Songbeat is a desktop application for accessing web-based music search and discovery services including Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, and Last.fm without a web browser.

When you fire up the application you're greeted with a search box. Just type an artist or song title and Songbeat will attempt to find songs from the music search engines mentioned plus a few more. Or you can click on the Station tab and enter an artist or song title to launch a Last.fm audio stream.

Songbeat lets you listen to as many songs as you want for free. But you can also use the program to download music or record audio from Last.fm. Once you hit 25 downloads, you'll have to pony up some cash to keep downloading the free music. A full license costs 19,99 Euros or $29.99 US.

There are a few kinks to be worked out. While I found the search and playback features worked fairly well, once I tried recording an audio track Songbeat went hog wild and started downloading a bunch of songs I hadn't asked for. In a matter of minutes all of my 25 free downloads were used up.

[via TechCrunch]

Do you still use your Pownce account? I stopped using mine months ago. I don't even know if I remember the password. If you do still use Pownce, the Twitter-like microblogging service that just never seemed to capitalize on its early hype, start preparing to migrate to something new. Today, Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, announced that it has acquired Pownce and will be shuttering the service in two weeks. Lead Pownce developers Leah Culver and Mike Malone will continue on at Six Apart, where presumably some of Pownce's features will be rolled into Vox.

Hey, at least there is Twitter! Seriously though, Pownce's failure is proof that hype alone will not make a product or company a success. As our own Nik Fletcher pointed out, Pownce is the perfect example of how NOT having a useful API at launch or soon thereafter is a huge mistake. Especially if you are trying to do the whole microblogging thing.

Not to get all Valleywag, but didn't Six Apart just lay off 8% of its staff, like three weeks ago? I don't know the particulars of either situation -- but simply on the surface, that's cold. Did something miraculously change or was this part of the plan the whole time?

If you are worried about losing your messages once Pownce powers down its service, the Pownce team has created an export tool which will generate a file (I'm guess its XML. I haven't had a chance to look at it) that can then be imported into Vox, WordPress or TypePad.

Fittingly, the discussion of Pownce's demise is much more active on Twitter and Friendfeed than on Pownce itself.

Gladinet is a new Windows utility that aims to help bridge the divide between desktop and web-based applications and storage. Here's how it works. You install the free (at least while in Beta) Gladinet utility and select the web based services and applications that you want to access locally. For example, you can mount your Windows Live SkyDrive or Amazon S3 Storage as a local drive that you can access using Windows Explorer.

You can also mount your Google Picasa Web Albums and Google Docs folders as if they were local folders, allowing you to upload, download, and access documents and images stored on Google's servers as if they were on your desktop.

But the ability to mount remote storage as a local folder is just the tip of the iceberg. You can also use Gladinet to launch web based applications like Google Docs, Google Calendar, or ThinkFree Doc, XLS, or PPT viewers in a standalone window as if they were desktop apps.

Last, but certainly not least, you can use Gladinet to mount folders on remote computers as local folders.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

gOS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that's designed to make it easy to interface with web-based applications like Gmail, YouTube, and Meebo. It uses the slightly OS X-like Enlightenment desktop environment, and the developers have been pushing it as a good operating system for low powered netbooks, thanks to its integration with web applications.

The latest version of gOS goes a few steps further, by emphasizing the web browser above all else. gOS Cloud is a stripped down Linux distro that can load in just a few seconds. And instead of loading a typical desktop, the first window it opens is a web browser (which looks suspiciously like Google Chrome in the press shots).

You also get a dock-style program launcher for starting desktop applications. And the operating system is designed for dual boot systems that also run Windows XP. Good OS, the company behind the Linux distro are working with netbook makers Gigabyte to build an ultraportable laptop that will come preloaded with gOS Cloud and Windows XP in early 2009.

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.

Since Twitter decided to take care of the frequent outages that used to plague its servers, I've actually started using it here and there. It's a nice service, and definitely has useful applications. You've only got to look as far as sites like NowPublic and Twubble to see how the API can be put to good use.

However, there are a mountain of applications feeding off it and they're not all contenders for Best in Show. These five definitely are, but only if it's a show dedicated to sucking at Twitter API use.

Twitemperature
Finally, a service that can tell you how hot or cold you are on Twitter. Does anyone actually need this? I suppose there are people that think Twitter is like a web 2.0 popularity contest, but can't you look at your follower total and figure this out yourself?

I'd also like to know how their script works. Their "hottest" tweeter has 55 followers. The crowd has spoken, and 55 < hot. Also, his level of hotness is referred to as "volcanic" and features a picture of a guy holding Tabasco - arguably one of the least-hot hot sauces you can buy.

And no, I'm not just bitter because I'm only a few degrees above freezing.

