New and improved, and ready to download today! Get ready to get your mobile application on because Yahoo just launched a new version of Go that brings users faster speeds, calendar and address books, better email, and more powerful maps.

Yahoo Go 2.0 has reduced data loading times which is not only good on your time, but also great on your data plan if you aren't on the unlimited. Some new tools to help in your day to day time management include the calendar and address book options. The address book even has 1 click to call functionality. As far as email is concerned, common attachments can now be viewed, including images, word, excel and pdf's. When you're on the go, mobile maps are a great feature. Yahoo had tied in GPS integration for select devices, which is going to be a great tool not only for local users, but for people who travel frequently.

We took a look at what Yahoo offered with Go Mobile when it first came out, and it still looks like Yahoo holds the top spot for universal mobile applications. We have also had the chance to use a version of Yahoo Go 2.0 just before they added all these goodies in, and it were extremely impressed with what it brought to the table. Look out for a full review on the new Yahoo Go 2.0 coming shortly.

BEA Systems, known for its leading enterprise infrastructure software, is getting set to launch its suite of corporate search and collaboration products. These three new applications look ready to help businesses with some Web 2.0 technologies including RSS feeds, tagging, and mashup platforms. Hey, enterprise business, here's your chance to roughly equal the kind of community building web interfaces that 20 somethings are pumping out from their basements.

Although integration efforts have been extremely slow for many businesses, it will be interesting to watch the effects these different integration options have with a number of useful 2.0 applications.

It's not very often that you hear of a bug attack with Firefox. A new little bug popped up in the newly released Firefox 2.0. It's only the second one though, so no biggie, it is a new version, and little things like this can happen. The newest Firefox bug can cause the browser to crash if the webpage a user is visiting has been intentionally coded to target the bug via JavaScript. The initial bug in Firefox that was found also caused the browser to crash when an extremely large document loaded into an iframe. There has been no release from Mozilla stating when a fix will be in place. Firefox 2.0, and IE7 have been under the microscope since their recent launches, with bystanders waiting patiently at the sidelines wondering which new browser they should test the waters with first.

Yes, that is an actual picture of what a Firefox bug looks like when code is zoomed up on at 598,005,002 X.

GAIM 2.0 is now in its beta 4 testing phase and I must say that it is simpler, a little easier, and seems to work a bit better. This version seems to be same as the last in most ways, though I do like the new system tray icon turned on by default. This keeps the GAIM program running instead of exiting when you click close, which brings GAIM to the level of many other IM clients. That's the thing, this new GAIM is a bit more standard, account setups are still easy, but seems to require less information to setup your account than past releases, partly due to the advanced features being moved to a new tab. The dialog is shorter because of this as well, helping to keep the app from overflowing your screen. As you might imagine the context menu has many helpful options like setting status and "show buddy list" among others. Like I said, not a ton of new features, but many things are simply more standard, making it a bit more usable. This is still a beta, so of course more may be added before GAIM 2.0 is officially released, so keep an eye out for that in the not too distant future.

Firefox extension and IE plugin Browster recently reached the big 2.0, and with it, brought some sexy new features that might just make the internet a friendlier place. Most notably, Browster 2.0 will strip out all of the badly written buggy CSS, annoying song previews, and all that other crap that helps make MySpace profiles the scourge of the internets. Yes, Browster does other things, such as pre-caching search result pages, inserting special contextual menus into certain pages, and allow users to view the profiles of MySpace commenters without leaving a given page; but at least to me, what Browser takes away is more important than what it adds. Perhaps Browster will enable me to actually start using MySpace again!

Ahh, Technorati, what would we do without you. You are the reason we obsessively tag all our posts, and you dutifully respond to our pings in mere minutes (under 5 according to Technorati Principal Engineer Kevin Marks) to crawl our data. On today, your third birthday, you provide us with even more excitement, in the form of a spiffy re-design and some interesting new features. The new design is more modular than in its previous state, complete with standard issue Web 2.0 graded header bars decked out in desaturated colors.

