OpenID is a really great concept. The ability to use a single digital identity across the web and avoid having to sign up for yet another user account is a real productivity boon. More and more high profile sites and services are adopting OpenID, but the project still hasn't gained the traction that many of us think it deserves. This is partially because it still isn't easy to use OpenID -- or even find out if a site supports OpenID -- on all services. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop think they've come across a solution: let the browser handle it.

Back in June, MySpace announced support for OpenID and also became an OpenID provider. In order to help users more easily manage their online identity across other sites and services, MySpace teamed up with Flock and Vidoop to create OpenID for Flock, available today at https://extensions.flock.com. OpenID for Flock is an open source plugin, part of the larger Identity in the Browser (IDIB) project which is focused on having the browser, not the user handle, authenticate and mange multiple user identities.

I had the chance to demo the plugin yesterday and it is pretty cool. Essentially, once installed an OpenID icon appears on the right of Flock's chrome bar. The extension scans a page for OpenID compatibility, and if a site supports OpenID, the icon starts to glow. You can then automatically choose to populate the OpenID fields with your designated OpenID URL or associate that site with a specific OpenID account. You can manage all of your OpenIDs, choose what sites to associate certain profiles with and view the login history and OpenID-to-site-relationship with each site.

First off, let me clarify: I'm not saying that StumbleUpon isn't a very complex, smartly built addon. It's just that I don't go stumbling off to a (somewhat) randomly selected site all the time. Sometimes I'd like walk a path that has been trodden by others searching for the same things I am.

Fast Forward by BuzzBox is an excellent alternative, suggesting possible destinations based on where other surfers clicked through. The addon installs as both a drop-down menu in the main toolbar and as a simple button in the status bar.

The dropdown presents the top destinations for you to choose from, while the status bar icon zips you off to the most popular one with a single click. Two other nice features of Fast Forward are its small size (the .xpi is only 69kb) and the fact that no registration is required.

There is a privacy policy that you may want to read - this is, after all, a recommendation engine and it needs to gather information about your browsing. According to the policy, "BuzzBox does not attempt to determine the identity of any BuzzBox user by analyzing Web usage paths. "

With only 245 total downloads from Mozilla's site, it's going to take a little while before you start seeing suggestions on every site you visit, but Fast Forward has tons of potential and is well worth a download.

[ via TechCrunch ]

If you know someone on your gift list is getting a camera or is a new shutterbug, you might want to consider getting them a "pro" photo sharing account where they can upload all their new photos. This is a nice gift for several reasons: 1. A pro account is a must have since most free accounts have a storage limit that the average photographer will easily exceed. 2. Pro accounts are ad free. 3. Pro accounts have more features and allow the upload of larger file sizes. 4. As the giver of the account, it stands to reason you might be given access to your shutterbug's photostream, although, it's equally possible you might not.

Here are my top picks for investing in a pro account. (Many thanks to our readers for enthusiastically recommending Smugmug).

Until about 15 minutes ago I was a big Digsby fan. When I fired up the installer on my clean Vista x64 machine today, I was greeted with an unpleasant sight.

First off, you don't even download the actual installer from Digsby.com anymore - it's a downloader application. While I'm not a fan of downloaders in general, this one in particular got me all riled up.

Apart from half a dozen crapware install offers, the final screen before anything actually happened asked to change my homepage and switch my default search provider to Yahoo. I'm all for supporting an app, but this was more than I'm willing to tolerate from an installer.

Are you kidding me? Digsby, tell me you're kidding. Looks like it's time for me to give Pidgin another try.

What about you? Are you willing to put up with skipping over the crapware so that you can still install the latest version of Digsby? Sound off!

Everybody says there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but sometimes a ridiculous Twitter app comes along to make me wonder whether that's true. Right now there are two of them: Tweetstalk and Twollow. Tweetstalk lets you "stalk" a Twitter user, reading his or her tweets without formally following. Twollow automatically follows anybody who posts the keywords you specify.

