The interface is split up into two columns: inbound and unbound. The inbound column displays a syndicated feed of all email accounts, Facebook messages, wall posts, Twitter direct messages, and @mentions. You can also single out an email account and filter it by unread or starred messages. Emails can be deleted, starred, or even archived (for Gmail). Any changes made through Threadsy is reflected on the respective email service. For composing mail, Threadsy offers a rich text editor, the ability to send mail from any email account, and include attachments. When choosing a recipient, Threadsy auto-fills contacts from email accounts and even cross checks Facebook for profile pictures. Unfortunately Threadsy is unable to send Facebook messages from within the user interface at the moment, but will still redirect you to Facebook to compose the message. Overall, I was quite impressed by the organization and functionality of the email aggregation.

The second column, unbound, manages social networks. Threadsy only supports the two popular social networks at the moment: Facebook and Twitter. There is one feed that combines both Facebook status updates and tweets, but also has the option of filtering down to only one service. There’s support for multiple Twitter accounts as well. Threadsy allows updating both Facebook and Twitter statuses at once. From within the Threadsy interface you can view/leave comments and ‘like’ Facebook statuses. For Twitter you can retweet, reply, and favorite tweets. Clicking on a contact will display a combined profile page that displays a feed of both Facebook and Twitter updates.

In addition to the in and out bound columns, there is a chat bar at the bottom which uses Meebo. The bar stays out of the way of all other communication, but is convenient enough to access chat accounts at any time. It also supports using a universal status and customizing online/offline per account.

Keeping in mind that this service is still in beta, it still has some bugs. The team at Threadsy has done an incredible job of putting so many services into one functional page. It’s rare to see something useful fall into our radar with so many pointless start ups in the making. In the move towards cloud computing, Threadsy could very well be the future desktop email client. While I was skeptical to try this service at first, I have now begun to use Threadsy to manage all my online communication. While I do still experience occasional hiccups, those will hopefully be resolved with further development. This service has real potential and I look forward to see where the company will take it.

Threadsy is still in private beta, but I’ve got some invites to give away. (You’re welcome!) The first 10 people to click through this link will be able to sign up right away! Enjoy: http://bit.ly/4S4Etx

Links: Threadsy.com

After about a week of unofficial hints and rumors, early this morning Hulu opened themselves up to the public. Anyone located within the United States can visit Hulu.com and watch high-quality TV shows, nightly highlights, full length movies, full games, and short clips. Hulu limited to a audience of private beta users since October 2007. In addition to previous studios partnerships, Hulu now features content from Warner Bros. Lionsgate, NBA, HHL, and 20 other new providers. All content is viewable right through your browser without any additional plugins or software other than Adobe Flash. And to clarify the content isn’t user uploaded content, but rather high quality shows such as Family Guy, The Office, 30 Rock, House, Heroes, 24, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

“Today, Hulu is crossing a milestone in its mission to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content, when where and how they want it,” said Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. “With full-length episodes of current and archived television shows, feature films, sports and news, we believe the Hulu service is a step forward in giving consumers entertainment on their terms.

In return for access to the premium content which is freely available on Hulu, viewers will be required to watch short 15 and 30 second ads a few times throughout each show. From most of the content I’ve viewed, there were only around two to three ads for a half-hour show which is a whole lot better than TV commercials. Hulu seems to be a big winner at the moment. With services such as these, the amount of illegally distributed copies of these shows should drop drastically. Due to the fact that Hulu was a joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal, they were able to gain support from a lot of production studios which other competitors such as Joost failed to do. Plus with the freedom to embed full episodes onto any web page or social networking sites, I expect Hulu to spread faster than ever!

Links: Hulu.com
Download: Hulu Programming Guide

I’m sure most of you geeks out there have run into the issue of trying to help someone download a torrent at some point. To save you folks some time, I suggest using BitLet to send torrent files to people who don’t have BitTorrent clients installed. If you haven’t heard of BitLet, it’s a simple web-based client which will allow download torrent files right from your browser without the need to install additional software. As long as the downloader has a fairly recent version of Java installed, there shouldn’t be any issues. The service is completely free but is still in beta an “experimental” project. I tested the service a few times and it functioned as advertised without any hiccups.