Front and center (well, top right anyway) is the new "Discover" feature. Discover allows users to view the most active posts within set categories including life, entertainment, tech and business. Users can also Discover by specifying tags or groups of tags. Keep in mind that the Discover feature is still under construction, and thus features may come and go before they reach a stable plateau. The new Discover functionality is similar to the popular site Techmeme.

Other differences from previous versions of the site include changes to the way favorites are displayed. Favorites now give more weight to a users favorites as opposed to simply which posts are most popular in the blogosphere.

Mozilla has released a 2nd alpha version of Firefox 2.0. As usual, this release is not recommended for any kind of serious use, but if you're salivating at some of the new version's features, check out what has been incorporated in this 2nd development milestone:

• Links default to opening in new tabs, not new windows
• Close buttons now appear on every tab, and the close behavior is slightly different
• Inline spell checking in text boxes (Works well, though apparently not on all sites yet)
  
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• Search suggestions now appear in the search box auto-complete for Google and Yahoo!
• New search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• Improved support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks (Really interesting new feature)
  
• New Add-Ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• New search service that supports Sherlock and OpenSearch engines
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

A mouthful, I know. I typed this post using this development version (Bon Echo, as they call it) on Mac OS X and I have to say, it's nice so far. Of course, none of my extensions were compatible, and I highly recommend backing up your Firefox app support folder before testing this, no matter what OS you're using. When I tried the last Bon Echo development version, it rendered my support folder incompatible with the latest stable release of Firefox. Just another one of those hazards of playing with dev editions.

If you want more details of this release, check out its download page and Mozilla's release notes.

[via diggdot.us]

While a maybe-it's-official alpha version of Firefox 2.0 showed up late last week, today we finally have a definitely-official version. Mozilla has put  up a download site for the official release of Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1, codename "Bon Echo." On the list of changes are new tabbed browsing features, a new storage system for bookmarks and history, and improvements to the extension and search plugin systems. One hopes it goes without saying, but this is alpha software, so read the release notes and use at your own risk.

"The default [user interface] of Firefox has not been altered since the launch of Firefox 1.0. It would be presumptuous to assume that the way in which users interact with their browsers has gone unchanged between that time and our planned 3Q2006 release date for [Firefox 2.0], and even more presumptuous for us to assume that we got things 100% right with Firefox 1.0." That's how Mozilla's Mike Beltzner starts a post to the Firefox development newsgroup in which he describes the changes he and his fellow developers have in mind for the next major release Firefox. In his post he includes an interesting (and kinda retro) ASCII mock-up that displays some of the proposed changes, like moving the Go, Reload and RSS buttons inside the URL bar to better show their relationship to the current page, moving the Home button and bookmarks search into the personal bookmark toolbar, and so on. Click the link for Beltzner's complete proposal and several pages of commentary from the Mozilla developer community.

[Via Digg]

Related article:

• What's coming in Firefox 2.0

RSS bigwig Dave Winer has released a draft specification for OPLM 2.0, the second major milestone for the XML outline format. You can read the draft at OPML.org, and in his blog Winer has a podcast explaining "why the improvements in OPML 2.0 will help users." If you're into OPML, you can read the spec and then post your feedback at the OPML group on Yahoo!

Mozilla Corp.'s Ben Goodger has a post on his blog describing the changes anticipated in Firefox 2.0, the next major release of the browser expected in about a year's time. Whereas the bulk of development in Firefox 1.5 went into improvements to the Gecko rendering engine, Firefox 2.0 will focus on user interface improvements, including new bookmarks and history systems, enhancements to tabbed browsing, and UI consolidation and simplification. Head over to Goodger's blog for his complete overview.

Back in November I posted about how much I was enjoying a WordPress 2.0 beta, and today I'm happy to say it has fortunately gone official. WordPress 2.0 is now available for your blogging pleasure, but there's just one problem for those of you who use external blogging clients like Ecto: WordPress 2.0 breaks file uploads. A post at Ecto's blog explains the whole situation, including good news for an eventual update from the WordPress crew themselves, but for now they also were generous enough to create a simple work-around. Altering two lines of code in one of the WordPress system files can re-enable file uploads for now, and I can personally verify this works on my own blog as I couldn't help but take advantage of that Ecto sale over the holidays.