.

Robert Scoble just lost a little bit of his influence - on me.

How about you?

One of my biggest barriers is Exchange integration. Since we use Exchange extensively (including Tasks), there's a meaningful switching cost to move off of it. Microsoft Entourage 2004 sucks. I've been a beta tester for Microsoft Entourage 2008 which is better, but still doesn't support a bunch of basic Exchange integration (like Tasks) and has numerous UI yuckiness.

Yeah - I know that I can use Mac Mail and sync with Exchange, but that doesn't get me very far in a mixed use environment (Calendar, Contacts, Tasks anyone?) I know I can use Parallels or Fusion to run an XP or Vista image on my Mac to run Outlook, but if I'm going to do that I might as well just live with my PC. And I know we could switch off Exchange, but I'm not going to begin to try to fathom that (although Ross is playing around with it.)

As I watch all my Mac friends "deal with this" (e.g. Ryan), they make it work but the cost is non-trivial. It'd be so much easier if Apple would just decide to really support Exchange natively within their apps (and on the iPhone.)

Hmmm - maybe they are.

An Advertising Recession?

Another New Ad Medium

Watching the Audience

Information Will Be Free

Since the dawn of the internet, "content wants to be free" has been the rallying cry of digital evangelists. But those who wanted to charge for content could always point to a shining example: the Wall Street Journal, with its 1 million online subscribers and $65 million in digital subscription revenue.

That will all change in 2008. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. recently completed its $5 billion acquisition of Dow Jones, plans to set WSJ.com free, judging from several fairly unequivocal public pronouncements.

Despite the short-term loss of subscription revenue, "long term, it's kind of a slam dunk," says Mike Vorhaus, managing director at the consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates. The money that is made from selling ads that reach a much larger audience will more than make up for losses, he adds.

The New York Times had a similar epiphany in September, when it shut down TimesSelect, its premium content service. But business news seemed to be one place where online subscriptions could still be sold successfully.

The Journal's move, however, will change the economics for competitors such as the Financial Times, which also charges a fee. "If the Wall Street Journal goes free, I suspect [FT.com] will also do it," says John Morton, an independent newspaper-industry analyst in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Companies that provide data rather than news may perhaps be more immune to the live-free-or-die fever, but then again, they might not.

ConsumerReports.org has been another success to date; just this month, it signed up its 3 millionth paid subscriber. But Jarvis predicts that free content will triumph eventually in that arena as well.

"Somebody's going to come along and pull a Craigslist on them," says Jarvis, referring to the listings site that has decimated newspapers' classified sections. "It's the kind of data you can get from your fellow customers."

Time to Part Ways?

• "you are my friend on Facebook - I thought we should be friends on LinkedIn"
• "you are my friend on LinkedIn - I thought we should be friends on Facebook."

Of course, if I hadn't turned off email reminders for both services I would have also had email messages alerting me to my new almost friends.

Pete Warden - who I met through some special friends that I'll be talking about shortly after the new year - showed me a really cool visualization of his Outlook Graph when he was in Denver for the Defrag conference. He's now made the alpha available for anyone to play around with (against your Outlook data store.) Social network as a function of email.

Fred Wilson is now living in twitter, tumblr, and disqus. I've been pestering Fred for a few months about the hidden social network across blogs, especially embedded in comments (Fred uses Disqus - I use Intense Debate.) Social network as a function of blogs + comments.

There is another layer of structure here that some smart people are working on, but so far I haven't found "the company" that is doing this. The metaphor that popped into my head was portal vs. Google. Before Google, we had Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and a bunch of others. They all did search and discovery, but were completely eclipsed by Google.

Today we have Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5, Meebo, Orkut, ... We also have email, blog comments, ... Seems like a parallel universe. Be a good friend and help me find the answer.

Source: paidContent.org
Author: David Kaplan
Link: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-zenithoptimedia

Techmeme permalink

Today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. You can download the final release using one of the links below:

• If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site.