So to help out your client-less friends, tell them to paste the .torrent URL of the file they are trying to download into the box on BitLet.org. And if you’ve already got the .torrent link and are attempting to help them download it, just use the formula below (without the brackets).

http://www.bitlet.org/?torrent=[URL To .torrent File]

BitLet should launch a new window and the file should begin downloading after a destination of where to save the file is chosen. Overall BitLet is a great little tool to help downloading torrents for dummies. It also comes in handy if you are trying to download a file on a machine that doesn’t allow installing new applications. To make this even easier BitLet has a neat little set of bookmarklets on their site so you don’t even need to deal with copy and pasting. And on another note, if you are looking for a lightweight yet powerful BitTorrent Client checkout uTorrent (personal favorite!).

Link: BitLet.org | Bookmarklet

I had been an avid Facebook user for over an year, but I’ve been reconsidering after the launch of Facebook Apps. The days when all Facebook offered was Photos, Groups, Events, Notes, and Posted Items were simple times. Today we’ve got over 450+ photo, 400+ music , 450+ video, 1000+ gaming, and 1000+ sports applications. And that’s nothing, as of now, Facebook is less than 200 short of reaching 10,000 pointless applications! Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of useful apps, but for the most part the majority of these tools are useless. Having to deal with hundreds of application invitations every time I login has become quite painful. For example, why on earth would anyone need a Top Friends list or a Super Wall when Facebook already has a fully functioning friends list and wall? Facebook seriously needs to implement an option to allow users to opt-out or block some of these applications.

The next most horrendous part is how long it’s starting to take to load some people’s profiles and how lengthy they have become. Just to give everyone an glimpse of how bad Facebook can get, take a look at four images provided above. I created temporary Facebook Profile and added the first 20 pages of the most popular Apps. The page was in fact so long that I couldn’t even generate a single screen shot. Fortunately I haven’t run into anyone’s profile that was this bad, but it is definitely going in that direction. Facebook should maybe consider placing a limit on the amount of applications a user can have active at a time. Hopefully the folks over at Facebook will spend time fixing up the mess they made by launching Facebook Applications instead of wasting resources on other projects like Facebook Ads.

Links: Facebook.com | Skatter Tech Fan Page

Skatter Tech recently got access to Hulu, a new service launched by News Corporation and NBC Universal, which offers streaming access to high quality TV Shows and short videos. When we say TV Shows, we don’t mean random content, we mean real actual prime time shows that you would watch on TV such as The Office, Heroes, The Simpsons, House, Chuck, Prison Break, and 24. Even talk shows and comedy sketches including Saturday Night Live (SNL), Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno are available through Hulu. The premium content will be distributed by streaming the video directly to your browser using flash player, so no additional plugins or software is needed. The player is quite advance and allows pausing, forwarding/rewinding, controlling volume, and even watching in full screen. And even when I played an episode of Scrubs in full screen, although the frame rate was a bit low, it was still much better than any other service I have seen to date. Viewers will have the ability to email the show to friends or embed them onto their own blogs and web pages.

So how much does this all cost? Absolutely nothing! Unfortunately the service is in beta and access is limited to testers, but should be opened to the public soon. We’ve included a embedded a full video of the latest episode of Heroes for your entertainment. In general, new shows will become available on Hulu once it has been broadcasted on television throughout the United States. (So, after it airs in Hawaii.) TV shows are automatically purged after approximately five weeks or five new episodes of that series has been added to collection. The content will obviously not be available for an infinite amount of time since studios will obviously loose revenue from DVD sales. Despite this, you now have free, legal, and high quality access to all your favorite TV shows.

This is probably one of the smartest moves production studios have made in a while. Instead of wasting time suing those who distribute or download copyrighted content illegally through P2P Networks or BitTorrent, they have decided to offer the shows themselves. The studios finally realized that if people are always going to find a way to get their content without paying for it, why not at least give it to them in high quality for free. News Corp. and NBC has done by launching Hulu. With this new service, studios are hoping to deter people from downloading their content illegally. The studios will also retain profits since advertisements are embedded into their content. So yes, you’ll have to watch ads. Fortunately they weren’t too bad, there were usually three to four 15-second ads for an hour-long show. Either way, this is a “win win” situation for both consumers and studios, since we get to watch shows for free and that they keep their content locked up in a secure player with ads to retain revenue. As of now, TV Shows will come from 15 different studios including FOX, NBC, Bravo, E! Entertainment, FX, SiFi Network, and USA Networks. (See the PDF for a full list of shows and networks.) Hopefully more networks will join this venture soon.

