The app will automatically search for, download and save all of the images that meet your requirements (you can specify image size and where to look for the images). Narrowing your requirements a little is a good idea, as there are over 5,000 photos available in the collection.

Where do you find wallpaper images to brighten up your desktop?

Via Lifehacker

• 8 Significant Developments in Social Media You Should Watch

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• Improved Productivity: A 12-Step Program

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• 7 Ways to Find Your Focus

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• Opera 10.5 Beta: The Fastest Browser on Earth

Simon looks at the latest beta of Opera 10.5, and finds that its claims to be the fastest browser available really do stack up.

• Minute Suites: Rest and Recharge, Airport Style

A new service that recently opened in Atlanta Hartsfield airport, called Minute Suites, wants to serve as travelers’ oasis from the stress of life traveling the unfriendly skies. Nancy takes it for a spin.

• Feb. 8 is Clean Out Your Computer Day

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• Minute Suites: Rest and Recharge, Airport Style

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Imran shares some meeting insights from Google’s Marissa Mayer

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Charlie’s new productivity tip: don’t go online before breakfast.

• Opera 10.5 Beta: The Fastest Browser on Earth

Simon benchmarks the latest release from Opera — and finds that it really is the fastest browser on Earth (currently)

There are so many people who influence us in our businesses, from the bloggers who consistently provide us with helpful information to keep our businesses growing and thriving to the people in our spheres of influence who rave about us and keep clients and customers coming our way. They help us every day, and it is important to reach out and say “thank you” every now and then.

Even when you think it will fall on deaf ears, that it won’t matter to the person, or that he or she is probably inundated with messages every day, let the person know how he or she helps you in your business and that you appreciate his or her efforts. Say what’s on your mind and make it heartfelt — because for most people, it really will matter.

Someone sent me a thoughtful thank you note a couple of weeks ago, and I have thought about her message several times since then. She said my help and support had been “wind in her sails” that week; little did she know that that note would be wind in mine for weeks to come.

Take the time to thank the people who inspire you, motivate you and teach you. Instead of passing over the comment sections of their blogs again, thinking you have nothing of value to add, let them know how their posts are making a difference in your business. With so many jerks in the world these days, it’s really nice to come across someone who actually takes the time to be, well, nice.

And, to my favorite bloggers (The Bloggess, Chris Brogan, Dumb Little Man and Gary Vaynerchuk, to name a few), thank you.

What was the most heartfelt or meaningful “thank you” you ever received?

Photo by Flickr user vistamommy, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In the past, profiles have been structured like standard résumés, with elements appearing in fixed order: a header, a text summary, optional applications like blog links, experience, education, recommendations, and an “additional information” section with web links, awards and such.

Now, when you click on “Edit Profile,”you’ll see a four-way arrow to the left of the section names. Drag it to rearrange the sections. Check out the video to see how it works.

This will be a boon to students, who may wish to make their educational backgrounds more prominent, as well as to entrepreneurs and career changers, who may wish to highlight other parts of their backgrounds besides their “day jobs.”

LinkedIn plans to offer more enhancements to LinkedIn profiles soon.

Will you rearrange your LinkedIn profile? What other editing abilities would you like to see on the site?

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• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
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• New Silverlight Client for Facebook: I Can’t Believe This is Facebook

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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Are you a Twitt user?

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So, who owns your data, and who has access to it? In my latest Long View for GigaOM Pro, “Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?” (subscription required) I take an in-depth look at the issues of privacy, security and data ownership in the cloud; the legal protection (or lack of it) that your information has to protect it from unwanted snooping; and the steps that we should all be taking to minimize the risks of our data being accessed or used in ways that we hadn’t intended.

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• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?
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Om and the team over at GigaOM recently shared “7 Things We Hope Will Come True in 2010.” While that list of things are all well and good for our industry as a whole, I’ve identified a list of changes that web app providers could make that would make my work and life easier on a day-to-day basis. Here’s my web app wish list.

Help Me

I really like that you provide me with links to support and help from within your app. It’s great to have that available to me when I’m working with new features or have questions. But please provide contextual help for your application, or at least try to guess what I might be needing help with based upon where I’m coming from. Dumping me at an FAQ and making me search through it isn’t really the type of support I need. This type of help has been available in desktop apps for a long time now — it’s time to make it standard on web apps, too. Also, oftentimes “Help” links take me far away from my original page, so please make it easy for me to get back to where I started.

Integrations are Good — Please Use Them

I’m going to pick on new aggregator Cliqset here. Not because it’s a bad product, but because it was going through its setup process that it really hit me just how tired I am of needing to enter duplicate information across multiple sites. Like many other sites, Cliqset asked me to enter in all of my social identity identities. After entering a couple of them, I gave up. If it had given me the option to use my DandyID, it could gather all that info automatically and I would be much more likely to use the service.

