It's Thanksgiving day for those of you in the United States, time to reflect upon the things for which you're truly thankful. While I'm sure there are many more noble things to list, this is Downloadsquad, after all, and what would be more fitting than a list of programs I appreciate?

16. Cabos. I rarely use a Gnutella client any more. When there is the odd song stuck in my head that necessitates a one-off download, Cabos is what I use. It's got a clean, simple interface, and it works - and that's really all I'm after.

15. Flash Player. Damn you, Adobe. Now that v10 has taken care of some of the CPU and memory issues, it's hard to begrudge Flash. There are just way, way too many addictive little games and excellent web applications that have been built using it.

14. FastCopy. My boss also runs a DJ business, and transferring his multi-hundred gig library from drive to drive was starting to drive me insane. After stupidly giving Windows a crack at the job once, I quickly hunted down a better tool for the job. FastCopy with the buffer cranked up made (relatively) short work of the task.

13. Find and Run Robot. It's not quite a flashy as the more popular Launchy, but it's much lighter on resources and gets the job done just as well. There are also tons of great extensions for it. For those who swear by the power of the keyboard, FARR is a must have.

Forget about listing your 'Web 2.0' company on eBay, selling your Facebook app is the in thing to do.

With the launch of the Facebook developer platform, a slew of great Apps have come out, leading the company into a superstar. Logbook, an application where users can add and review movies, books and music is built on top of the Amazon affiliate platform and accepts Google ads. This money generating application is now newly listed on eBay and with 25 bids, the price currently sits at $510. Could this spark a new trend in the Facebook saga? With Facebook recently launching a $10 Million grant fund dedicated to funding companies that have the sole purpose of building dedicated applications, you can bet there are a slew of startups that will just not make it into the fund and choose to unload the app for another developer to work their magic.

Written in PHP and using MySQL on Apache, this application could have a lot of potential for those that put a little marketing effort. There are currently only about 90 users. (all friends and family of the developers no doubt.)

UPDATE: appmrkt is a place where developers can buy and sell Facebook applications.

[via mashable]

There's more evidence that the mythical GDrive, Google's mysterious Google storage hard drive, could be real.

Google has apparently updated the name servers on GoogleDrive.com as noted by Garett Rogers. This could be one of the final steps necessary in launching the online storage solution. Could it be built into Google Apps? Or maybe a standalone service? We will have to wait and see.

GoogleDrive.com has been on quite a journey since its original registration in 2004. It sat parked until in 2006 it expired and picked up by a squatter. Then in July of 2007 Google's official domain management company took control on it. Now it's been transferred to Google servers.

Take a look at some other interesting domain names Google owns.

The word on the web is that Google could be transforming JotSpot into a Google Wiki.

Google acquired the WYSIWYG wiki website creator last October, and there have been numerous discussions about what they could be doing with it. From making it into the GDrive storage location for storing and sharing spreadsheets, calendars, files and photos, to integrating it into Google Apps as a business wiki. With the moving of the JotSpot help and support pages being transferred under the Google name this April, there is now a Google Apps service code name for 'jotspot'. This all means that Google is most likely building JotSpot into Google Apps accounts, and could be in the final testing phases before its release.

Stay tuned for news from the Office 2.0 Conference being held in San Francisco next week, Google could be dropping some news on this as well as the launch of Google Presentations.

Calling all Google Apps users, your schedule might not be spot-on this Thursday.

Users of Google Apps can expect some downtime during routine maintenance of the Google Calendar Thursday April 26th, from 8AM to 9PM. As is expected with any sort of maintenance, downtimes may and will occur and in this case Google Calendar might not be accessible for some time. Scheduled maintenance during daylight hours, what gives, Google?

This blow to users scheduling sure does make us wonder if Google Apps is worth using for our main scheduling application. It is understandable that system upgrades have to occur in order to improve services, it just sucks that we are now forced to suffer.

For Google Apps support you can check out http://www.google.com/support/a/

Drop a comment on Thursday to let us all know if you were affected by the maintenance and approx. how long your downtime lasted for.

UPDATE: More info on the scheduled maintenance from Google:

Why are we doing an upgrade?
We are updating some of our servers as we continue to improve Google Calendar. This is a normal maintenance update, and as with all updates we look to minimize the impact to our end users.

How will this impact my end users?
The impact to your users should be minimal. Only a subset of your users should be affected by the upgrade. These users may have trouble accessing their Google Calendars for a short period of time, generally less than 5-10 minutes each.

Will Google Calendar be down from 8AM to 9PM PDT?
No. This is the window of time that the maintenance upgrade will take place. During this time some users will experience issues accessing their calendar, but only for a short period of time each.

Google has announced a partnership with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure, and the Kenya Education Network that will result in the use of Google Apps in Rwanda's educational institutions and government ministries, as well as in Kenya's universities. Both of these African countries will now have access to free communication tools that include email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing under
their institutions current domain names.

There are two main packages of the Google Apps that are being provided free of charge. With 20,000 users in Rwanda, The National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology will have Google Apps Education Edition. The countries government ministries using Google Apps Standard Edition. 50,000 students at the University of Nairobi will be the first ones offered the Google Apps for Education in Kenya, with 150,000 additional students signing on at a later date.

Google has just issued a press release stating that this initiative will be helping Google to further organize the world's information, and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google's philanthropic Freudian slip is showing, don'tcha think? Gates can run around throwing money at the worlds problems all he wants, but I bet this secures Google a permanent spot in the hearts of many a socially conscious geek.

