Interestingly, that goes for both service providers and their users. On the provider side, Yahoo’s Luke Beatty, it’s VP and GM of community, thinks that users understand that the way sites operate and rank them will change. However, he said, “I don’t think anyone has a problem with the change as much as they have a problem with the transparency.”

Matt Thompson, VP of platform at Klout, echoed. “The desire to be transparent and the execution to be transparent are two different things,” he said, “and we stink at the execution right now.”

Transparency is so critcal, Beatty said, because how sites rate users will change over time. Behavior or skills that used to be important might change, and users looking to establish reputations need to know.

There might be a limit, though. Trada CEO Niel Robertson said he believes in half-transparency, kind of like the way Google only gives a guideline as to how its AdWords algorithm works. Users — in Trada’s case freelance, crowdsourced workers — need to know the criteria, he said, but if you’re completely open they might look to start gaming the system.

When it comes to users, transparency (aka the opposite of anonymity) is important for taking reputation with them across sites. Being chattygirl32 in the New York Times comments section, for example, isn’t so helpful when you try to leverage online reputation elsewhere. A real name, however, might stick.

Of course, using real names is also helpful in letting platform providers know who they’re dealing with. Robertson said Trada requires workers to use their real names, and Beatty said Yahoo does the same for people it pays for content. On Klout, Thompson said, tying together multiple anonymous accounts wouldn’t be too helpful — a real name, at least, is what what ties your influence to your reputation.

Robertson made another good point that often goes overlooked, which is that making user transparency might start spreading beyond users’ control, and beyond the web. There are all sorts of sites ranking doctors, for example, but he thinks we’re ripe for a time when doctors start rating patients, landlords rating tenants and the like.

You can hide behind all the screen names in the world, but don’t think those with whom you do business in the real world will be so accomodating.

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Judging from reader feedback on GigaOM, Yahoo’s outage has a lot of people thinking about making the switch to another email client. We’ve scoured the web for the best information on backing up your email or moving to another mail provider, but it’s important to remember no email provider is perfect. Whether it’s because you’re fed up or just a little spooked, it’s always a good idea to back up your data in more than one place.

• TrueSwitch is a third-party provider of email switching services. The company will copy your messages and contacts, forward your mail to your new address, and notify your contacts about the switch. TrueSwitch is free if you’re migrating to one of its sponsors, which include Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, and others.

• Yippie Move supports migration between colleges and universities. The service costs $15 per account, but it covers a wider number of clients than TrueSwitch, like .edu email addresses at colleges and universities.

• Google has an official “How To” on porting to Gmail from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and others.

• Microsoft jumped on the Yahoo outage news by offering free “Hotmail Plus” accounts to the first 1,000 Yahoo Mail users who make the switch to the “new Hotmail.”

• With Mozilla’s Thunderbird, you can locally back up all your Yahoo email messages (or any other POP-enabled email, like Gmail). Unfortunately, Yahoo requires users buy a $19.99/year premium account for the ability to export POP data.

• Tech how-to site Labnol.org has the most awesome and comprehensive post I’ve found about the ins and outs of migrating email.

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The research focused on the ways influence is established through Twitter, hinting at which user categories are the most popular, as well as which provide value, and how.

While businesses can apply this information to tweak their interactions with clients, customers and the public via Twitter, the research points to much more than that: It implies that greater benefits are available to companies that use Twitter to actively engage with their own team members: companies that stop seeing Twitter as an outward-focused medium, and customers as a separate audience from staff.

A Culture of Public Collaboration

How many of your staff members actively follow — that is, engage with — your company’s Twitter feed? How many staff members’ Twitter accounts are actively followed (or engaged with) by your company’s Twitter feed?

According to the Yahoo study, “Organizations … devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news.” Other user categories didn’t behave like this, though. It reported that, for example, bloggers:

• retweet valuable URLs from a range of relevant categories, noting that “[In-Tweet URLs] originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs.”
• act “as recyclers and filters of information.”
• consume large amounts of information, acting as intermediaries between the media and other users.

Do those who run your company’s Twitter account see staff as peer sources of valuable information that can be recycled for the company’s broader following?

This approach has the potential to benefit the company among internal audiences, as well as those in the public space. At its most basic, actively engaging with staff members within the public space provided by Twitter reflects the value of the staff to the company.

It reinforces to team members themselves — as well as customers and clients — that the company regards its staff as thought leaders, and while this approach can’t create a culture on its own, it can support a culture in which team members are actively recognized.

