Over the past few years, a cottage industry has formed around the idea of allowing users to synchronize their mobile Google contact and calendar items with mobile devices. Today, Google got in on the action by announcing that iPhone and Windows Mobile devices could now be synchronized with Google Calendar and your Gmail contact list.

Google Sync is using Microsoft ActiveSync push technology to keep your contacts and calendar appointment up to date. Once you set up your phone, your information should update continuously, with no user intervention required.

In order to synchronize your contact list, your phone will need to support SyncML. Google Sync is currently in beta, which means it's a real Google product. But it also means there may still be some kinks to work out. It's also important to note that Google Sync will replace all the data on your device with information from the server, so you'll want to make sure to back up your data before trying it out.

Foxmarks provides a simple way to keep your Firefox bookmarks synchronized across multiple computers or Firefox profiles. Just install the plugin and any time you add or remove a bookmark from one computer the changes will be reflected on Firefox on any other computer you use. This comes in handy if you want to sync the bookmarks on your home and work computers, or if you have a portable version of Firefox that you keep on a USB flash drive for use while you're traveling, but which you want to keep up to date.

This week the Foxmarks team released tools that let you synchronize your Internet Explorer and Safari bookmarks as well. That means you can sync your IE7 bookmarks at home and work. But it also means you can keep your bookmarks on all three browsers synchronized.

The new tools don't support password synchronization, a feature that Foxmarks added for the Firefox plugin a while back. But it's still a pretty awesome development, especially for anyone who uses Internet Explorer at Work and Firefox at home.

[via Lifehacker]

About three years after acquiring FolderShare, a utility for synchronizing files across multiple computers, Microsoft is retiring the application and plans to replace it with a similar utility called Windows Live Sync. You could make the case that what's happening is Microsoft is renaming FolderShare rather than replacing it, as the new version will likely look a lot like FolderShare and have many of the same functions. But it will also have a few improvements including:

• Ability to sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each
• You can login with your Windows Live ID
• Integration with the Windos Recycle Bin
• New clients for Windows and Mac
• Unicode support for synchronizing files in other languages (beside English)

Why Microsoft is continuing to push this software at the same time as it develops Windows Live Mesh which allows you to synchronize files across mutilple computers, the web, and mobile devices, is anyone's guess.

Soocial is a free web service that provides a central location for all of your contacts' phone numbers, email addresses, and other information. If that's all Soocial provided, it wouldn't be that interesting. But Soocial goes a few steps further and allows you to synchronize your contacts across multiple platforms, including your cellphone, Mac, PC, and Gmail.

Yesterday the company released a utility for Outlook synchronization that supports Windows XP and Vista and Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. While the Outlook sync plugin is in alpha and Soocial recommends backing up your contacts before running, I didn't experience any problems. In a matter of minutes, all of my contacts were backed up online and accessible through the Soocial web site.

Gmail sync, on the other hand is a bit slower. I've been waiting about an hour for the Gmail synchronization to kick in. If and when it does, Soocial wil fill in the next piece of a synchronization puzzle that I've been struggling with for ages. Using Soocial, you'll be able to keep your Outlook and Google contacts in sync, and using Calgoo or Google Calendar Sync, you'll be able to synchronize your Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. And that means you'll be able to update your information on any computer with a web browser, knowing that the changes will be synched to your primary computer and any mobile devices like cellphones and PDAs that you keep synched with Outlook.

Now would someone please release a tool that synchronizes Outlook tasks with Remember the Milk?

Soocial also plans to release a BlackBerry client soon, and already supports hundreds of cellphones.

[via Decoder and TechCrunch]

Foxmarks is a plugin for Firefox that makes it easy to keep your bookmarks synchronized across multiple browsers. When you add or delete a bookmark on one machine, the changes will be reflected on another. Pretty useful for keeping your home and work computers up to date, right? But what about all those passwords you have saved on one computer but not the other. Now Foxmarks has a solution for that too.

The most recent version of Foxmarks adds support for secure password synchronization. In order to use this feature you'll need to enter a new PIN which is separate from the password you use to login to Foxmarks. For security purposes, if you forget this PIN, Foxmarks will not be able to help you recover it, so make sure to write it down or pick something you'll remember. But for obvious reasons, make sure it's also not something that's easy to guess (unless you like the idea of synchronizing your online banking password over the internet with only your birthday as a password).

[via jkOnTheRun]

It seems like the days of the family computer have come and gone already, and more and more people have their own individual computer to use. In my house, everyone over the age of 3 has one (plus a couple of extras), and keeping data synchronized amongst them all is a bit of a nightmare.

Our main two machines are the Macs that my wife and I use. In our family, I'm the techie one, so over the years I've spent a lot of time ripping our CD collections into MP3 files. Though she certainly enjoys listening to music, she's never bothered to do the same on her machine. The other day she decided that she should have access to all of the music that I've been dutifully ripping from our CD collection, and since 1/2 of the CDs were hers in the first place, she's right.

So, what's the fastest way to get my iTunes library over to her machine, while maintaining the song ratings and playlists that we've come up with together? I found an application called Syncopation that fits the bill perfectly.

Syncopation does exactly what I've described - it allows you to grab an entire music library from another machine over your local network. It even supports synchronizing podcasts, movies and TV shows! The process is very straightforward:

1. Install Syncopation on both the machine you want to synchronize from, and the machine you are moving the music to
2. Set your preferences; do you want to transfer videos and podcasts, or no?
3. Subscribe to the other machine that should be showing up in Syncopation's browser
4. Press the Sync button, and wait.
   
