After Adobe's recent acquisition of analytics giant Omniture for $1.8 billion, there was a lot of speculation that Adobe was beginning a foray into the advertising. Now we've got some more clues, since Adobe's partnering with Gigya, a company that distributes widgets and advertising. Now, Adobe's got its fingers in every part of the process, from content creation to ads to analytics.

Adobe's new Distribution Manager lets developers share their Flash widgets on 70 sites, tracks traffic for the widgets, and serves ads. Destinations include Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle, amongst others. It also supports mobile devices, including Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. The iPhone is also (sort of) supported, but without Flash, the widgets have to be part of approved app store apps. Developers can follow their traffic and ads with - what else? - an Adobe Air app.

[via Techcrunch]

1. Right click in some empty space on your taskbar and choose toolbars -> new toolbar from the menu
2. Paste %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch into the "folder" box and click select folder.
3. Drag the recycle bin icon from your desktop onto the newly-created toolbar.
4. Position the bin icon so it's first in line.

You're done! All that's left to do is to grab the slider and place the toolbar where you want it, and shut off the title and text labels if you want a seamless look. To do that, right-click the slider and untick show title and show text.

One note: this doesn't look all that hot if you have a vertical taskbar since the toolbar icons are left justified while your taskbar icons are centered.

Thanks, Julio!

Do you tire of your humdrum, meatspace world? Does Sony's PlayStation Home look too real? Are there too many flying penises in Second Life for your taste? Well, strap on your hippie goggles and head over to Cybertown, where VRML never really went out of style, it just got better textures.

I remember stumbling into Cybertown around the turn of this century and being plenty impressed. Back then, before Shockwave got all 3D and around the time of RealPlayer G2's enhanced multimedia capabilities, this was neat stuff. Now, sadly, CyberTown is pretty much a Cyber-GhostTown.

No one but the resident chat bot appeared while I was online, and the markets, parks and cities were devoid of anything but a futuristic, bleak landscape. Pretty much what Caprica looked like after the Cylons were done bombing it to oblivion. Except with references to RealPlayer G2 (I kid you not).

Now, of course, even without any human meatbags occupying the place, it is rather sad. The graphics haven't improved in years, despite the new owners' insistence upon pending upgrades. The Blaxxun plug-in (not Mac or Linux compatible) is an older version as well, which doesn't say much for those upgrades. Adding insult to injury, the site owners now charge $5 a month for the privilege of walking through this virtual ghost town. Does it get sadder? Yeah, it kind of does. Check the gallery.

With all the social networking sites out there, it can be tedious to share all of your usernames with a new acquaintance. Hi, I'm is a "nametag on the Internet" that you can show people so that they can read - or click through to - your postings on all of your different social sites. Right now, it supports around a dozen networks, including Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Last.fm.

The main thing I was worried about with Hi, I'm was whether it needed login credentials for any of my networks, because most of them have public feeds to pull from. Fortunately, it doesn't use your login info at all, although you can sign in with Facebook Connect or MySpace. In addition to your feeds, you can add a quick bio, a photo, and highlighted links to your best stuff. All in all, Hi, I'm is a pretty decent execution of the online identity hub concept. On the other hand, it's nothing you can't do (with a bit more work) with an about page on your bog.

Download Squad has covered augmented reality apps before, both on Android and on the iPhone, but we speculated that it would be a while before AR became commonplace in apps people actually use. We might have been wrong about that, thanks to a surprise in the latest version of Yelp for iPhone. Shaking your phone a few times unlocks a hidden augmented reality mode called Monocle, that shows reviews for anything you point your camera at.

There was some question as to whether Apple was going to be approving AR apps until an app called Metro Paris Subway was approved last week. Still, Yelp's hidden feature seems to be the first augmented reality software that works in the US. Overlaying a data layer on camera images could be the next big thing in restaurant reviews, in real estate, or in any number of other areas, and it's definitely something to keep an eye on, beyond just Yelp.

