It is a cool new “Relationship Manager” that recently launched publicly in beta. Gist is not for casual users, rather, it’s a one-of-its-kind service for professional users that bridges key gaps between other popular services. For personal use, you should checkout Life.IO.

What is Gist?

Gist aims to help you control information overload by focusing on people and companies that are important to you. First, Gist gets information from your inbox and social networking accounts to build a database of your network. It then monitors the web for information about the people and companies in your network. Using the concept of “importance”, it then provides customizable views of people and companies, showing you news, blog posts, tweets, etc. for each of them. Your Dashboard becomes a “intelligent reader” thus giving you insight into critical updates that are important to you.

Get Started By Connecting Accounts

Gist allows you to connect a variety of sources using built-in business networking techniques to build your network database. At present, you can integrate your email from Outlook, Gmail or any service that supports IMAP. Your professional contacts can come from LinkedIn, Salesforce, or any CSV file. Note that Gist doesn’t connect with LinkedIn at present, hence you need to export and import your LinkedIn contacts.

Social networking contacts can be imported from Facebook and Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plug-in so that you can use it from within Outlook. To use Gist effectively, you will need to personalize it as described later in this article, but first let’s look at the powerful views Gist offers.

Dashboard View

The Dashboard is your top-level view to get all the news about your network. It is a RSS news feed reader, Twitter client, and Calendar rolled into one, with optional widgets showing shared links and attachments received in your email inbox.

You can customize the Dashboard to show Recent News, or news from people you’ve recently contacted or added. Information displayed can be filtered by date, content source, importance and tags. You can search to quickly find people, companies, attachments, or shared links.

You can also share any information item from your Dashboard to Facebook or Twitter. In this way, Gist goes beyond an “intelligent reader” to being a “intelligent networking” tool.

People and Companies View

The People and Companies tabs organize your contacts according to importance. It shows your email history and stats, the last time you were in contact, number of contacts from a company, and so on, for each person and company in your network.

You can search to find and manage contacts, or add new contacts manually. You can sort the view using any of the column headers, and use tags to filter the view. For each person or company, you can edit their names, add tags, and adjust their importance. You can merge duplicates, and use multi-select to perform bulk operations. Finally, you can instruct Gist whether to Watch a person or contact for news updates.

Profile View

Gist Profile pages are a central place to find out everything about the people and companies in your network. Gist scans your email accounts, calendars, contact databases such as LinkedIn, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to create unified profiles for each person or company. Gist is continuously searching for new information about your contacts even when you’re not using it.

The What’s New section pulls blog posts, tweets, and news from thousands of sources with sharing and filtering tools. You can flag items, mark them as read, share items via email, Facebook, or Twitter, or dismiss them as not relevant. The right-hand side shows searchable widgets such as aggregated conversations, shared links and attachments. Shared Contacts shows related people with links to their profiles. There is even a Google Search widget pre-populated with search results that can be customized with your own search term.

Profile information can be manually edited and updated. If the Gist profile doesn’t have it already, you can add a relevant image, website, phone number, address, and tags. The best way to organize your contacts is to use tags. Finally, a cool Dossier feature provides a printable version of a profile that you can use before meeting or communicating with a person.

Optimize To Get The Most Out Of Gist

After initially building your Gist contacts network, I recommend that you spend some time tweaking it for your needs. I found this necessary because:

• Gist may not recognize that the person from your LinkedIn network and your friend on Facebook are the same person. In these cases, you will need to Merge them.
• Similarly, Gist may not correctly associate Twitter handles with the contacts from your email inbox.
• Gmail has a rather unconventional approach of adding every email address you send email to, as a contact. To my dismay, this doesn’t work well with Gist, which imports all Gmail contacts. I ended up deleting tons of frivolous help@…, support@…, and info@… kind of “contacts”.
• You may not have had much interaction with influential people who are actually important to you. It appears that Gist’s ranking uses frequency of communication as a benchmark to assess importance, because of which you may need to manually adjust their importance.
• If your Facebook friends are primarily personal friends who work at companies that don’t really matter to you, you will need to either delete or lower their importance in Gist.
• Also, profiles may need to be edited to add individual websites, blog feeds and news sources so that you get relevant information.