Links: Hulu.com | About Hulu
Attached Files: Hulu Program Guide (.pdf)

P.S. I sadly don’t have any invites to give away, but go ahead and try signing up anyways. You might get lucky! And as promised, here’s the entire latest episode of Heroes – “Cautionary Tales” (S02E09):

I recently received an email from a reader asking whether to use Amazon’s new MP3 store or Apple iTunes for purchasing DRM-Free songs. We have used both services and we’ve got to say that they both have some up and downsides. Both Amazon and iTunes offer downloads of individual songs and albums in a DRM-Free 265kbps file format. Amazon uses the widely popular MP3 format, while iTunes Plus uses AAC. Excluding the iPod which uses AAC, the majority of Digital Audio Players (DAP) on the market have primarily been MP3 decoders. Despite this, just about all the new DAPs hitting the market today including the Microsoft Zune, Creative Zen, SanDisk Sanza, and Sony Walkman now support (DRM-Free) AAC. Finally, both stores also have a selection of over two million un-protected songs!

As for prices, iTunes charged $1.29 per song until two days ago, when they dropped the price to the standard $.99. Amazon’s rate is $.99 per song, however over half the songs in their collection are available for 10-cents less. If you are one of those people who constantly purchases popular songs, items in Amazon’s Top 100 list will always cost just $.89! Also if you are an iPod owner and find a song for cheaper on Amazon than iTunes, go ahead and purchase it. Amazon’s MP3 files are 100% compatible on your iPod and can even be added into your iTunes Library.

At the moment one thing that Amazon’s store does lack is a desktop client to organize and purchase music. Despite this, we found Amazon’s online store to be just as easy to browse as iTunes. Also as Web 2.0 apps are beginning to become desktop replacements, there’s no true need for a desktop browser. In addition, once songs are downloaded to your computer using Amazon’s download tool, the files can be automatically added to either Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes. Apple does have the upper edge on this topic since browsing, purchasing, managing, and syncing songs with iPods can all be done in one place. Both Windows and Macintosh users should have the same experience using either of the two services on their computer.

So our conclusion? We would recommend giving Amazon MP3 a shot since they offer plenty of albums at the same quality for a bit cheaper. At this point, only a few weeks after launch, there’s no chance that Amazon’s store will grab a piece of Apple’s market share. However if enough people start to switch over soon, competitive prices may even drive Apple to lower prices on iTunes in the future. From our tests, we didn’t seem to find any problems with Amazon just yet, however if any of you have found a bug or ran into problems let everyone know!

Links: Apple iTunes | Amazon MP3

There have been a slew of online Web 2.0 applications introduced over the course of the year boasting to be desktop replacements, but to be honest, I’ve haven’t really been all too impressed with most of them. Sure, there are a few good ones, like for instance, Google’s online office suite, Google Docs. For the most part there hasn’t been too much to get excited over. Until now that is!

One application that has finally convinced me that there might very well be a true market and future for Web 2.0 online applications is Picnik. It’s a powerful, yet simple, online photo editor, based off of a clever combination of AJAX programming techniques and some pretty advanced Flash. Although this is no replacement for powerful tools such as Adobe Photoshop, it is an amazing tool for average web users. With its Full Screen mode, your computer literally is taken over (in a good way) by Picnik offering more space to work with. All the standard manipulation tools are present including: auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color correction, sharpen, and red-eye correction.

Not only does it allow users to upload and edit photos in near real time, but the developers have also done their best to seamlessly integrated Picnik into a wide variety of social networking sites, including: Facebook, Tumblr, Photobucket and Flickr. On top of that it also allows users to easily send their finished images off to a variety of printing services through Walmart, Costco, and a bunch more.

At the moment, this is by far one of the best photo editors we’ve seen, but that might change when Adobe launches their online version of Photoshop. As for now, if you’d like to read a more in-depth review check out Tech-Talkers.com or just start editing by visiting Picnik.com.