• If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here. A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week. A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here.

• If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here.

• If you want to just install the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime, you can download it here.

Quick Tour of Some of the New Features

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 contain a ton of new functionality and improvements. Below are links to blog posts I've done myself as well as links to videos you can watch to learn more about it:

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. This means you can use VS 2008 to open, edit and build existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 applications (including ASP.NET 2.0 applications using ASP.NET AJAX 1.0), and continue to deploy these application on .NET 2.0 machines. You can learn more about how this works from my blog post here:

• VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support

.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (no separate download required). In addition to including all of the features in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET 3.5 also now includes richer support for UpdatePanels integrating with WebParts, ASP.NET AJAX integration with controls like <asp:menu> and <asp:treeview>, WCF support for JSON, and many other AJAX improvements.

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 also now have great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications. You can learn more about this from my blog posts here:

• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense
• VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging
• VS 2008 ASP.NET AJAX Control Extender Support
• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

You can watch some videos that discuss ASP.NET AJAX and Visual Studio 2008 support for it here.

I also highly recommend the excellent ASP.NET AJAX in Action book to learn more about ASP.NET AJAX (both client-side and server-side).

VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express includes a significantly improved HTML web designer (the same one that ships with Expression Web). This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration. Below are some articles I've written that discuss this more:

• VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support
• VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support
• VS 2008 Vertical Split View Support
• VS 2008 Support to Treat CSS and JavaScript Validation Issues as Warnings instead of Errors

ASP.NET 3.5 also has a new <asp:ListView> control that provides the ability to perform rich data scenarios with total control over the markup. It works nicely with the new CSS support in VS 2008. You can learn more about it from my article here:

• ASP.NET 3.5 ListView Control

You can watch some videos that discuss the new Visual Studio 2008 web designer features and the new ListView/DataPager controls here.

Language Improvements and LINQ

The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages. Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code. These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET.

Below are some of the articles I've written that explore these new language features using C#:

• Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Lambda Expressions
• Query Syntax
• Anonymous Types

Here are a few additional blog posts I've written that show off some of the new VS 2008 code editing support and some cool ways to use these new language features:

• VS 2008 Code Editing Features
• Tip/Trick: Building a ToJson() Extension Method using .NET 3.5
• The C# ?? null coalescing operator (and using it with LINQ)
• Using LINQ to XML (and how to build a custom RSS Feed Reader with it)

The Visual Basic team has also created some great free videos that cover LINQ. You can watch them here.

Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL

LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M (object relational mapper) in .NET 3.5. It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model. You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it. LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures. It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model. Below are some of the articles I've written that explore how to use it:

• Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL
• Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes
• Part 3: Querying our Database
• Part 4: Updating our Database
• Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control
• Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures
• Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures
• Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions
• Part 9: Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the <asp:LinqDataSource> control

I think you'll find that LINQ and LINQ to SQL makes it much easier to build much cleaner data models, and write much cleaner data code. I'll be adding more posts to my LINQ to SQL series in the weeks and months ahead (sorry for the delay in finishing them earlier - so much to-do and so little time to-do it all!).

Scott Stanfield is also working on creating some great LINQ to SQL videos for the www.asp.net site based on my article series above (all videos are in both VB and C#). You can watch the first 4 videos in this series here.

Browsing the .NET Framework Library Source using Visual Studio

As I blogged a few weeks ago, we will be releasing a reference version of the .NET Framework library source code as part of this release. Visual Studio 2008 has built-in debugger support to automatically step-into and debug this code on demand (VS 2008 can pull down the source for the appropriate .NET Framework library file automatically for you).

We are deploying the source servers to enable this right now, and will be publishing the steps to turn this feature on in the next few weeks.

Lots of other improvements

The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming. For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support. ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox. WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data.

Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon, and with Outlook. Visual Studio Tools for Office support is also now built-into Visual Studio (you no longer need to buy a separate product).

New WCF and Workflow projects and designers are now included in VS 2008. Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS). Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS. AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU. And there is much, much more...