Our sister site, TUAW, has an excellent gallery of the Monocle feature.

There are plenty of places that will host your files for free. Many of them, however, have bandwidth limits or size restrictions, or are just too darn complicated to bother with. s4ve.as offers the basics I want from a free host and is dead simple to use.

As Jay mentioned to me, it's kind of like a beefed-up Senduit. While Senduit offers customizable time-before-self-destruct, it's got a 100Mb limit. That's just not enough in a lot of cases. s4ve.as does away with size limitations, so you're free to upload whatever the heck you want.

Simplicity is key here - browser for any file, and click upload. When the transfer is complete, integrated bit.ly support gives you an automatic short url to paste into sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just make sure you tell your pals to grab it within 24 hours. After that, it's gone, daddy, gone.

Thanks for the tip, Scott!

As Twitter's worldwide growth continues, non-English-speakers are adopting it in larger numbers. And when we don't all speak the same language, it might sometimes be necessary to translate a tweet into something other than your native tongue. Twinslator makes that very easy, by providing what's essentially a mashup of Twitter and Google Translate. It's a translator you can tweet from.

If you don't translate very often, it might not thrill you to save a minute or so and a little copy-paste from the regular Google Translate site. If you do it frequently, though, Twinslator could be great for you. Twinslator also wisely gives you the option of double-posting the original tweet and the translation, so the maximum number of your followers will get the message. Even if it's not likely to be wildly popular, it's still nice to see someone acknowledging the global scope of Twitter and attempting to connect cultures

In the aftermath of the quick shutdown and restart of popular URL shortening service Tr.im, several important players in the short URL market have joined an effort to archive short links in case other services shut down. The coalition is called 301works, and it will be run by Gnip. Other participants include Adjix, awe.sm, betaworks, Cligs, URLizer, and urlShort, and the most popular service going, Bit.ly. Even after giving users a scare that their links might be going away, Tr

301works will function as a directory of shortlinks, so users of the participating services should be able to see the destination of any short link, even if that service stops operating. 301works will be to short links what The Wayback Machine is to dead websites. It's not a guarantee that every link will always resolve, just that you'll be able to see where it pointed when it did.

Need to sync files across machines? Need to access those files on your mobile devices? SugarSync to the rescue. There are currently SugarSync clients for WinMo, BlackBerry, iPhone, Mac and Windows, and starting today, Android phones (Android netbooks too, if they ever appear).

The apps are free, but you pay for storage, starting at $4.99 a month. You can try it free for 30 days, or keep it free with a mere 2GB of storage. You get 30GB for the $4.99 price. SugarSync hasn't yet replaced my current favorite, DropBox, but in light of Apple's iDisk app release, it seems there are more options for syncing files than ever. Here's to choice!

Because I work almost exclusively in remote-based teams, I'm always looking for new tools and services that can help me manage my daily tasks and effectively collaborate with my team members. One of the biggest problems I have with some collaboration systems is that they require everyone to login and collaborate using the web app itself. This is great if you are always in one place or in a more traditional office environment, but it becomes less problematic if you are on the go frequently and already have tools and practices in place to try to manage your life.

This is why I think that WizeHive has real potential. WizeHive was launched in late 2008 after its founders, who were unsatisfied with the current crop of web-based collaboration and task management tools, decided to scratch their own itch and launch their own service. Over the last six months, WizeHive has rolled out additional features and today, WizeHive is releasing a bevy of new features and enhancements with the aim of bring WizeHive to the masses.

I talked to WizeHive's co-founder, Mike Levinson on Monday about the product and its development and what the new release brings to the table. I was most impressed that Mike and his team use WizeHive internally to manage various projects and activities not just including WizeHive's development, but for other business tasks as well.

After playing with WizeHive a bit, I think the best way to describe the service would be that it is Basecamp meets Backpack, with a dash of Yammer on the side. Unlike some collaboration solutions like Box.net, which really do an excellent job of replicating or replacing SharePoint, WizeHive is a more streamlined way to share files and communicate details back and forth, or to keep track of task management.