The “intermediary layer” alluded to above comprises about 500,000 Twitter users, according to Yahoo’s research, and only 4 percent of them are among the “elite” 0.05 percent of users who attract half the attention of the Twittersphere. Your company doesn’t need to be Lady Gaga to lead opinions on Twitter. But to take advantage of the intermediary layer, it does need to actively engage with peers (including staff members), filter information and retweet the good stuff.

It also needs to do that consistently. More than 270 URLs were initiated by bloggers per capita, according to the research. (By comparison, the average organization generated an average of 104 URLs per capita.)  To approach a significant level of value, your corporate Twitter team needs to consume a lot of relevant media; either direct from the source, or from other opinion leaders, including your staff.

Twitter and the Corporate Blog

If your organization has a blog, you’ll likely be tying your Twitter strategy into that, so if you’re planning to improve the value of your Twitter interactions, using them to engage with staff as well as clients, you might need to apply that same approach to the corporate blog, too. Do your staff members actively engage with the corporate blog, not just as contributors, but as audience members?

While many company blogs like to take the company line, apply the company style guide, and adopt a semi-corporate tone, some of the tried-and-tested blogging advice — writing “on the level,” telling stories, using anecdotes, and revealing a human side — may help companies to build credibility among all their audiences.

It’s one thing to have a team member draft a blog post; it’s another to see your staff daily accessing the company blog—perhaps via their Twitter feeds—then making comments, retweeting links to posts, and so on.

The company blog can be a particularly appropriate way to keep staff informed of the work of other parts of the business, and aware of the relationships the company has with its followers—provided the blog, like the company Twitter feed, is authentic, and successfully treats all its followers as collaborators, rather than “staff” and “customers”.

Does your company treat staff and clients as separate audiences? How well does it engage and collaborate with both groups through the company Twitter feed and blog?

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Threadsy supports email accounts, including IMAP, Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, Windows Live/MSN, AOL and MobileMe, as well as Facebook and multiple Twitter accounts. Once authorized (using OAuth or Facebook Connect, so you don’t have to give Threadsy your passwords), updates and messages from these accounts appear in a unified inbox.

When Doriano wrote about it back in December, he noted that it took a while to start up; that issue seems to have been resolved. After login, Threadsy displays an amusing quote or an item from their Twitter feed for a few seconds, then loads Threadsy’s main screen.

In the main screen, you’ll see your inbox on the left, and a social network feed on the right. Threadsy also provides access to Facebook Chat, AIM, MySpace IM, Google Talk and Twitter through the included Meebo Bar. I was concerned that having that much information on one page might lead to overload, but I didn’t find it so.

Threadsy’s email functions work well and searches are fast. You can also view Gmail’s labels/folders. It manages attachments reasonably well, although it doesn’t display PDFs inline the way Apple Mail and Gmail can. You can also print messages, but they include a large Threadsy image in the header.

The compose screen is very slick. Just start typing a recipient’s name, and Threadsy will auto-complete the information if the person is in the address book for any of your accounts. You can specify which of your accounts you want to send the message from, and you can attach files. You can’t actually edit your address book, though.

The social network feed in the sidebar is well laid out, and can be resized. It has some nice touches, like an automatic link expander. When one pulls up a message, the sidebar automatically switches to a timeline showing the sender’s latest updates. This is a useful function that Gist also does well.

Threadsy offers help, but everything is pretty intuitive. The service works very well, although I do have a wish-list of features I’d like to see:

• The ability to control sounds for each account separately, and to change the default sound. I turned off the incoming message sound, since it was chiming very frequently.
• The ability to edit message signatures, as they automatically include links to one’s networks, along with a prominent “sent from Threadsy” message that can’t be eliminated without turning off signatures entirely.
• A”view this message in Gmail” option.
• An option to view full headers and the original message code.
• Growl notifications.

Threadsy does still have some bugs. For some reason, it keeps failing to authorize my Gmail account, even though Google says that Threadsy has access. And it sometimes doesn’t display embedded YouTube videos from friends’ Facebook status updates. Threadsy isn’t quite ready to be my universal inbox yet, but it’s getting close.

Have you tried Threadsy?

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After my recent post about the betas I use, I was introduced to Nimbuzz, an IM program that is now offering voice services in competition with Skype and Gizmo5 (which was recently purchased by Google).

The origins of Nimbuzz are in Europe. It claims a 20 percent market share in several European countries, and it’s popular in the Middle East. The company says that it has 12 million users, and is adding 40,000 users per day — not bad for a service that’s less than two years old. Nimbuzz is less well known in North America, but that may soon change.