Installation Suggestions

People often ask me for suggestions on how best to upgrade from previous betas of Visual Studio 2008. In general I'd recommend uninstalling the Beta2 bits explicitly. As part of this you should uninstall Visual Studio 2008 Beta2, .NET Framework Beta2, as well as the Visual Studio Web Authoring Component (these are all separate installs and need to be uninstalled separately). I then usually recommend rebooting the machine after uninstalling just to make sure everything is clean before you kick off the new install. You can then install the final release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 on the machine.

Once installed, I usually recommend explicitly running the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu option, choosing the "Reset Settings" option, and then re-pick your preferred profile. This helps ensure that older settings from the Beta2 release are no longer around (and sometimes seems to help with performance).

Note that VS 2008 runs side-by-side with VS 2005 - so it is totally fine to have both on the same machine (you will not have any problems with them on the same box).

Silverlight Tools and VS Web Deployment Project Add-Ins

Two popular add-ins to Visual Studio are not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release. These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio and the Web Deployment Project add-in for Visual Studio. Our hope is to post updates to both of them to work with the final VS 2008 release in the next two weeks. If you are doing Silverlight 1.1 development using VS 2008 Beta2 you'll want to stick with with VS 2008 Beta2 until this updated Silverlight Tools Add-In is available.

Hope this helps,

Scott

1. Gmail Java app for mobile phone: this was noted by 18 people in the comments of our original post. This app is a Java-based version of Gmail for mobile, which features IMAP sync, attachment viewing. Phrases that were associated with Gmail for mobile by our readers included: "just works", "simplicity", "functional", "useful", "a joy to use".

Commenter "mr white" said of the Gmail java app: "This *is* clearly the path of the future. All your e-mails, all the time, everywhere. No more tedious synching with this outlook / that outlook and the webmailer. Now bring on calendar and contacts."

Nathan commented: "A very nice frontend onto a very nice service, and it does a rather nice job of reformatting files for the tiny screen. That's the sort of feature you don't actually appreciate until you're out in the countryside with nary a hardline in sight and need an address that was wrapped up in a .doc in your inbox that you forgot to print."

2. Google Maps for Mobile: mentioned by 11 people. This too is a Java app, which Google released in December 2006. There is also a full-featured version, including GPS Integration, which can be used on Windows Mobile PocketPCs and smartphones. According to our readers, utility is the key factor for this app.

Phil commented: "...my favourite app has to be Google Maps for mobile (on my Sony Ericsson k800i). I use it a lot, from finding my way about places (I've lived in London a year and still have no idea where I'm going most of the time) to turning to the satellite view and impressing friends with the detail I can get on my mobile. The clarity of the maps, one of the main apps benefits that really shines in the mobile version, negates my need for a real map any more, though any time I'm stuck without signal I'm probably also lost too. I'd recommend Google Maps to anyone (with an unlimited or generous data plan and 3G, the maps can be pretty big!)."

Simon uses Google Maps on his N95, noting that "it's fast, plays nicely with GPS and I hope it really pushes Nokia's own mapping."

g0at commented: "My favorite web app is Google Maps. It seamlessly blends the divide of a local application, and web app (as every good web app should). Incredibly useful stuff."

Mr Gunn also uses Google Maps on a Nokia. He says "they've [Google] got a Symbian native version that blows the java version away. The N75 and 95 have better screens so they look better than the iphone already, but the symbian native program runs so much faster, too."

3. Opera Mini: noted by 10 people. Not strictly speaking a web app, but still it's something a lot of people want to download to use as their mobile web browser. Also the recent 4.0 release impressed a few of our commenters. The new features in Opera Mini 4 include quicker scrolling, auto-sizing and faster page rendering. It seems to be the mobile web browser of choice for our readers - odd though that Safari on iPhone got no mentions?!

Jono commented: "It's better than my Nokia's built in browser for many sites because it doesn't get bogged down and run out of memory, plus it saves you money because everything is compressed through Opera's servers."

