Admit it, you're addicted to text-messaging, right? Well someone is, because lately I've been bombarded with ads proclaiming a national epidemic of texting and related fees. Won't someone think of the children! Well maybe someone has, or maybe all this is just silly. Why not send a bunch of text messages for free? I mean, that's what the web is all about, right? Free stuff? As in beer?

Katie over at GigaOM wrote up a neat little roundup of some free SMS tools you can use to send out for free. She points out the usual caveats: these services could be used for nefarious purposes (spam), and often it costs the recipient some cash to get a message. So use it wisely or wind up on some silly national TV ad.

Are you a widget lover? You know all those cool little tools that can be added to desktops and webpages to show the weather, sports scores, news, and horoscopes. The widget world is growing strong, major players and individuals are creating some very neat modules, widgets and gadgets. GigaOm founder Om Malik, and Niall Kennedy have teamed up to organize a conference called Widgets Live! The new conference is aimed at the emerging widget economy, and being held at the Marines Memorial Club in San Francisco. Widgets Live! Is set to be a conference where developer's, business leaders and content producers can get together and understand how widgets, gadgets and modules can communicate and syndicate content effectively. The Widgets Live! Website has not released speakers, panels, or a session list, but judging from this unique niche, and logo collage on Niall's website, we could guess that the list of participating companies might include Google, MSN, AIM, WordPress, Six Apart, Netvibes, Apple, MySpace, and Yahoo. Tickets are set at $100, and can be purchased online.

So, out of all the widgets, gadgets, and modules out there, which ones do you find the most useful?

UPDATE - the Widget Live! schedule has been posted.

Some of the news that's fit to blog from around the world and throughout the day. Here's your daily bits of news...

• A new community tech preview of Vista should be coming out "in a few weeks" according to Josh's Windows Weblog.
• Speaking of Microsoft, you can download a trial version of BizTalk Server 2006 if you're into that sorta stuff.
• BetaNews reports MobiTV is partnering with Microsoft to bring its services to Windows Mobile and XP. Which means Windows DRM and codecs for everyone, hooray!
• BoingBoing links to an analysis of what .COM domains are left unregistered. I'd say there's one obsessive-compulsive with one less thing on his to do list, but this is great info.
• There's a great link on digg on 10 ways to optimize Firefox. Does it work? On my Mac, not really, on my PC, yeah, mostly.
• PaidContent notes C|net has started a college-oriented site called CollegeLive. Facebook is still crying in the corner, unable to comment.
• Sales and Marketing has a nifty piece on "The World According to Google." Worth a read, even if it's a little fluffy. Let's face it, but for the grace of Google goes online marketing...
• And Om Malik says what we all feared, MySpace is hotter than we wish to believe. He calls it "the new black." Heaven help us.

Again, if you have news, send it to our tips page.

Another piece of Google's fabled web-based office suite falls into place with the big G's acquisition of Writely, the web-based word processor that we (and everyone else) have been keeping an eye on since its beta launch last year. To refresh your memory, Writely is the flagship product of Upstartle and lets people collaboratively write and edit documents in their web browser. Writely shares its category with heavy hitter 37signals' Writeboard, Zoho Writer, and many more that seem to be popping up weekly. As Om Malik points out, Google has Gmail and its upcoming CL2 calendar app poised to replace Outlook and Google Base has the potential to replace the likes of Access, so all that's missing for a complete Voltron office suite is a spreadsheet app and a PowerPoint-killer.

Business 2.0 is running an interesting article called The Next Net 25 in which 25 newish companies are identified as the potential next Googles, Amazons, and Microsofts. To regular readers there's nothing too suprising in any of the five categories: Social Media, Mashups and Filters, The New Phone (VoIP), The Webtop (web-based office), and Under the Hood. Digg and YouTube are the big names in Social Media, 37signals shows up in The Webtop, and so on, but there may be a few companies you haven't heard of, like Jigsaw in the Under the Hood category, which lets salespeople exchange company managers' contact info. Overall the list is very Web 2.0 and worth a look if you want a peek at who might be among he big players in a year or two.

[Via tech.memeorandum]

30 Boxes is a next-generation web-based calendar that'll be hitting beta later this week. I'm not very excitable when it comes to web-based calendards, even the new breed of AJAXy ones, but blogger Thomas Hawk got in on an early demo (along with a few other Web 2.0 notables like Matt Mullenweg and Andy Baio) and declared: "Best... Calendar... EVER!" In his long review, Hawk calls 30 Boxes "one of the most exciting social network tools I've seen in a long time and reiterates Om Malik's sentiment that it "will be to calendars what GMail was to email." It sounds like 30 Boxes has hit all the right buttons, and I must say after reading Hawk's review I'm pretty sold, though there's no word yet on whether it's going to be a free service or require a subscription.

[Via Waxy.org]