Nimbuzz Mobile

Nimbuzz focuses much of its effort on developing mobile clients for a wide variety of mobile phones, including the iPhone/iPod touch, Android systems, and BlackBerry (a native BlackBerry app is new today). Nimbuzz clients are available in several languages.

The Nimbuzz Mobile client supports the IM services one would expect (Windows Live/MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ); social networking chat (Facebook, MySpace); plus some services not often seen in North America, but which are popular elsewhere (the VZ Networks, Gadu-Gadu, Hyves, Giovani).

The client also allows you to make VoIP calls using any SIP account (like Gizmo5), Skype, or its own NimbuzzOut service. Nimbuzz claims that its international calling rates are cheaper than Skype’s.

I found the Nimbuzz mobile client for iPhone/iPod touch to be attractive and easy to use. Both the IM and voice functions work well. I have some minor grumbles, which I’m told will be remedied in upcoming versions.

• In order to make voice calls, the phone number to be dialed must be entered into your device’s address book in full international format — like +1 (555) 555-1212. However, one can’t edit this data directly from Nimbuzz.
• The client supports only one account per service, so if you have, say, two Google Talk accounts, you must pick one.
• Nimbuzz does not yet support GTalk for Google Apps accounts.
• I was recently required to change my GTalk password due to “suspicious activity,” but Nimbuzz for iPhone doesn’t seem to have a way to change service passwords. I had to delete the GTalk account in the client, then re-create it.

Nimbuzz for Mac

The developers at Nimbuzz say that they are “big Apple fans,” and it shows. The Nimbuzz Mac client comes close to the elegance of Adium. I hope the program will maintain its Mac-friendly design as it matures. The Windows version looks good, too, although I haven’t tested it.

The desktop client has most of the features and limitations of the mobile version, although it doesn’t yet support voice calling or Skype chat. It also doesn’t share data with the mobile version, which would be nice, so as to avoid having to input account data more than once. And I would have liked to have seen integration with the Mac Address Book app.

Nimbuzz also offers a web version, which isn’t as full-featured as some other web-based IM services, such as Meebo.

Nimbuzz doesn’t work with Twitter, although I think that’s a good thing. Twitter isn’t a messaging service, it’s a microblogging service, and I have found that Twitter functions in IM clients don’t work very well.

I’m very encouraged by the development of Nimbuzz so far. The company tells me that, instead of adding features willy-nilly, they have chosen to “do it right.”I can certainly agree with that in principle, although given the speed with which other apps are being created and updated, let’s hope that Nimbuzz can keep pace.

Have you tried the new Nimbuzz BlackBerry client? Let us know what you think of it below.

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But why not buy an iPhone, or a Palm Pre, which I’d had my eye on for several months? The Pre seems to be a good phone, but it doesn’t yet have the apps that the iPhone does. And the monthly fees for Pre service are considerably higher than what I’m paying now. The iPhone’s monthly fees are even higher, and many folks I’ve talked to don’t find it to be a very good phone.

So, keeping my current phone and buying an iPod touch seemed like a good compromise. I can get good Wi-Fi coverage in most areas where I live, so I’ll be able to go online, even without the phone function.

Many of my WWD colleagues already have iPhones. Aliza has recently written about good apps for web workers. Dawn’s shared her favorites, too. But with the holidays coming up, here are some of my ideas for apps to put on that brand-new iPhone or iPod touch:

Communication

• eBuddy. A multi-service instant message client for MSN/Windows Live, AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, Facebook Chat and MySpace Chat. Supports multiple accounts on the same service. Versions for web, Android and other platforms also available. Free.
• Facebook. A well-designed way for Facebook users to keep up with their friends while on the road. The app has had its issues, but they are apparently fixed now. Free.
• Gist. Scott and I have both found Gist useful, and the Gist iPhone app does a pretty good job of presenting a lot of information in a small space. Free.
• LinkedIn. This app keeps LinkedIn users, er, “linked in” from their iPhones and iPod touches. The latest upgrade adds some nice features, including an inbox for LinkedIn messages. Free.
• Nimbuzz. You can use this app to make inexpensive international calls over Wi-Fi. The app also includes a chat function, but it’s pretty rudimentary compared to eBuddy. Free app; rates for calls vary.
• RingCentral. If you’re a RingCentral user, you can use this app to manage your phone messages and more. Free for RingCentral users.
• Tweetie. There are lots of Twitter apps, but so far, I like Tweetie the best. It has a clean interface, and supports multiple Twitter accounts. Thanks for the tip, Darrell! $2.99.
• Waveboard. Mobile access to Google Wave. Will hopes for better access soon; I imagine that this app will become more sophisticated as Wave does. $0.99.