You Are Not an Island

On a related note, if you have an API or are providing integrations with other tools and are going to change how your tool works, you’ve got to give us advanced warning. We’ve often built tools of our own that tie in to your tool, or use other applications that work with it. Even the smallest change in your program can break these connections.

If you integrate with others, you should know about their changes as well. When 37signals updated its login program, a ripple effect was felt throughout the web, as applications that integrated with its tools based on existing login IDs stopped working.

Easy Multi-user

If your application offers multi-user access with any level of permissions, please make it easy for the administrator (me) to masquerade as another user. I need to be able to easily test and verify that the settings I’m choosing for my users are working as I intended. Forcing me to log in and out with my user’s passwords is just crazy — let me see things as my user does with no hassles.

I don’t ask for much, really. Think you can take care of this stuff for me this year?

What’s on your wish list for 2010? What do you want from your web service providers this year?

Photo credit: Flickr user Sassy Frassy Lassie http://www.flickr.com/photos/dystopian/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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What’s changed? Apple has improved its ranking, thanks mainly to removing toxic chemicals from its products. Sony also climbed the rankings, having reported a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2008 and ensured that 8 percent of its power comes from renewable resources (an increase from 2.5 percent just one year ago) as well as boosting its use of recycled plastics.

Samsung has slipped from its top three position and now lags behind Toshiba and Phillips. Samsung, along with competitors Dell, Lenovo and LGE were penalized for failing to meet their promised deadlines for phasing out toxic chemicals in their products by the start of 2010.

For full details, download the guide.

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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One of the advantages of being a web worker is not having to worry about travel on days like today, but if you have colleagues who are being forced to temporarily join our ranks, why not send them our e-book, “Web Work 101: How to Escape the Cubicle.” Written by the WWD team, it’s chock full of hints and tips for web working newbies, covering topics like what apps to use, what to do if hardware fails, and maintaining work/life balance — and best of all, it’s free. You never know, it might just encourage them to become a web worker full-time.

Photo credit: Flickr user cooljinny http://www.flickr.com/photos/11600215@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Photo credit: stock.xchng user asolario

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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RDM+ allows users to control desktop computers from mobile devices. The software comes in several versions covering many mobile devices, including the iPhone/iPod touch, BlackBerry (which WWD reviewed in 2008), Windows Mobile, Palm and Java-enabled phones. There is also a web version.

In order to control a computer, one must have the desktop software (free, available for Windows or Mac) running. Setup is easy, and doesn’t require any special rules to deal with firewalls or dynamic IP addresses. During the setup process, one registers the desktop, and it is assigned a computer number, which is then used to access the machine remotely, together with a username and password combination you create.

RDM+ works well. With the software that the company provided to me, I found the interface easy to use. It takes good advantage of the iPhone’s landscape mode and zoom capabilities. There was only minimal delay in response time on an iPod touch connected via Wi-Fi, although I’m sure that data speeds will affect performance, depending on which network you are using. The software has an impressive list of other features, but doesn’t have file transfer capabilities.

There is a free trial, but don’t wait too long, as the sale on the iPhone version probably ends today; it’s unclear from the RDM+ web site when the normal price will return. The other mobile versions are also on sale, reduced by $5 – $10, depending on the version. Web access is also reduced — the basic price is down $5 to $24.95, or you can choose to buy a subscription for $5.95 per month. Costs for remote control software on mobile phones are definitely coming down — a similar product, LogMeIn Ignition (which Samuel wrote about back in September) was recently also on sale, with its normal $30 price reduced to $20.

Do you use RDM+ or other remote desktop software on your mobile phone?

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• Transient Apps: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 2
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Here’s the full rundown of winners and losers:

Winners

• Twitter
• Foursquare
• Government 2.0
• Employee productivity
• Facebook

Losers

• Consumer privacy
• eBay
• Journalism
• Yahoo
• Offerpal Media

For more detail and the reasons why each selection was made, check out the full post over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

What do you think the winners and losers of 2009 were?

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gwabbit is a handy application that automatically identifies and parses contact information from your emails to help ease the process of creating new entries in your contact list. I’ve written about the Outlook version as well as the paid BlackBerry edition in the past and was impressed by the offering.

The team at gwabbit recently released a free version of the BlackBerry app. It offers the same functionality as the paid version, except that it automatically notifies the folks whose addresses you’ve grabbed via email. I’m not usually a huge fan of this sort of thing, but it could be useful to let people know you’re trying to keep in touch with them. Personally, I think I would spend the $9.99 annually and spring for the paid version. The time savings make it a no-brainer, as does the knowledge that you’re not bugging your friends, clients and contacts.

You can download gwabbit (both free and paid editions) at the BlackBerry App World.

Would gwabbit Free help you keep your contacts in order?

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