Are you excited about Gist using as an intelligent networking tool? Did you like the post? Tell us in the comments!

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Thankfully, there are a growing number of ways to use the internet to create, share and use your business card. Using these services, you can send your card to others, get contact information in your email (where all your contacts are anyway), and have the business card work with your existing address books, which are increasingly online.

Although there are many, here are five ways to bring your business card into the 2.0 World.

Retaggr

Retaggr is a business card, an “about me” page, and a signature to add to emails, blog posts, and anything else you can think of. When you create a card, you can embed it into emails, paste it onto your blog, or send it to someone. It’s a great tool for connecting with other people, and is very social-network heavy.

Retaggr lets you link to your profiles (on hundreds of sites), so you can find friends all over the Web. For more information, check out Kyle’s great article about Retaggr.

Dropcard

The thing I love about Dropcard is that it’s dead easy to use. While it doesn’t have any unique features to speak of, its delivery system is what makes it so great. When you meet someone, you send Dropcard a text saying “drop theperson’semail@theirdomain” and Dropcard sends all your contact information to their email. Most of us use contacts and email in the same location anyway, and Dropcard knows that.

There’s an iPhone version, lots of keyboard shortcuts, and a number of other great features. Another nice touch – you can have two different cards, a business card and a personal card. Customize them however you want, and give people only the information you want to.

Nuebbo

Nuebbo is a fully-featured contact manager, but also works great for giving people your personal information. You can import contacts from Google, Outlook or Windows Live Mail, and then send your contact information to others. Create one card or many, and send them to other people. Cards can be organized into categories, updated automatically by Nuebbo, and even downloaded as Points of Interest on your GPS (an unnecessary, but cool touch).

If you want a full address book, and not just a business card, Nuebbo’s a great one to try out. If you’re just looking for a simple business card to send to people, Nuebbo’s good, but not the best of the group.

Handshake

This one’s iPhone-specific, but deserves a mention. On your iPhone, boot Handshake. The application lets you send a business card or a picture to anyone else using the Handshake application, with the touch of a button. It’s a great way to exchange contact information with someone, right when you meet them.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see an application like this for the Blackberry or Windows Mobile in the near future.  For now though, if you meet a fellow iPhone user, a simple Handshake is all it takes to exchange your contact information.

Plaxo

Plaxo remains the gold standard online contact-manager. Plaxo syncs with Outlook, Google, Yahoo and others, automatically updates contacts’ information, has an integrated task list, and keeps everyone in contact.

Sending your card is easy, and it works really well. Plaxo even has a FriendFeed-like feature called “Pulse”, where you can see what your contacts are doing around the Web. Actually, ‘Friendfeed-like’ is a misnomer, because Plaxo did it first. Plaxo’s a great utility, and becomes unbeatable when all your contacts use it.

No longer is the business card a tiny, index card-like thing you put in your wallet, sit on for a while, try to find, and painstakingly enter onto your computer. With any of the services above, bring your business card to the Web, and make the sharing of contact information even easier.

You do everything else online, right? Why not your business card?

How do you manage your contacts and business cards? Online or on paper?

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So what makes Zenbe different? There are a lot of things, but here are the highlights.

First, Zenbe helps you centralize. Bring all your emails in one. It helps you cut down on your account clutter by bringing together in one window your email, task lists, files, and calendar. You can also use Zenbe to manage all your email addresses. It allows you to send from any email address and downloads outside email messages via POP.

Second, Zenbe has awesome features. What other email client do you know of that allows you to use Twitter and check your Facebook updates while reading your latest email? That’s just the beginning, though. Zenbe has a full featured calendar that includes support for iCal subscriptions, and, unlike some competitors (*cough* Google *cough*), the developers included task lists.

The file view is awesome, too. It takes all your email attachments and makes them available in their own separate tab. You can search, tag, star, or sort them by file type. Audio and video files can be played right in your browser, and images can be previewed in a neat lightbox.