File and Idea Management

• Dropbox. This app is another reason to love Dropbox, which many of us at WWD do. As one would expect from Dropbox, it just works. Free.
• Evernote. My colleagues at WWD like Evernote, too, and I’ve finally seen the light. It’s a great replacement for PhatNotes, which I used to use with various Palm products. (The Palm versions are apparently no longer available.) Free.

News

• Reeder. A very nice and elegant RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. $0.99.

Just about every news source also has its own iPhone/iPod touch app these days. So far, I’ve been impressed with the ones from NPR and from some news outlets that have used the PodCurry platform.

Password Management

• 1Password. Manage and sync passwords. I’ve been playing with the brand-new version 3, and it’s good enough that I’ve moved from SplashID after many years. Use Dropbox with 1Password to make your password data available on multiple machines. $7.99.
• LastPass. Manage and sync passwords across multiple machines. The Firefox add-on for this service was included in WWD’s Add-Ons Collection. Apps for iPhones and other mobile devices available with premium membership, $12/year.

I’ve barely begun finding fun stuff, but I think I’m off to a good start with the Google Earth app, and TriPeaks Lite. I’m sure that I’ll find more, but I really need to get back to work now. Happy holidays!

What iPhone or iPod touch apps would you recommend for new users?

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I really appreciate well-produced synchronization, because I’ve experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get right. It seems that software developers can never quite agree on how to organize contact information, so everyone’s databases are different. For a long time, for instance, one of the major makers of financial management software didn’t even create city, state and ZIP/postal code fields, opting instead for an address field where all of that information was run together, making the data very difficult to parse.

So I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Snow Leopard’s “sync with Google” function, especially because I have a fairly large address book, and most of its entries have photos associated with them, something that very few sync solutions even try to support.

With a little planning, you can easily sync your address book with Google. Here are some tips — some of which are also applicable to other synchronization systems, such as the one available for synchronizing data between Google and Thunderbird’s Address Book on a PC.

1. Clean up your contacts. It’s easy to get sloppy about how we enter information, so it’s worth looking through your Address Book to make sure that your data is accurate and well-formatted. Putting first names and middle initials together in the first name field can produce amusing results, as can forgetting to check the “company” box for such entries — I had one card titled “Daily, Web Worker”! I also discovered a bunch of messed-up entries that had apparently been caused by previous experiments with sync software and services. One such service must have been European, because I found lots of entries where the postal code preceded the city, as is standard in France, but which isn’t correct in North America or the UK. Be careful with international phone numbers, too. If you don’t precede country codes with the plus (+) sign, some programs will try to format the numbers in North American format.
2. Back up your data! At the least, use Address Book’s Export function, and save a backup in Address Book Archive format. If you want added safety, use a program like Address Book to CSV Exporter to save your data in CSV format, which can be read by lots of other programs.
3. If possible, don’t try to sync two sources with different data, at least for an initial synchronization. You’ll get best results if you can clean up your data in the Mac Address Book, and completely erase all your contacts in Google. However, if that’s not possible, the charmingly named Conflict Resolver will spring into action during the sync, and give you the choice of which records to keep.

Once you’re ready, enter your account information into Address Book’s Preferences. Go to Accounts, check the “Synchronize with Google” option, click “Configure,” and enter your Gmail or Google Apps email address and password. That’s really all there is to it. I’ve found that you need to be logged out of the Google web interface for the sync to start. You might also need to make a change to your Mac Address Book in order for the sync program to become active, but once it begins, the process is surprisingly fast.

The Mac-to-Google sync system does have limitations. It can sync with one Gmail or Google Apps account at a time, and although it offers sync with Yahoo Mail’s contact lists, I’ve never been able to get Yahoo sync to work. Sync is also available with Apple’s MobileMe service, but I haven’t tried that.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the results, and am happy that I can have immediate access to my contact information in several different places. As far as I’m concerned, one can never have too many backups of this vital data.

How do you keep your contact data synchronized?

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So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive.

