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Filed under: Business, Social Software, Mobile, Web

Brightkite teams up with Limbo

In the location-based social network arena, BrightKite has made quite a name for itself. The BrightKite product is so strong that the company is merging with another social network, Limbo, and moving to Limbo's offices in Burlingame, CA. The combined company gets BrightKite's service and brand name, and adds Limbo's engineers and offices.

So, what does BrightKite get out of this deal with Limbo? One of their main motivations is that Limbo's expertise will allow BrightKite to eventually expand to the Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, which could increase its userbase by leaps and bounds. BrightKite also absorbs Limbo's users and features, which gives it a huge boost toward becoming the dominant location-based social network.

[via Webware]

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

Atomkeep synchronizes your profile across social networks

AtomKeep
If you're a good, upstanding netizen, odds are you have accounts with half a dozen social networking service or more. You may only use one or two services, but if your friends or colleagues pressured you into signing up for LinkedIn, Plurk, or Pownce, you probably filled out an online profile before promptly forgetting about it. And now that you've moved, changed jobs, or gotten married, the profile is woefully out of date. Atomkeep can help.

Atomkeep lets you synchronize your profile information across more than 20 different services including Digg, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress, Jobster, Facebook, and Twitter. You can choose from a huge list of category elements to fill out and when you hit the sync button Atomkeep will send that information to your social networks. You can sync with all of your networks at once or just select the ones you want to update from a list.

The coolest part of the service is the fact that you don't need to fill out your Atomkeep profile at all if you don't want to. It can import your profile from another service and merge it with your profile from other locations. So if your Facebook profile is already pretty complete but your Last.fm profile could use some work, Atomkeep can import the former and use the information to fill in the blanks on the latter.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Browser Tips, Social Software, Mobile Minute, web 2.0

Opera: There's a good chance you've visited Facebook on your phone

Opera Mini usersOpera has released a report on the state of the mobile web. And considering the company claims more than 44 million users for its Opera Mini cellphone web browser, Opera's in as good a position as any company to report on mobile web usage.

There are two trends that are particularly noteworthy. First, 77% of all traffic was to full web pages, not stripped down mobile pages. This probably shouldn't be that surprising, since Opera Mini renders full pages pretty quickly and lets users zoom in and out to read the fine print. And while WAP might have been pretty exciting a few years ago when there wasn't as much rich media content on the web, and when mobile internet connections were significantly slower, those days are long gone.

The second trend is a bit more surprising. 40% of worldwide traffic was directed to social networks. In some countries including the US, South Africa, and Indonesia, that number was as high as 60%. Now, it's not like we didn't know that social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Bebo were popular. We just didn't figure people would be spending half of their mobile web browsing time visiting them.

What sites do you visit regularly with your mobile web browser?

[via VentureBeat]

Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Social Software, Beta

Digsby: Manage multiple social networks, e-mail, IM accounts - 5000 invites!

Digsby
We're suckers for all-in-one applications. That's why we were excited to check out Digsby, a new all-in-one utility for managing multiple IM, e-mail, and social networking accounts. Digsby just launched in private beta this week, but we've got 5000 invites to give away to Download Squad readers. Keep on reading to find out how to get yours.

Digsby is a desktop client that lets you chat with contacts no matter which IM service they use. It also includes an e-mail notifier, and a pop up screen for keeping track of Facebook and MySpace updates. You can even add a Digsby chat window to your Facebook page so that anyone viewing your profile can send you instant messages which you can reply to using Digsby.

Read more →

Filed under: Social Software

Open Web Awards: Call for nominations

Open Web AwardsDownload Squad is pleased to announce that we're participating in the Open Web Awards. What that means is you, our dear readers, get to participate in the first ever interblog collaborative award event designed to recognize excellence in the social networking world. The Open Web Awards are the brainchild of the folks over at Mashable, and about 30 blogs are participating.

Over the next few weeks, we'll have voting rounds in several different categories. But today we're going to give you a list of categories and call for your nominations. To nominate a company or website, just leave a comment with the business name and the corresponding category. For example, if you want to nominate Hi5 in the Mainstream and Large Scale Networks category, just say so. That's all there is to it. Once we've got all the nominations in we'll add your votes to those gathered from other web sites and let you vote on the top companies in each category.

Here are the categories:
  1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
  2. Applications and Widgets
  3. Start Pages
  4. Mobile
  5. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks
Feel free to interpret these categories however you like. You can nominate a company in just one category or in all five. Please just make one selection per category. Now go forth and nominate.

Filed under: Business, Design, Internet, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, Beta, web 2.0

Get all your mail in one place with Fuser

Get all your mail in one place with Fuser


Checking multiple accounts is just a fact of life for many users. Log into a Yahoo account, then switch over to Gmail, then off to Facebook. Fuser aims to make things a little easier.

With Fuser, users can check multiple email accounts and social networks from one place and with one interface. Emails can be pulled in, read and replied to from popular email apps like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and SquirrelMail as well as POP and IMAP emails and such social networks as MySpace and Facebook with a single login.

There is no limit to the number of email and social network accounts you tie into Fuser. All emails can be sent to one inbox, or the application can be set up so that incoming mail can be better organized through folders. As for security, Fuser does not store any of your emails. It simply views them. So if you delete an email from your regular email account, it is deleted in Fuser. All information is stored in encrypted databases, including passwords, usernames and any information that is transmitted.

Fuser is a great way to streamline emails, and a real timesaver if you find yourself switching between a number of locations.

[via TechCrunch]

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