In addition, Zenbe has partnered with Scribd for document previewing, so you can view documents without downloading them to your computer. You no longer have to email files to yourself, either, since Zenbe lets you upload files without emailing them. With 4GB of storage, there is plenty of space to use Zenbe as a repository for your important documents and media.

I’ve mentioned only some of Zenbe’s features. There are many more, and everything – from the contact manager to the tagging system – is innovative.

The best part about Zenbe, though, is that it’s still evolving. While other email providers will go months without any updates, Zenbe is constantly adding new features. For example, the Zenbe team is currently testing a unique conversation view, as well as an innovative “favorites inbox” that shows you emails from the people you care about most.

Zenbe really does have some of the best features I’ve seen in an email client. It incorporates them in an elegant way, too, so you aren’t overwhelmed with clutter.

What about you? What features would you like to see in the inbox of the future? Let us know in the comments.

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Why do you need to use this? Well if you need to use contacts in more than one program or service (like email, IM, Skype, or others) or use a desktop app and need it on more than one computer, it’s difficult or even impossible to automatically keep everything in sync. The solution that iContact proposes is to have Gmail contacts as your central repository for everything having to do with people you know. When you need to look up one of them, instead of opening a full browser you open this small stand-alone contact manager to find or search for the person you want. It keeps everything in the cloud in your Gmail contacts, so they’ll still be available on any device with internet access and a decent web browser.

To get iContact, you can download it as a zip file with a portable executable and accompanying files, or an msi installer package (although the msi doesn’t seem to do anything special except extract the files and create a shortcut…um, I guess it’s good for people who don’t have unzip software?) and then run the executable.

Enter your Gmail credentials (if you’re using an @gmail.com account, you can just enter your username; if you’re a Google Apps user, enter the full email address, i.e. your_name@your_domain.com), and then watch as it loads your contacts. Certainly a lot faster than opening a web browser, signing into Gmail and navigating to the contacts!

You can edit your contacts by selecting one and clicking ‘edit’ at the bottom, add or remove contacts by clicking the (+) or (X) buttons, and all changes you make are made directly to your online Gmail contacts. I noticed, however, that if you modify your contacts in iContact, it won’t show up in Gmail until you refresh the page. The reverse is true for anything you do in Gmail, you have to sign out and sign back in to iContact in order to show the changes.

When you click a contact, you can then do a few things. If you have their email address stored, you can click the email category next to the address (Home, Work or Other) and click ‘Send Mail’ to open your default mail program and begin a new message to that address. For phone number, click the category (Home, Work, Mobile, Other, etc.) and you can choose ‘Call with Skype’ or display in large text. For addresses you can drop down the category and choose ‘Show Map’ to map it on Google Maps, and for any piece of information you can click ‘Copy’ to copy it to your clipboard. This solves the problem of having a separate contacts list in every program!

iContact currently doesn’t work with contact groups (in Gmail/Google Apps you can add contacts to a group, enter the name of the group in the To: field when writing an email, and send to all addresses in the group at once).

Also, unlike the Gmail contacts manager, there are no “actual contacts” and “suggested contacts” for people who you’ve communicated with but haven’t explicitly added as contacts. They all just show up in the same list.

These limitations aside, iContact does its job well. It’s certainly a convenience for people who use a desktop mail or chat client (especially Skype) and who wants all their contact information in one place without having to sync.

[rating=3]

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What you can do with Sendible

With Sendible you can schedule messages to be sent at any time, down to the minute, and I’m not just talking about email here. SMS, Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and Twitter are the services available and all work without fail. The services are completely new so you will probably see some development in this area but the list is already impressive.

Sendible comes with a contact management system too. The options here are pretty basic (edit, send email and delete), but sufficient for me at least. When you send an email to a contact you do not have in your list yet, the application asks you if you want to add him/her, you just type the name and it’s added, no fuss, smoothly implemented.

