WWD Coffee Break – Birds, Cards & Twitter

ScreenshotAnother Collaboration Suite – Spicebird is a new (so new that it isn’t quite released yet) collaboration suite based on Mozilla products: Thunderbird for email, Lightning for calendar, and some Jabber-based instant-messaging thrown in for good measure.

They’ve got a video demo up on their site, and it looks promising; the design is clean and pulls together a bunch of stuff in a dashboard reminiscent of Outlook Today or perhaps iGoogle. The big question is whether they’ll be doing anything to extend the capabilities of the underlying applications (especially as far as working with Exchange), or are just working on the user interface level. An alpha release is promised soon.

Gift card arbitrage – Every once in a while technology gives rise to a business that didn’t exist before. People are giving more and more gift cards, and too many of them end up in hands where they’re not really wanted. The answer: Swapagift.com, where you can buy, sell, and swap the little plastic monsters. With the cost of building a market over the web falling to near-zero, I suspect there are other, similar opportunities waiting out there for the clever web worker who can think of them.

News at Twitterspeed – As Jonathan Trenn points out, many of us learned of the Bhutto assassination yesterday not from CNN or the BBC, but from people posting things to Twitter. The more you participate in a global conversation, the more you hear things from your virtual neighbors. And as the FrozenPeaFund has shown, Twitter can be a powerful tool for getting people to act together. There are implications here for reputation management that I’m sure major corporations are simply ignorant of.

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