Miss Universe noted: "The latest version of Opera mobile allows for full page zoom-outs that enable magnification of a specific area of the Web Page."

Marat uses Opera Mini "to check gmail, greader and search the web."

Sean said: "I love how it intelligently modifies web pages (even if it does have to go through their servers)."

4. Fring: noted by 5 people. Fring is a free mobile VoIP software, that lets you connect to all your IM services and talk for free when connected to 3G or Wi-Fi.

Honor Gunday commented: "It allows me to connect to all the IM networks I am part of : Gtalk, MSN, Skype, ICQ and chat, also it allows me to make mobile calls to Gtalk users when they are online and I am mobile. Normally, I would have to pay money to call them, but this calls right to their desktop and works perfectly fine over a slow GPRS connection even. I tested at least 6 apps to come to the conclusion that Fring is the winner among mobile IM/VOIP software."

Uri said: "The all-in-one IM client with great interface and Skype gateway, just makes my wi-fi Nokia e65 a portable skype phone & messenger. It's very useful when sitting at home on a couch not near the desk or simply in Caffes."

5. Shozu: noted by 4 people. Shozu enables you to send your videos and photos from your phone to the Web - e.g. your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. The Flickr use case was the one most cited by Read/WriteWeb readers.

Anne Helmond commented: "My favorite app for my N95 is definitely Shozu which enables me to send my pictures to Flickr with just one click. It is the perfect application for Flickr addicts and very easy to install and use. You can enable updates on the photos of your contacts (ZuCasts) and comments on your photos. You can also upload your videos to YouTube but I haven't used that option yet."

Honor said: "It allows me to send the pictures I take with my n80 to Facebook and share with my friends, or email people pictures while I am at an event, shopping for stuff for them etc..."

Honorable Mentions

The following Mobile Web apps were mentioned at least once in our original post. Please add more to the comments. Also we'd like to hear which websites and blogs have the best mobile features. Here is the mobile version of Read/WriteWeb, but we have more work to do yet for it.

WidSets
OggPlay
Installer.app for the iPhone
http://xpenser.com
netvibes
Nextbus.com
Yahoo go
ZuCasts
greader
TomTom
facebook
Agile Messenger
Jaiku client
Calcium
Windows Live Mobile
http://seeqpod.com/m
FeedM8
London Underground journey planner
FT.com newsreader
emoze
LiteFeeds
flickr
Radar
www.waterfallmobile.com
Mail for Exchange
Jott
Grandcentral

I love the word synchronization. Early Lotus Notes users (and database geeks) will prefer replication which I did until I saw Blade Runner for the first time. So synchronization or sync (not synch) is my preferred word. The construct is the same.

There was a time in the late 1990's where sync became popular. Microsoft Exchange promulgated the phrase into mainstream corporate IT while the Palm Pilot got folks like my dad saying the word sync on a regular basis. Sync was hot and important for a little while.

Post-bubble, sync wasn't to be found anywhere. The emergence of broadband and the rise of the consumer Internet rendered sync less interesting and it faded. Exchange users still loved it most of the time (except when Outlook sat there and grinded away on a slow connection), but they stopped cherishing (and talking about) it.

I've never loved laptops as my only computer. I've got a desktop in each office I work in using almost exactly the same configuration as their fellow desktops. Today, almost all of my data lives in the cloud or on a server somewhere so I have these lovingly overpowered desktops with beautiful monitors to do email and browse the web. However, when it's all seamless and works, it's really nice and allows me to only have to carry my smartphone (running Windows Mobile) around with me.

All my friends that are web only - especially my Mac buddies are suddenly starting to find that their data isn't always where they want it to be. Specifically - it's not on their laptop when they are offline (e.g. on a plane) or on their desktop at home (when they leave their laptop at work.) Oops.