My favorite features however are the news feed and calendar. Both essentially show the same information in a different format. The news feed shows all the upcoming events in feed style, chronologically, with the closest first. The calendar shows all your activity in a calendar style and does it pretty well. But I do see some problems which will deter people from using it regularly, especially after Google Calendar.

When you look at the calendar all you see about an event is the time and type – you see nothing about the message body. If you click the event you will get a pop up box which shows all there is to see. This is an elegant way of showing events but I think that showing at least some of the message body in the preview would have been nice.

You can also do some advertising with Sendible. I have quite ambivalent feelings here, so I’ll just tell you about it and you can share your comments. Sendible is monetized by giving you the option to put ads below your messages. You can create some ads and when you send out any email they will be slapped on and sent to the recipient as well. Each ad costs one credit, so every time you send an email your credits are reduced by one. You start with 5 free credits and can buy more for a few dollars. 100 costs $12 and 500 costs $40 for example. This can be a cool way of advertising, but I am not a huge fan of email ads, so I don’t really know what to think of this. For some people this will be a nice feature, for me it’s something I’ll never use.

How you can use Sendible

At the most basic level you can use the app to send emails to your friends, family, Orkut, Myspace and so on so you don’t forget to send a birthday email for example. If someone asks you to get back to them in 6 weeks you can write the email now, schedule it, and just forget about it. I’ve actually had some of this happen to me recently and Sendible would be a great way to remember these things. You can opt to receive notifications when the email is actually sent, so you will be prepared for an answer. This feature allows you to forget about many things without any negative effects, so in a sense it’s a bit like GTD.

You can use Sendible for much more than that though. Just as you can use Sandy as your personal assistant, you can use Sendible to manage some of your tasks for you. Sending messages to people can be a part of that, but you can also send messages to yourself for reminders, to do lists, daily tasks and so on.

The one feature that can provide the most assistance here is the option to send recurring messages. If you have to take the garbage out every Tuesday or your wife will kill you, just schedule yourself an email for 10:00 every Tuesday and you can put a stop to all the killing. If you write a lot of posts to multiple blogs you can send email reminders to yourself each day about which blog you have to write to on that day. The people at Sendible thought about this in advance, since there are message sending options and reminder options. Messages can be sent to other people (although you can send yourself one too), while reminders are the same thing essentially, but the “to:” field is omitted, it will be sent to you by default.

Since there are contact and contact group options, you can actually quite effectively use Sendible for team management as well. Shoot out tasks on different dates to your employees, remind them of tasks, ask for a report automatically in advance for the next 15 years. There have been some more advanced calendar sharing options requested for example which will add to this and event management is already in the works which is another plus.

Is Sendible worth the time?

What you can see in Mark’s Sandy article holds up here too. Sendible is a fast and effective way to work, but in the end it’s only a bot we’re talking about. However I didn’t get too much of the actual feeling of that here. Sandy is positioned so that you feel like she’s real, when in reality you know she’s not so the positioning utterly fails. Sendible however never intends to substitute your personal assistant, so perhaps your expectations are lower. But for me, Sendible seems much better so far even though the options are more limited right now.

There is definitely work to be done, adding task addition by email, maybe even Launchy for example, task listings, and so on. But I think things are shaping up pretty nicely. For me Sendible is worth the time, and I would guess that many of you who have scheduling problems will feel the same way.

“Daniel changes his signature lines all the time because although he has a blog about organization, Hack Your Day, he can be a bit all over the place at times. He also has a Blog management service called Blogtastique which helps newbie and pro bloggers in anything they need.”

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I am all for configuring OS options, digging into the roots and so on, but I want to do this to make it look good, go faster or do some extra stuff, not to make it actually work. I now do not use any illegal software whatsoever and I’m not really missing any of them. What Windows software is there to miss that I used a lot?

Office

I used MS Office although with the dawn of AJAX and fancy new technology I use online word processing more. Open Office is also a great alternative although Excel is very hard to beat.

I also used Microsoft’s OneNote and as note organizers go, I have never found a really suitable alternative. With Linux I found it after about 5 minutes of searching. Basket Notes is a very capable replacement with possibly less features but the basic idea is the same.