I'm conflicted about these two services. Tweetstalk is a Firefox plugin that adds a "stalk" button next to the follow button on users' Twitter pages: click it to subscribe to their tweets without following them. This doesn't do anything you can't do by going to a user's Twitter page and reading it. But if you intend to do it on an ongoing basis, you might as well let him or her know you're doing it by following.

Twollow could be useful for business Twitter accounts, and marketers who want to reach out to people who are discussing their clients. Depersonalizing it by making it automatic hardly seems productive to me, though. Why not use search.twitter.com to see who's talking about a topic, and decide whether to follow them yourself? Otherwise, you might end up following some really lame people, based on only one of their tweets.

If you've been to a tech event since SXSW in 2006, you've probably seen some kind of large monitor displaying info from the conference-goers. Often, this means Twitter tweets by attendees. Brightkite has just taken this a step further, with their own "Wall" feature. Because Brightkite is a location-based service to begin with, the wall has a built-in way to gather data. This means the usefulness of the wall isn't limited to events: you can just display it in any place (like a coffee shop, for example) and show all the people who are posting messages nearby.

I love the Brightkite Wall. It could turn out to be a brilliant way to show new users what the service is all about, as well as making an interesting public installation. It also opens up Brightkite to people who don't even have Brightkite accounts: you can put the appropriate location at the top of the wall, next to the Brightkite shortcode, and anyone can text a message onto the wall via SMS.

Xobni is a plugin for Outlook that adds advanced search and social functions to the email client. When we last looked at Xobni, the service indexed your email messages and created personal profiles for each of your contacts by automatically extracing phone numbers and loking users up on LinkedIn. Now Xobni has rolled out an update that adds integration with Skype, Facebook, Hoovers, and Yahoo! Mail.

Here's how it works. You can search for email using the Xobni sidebar. When you click on a message, Xobni will pull up information about the sender, including information from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Hoovers. If your contact's Skype profile or phone number are available, you can also initiate a call with the click of a button.

In addition to searching your Outlook mail, you can also have Xobni index your Yahoo! Mail, although in order to reply to messages you'll need to login to the Yahoo! Mail web interface.

On Sunday, Business Week published an article stating "It's the end of instant messaging as we know it." In columnist Douglas MacMillan's mind, integrated chat features on sites like Facebook and GMail have signed the death warrant.

Oh really? That's kind of interesting, because there's a lot of evidence that IM is alive and kicking.

Taking a quick look at some stats on Download.com, I notice that these apps still seem to be pretty damn popular. Pidgin has more than half a million downloads to date. Since Trillian was added to the site, it's been downloaded almost 37 million times.

The latest release of Live Messenger 14 is well over 400,000 in just two months - and these numbers don't take into account the numerous other mirrors for these (and numerous other IM) apps.

For years, the president of the United States has delivered a weekly radio address to the nation. President-elect Barack Obama plans to be the first to videotape that weekly address and post it on YouTube.

The move shouldn't come as a huge surprise. The Obama campaign used new media tools like Twitter, YouTube, and text messaging as a key part of its effort over the past two years. But it's a bit silly to point out that Obama will be the first president to use YouTube in this way, as Obama's transition team is trying to do. The video sharing site didn't exist when President George W. Bush was running for office. So all it really means is that President Bush didn't use YouTube.

While Obama won't be sworn in as president until January, he has started to deliver the weekly Democratic Party radio address, which will also be videotaped and uploaded to YouTube and to Change.gov.

[via Mashable]

OpenID is a great concept. Consolidating your online identity across multiple sites and services is convenient, and arguably offers security benefits. So why do some sites make it such a pain in the butt to use? If you support OpenID on your site, and make it as easy as possible for your users to log in, check out ID Selector.

ID Selector helps you set up a customizable OpenID picker, so your users can quickly get an OpenID or choose one they've already set up. It doesn't require any fiddling with your existing login form, it "just works." The best part is that your users only have to pick an OpenID provider once. When they return afterward, they can just log in with one click. Neat!