Sync is coming on fast. Again. Mary Foley just wrote an article about Microsoft Sync Framework CTP1 titled Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform. Google Gears appeared six months ago and several of my friends at Google (and the Google Gears API site) suggest it's going to be the automagic offline sync interface from Google. I remember the joy I had when I discovered the Google Browser Sync Firefox Extension.

Several really smart developers I know are working on sync applications both at the file and object level. Everyone that I know that is working on sync talks about how important it is to make it invisible to the user. Well duh. It should have been built into the operating systems that were released in the past 12 months (you each know who you are) but it wasn't (although the perversion referred to as Sync Center tries, but not very hard.) The window is still open for real sync solutions at least for another major OS iteration.

Sync is the new pink.

Nov. 2, 2007 NewsGator Technologies, Inc., a pioneer in RSS and Enterprise 2.0, today announced the release of Didja Hear!?, the latest NewsGator social application that will give Google users the ability to easily share and discuss video and image content.

Didja Hear!? leverages OpenSocial, a programming model developed by Google in which developers are provided with a set of common APIs enabling distribution of their applications across multiple sites all with the aim to help the Web become more social and to make sharing great content easy. Didja Hear!? and its participation in OpenSocial reinforces NewsGators continued commitment to innovation and highlights the power and flexibility of NewsGators RSS platform to deliver compelling, social and useful applications.

Didja Hear!? leverages NewsGators database of nearly two million feeds and the editorial controls of NewsGators Widget Framework to present the images and videos that are most compelling and enjoyable for users to pass on to their friends. With Didja Hear!?:

NewsGator automatically recommends the top video and graphic content from nearly two million RSS feeds more than seven million articles per day;

The NewsGator Widget Framework divides those videos and images into categories including movies, sports, celebrities, television and more; and,

Users can easily send a cool video to their friends along with comments and reply back with comments on any videos they get as well as see existing comments on anything they have sent.

Didja Hear!? and our early participation in OpenSocial exemplify our mission of getting the right content to the right people. We developed Didja Hear!? to filter and deliver the best video and graphical content from across the Web to the users who want to interact with it, said Brian Kellner, vice president of products at NewsGator. Didja Hear!? is like a Web 2.0 mashup of a greeting card store and a coffee shop its a fun way for people to communicate, interact and socialize around quality content.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies is the worlds leading enterprise 2.0 and RSS company. Headquartered in Denver, Colo., NewsGator develops and markets RSS aggregation solutions for individual end users, enterprises and online content providers. Using NewsGator products and solutions, businesses and consumers can subscribe to news, information, podcasts and other relevant content more efficiently and effectively than with traditional channels. With NewsGator, users have access to RSS information via the Web, Microsoft Outlook, mobile devices and both Windows- and Mac-based desktop clients. All NewsGator products synchronize seamlessly, enabling users to read their RSS feeds anywhere, anytime, with any device. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.

Google and OpenSocial are trademarks of Google Inc.

File Sharing

Both OS X and Windows can see each other's shared drives over the local network. To mount a Mac's shared drive on a PC, it's a simple matter of enabling Windows Sharing in System Preferences and browsing to the shared folder the way you would on any other PC. Here's a step by step rundown for accessing a Mac's files on your PC. Update: Reader Jeremy writes in with more information on how to get Windows Vista to see Mac-shared folders. Thanks, Jeremy!

By default, OS X shares only your home folder. To share out another location on your Maclike, say, an external drive that houses all your media filesuse the free SharePoints System Preferences pane to configure advanced sharing.

To go the other way around and see your PC's files on the Mac, use Finder's built-in support for Samba, a network file-sharing protocol. Here are the details on mounting a shared Windows folder on your Mac.

File and Application Compatibility

But while you're unlikely to run into filetype compatibility issues, Mac newbs should know that applications are not compatible across operating systems. That is, if you buy Microsoft Office for Windows, you've got to buy a whole new package/license for Office for Mac. Same goes for Photoshop and other utilities like text editors or FTP clients. Some Mac-only apps can export files that work on PC, but won't run on PC'slike iPhoto, for instance.