There was also a time I used Evernote, although I didn’t like it very much. If you want to take notes on Ubuntu I don’t think Tomboy is beatable. I don’t think actually any Windows application beats it either, it’s just phenomenal. The interlinking wiki style goodness and simplicity is just awesome. Mackenzie mentioned it earlier as well.

Graphics

Photoshop was an application I used quite a lot to edit some pics for my own blog, but GIMP has replaced it totally. I always had something against GIMP, but maybe I used an older version because it is easy to use and can do everything I require of it. The navigation differs a bit from Photoshop which took some time to get used to, but the learning curve isn’t steep at all.

Desktop

I always liked having multiple desktops and I used various ways on Vista to get what I need. I created separate user accounts for different tasks, tried software VirtualWin, but since Windows isn’t really built for a multiple desktop environment all of these methods had problems. Enter Ubuntu 7.10 with all these features virtually built in. With Compiz already installed, all you need is a couple of downloads and you will be off to 3D goodness, with rotating cubes, wobbly windows and all the bells and whistles you need.

Email

Outlook is an industry standard software solution to email and task management and is actually very good at it. It is one of the best apps for Windows and I thought finding a replacement wouldn’t be easy. Well, there are numerous ways to replace your trusty Outlook. One of the best and most complete solutions is Evolution, which is really an Outlook clone with a lot of the same functionality.

I actually switched to a fully online based email management system but I wanted to keep a separate contact manager. Rubrica Address Book was my application of choice. It’s just a simple, but effective task manager with a unique tab-based approach to task management. Another application I used in Windows was Gmail Notifier, which is officially not available for Linux, but clever people have written an application which does exactly the same. Take a look at the Linux based Gmail Notifier.

Stay tuned for the next part of the article where I will be covering media players, torrent clients and other apps.

(By) Daniel, who needs to learn to write well, manage a blog and learn how this internet thing works but otherwise is a really great blogger. You can read his personal blog or his productivity blog if you dare!

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The Series of Tubes*

We all use the internet. I’m sure anyone reading this has also heard of Firefox but do you know about all the others? Konqueror is a nice browser based on the KHTML rendering engine, the same great engine Safari and WebKit use, which means it supports a few things (like drop-shadows on text) which no other browsers do. Then there’s Epiphany, which will display pages the same way Firefox does, but which fits the look ‘n feel of GNOME environments a bit better than Firefox 2.0 does (Firefox 3, however, fits very well). There are also lightweight browsers like Kazehakase you might like. Firefox is by far the most extensible, though.

Instant Messaging

For text-based instant messaging, nothing beats Pidgin’s flexibility. It can handle AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, Gadu-Gadu, QQ, SIMPLE, Bonjour, Novell Groupwise, XMPP and Google Talk (aka Jabber), Zephyr, Sametime, and even MySpaceIM. If you haven’t heard of half of those anywhere else, I’m with you, but from what I’ve heard it seems they are each varyingly popular in different parts of the world. As with OpenOffice, it’s cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux), so transitioning can be easy. The Mac OSX version is called Adium. If you want to add voice or video chat capability, Skype 2.0 for Linux does have video support (older versions did not).

Kopete can also do voice/video on many protocols, while aMSN is a very close clone to Microsoft’s MSN. Yahoo and AOL have also both made native Linux versions of their software available. Finally, there are SIP phones, such as Ekiga and OpenWengo. OpenWengo is available for OSX and Windows too, so you can try that out without switching as well.

Staying Organized

Mozilla’s mail client, Thunderbird is, like the Firefox it’s built upon, available on pretty much everything. It’s not only an email client, but a newsreader as well. Like Firefox, there are plenty of extensions available to add extra functionality. If your office requires that you be able to reach Exchange to get your mail, Evolution may be what you need.

It can use the Exchange web interface as a backend. Evolution and Thunderbird both have built-in address books, and Evolution has a calendar. Evolution is GNOME’s built-in PIM or groupware. To add a calendar to Thunderbird, just install its extension, Lightning.