After creating a WizeHive account, you can create a different workspace for various teams or projects you might be working on. Within that workspace, you can choose who you invite to collaborate in that space. Once you have invited someone to your space, they can share documents with you, make comments, assign or complete tasks, etc.

You can also create pages within a workspace to further drill down your focus. In my DLS (for DownloadSquad) workspace for instance, I can have pages for Posts, Features and Ideas. Each page can contain its own task and its own set of comments.

The thing I like best about WizeHive is how easily it integrates with other services. You can create a new task (or even a new page) using e-mail, but you can also send messages, tasks and reminders using Twitter. By sending a direct message to @wizehive, after your account is verified, you can communicate directly with your workspace and the people in your group will get notifications and can reply by e-mail, Twitter or using the web site.

Here are some of the new features WizeHive has introduced with this release:

• improved UI for tracking and managing a large numbers of shared files
• enhanced file management and version control
• an increase in the number of files that can be uploaded at one time to 50
• bump in the maximum uploaded file size to 100 MB
• embedded image viewer
• streamlined collaborative editing of documents and spreadsheets

Although you can create and edit documents using ZoHo (it is integrated) and you can save revisions, the real focus of WizeHive seems to be on tasks and communication.

WizeHive is still in beta, so you can sign-up for a free account with unlimited users. You're limited to 50MB of storage space (an additional 3GB is $8US a month), but you get every other feature and you can use the service at least until the end of 2009. Personal accounts, limited to 3 users and 50MB of space are also free. Teams or Small Businesses can get an account with support for 10 users and 3GB of storage for $39 a month.

I'm going to give WizeHive a try and see how well I can integrate it into my life.

"Daddy, what's a bookmarklet?" A childish question, perhaps, but not a question a child might ask. The kid might also call them favelets if he was raised on a diet of Internet Explorer. A bookmarklet, or favelet comes from "bookmarks" and "favorites" that you would save in your browser. Bookmarklets are Javascript applications in the form of URLs, and wherever you can store a URL, you can store a bookmarklet. Usually you drag them from the page to your bookmark bar, or you can add them like any favorite or bookmark.

A bookmarklet functions much like a button, but instead of just taking you to a website (like your garden variety bookmark), it does something at that website as well. As I said, it is an application. Some bookmarklets are used to modify a website, even if the effect is an illusion on your machine. Javascript can do some crazy cool things in a browser, and bookmarklets can similarly do some crazy cool things. Unfortunately each browser handles Javascript just a bit differently (and different versions of a browser will behave differently), so your mileage may vary.

Bookmarklets are commonly used to quickly tie into websites that allow you to share information. For example, this handy Delicious bookmarklet that allows you to easily save a URL to your Delicious bookmarks. Normally you'd copy the URL, go to Delicious, then paste it in to the right place and fill out the metadata. With the bookmarklet you simply hit the button (the bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar, or elsewhere in your bookmarks) and it will take whatever site you're on, send you to Delicious, and fill out the URL and title. It usually suggests some tags as well.

Lots of sites provide handy bookmarklets, including VodPod, Tumblr, Reddit and FriendFeed. But here are a few resources you might find handy or fun:

• The Internet Archive has a Wayback bookmarklet so you can see previous versions of a website instamagically (scroll down a bit).
• Prank your friends with the ability to edit any website (well, not Flash sites) using this fun bookmarklet.
• Opera users? Here's a pile of bookmarklets just for you.
• Ever wanted to read some text on a web page in big text, one word at a time? Check out the nifty Spreeder bookmarklet to do just that.
• Finally there's the spiffy Rollyo, which adds a search to any page you visit. Plus, you can save your searches for later.

If you missed it the first time, Lee recently put together a list of 15+ handy bookmarklets.

[Hat tip to Lifehack for another excellent list of bookmarklets]