File Sync and System Files: Thumbs.db and .DS_Store

Printer and Fax Sharing

To go in the other direction, simply share your Windows printer as usual and use the Mac's printer browser to find it.

Running Windows on your Mactel

• Dual boot Windows on your Mac using Boot Campforces you to partition your hard drive into two sections and choose which OS to start when you turn on your computer, but runs Windows natively (read:fast)
  
• Run Windows inside OS X with not-free virtualization software like Parallels or VMwarelets you move files back and forth between each OS's drives and open any file on either system using a Mac or Windows app. (You can even set a Mac or Windows app to open for a filetype by default from either system.)
  
• Virtualize your Boot Camp partition to get the best of both worldsmake your choice every time whether you want to start Windows natively or within OS X, based on the task at hand

A few things to keep in mind when you set up Windows on your Mac: If you choose Boot Camp, you'll have a choice to format your Windows partition as FAT (which has a 32GB size limit for Boot Camp) or NTFS. NTFS is more secure and has no size limit, but OS X cannot write to NTFS drives, only read them. That means that you cannot save files to your Windows partition while you're booted up into OS X, just like you can't write to your Mac drive in Windows. (If you do opt for FAT, you can write to your Boot Camp Windows partition in OS X.)

If you go the virtualization route, when Windows is running inside OS X, you can easily copy files between your Mac and Windows drives. In fact, Parallels mounts your Windows hard drive and displays it in Finder like any writable external drive (pictured.)

Remote Server Access

Most commercial remote login services like LogMeIn are Windows-only, but the cross-platform VNC lets you remote control your Mac or PC from either OS. Likewise, the free VPN software and network which lets you stream your iTunes library over the internet and access shared drives, Hamachi, is also available for Mac with HamachiX.

Instant Messenger, Email and Outlook/Entourage

There's no Microsoft Outlook for Mac, but Entourage (included in Office for Mac) can talk to your Microsoft Exchange server. Mac's Mail.app is also not available for PC but supports your standard email fetching and sending protocols, like POP/IMAP and SMTP, so it can download and send mail from Gmail or your ISP just the way Outlook Express can on your PC. Update: Mail.app can also work with Exchange server. Thanks, Byslexic!

iTunes, your iPod, and Other Incompatibilities

You can, of course, share a library on a Mac or PC and listen to it in iTunes on any other machine regardless of OS.

Likewise, you've got to choose between formatting your iPod for Mac or Windows. An iPod formatted for one will not work with the other. Update: Two readers report that a Windows-formatted iPod WILL work on a Mac, but not the other way around.

Along those same lines, an external hard drive formatted "Mac OS Extended" can't be plugged into Windows and just work. However, USB drives formatted "MS-DOS" (for Windows, that is) can be recognized, read and written to by both Windows and Mac OS. So a thumb drive sneaker net will work between Mac and PC.

Making the Switch

How do you negotiate Windows and Mac OS in your computing life? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, has one foot in each OS on a daily basis. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

At this point in the game, the most interesting thing about RSSCalendar may be Pacchetti's provisional patent application, which presumably covers the delivery of calendar items to a calendar by RSS. LookOut said this morning that Pacchetti would not be joining the company.

By now the product's functionality seems common enough (specifically in Google and probably Zimbra products) that the IP could pay off well as a gamble. When asked about the status of the provisional patent, which will expire one year from filing date, the company said no one was available to comment about it yet this morning. If a return phone call does come in, I don't expect it to be very forthcoming.

Lookout Software was also the name of another company that was founded by Netscape CTO and Zimbra backer Eric Hahn and which was acquired by Microsoft in 2004. Thus this does not appear to be a story of an undercover Microsoft acquisition to launch an IP attack on Google and Yahoo calendaring products.

It could instead be a legitimate small purchase of one man's software by a larger, related company seeking to add functionality. In that case, lookout Lookout customers - here comes sharing by RSS!