EventBox is an OS X desktop app that lets you watch activity on the various social networking apps you use, from one convenient window. Right now, it supports Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Pownce, Reddit and rss feeds. You can view everything in your stream, including photos, from within EventBox.

If you're completely addicted to your information stream, and you want to see it all in one place, EventBox might be worth the $20 pricetag. The UI looks fantastic, and the app features the all-important Growl support. Apparently a HUD mode is coming soon (think Twitterrific), which will make the app's footprint on your screen smaller. You might not be interested in what EventBox has to offer if you're not very active on social networks, but if you're looking for this kind of app, EventBox gets it right.

Twuffer is a site that lets you keep a buffer of Twitter posts that will go up at times you schedule. Twitter plus buffer equals Twuffer, get it? In theory, this is a pretty good idea if you're someone who needs to make periodic announcements or post reminders at intervals. The thing is, I don't think the majority of Twitter users could do that without being annoying.

Twitter is starting to become more mainstream now, but the biggest complaint people have about companies and celebrities starting to use the service is that they come of as inhuman. Pre-writing your tweets only makes you seem more mechanical. Twuffer could be excellent if you use it on an account that only you follow, to post reminders to yourself. There are already services that do this, but Twuffer might be faster to set up.

I could be completely underestimating this service, though. The site suggests a few ways to use Twuffer, but if you have an idea about how it could be effective on someone's main account, let me know in the comments.

When it comes to potential new features for Twitter, the Japanese version has always been a testing ground. For example, Twitter in Japan is supported by ads, which haven't hit the US yet (and nobody seems sure if they ever will!). While I'm just fine using Twitter without ads, we'd love to see an English version of Twicco, which basically adds group support to Twitter. You can test it out for yourself already, if you know Japanese or use something like Google Translate.

On Twicco, you can create a group account, and members can post messages that will then be distributed to the account's followers. The idea of a community account seems to add a lot to Twitter, especially for people whose normal accounts mix business and personal posts. Businesses could also benefit from using a community to open up a dialogue with their customers. That way, the rest of us don't have to read the ' tech support discussions and feature requests our friends are sending to companies as @replies: they can post them to the company community instead.

VoxOx is one of those applications that does so many things that the easiest way to describe it is by listing some of the tools it can replace: AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, whatever email and social networking notifiers you use. In other words, it's like Digsby. But with support for video chat and VoIP calls to telephones. Oh yeah, and VoxOx automatically assigns all new users a phone number which people can dial to reach you on your computer.

VoxOx is currently in beta, with clients available for Windows and OS X. Linux and mobile clients are coming soon. And right now some of the services listed in VoxOx are unavailable. For examle, you can link the client to your Yahoo! Mail account to receive a pop up message every time you get a new email. But when you click the button to do the same thing with Gmail, nothing happens.

One of the most interesting things about VoxOx is the company's business model. You can do text chats with anyone for free. You can make free voice or video calls to anyone using VoxOx. And when you sign up you get 120 minutes of free calls to telephones. You can purchase credit for additional calls, or pay a monthly fee fro unlimited access. But every time you refer a friend to the service you get another 2 hours. And VoxOx will also soon add the ability for users to gain points by watching video ads.

If you're one of the first 500 Download Squad to register using our signup page, you'll get 1200 VoxOx Points which are good for 1200 domestic phone calls minutes of domestic US phone calls. Keep reading to find out how to get your bonus minutes.

If you've ever been in the situation of trying to make plans with a group of people who are all communicating via different methods (SMS, IM, email), then you know how much of a pain it is to keep track of what everyone is doing. Notifu tries to make it easier, with a web app that can send messages to your friends via email, IM or text message, and let you know when they've received them.

On Notifu, you can set up a contact list, complete with groups. You can also set up polls, so your friends can text back a single number to indicate what they prefer to do, and Notifu will count them up for you. Notifu's developers are also very savvy about web platforms, with an iPhone web app available and an OpenSocial app in the works.