One thing I really do have to give Apple credit for is their suite of tools: iCal, Mail, and Address Book. These three applications share a backend so that they can all access each others’ data, so you can use names from Address Book in both Mail and iCal. I really like how they are separate but integrated, instead of being monolithic like Evolution. KDE has a similar suite, KDEPIM, which you can access as if it was a monolithic app through Kontact or as its individual parts, KAddressBook, KMail, and KOrganizer (the calendar). The advantage is that you can run one at a time. If you’re like me and like running separate programs for separate tasks, you might like Mozilla Sunbird. GMail and Google Calendar also can cover this territory while letting you keep your calendars nicely synced wherever you go.

Students

For students, Tomboy is a wonderful little note-taking app. It behaves like a wiki, allowing you to link your notes together, so looking up keywords becomes easy. You can also see what notes refer to the one you are on, since that is tracked as well. There are even options to export notes to HTML and sync your notes between different computers.

As of the latest release, notes can be organized into separate notebooks, so your History notes aren’t mixed in with Discrete Math.

BasKet is a similar program with a bit more flexibility on the layout of notes. While Tomboy is aimed at pure simplicity, BasKet goes full-stop to provide all the features you could think of, making it a good replacement for OneNote.

In my team project development class, my team’s lead has been using a program called Planner. I haven’t used it much, but from watching her use it, it seems to be just the thing for project management. There are a few different views available, but perhaps the most useful one is the Gantt Chart, which lets you map out what tasks need to be completed, their subtasks, and how long that will all likely take to get a reasonable timeline for the project. Tasks can be assigned to team members, and you can monitor what percent of each task has been done to adjust your time frame accordingly. It can also track resource usage. There’s probably more I haven’t noticed, but all I’ve done is look over her shoulder and poke at it a few times.

* If you don’t know about the series of tubes, please refer to this episode of the Daily Show wherein US Sen. Ted Stevens, head of the Senate Commerce Committee (the guys that regulate internet commerce laws in the US), described the internet as a series of tubes.

Mackenzie is a college student who likes to promote Linux and Free/Libre Software. Most of her free time is spent on the computer, helping new users, or hanging out with some of the friends she’s made in the Linux community. Check out her blog, Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks.

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(1) Mobical – Simple and straightforward over-the-air mobile backup and restore service to automatically backup mobile address book, calendar, settings, bookmarks and notes online. Mobical supports pretty much all modern handsets and can be accessed from any web-enabled device. You can edit contacts, add appointments, and save notes online and it will sync added changes with your handset. Similarly, all on-phone edits will be synced with the web copy. Simple and convenient.

More details @ Mobical: Backup Mobile Contacts and Calendar

(2) Bloove – Online mobile contact manager and backup tool. Edit address book contacts, add speed dial settings, make calls, and send SMS messages rite from your browser. Any changes made on the web are automatically synchronized with your mobile and vice versa. Supports only Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. It’s also quite low on data usage and consumes only about 20 Kbytes per hour in idle mode.

More details @ Bloove: Contact Manager for Your Mobile

(3) ZYB – ZYB provides an easy way to backup and synchronize your mobile phone’s contacts, pictures, text messages and calendar events online. Unlike the above two, ZYB is a mobile networking platform that allows you to connect with friends, share pictures, exchange free messages, and follow-up on updates rite from mobile.

More details @ ZYB : BackUp Your Mobile Online

(4) Anywr – Anywr is a web-based contact manager and calendar that offers free contacts and calendar backup functionality. Plus you can use to import contacts from your Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts and sync them with your phone’s address book. For fulll feature list check out Anywr review on MUO directory.

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FBLook (for FaceBook)

One of the two new products (still in alpha) from Outlook extension developer TechHit. FBLook (Facebook + Outlook) is a simple toolbar add-on that integrates two key factors, (1) changing your “Status” and (2) notifications for friend requests, messages, pokes and more.