5. And wait, and wait, and wait.

Depending on how big your library is and how fast your network is, it could take a number of hours to transfer everything across. On our 802.11g network, it is taking about an hour per gigabyte transferred.

You'll have to keep Syncopation running on all machines that are actively synchronizing while they perform the transfer. Syncopation supports up to five Macs, though the trial verison only supports two, and the trial is good for 30 days. I see myself purchasing this tool when my trial period is up, because it makes keeping our iTunes libraries in sync a snap.

FeedDemon has been the best RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they bought FeedDemon. The best news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth every penny), it's now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is easy to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator's web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the ability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you choose to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

Since I became irked with the limitations of Allway Sync's free edition, I've been looking for a good replacement. I've been getting by with the MS Synctoy, but thankfully a kick-ass open source app has once again come to the rescue.

Synkron is a powerful, cross-platform synchronization tool that boasts an impressive array of features.

During the install the option is given to add a context menu extension. Oh yes, I'll have that. I work my context menu like a rented mule, and if I can add one-click synchronization to it, you'd better believe I'm going to.

The program sports a tabbed interface, making it easy to set up, run, and manage multiple jobs. The interface is uncluttered and easy to understand. Folder analysis is extremely fast, and files, file types, and folders can be blacklisted to exclude them from synchronizations.

Since the dawn of time Google Calendar, we've been waiting for a free, easy way to fully synchronize our Google Calendar to desktop calendar clients like iCal. We'd love to be able to access the same calendar data across multiple computers, but it's always been a messy affair, not free, an incomplete solution, or PC only.

Well, Calgoo has been one of those paid options up until now, but the minds behind the program just announced that it is free from here on out. That's right, Calgoo is now the free option in Google Calendar and desktop caledar synchronization. Calgoo officially supports 30 Boxes, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and -- of course -- Google Calendar.

Calgoo's "Chief Owl" will not employ ads in the app in order to pay for the costs of developing the program, but the team will begin to run ads on Calgoo Hub and possibly other future products. As for the software itself, it's pretty easy to use, and it provides for two-way synchonization, which means that any changes on one calendar will apply to the other.

[via WebWorkerDaily]

Microsoft has thrown open the doors to its Live Mesh file synchronization service. Now anyone can sign into the service using a Windows Live ID. You no longer need to sign up for an account and sit on a waiting list.

Live Mesh, which launched as a technical preview in April, allows users to synchronize files across multiple computers. All of your synchronized files will also be available via the web for easy access even if you're not near one of your computers. The service is still in beta, but now it's a public beta.

The Live Mesh interface also features a nifty news category that presents you with recent updates to your folders and files. If you add music to the shared music folder on your home PC, you can read about it on your work PC or on the web.

Eventually Microsoft plans to roll out Live Mesh clients for Mac and mobile devices, but right now Live Mesh works only with Windows XP and Vista.

[via LiveSide]

There are plenty of Windows applications out there that will let you synchronize files across multiple folders. But there are a few things that set Allway Sync apart. First up, you can install Allway Sync on a flash drive to carry with you and use on multiple PCs. Second, Allway Sync is free for personal use and you're only required to pay for a license if you're a heavy user of if you feel like it. No one will ever make you pay, but the software is totally worth buying.

The latest version also adds support for synchronizing files with an FTP server or Amazon S3 storage. This makes Allway Sync a great little tool for backing up your files to offsite storage. The only problem is that there's no built-in scheduler. You have to initiate each sync job manually. If you're lazy and prefer automated backups, you might be better off with a utility like Jungle Disk. But the advantage of performing manual backups is that Allway Sync provides detailed information about each new, changed, or questionable file.

[via Ed Bott]

If you're like us, your hard drive is anything but tidy. That's because us power users can't be bothered to keep things organized - there are just too many awesome things out there to download, extract, and forget about because half of them turn out to be garbage.

FlexTK for Windows helps make short work of cleaning up after yourself, offering a full complement of file management tools in one handy package. Folder sync, duplicate file search, temp file cleanup, storage utilization, search, and an advanced organization module are all included. Navigation is handled beautifully in an explorer-like manner, tweaked by the addition of breadcrumbs and a "bookmarks" pane that allows you to quickly link your favorite locations.

Microsoft has announced plans to buy MobiComp, a Portuguese software company that develops applications for storing cellphone data online.

MobiComp's products allow you to perform over the air backups of your contacts, calendar, and other mobile data. The company's MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities software also lets you share and download content from social networks including Flickr and Hi5.

The acquisition is described as Microsoft's largest investment in Portugal. Nobody's saying exactly what Microsoft is planning to do with MobiComp's technology, but we'd say it's a safe bet that you could eventually see some sort of data backup/synchronization software for Windows Mobile devices, perhaps as part of the Windows Live suite of web-based services.

[via Electronista]

Google may have decided to cease development of the Google Browser Sync plugin for Firefox, but that doesn't mean the utility will never see another update. Because rather than simply boxing up the source code and packing it away, Google decided to release the source code publicly under the BSD license.

Google Browser Sync is a utility that lets you synchronize your Firefox bookmarks, preferences, and cookies across multiple computers.

Now anyone can check out the source from the Google Code project page. While nobody's done anything really cool yet like make a version of Google Browser Sync that works with Firefox 3, it may just be a matter of time.

One thing that's particularly interesting is the fact that Ars Technica reports Google posted the source code online on June 13, the same day that Lifehacker confirmed the death of the official project. It's not clear which came first, the chicken or the egg. But either way, we're not complaining. If Google isn't going to continue developing this useful utility, then we're just glad that someone else may be able to pick up the torch.