• Get your email on the web. Dump your desktop email software, and switch to Gmail/Google Apps or another online provider like Yahoo. If your Internet connection is unreliable, Google Gears lets you work offline.
• Create a master inbox. If you have multiple email accounts, you can set up forwarding to receive and send email from one place.
• Use IMAP. If you need mobile access to your email, set up your phone software to use IMAP, not POP. By using IMAP, your messages will sync automatically in all of the places you check your mail.
• Use social networks. It seems like all of my friends under 30 don’t do email anymore, but they’re on Facebook a lot.
• Use instant messaging. For short, simple conversations, IM can be very efficient. In a few seconds, you can schedule a meeting or a lunch date. It’s much faster than email or phone conversations.
• Use file-sharing services for sending large documents. There are lots of such services, and new ones are popping up all the time, including Fluxiom and FileShareHQ. And Dropbox and the new Opera Unite service allow you to share files directly from your computer.
• Organize your electronic communications. Celine wrote about this recently, and I’ve talked about it, too.

Oh, and one more:

• Remember your passwords. This is obvious to you and me, but I’ve heard “I didn’t know I had a password” way too often. Online services like LastPass, or programs like 1Password, SplashID, or the free KeePass (Windows and phones; also available for Mac and Linux) can be lifesavers.

How do you keep email simple?

Image by stock.xchng user chris27.

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Earlier today the company rounded out its ‘Yuuguu Inside’ strategy by extending its integration of Google Talk buddies to users from AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo’s instant messaging networks, bringing cross-platform and cross-network support to the company’s ‘Yuuniverse’.

With a reach extending into hundreds of millions now, its easier than ever for users of the service to invite participants to a Yuuguu session, though it remains to be seen if removing previous barriers actually makes a difference in adoption of screensharing over face-to-face meetings.

Regardless, Yuuguu remains a useful free tool for web workers and one that now extends a little further.

UPDATE: Yuuguu CEO Anish Kapoor assures me that a bug in the acceptance of .Mac-based AIM screennames will shortly be resolved.

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This is Yahoo’s second price increase in under a year.

The $22.00 increase is a hard pill to swallow for web workers who have used Yahoo to register domain names for their web projects. Competing registrars are reacting. GoDaddy, for example, is offering a 30% discount on domain registration this week.

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Actually it’s one new domain at @ymail.com, and the resurrection of an old classic with the renewed availability of @rocketmail.com addresses. For those unfamiliar, Rocketmail was a leader in the web based email market before being acquired by Yahoo in the late 90′s.  An @rocketmail.com address might hold sentimental value for some users and it’s great to see them being released back to general availability.

In conjunction with this announcement, Yahoo! also released some interesting statistics from a survey they commissioned. It seems that having a personalized and meaningful email address is important to many folks.

“Of online adults who indicated that they are not currently using their first choice email address, over half (54%) agree that they want their email address to reflect who they are, and about half (48%) would be at least somewhat likely to change addresses should their preferred choice become available.”

If that sounds like you, head on over to ymail.com or rocketmail.com later today to register your new address.  Accounts are free and give you all the same features and access to Yahoo! services that you would get with a yahoo.com address or ID.

Are you happy with your email address? Would you trade up if you could get the address you really wanted.

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After 30th June, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail application will be the only means by which desktop and offline access to Hotmail accounts will be supported. This effectively means that a Hotmail user’s messages continue to be imprisoned within a closed ecosphere of services and applications. OK, smart people won’t be using Outlook, Outlook Express or Hotmail, but millions do and many have years of messages archived that they may wish to continue accessing outside a web-based interface.

However, there are some unofficial mechanisms that can not only continue to provide offline and desktop access, but also standards-based access into most email clients

• IzyMail has close to a decade of experience in delivering webmail gateway services. A one-off payment of $17.95 buys a one-year subscription that equips any Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail account with a POP and IMAP ‘wrapper’, so users can send, receive and synchronise messages using most desktop clients, such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Outlook

• Thunderbird’s WebMail extension plays a similar role to IzyMail, though is of course limited only to Thunderbird and doesn’t necessarily support the various permutations of a service like Hotmail (Live Hotmail, Hotmail Classic etc.) but does support a wider range of services

• Apple Mail fans can use a similar plugin – HTTP Mail – to retrieve Hotmail messages and folder.

Of these solutions, I’d recommend IzyMail’s standards-based approach, freeing the user to employ any both leading mail protocols with the widest range of clients. Indeed, IzyMail saw a huge spike in subscriptions with the launch of the iPhone last Summer as users utilised POP and IMAP webmail gateways to synchronise their email with their phones.

