Adobe just added new video content to its AIR-based Media Player, but it all pretty much sucks in one form or another. The Adobe Media Player is a slick media browser that can play and subscribe to videos from the web, and it also provides somewhat high-resolution content from Adobe's media partners such as MTVN and Comedy Central.

Despite the fact that the player is very visually appealing and easy to navigate, it's just not that useful. It's possible to use any regular, free browser such as Firefox to watch online video content, allowing web-travelers to avoid the installation of an extra app. As a result, the main reason for installing the app (unless you really, really like the subscription feature) is to watch the 25,000+ videos provided by Adobe.

And that's exactly what's wrong here. Adobe's video library is still weak, and most good of the good TV shows aren't full episodes but rather short clips. Furthermore, the full videos Adobe is adding aren't current TV hits like Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Instead, Adobe partnered with CBS and Sony to add tons of clips and a few movies/episodes from old stuff like Men in Black, Jerry Maguire, The Love Boat, Beverly Hilly 90210, Family Ties, and even The Price is Right. They might as well call the app something to the tune of Adobe Senior TV On Demand.

Sure, Adobe has the money to keep it up and running, but why bother if the company isn't bringing its best to the table? Why not partner with Hulu and create an official, fully functional Hulu AIR app instead?

We cover a lot of topics here at Download Squad. We cover software you can download, programs you can use online, Mac software, PC software, Linux software, news, information, and so on.

Of course, we think all of the topics we cover are fascinating, but if you're only interested in specific items we cover, it's very easy to subscribe just to the categories or tags you're interested in.

Here's how it works. If you scroll down the page a bit, you'll notice a huge list of categories. Click on a category and you'll go to a new page with nothing but posts in that category. For example, if you only want to read about Mac software and news, just click the "Macintosh" category under "Platforms."

But what if you want to subscribe to a Mac-only Download Squad feed using your favorite feed reader? No problem. Just look at the URL bar in your browser. It should look something like "http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/macintosh/" If you add "rss.xml" to the end, you'll get a URL that you scan use to subscribe to that feed using Google Reader, Bloglines, FeedDemon, or just about any other reader.

You can also subscribe to stories based on tags. If you look at the bottom of each Download Squad post page, you'll notice a bunch of tags that we add to each story. Just click one and you'll see a list of stories using that tag. Again, you can subscribe by adding "rss.xml" to the end of the URL. So if you're just interested in stories about OS X 10.5 Leopard, for example, you can subscribe to "http://www.downloadsquad.com/tag/leopard/rss.xml" Easy as cake.

Just a quick warning. We're much better at categorizing stories than tagging them. So if you want to make sure you don't miss stories you're interested in, try subscribing to appropriate categories first. And we'll try to get better about using standard tags. Deal?

The new Windows Calendar in Vista might fall a bit short for power users who need all the features Outlook has to offer, but that doesn't mean it can't hold its own for the rest of us. It's a basic, solid calendar and todo manager that allows users to set up multiple color-coded calendars, set alarms and add notes and URLs to items.

In addition to helping you keep track of appointments and things to do, however, Windows Calendar can also get social. Just like Google Calendar, Apple's iCal and many of the web-based calendaring tools available, Windows Calendar can subscribe to just about any public calendar feed. Want to see your favorite TV show's schedule right alongside your classes or client appointments? Or how about your favorite sports team or a local club? You can probably find these schedules at any of the public calendar repositories, and Microsoft just so happens to offer a small list of said repositories at their Windows Calendar product site. Included in the list is their own Microsoft Office site with public calendars (Outlook and Windows Calendar can apparently subscribe to the same calendar formats), Attendio.com, ClendarData.com and even the iCal-inspired iCalShare.

Chances are, if you're into something and need a schedule for it, you can probably find a calendar already waiting for you at one of these sites. Using Windows Calendar, you can easily subscribe to as many calendars as you want, and only toggle to view them when you want to check in on things.

While social media sites seem to be the future of web site aggregation, at least one element of it, there's one aspect of these sites that is starting to get annoying. Have you noticed some of your favorite sites adding a row and sometimes multiple rows of links to social news sites, ostensibly to make it easy for visitors to bookmark or save the site on del.icio.us, digg, netscape, reddit, furl, or any number of other sites of this ilk. Of course, there's also a myriad of service-specific RSS links, so that users of Bloglines, Google Reader, NewsGator, Netvibes, etc. can click on one link and subscribe to the site in the reader of their choice. The thing is, I'm not sure people even use these buttons, particularly when they're all grouped together; they've simply become litter online.

Well, if you're someone that wants to offer your users the ability to easily subscribe to or bookmark your site, but want to avoid littering your site with all of these site-specific icons, check out Add This. Add This allows you to put a single image link on your site to take your readers to a dedicated bookmarking site page, and another for feed readers. Once there, they can choose the service they'd like to use, and perform the function they're looking to do. On one hand, all this seems to be doing is cleaning up your pages by putting all the site-specific links on an intermediate page - something you could arguably do yourself. But there's more to the Add This service, which makes it more compelling.

Add This aggregates statistics about which pages and site features your readers are collecting in their bookmark collections the most, and provide that data back to you. Assuming the web viewing population uses these links more than I think they do, this could provide some very valuable information as to what people are truly finding interesting on your site. Personally, I'm still a bit skeptical as to the need for all of these site-specific links. If this trend continues at the rate it's been going, ad blocking software will also be blocking social media bookmarking links just to provide a cleaner interface for web users. Hey, it's a thought.