OutTwit (for Twitter)

OutTwit (Outlook + Twitter) is a little more robust than FBLook. With OutTwit you can update your Twitter status, receive friend updates, check messages, assign categories to messages, shorten URLs with TinyURL and archive/search your messages.

Next, let’s move onto the the little more robust and advanced Outlook add-ons.

LinkedIn – Outlook Toolbar

The first from LinkedIn is a toolbar, but it heavily integrates with Outlook. The simple and advanced features include; updating your Outlook contacts with LinkedIn profile information, receive notifications of profile changes, one click invites, mini-profiles in the emails, updates for your “network” and more. If you really use LinkedIn and have Outlook this is a must have.

Plaxo – Outlook Add-on

Similar Outlook add-on comes from Plaxo. Plaxo actually has slight integration with LinkedIn and you are easily able to add your LinkedIn friends to Plaxo, so it’s all a matter of which you prefer (or both). With Plaxo’s new Outlook add-on with Pulse, the new “social stream”, which integrates your “Connection’s” streams from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, etc., makes Outlook your ultimate source for following your friends and news. Like LinkedIn’s add-on, it keeps your address book up to date, but Plaxo’s also syncs your calendar, tasks and notes. This could come in handy to synchronize multiple Outlooks or even multiple calendars, like Yahoo or Google.

Xobni

Xobni, which is still in private beta, but has released plenty of more invites, is a social Outlook add-on without a social network behind it. I’ve been using Xobni for several months now and I love the integration and search functions. Any email I click on, Xobni will bring up:

• nr.of emails that were sent and received from the email address (which determines their rank)
• list of all email conversations (better than Gmail)
• a list of all the attachments for the person
• broken down timelines of when I usually send/receive emails to/from that person
• automatically pulls the phone number from an email
• and the best feature is the almost instantaneous search function.

You can sign up now for an invite here.

FreeConference

Finally, I have to schedule conference calls several times a week. FreeConference, is the simplest and quickest way to setup a free conference call. There are paid options, but I’ve never used them. Just recently they updated their offerings with an Outlook add-on that is literally 3 clicks away from within Outlook to setup a conference call. Clicking “Schedule a Conference” brings up a Calendar Appointment with all the details, select your invitees, and hit send. All the information is automatically included with the calendar appointment.

I love Outlook and I love integration, is there something else out there for free I should be using?

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Here’s my list of some of the popular and most anticipated Web 2.0 sites that are still in private beta, but already have a pretty large following!

	Hulu is probably the one site I’ve heard the most about lately and that looks to have the most promise. Imagine being able to watch any of the most popular TV shows online for free including Heroes, Bones, 24, and the late night shows also! Plus all of the shows are in pretty good quality. It’s video on demand plus video sharing. It will also include shows from Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance, etc
	Jooce is another very cool looking service that will help bring the desktop to the web, also called a web operating system. Basically, it’ll look just like your local desktop, but all of the processing, software installation, etc will take place on the server, thus freeing your local computer resources. As of right now, they have an IM client, file uploader, file sharing features and a few media players. Eventually, though, it will have photo editing apps, and office suite, and more! Jooce came out of private beat only couple of days ago.
	Adobe Cocomo is are components being developed by Adobe that will allow for real-time collaboration across web apps. If you haven’t played around with Adobe Buzzword, definitely check it out because Cocomo will add cool features to that such as real-time chat while you write documents and a shares real-time whiteboard.
	Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that aggregates all of your inbound and outbound activity online and manages it in one place. Other services like this are Tumblr and FriendFeed. It’s like an RSS reader and a social network rolled into one product. As more information is gathered from your online activity, a fuller profile is created.
	Xobni takes the effort out of organizing, searching, and navigating your email. It extends your IM (MSN, AIM, etc.) program and email client (Microsoft Outlook, etc.) by adding additional sidebar menu. View sender profile for each email (contact details, phone nr., social networking profiles, sent attachments, etc.), threaded conversations, extremely quick search, and more. [Video Demo]

Are you looking out for some other site to come out of private betta that you think will be even better? Go ahead and post a comment to let us know!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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