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FuseCal, a new web application, allows you to combine multiple calendars and create one master calendar. Ideally, this means you can take any iCal calendar such as Outlook 2003/2007, Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, and Yahoo! Calendar and add them into FuseCal, granting you new functionality.

Specifically, once the individual calendars are imported into FuseCal, you can choose which events you’d like to add, filter events by keyword, and then add those into your master calendar. Once you have your master calendar built, you can easily import this new filtered and personalized calendar into Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or whichever calendaring application you use.

Another feature of FuseCal is aimed at those who have their own websites and want to publish calendar data, such as a business who wants to publish upcoming events or a softball team who wishes to display their game schedule on their website.

To get started, sign into FuseCal and click on the “Publish Calendars” link. Follow the on-screen instructions for building your FuseCal calendar for publishing. The final step will provide you with an embeddable snipped of HTML to put on your website. If there are any changes to your embedded calendar, users subscribed to your calendar will automatically be notified in their calendaring application.

FuseCal is currently in “Alpha” and the service is free. Considering how new it is, I wouldn’t suggest keeping business critical data within FuseCal’s system. However, in my initial testing the services has worked as promised.

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For web workers, onePlace could be a great tool for on-the-go research and tracking pertinent mobile content.  For more, check out the complete post at GigaOm.

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For those of us who use instant messaging to conduct our day-to-day business, we know the frustrations of having multiple friends spread throughout all the major IM platforms including Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and Skype. Pidgin is a freeware multi-protocol IM product that allows access to all your contacts from Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, and many more systems. However, Skype however was always closed off.

Not any longer, thanks to the Skype API and the Skype API Plugin for Pidgin. Using this free plugin, you can instant message back and forth with your Skype contacts within Pidgin. At this point, it isn’t possible to do voice calling from Pidgin. However every Skype contact is brought into Pidgin for easy access. Because Pidgin is cross-platform, this functionality is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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Here’s how it works: simply go to Google News, look half way down the page you’ll see a text box allowing you to enter either a zip code or city/state. Do so and Google News will reload with your local city listed as one of the categories of news available for your reading pleasure. Aggregating local news stories from a variety of sources is nothing new for Google News, but this is the first time we have been able to see a specific city’s news items as a news category.

One obvious missing feature is the ability to search the local view. If you do enter a search term, you see the global search results. Additionally, at this point in time the local news feature only works in the United States and only in English.

Google may make a splash, but their not the first

Google joins a competitive space. Yahoo! News has had local news in Beta status for some time. To it’s credit, Yahoo! News is more pleasing to the eye when compared Google News. It cleanly breaks up news content based on originating source and allows easy access to local video reports. Additionally, Yahoo! leverages it’s assets by displaying user submitted photos for the area that reside on Flickr.

Similar to Google News, Yahoo! news does not enable you to search the local sources and retrieve results based on your geography. Google’s local news offering delivers local news from many more areas as Yahoo has not expanded it’s service beyond major metro areas.

MSNBC‘s offering is even more limited than that of Google or Yahoo!. After being prompted for your zip code, MSNBC’s home page displays a paltry 3 or 4 stories and your local weather provided by the Weather Channel. An individual city’s news page requires massive amount of scrolling and, as expected, shows a few stories from local news sources including newspapers and local TV affiliates’ news departments. Again, leveraging their assets, MSN displays a Virtual Earth map showing local traffic, a view of local company’s stock activity, local sports scores, and lottery results. To my surprise, MSNBC adds a unique view into local blog scene by featuring recent posts from local blogs. As with Yahoo! and Google, no local search is supported.

Topix is a winner in the news aggregation scene and is sure to feel some pressure from Google’s News’ newest feature. Topix’s claim to fame is mixing traditional media with citizen journalists. Topix presents a well laid out website with main news stories dominating the page with weather, traffic, and a poll appearing on the page. Like Google News, Topix pulls from numerous sites. Their tagline on their site is “Local news continually updated from thousands of sources on the web”. Topix has developed a strong audience by delivering pertinent information to a local audience. Each article has “Related Topix” that give a tagsonomy to the website and creating linkage to each article. Topix, like Google News, features many geographic area because of the reach of it’s new sources.

Conclusion

Google’s local news service has a massive amount of potential and represents a fantastic way to stay up to date on news in a geographic area. However it’s clear that if they utilize other components of their online offerings, Google’s local news sites would be more valuable for users. For example: offer Google Maps with it’s easy to use Traffic view, embed Picasa photos that have been tagged or geo-tagged with the known local city name, and offer blog posts that have been discovered by Google Blog Search.

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