Synovel plans to release a new open-source email/calendar/collaboration suite built on Mozilla Thunderbird. But Spicebird won't just be the equivalent of Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar extension thrown in for good measure. Rather, Spicebird is a new open source project that allows users to collaborate with one another.
In addition to the email client, Spicebird lets you send instant messages using Jabber, share yoru calendar with friends or coworkers, and subscribe to web-calendars using iCal. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds using the client or post to your own blog.
All of these features are designed to work together. For example, say someone sends you an email with a date in the text. Spicebird will automatically ask if you would like to create a calendar event, which you can do with a single click.
An alpha release is coming soon, but Synovel has released a web demo to whet your appetite while you wait.
There are plenty of instant messaging applications available for Windows Mobile phones and PDAs. But ever since Agile Messenger went and started charging money for their excellent IM client, there's been a dearth of good free IM clients.
Palringo is stepping up to the plate with a full-featured freeware app for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. Palringo supports several of the most popular instant messaging services, including MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, and Google Talk/Jabber.
Palringo sports a few unusual options like the ability to logon to the same service multiple times. So if you've got two AIM names, you can use both at the same time. You can also send voice clips, although Palringo doesn't support real time voice chat.
Oh, and one of our favorite things about Palringo is that it's got support for older Windows Mobile devices. Unlike many newer applications, it supports Windows Mobile 2003 and up.
You are reading this post about Twitter. That's what you would answer to Twitter's simple question, "What are you doing?", which is the entire premise of Twitter's existence. Getting people to answer in 140 characters or less, by IM or logging onto Twitter.com, what it is they are doing at that particular moment. Big stuff, right?
Constant stream of consciousness chatter is the lifeforce of Twitter. And this constant feed of the bright and banal is turning a lot of people into Twitter addicts. What makes this so? It could be the sheer ease of use to Twitter. You don't have to construct an entire blog post or for that matter, even a full sentence. Just a thought, a word, an impulse to share and you can Tweet (or post something on Twitter).
To Tweet or not to Tweet Warning: if you're the compulsive type, you may want to move onto the next post and stop your habit before you even have a chance to start it. (We're not making this up. According to Alexa, Twitter's user reach has increased 526% in the last three months). Now, for those of you who aren't the addictive type or who like to throw all caution to the wind, let's investigate what awaits you in the world of Twitter.
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.
Having access from your computer desktop anywhere there is a connection and a computer is a dream for some, and a reality for some early beta testers of Desktoptwo.
Created by Sapotek, Desktoptwo is a free web based service that allows complete access of your desktop wherever you are. It has a web instant messenger using the Jabber platform, email, search, MP3 player, address book, WYSIWYG web editor, blog publishing platform, rss feed, layout templates, and 1 GB of free storage.
Subscribers of the tool will find out that Desktoptwo could be very valuable and useful if you're moving from computer to computer. If anyone has experience in using this tool, please let us know how it worked out for you.
Those that have been keeping up with Six Apart's open source work may be aware of DJabberd, which is a framework for building Jabber chat servers (Jabber, of course, being the open IM protocol that powers Google Talk/Gmail Chat). It's unsurprising, then, that the company has just announced the integration of a Jabber server into LiveJournal. Though I use the term "integration" loosely--for now it's just a Jabber server running on livejournal.com--you can now use any Jabber client, like iChat, Gaim, Trillian Pro, Adium X, or Google Talk, to chat with other Jabber users. The service seems to be going by the name "LJ Talk," and you can get on right now using your LiveJournal username and password and livejournal.com for the server. Be aware, however, that it's still very beta, and every time you connect (which will be often, as disconnections are frequent) you'll get a message from the server that says "LJ Talk is currently a pre-alpha service lacking tons of features and probably with a bunch of bugs. We're actively developing it, constantly restarting it with new stuff. So just don't be surprised if the service goes up and down a lot." And it does. Still, pretty cool. More details can be found in the announcement on lj_dev.
I'm a bit behind the
curve on this one, but on January 24 the Gaim team released Gaim
2.0 Beta 2, the latest cutting-edge release of the open source, cross-platform, multi-network IM app. 2.0 has a lot
of improvements and added features since 1.5--so many, in fact, that I'm just going to refer you to the extensive changelog. If you're looking for a nice free multi-protocol
IM client that'll work on just about any OS, I heartily recommend you give the beta a try.
Recently Google updated
Google Talk to enable "federation" with other servers, the main effect of which is that you can now talk to
users on other Jabber servers using Google Talk. As a side effect, however, it's also possible to sign on to AIM, MSN
Messenger, or Yahoo! IM and talk to your buddies, all from within Google Talk. BigBlueBall has
a tutorial on getting it working. It takes a bit of fiddling—basically you have to use another Jabber client
to set up connections to special Jabber servers that talk to other services like AIM—but once you're finished
it's easy to add new contacts on AIM, MSN, or Yahoo! to your Google Talk contact list.
People have been talking about Google releasing their own IM software since, I think, the beginning of time, but internetnews.com is reporting that it's got to be what they're up to now. You see, this week Google is expected to announce its acquisition of Meetroduction, the company which makes Meetro, which is some sort of IM client that supports multiple protocols (e.g. AIM, Jabber, ICQ) and uses wi-fi mojo to find new buddies for you based on your physical location.
I can't help but wonder if something more is going on here, though. If Google just wanted an IM client, why wouldn't they have just started with Jabber or even Gaim? Meetro seems like an odd purchase, unless they've got something special in mind for that wi-fi mojo, and I sincerely hope they do. If anybody can make an IM client with a difference and actually get people to use it, it's Google.
GAIM 2.0 is 
People have been talking about Google releasing their own IM software since, I think, the beginning of time, but 