We've asked you which blog editor you prefer (and so has Lifehacker), but for my money you simply can't beat ecto, at least on Mac OS X (I've honestly never used it on Windows). It's a powerful editor with strong integration with other tools and software, and Adriaan Tijsseling has just updated it to version 2.2 with quite a few new features and fixes, including:

• Flickr Search support for image upload
  
• support for CSS style/class for image upload
  
• support for generic tag format (e.g. Ultimate Tag Warrior)
  
• GoDaddy.com's Quick Blog to the preset list of blog type in Profile Creation Wizard
  
• initial support for the new Google's Blogger beta using the GData library
  
• profile backup and restore to file capability
  
• Paste Special option to Post window with capability to paste text as unformatted text or strip out MS
• and much, much more

This looks like a strong update to a killer blogging app, and if you're in the market for more blogging power than a simple web form, I highly recommend it whether you're on Windows or Mac OS X. You can learn more about ecto here and download a demo. A license costs $17.95, with discounts for cross-platform and bulk purchases available.

In the first sign I've seen of 3rd parties embracing Apps for your Domain, a developer named Ahmet Tahar Sakar has created a widget for Mac OS X's Dashboard that can check your domain's Gmail account. It even works with Growl, a system-wide notification utility that can allow any apps to hook in to display visual notifications of events like new email, song changes in iTunes and even device disconnections. Since I'm no longer using Google's services I haven't been able to test this out myself, but if you give it a go please share your thoughts with the rest of the class.

[via Gmail.pro]

Google has just announced a partnership with GoDaddy and eNom, two leading domain name registrars, to allow new users of their Apps for Your Domain service to register a domain right from within Google's signup process. This is a killer idea that, in hindsight, sounds like a completely logical step to take, but I bet most didn't even see it coming. After you sign up for a Google Account or log in to their service signup page, you are how offered the ability to enter your existing domain to get the process started, or search for and purchase a domain if you don't already have one. As icing on the cake, Google is even including private registration (typically ~ $2-3/year/domain) if you buy your domain through this new feature.

Joe Kraus of Jotspot, has announced today that they have been acquired by Google. Jotspot is a leader in hosted wiki application development. Jotspot was founded in 2004 as the first company to offer this type of hosted wiki solution. Jotspot's goal was to make wiki websites that anyone could update and add to, without knowing coding. Jotspot had a simple WYSIWYG editor, with advanced search and email integration components. Jotspot was not only aimed at smaller personal projects, it was also aimed at corporate intranets, project management, and help desks.

Jotspots hosted plans once sat from a $199 month for 5000 hosted wiki pages with unlimited users. To a simple Personal account with 5 users, 10 pages, for free. Could we possibly see the integration of one giant free plan from Google?

Currently, Jotspot is offline to users. The Palo Alto based company says to stay tuned to regain access to the system. Google is most likely merging all data and transferring the Jot system over to Google's servers. This is an exciting move by Google, again, in the online application environment, adding to their online suite of applications with the likes of Documents, Calendar, Gmail, Spreadsheets, and Apps for your Domain.

Check out some Jotspot screenshots after the jump...

Google has announced what is quite possibly the largest update to Google Reader since its inception, bringing an entirely new UI, more keyboard shortcuts, new bookmarklets and a whole lotta results from user feedback to the table. Overall, as a Google Reader fan for some time, I am pleasantly surprised by this wholly positive and usable update, but it isn't without a few confusing quirks.

The first and most noticeable update is the radical change to Google Reader's UI, bringing it more in line with the tried and tested UI of many other online readers, but still with much of the Google engineers' unique genius baked in everywhere. Above you can see Reader has adopted the typical folder/grouping system on the left, while headlines can be listed on the right.

For many of our daily tasks, the eternal debate (well, 'eternal' meaning 'over the last couple years') has plagued us all: whether to use a desktop app, or a web app? Both offer significant advantages, but not without equally constraining drawbacks. Read/WriteWeb, a tech blog by Richard MacManus, feels our pain, and has posted an in-depth perspective on the issue titled Webified Desktop Apps vs Browser-based Apps, as well as a poll to help readers voice their choice.

Richard delves into the dynamics of either side of the issue, includes quotes from other web notables and offers succinct roundups of both webified desktop apps and desktopified web services to demonstrate his ultimate point that neither aspect of computing is going to disappear anytime soon. It's an interesting read for sure, with some solid points to consider when arriving at the crossroads of the web and the desktop. Check it out.

I've long been meaning to give Ubuntu a more serious look, and Adam Pash's Top 10 Ubuntu apps and tweaks over at Lifehacker is all the more motivation. Pash identifies ten ways you can improve your Ubuntu experience, including Automatix (application installation automator), Beagle (desktop search), Gnome Deskbar Applet ("a great app launcher and then some"), VLC (video player), Firefox (web browser), amaroK (audio player), and CheckGmail (email notifier for Gmail). As usual, the comments following the article are a great trove of further tips.

We at Download Squad are big Digg fans, so this Complete Digg Tools Collection is a welcome list. There's about three dozen tools and links to keep the compulsive Digger happy, some official, most third-party, from widgets and scripts to extensions and stand-alone apps. Check it out.

This MSN Spaces blog has a nicely-organized list of all of the free software available from Microsoft. There are a number of surprising little gems in there, including some things I've never heard of, like half the stuff from Microsoft Research, and others I'd forgotten all about. Definitely worth a look if you're running XP.