Link: Picnik – Edit Photos The Easy Way
Full Review: Tech-Talkers.com

This morning, Digg’s founder Kevin Rose announced a few new features that digg will soon be getting. The fist implementation, which will be pushed out tonight, will revamp digg’s user profile system by making it more “social”. Registered diggers will now have the ability to send each other quick messages called “shouts”. When the recipient logs in, a notification will be visible in the headers as well as his or her profile page. With the new “share” feature, users can also send other users links to digg stories. Previously the only method to share a story would have been to send an actual email. Digg’s new favorites feature seems to be replacing the “My #1″ feature. Once a story is dugg the option to add to favorites will become available. As for the profile page, it now displays larger profile pictures, full name, location, member since date, about section, personal photos, recently dugg/comments, favorites, and contact information. (50 new additions!) And just like Facebook, diggers will have privacy settings to choose whether or not to display each component. Only time will tell whether this feature will be accepted or ridiculed by the digg community.

Also, due to popular demand, digg will soon be implementing a pictures section next month. In addition they will also be fixing the problems with the slow comment loading system, offering email alerts, and automatic suggestions based off your digging history! Check back tomorrow to see the what’s changed and if you are in a hurry, a video demonstration is available on Digg’s Blog.

Links: digg.com | digg blog | my profile

Have you ever gotten a call and don’t recognize the number? Well with Sullr, getting information on that number couldn’t have been easier. Just enter the area code plus the 7-digit number and the caller’s name or business along with an address and map will be instantly provided. Free reverse phone number lookup services, such as this one, do already exist, however none are clean, Web 2.0 powered, and ajaxified like Sullr. In addition Sullr’s works from just about any mobile phone, just visit ‘wap.sullr.com‘ and get the same results.

At this time Sullr’s beta Web 2.0 service only works in Argentina, Belgium, France, Italy and the USA but they are working to add support for more countries. Just bookmark it and it’s sure come in handy!

Update: Spain and Luxembourg have just been added!

Links: Sullr.com
Related: Do Not Call

Today when ID theft is so widespread, it is very important to avoid giving away personal information away as much as possible. Unfortunately most people, having no choice, end up giving away their personal phone numbers when posting on services such as Craigslist. Today a new service, CraigsNumber, offers a safe solution. The free service will provide a temporary local number, which can be posted or given away to others. When the line is called, the caller will be transferred to your real number.

CraigsNumber currently provides numbers for San Francisco, Washington DC, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, and New York. The number you are provided with automatically expires, but can be set to work for as long as a week at a time. Craigslist already protects your email address by creating random forwarding email address. If you use services such as Craiglist to buy or sell, we strongly suggest using CraigsNumber to protect your privacy.

If you know of any other similar services, which help protect your privacy, let us know!

Links: CraigsNumber.com | CraigsList

1) Google Calendar screenshots have been revealed by TechCrunch, a popular Web 2.0 blog. (Yahoo! apparently fed them the info) Anyways “to be launched” service is an online AJAX based calendar service, which is suppose to be called CL2. The service has a gmail-like user interface and will have plenty of colaboration features, including RSS. It should also become intergrated with many of Google’s other services.
Links: Tech Crunch | CL2 Login Screen

2) Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have been added to the iTunes Store. The “season pass” will cost only $9.99 and will download the current episode plus the next 16 shows when they become available. Epsiodes can still be purchased individually for $1.99.
Links: Daily Show | Colbert Report
iTunes Links: Daily Show | Colbert Report

3) Microsoft has announced that their code name “Origami” Tablet PC should be available by the end of April. This is a new line of products, influenced by Microsoft, which are ultra-portable machines that are powered by Windows XP. Samsung’s version has a 7″ touch screen display, an extendable keyboard, Bluetooth, and WiFi. They can also run standard apps such as MS Office as wells as support playing videos, listening to music, and viewing photos. (Pricing will be around $600-1000)
Links: Origami Project | Microsoft’s Preview

4) MSN Live (aka. Windows Live) has just gotten a full AJAX makeover. Although still in beta, the service looks simple and clean. It has support for custom RSS feeds, as well as a selection to choose from. (weather, horoscope, email, news, etc.) The interface looks much better than Google IG. One neat feature that other services don’t offer that MSN Live does is Feed Search. For example search for “CNN” and when the results appear, if a feed is available a “add feed” button will be displayed.
Links: Windows Live | LiveCom Offical Blog