Newsified is a simple, but brilliant, idea. Take your favorite social news sites, the ones you normally read on the web or through RSS, and lay them out like ... a newspaper. It's an old-school approach that actually proves really useful when it comes to deep sites like Metafilter and Digg. You only see a small percentage of the popular content on the front pages of these sites, but Newsified gives a broader view at a glance.

Newsified pages exist for 6 sites so far: Digg, Reddit, Metafilter, Mixx, Delicious and YouTube. It takes the most popular front-page content from those sites and puts it in a prominent position at the top of the page. Then, as you read down, you'll see the deeper content that you might have missed, laid out in convenient capsule form for your consumption. It's a quick, fun way to read news. In fact, I like the concept so much that I'm giving it a try as my homepage this week.

A lot of people don't know that YouTube has high quality videos, as well as the generally poor-quality standard versions. The links to the better (not HD, but still pretty good) versions are easy to miss, but there are a few steps you can take to make sure you're watching (and even embedding) the good stuff. Jason Kottke ran through a few of them recently on kottke.org.

First, make high-quality your default setting. You can do this in the Account menu, under "Playback Setup." That takes care of playback, but what if you want to link to the high-quality version of a video? Just paste "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=22" at the end of the URL. 18 is the 480x360 version, and 22 is the 720p version. Some videos will have one, but not the other, so try both if you need to.

When it comes to embedding, you can make a quick change to the embed code to get better video quality. Just add "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" to the end of the URLs in your embed code. Here's an example:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

[via Kottke]

The folks behind the Working series of radio stories that have been running on public radio program Marketplace, have put together a nifty Flash-based Working Browser. The radio stories explore some of the more unusual occupations of people around the world. But the Working Browser allows anybody to create a profile and rate their job satisfaction, describe their compensation, and answer a few other questions.

Right now there are only a handful or profiles, but the web site only launched yesterday. As more people enter their information, the site will provide an interesting way to see what people do for a living and how they feel about it. In addition to browsing profiles, you can sort the browser by categories like gender, education, compensation, length of commute, and other variables to see how many people fall within each category.

It wasn't too long ago that I chose Twitterrific as one of my favourite three applications for the iPhone as part of our 'Favourite Apps' series. Even then, there were plenty of alternatives out there for you to use: Twinkle, Twittelator [and Twittelator Pro]. However the release of Tweetsville today appears to have changed my mind as my Twitter client of choice.

The most noticeable difference between Tweetsville and its competitiors is that the application sticks to a very conventional user interface: users will be instantly familiar with most of the controls, and a hybrid of both the iPod and Mail-esque look to the application [along with some nice touches that shows you posting tweets as messages 'To the Twitterverse'] mean you'll feel instantly at home.

On top of the nice little touches, there's TwitPic integration for posting photos and linking to them in tweets, a customisable toolbar [and two timeline views to pick from], not to mention built-in support for Twitter Search and Twitter Trends - Twitter's two biggest service additions recently.

Even though there's almost every feature you could need on the go, it's utterly intuitive to use and almost instantly has become my de-facto iPhone Twitter client: sorry Twitterrific.



Some will be unhappy without there being a free version to try - though it's worth remembering the application costs just $3.99, which isn't exactly bank-breaking - and there's no inline @replies to be found in one of the two timeline views. It's also worth pointing out that other clients include features for re-tweeting links. Despite these [admittedly few] pitfalls, for a true Twitter control panel that has almost all the features you need - along with a clean, familiar and above-all thought-out user interface - I can't help but give Tweetsville a very firm thumbs-up.

Microsoft is rolling out a number of changes to its Live.com portal and Windows Live suite of applications. In a nutshell, the company is trying to add social networking-style features to the web portal. Users will be able to create profile pages where they can connect to other friends, share images and other media, and post short status updates. In other words, it looks a lot like Facebook. But Microsoft will be leveraging its existing services like Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. Your IM contacts will automatically be added to your Windows Live contact list.

The new Windows Live also supports integration with third party services like Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, and Twitter. And Microsoft is increasing the amount of free storage space for Windows Live SkyDrive users from 5GB to 25GB.

Microsoft is doing a phased rollout of the new services, so you may not notice any changes to your account right away. But all existing Windows Live users should see the new features within the next few weeks.

The company is also releasing new versions of its downloadable and web-based applications including Windows live Messenger, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Photos, and Windows Live People, a one stop shop for contact management.

Online video portal Sling.com is set to open to the public on November 24th. It's currently in private beta, but we got an early peek at the service. The online video player is easy to use, and there's plenty of content from a number of major US television networks as well as ton of videos from web sites like College Humor and 60frames.

While the selection of videos is pretty extensive, that's not really what makes Sling.com special. In fact, the content library looks pretty much like what you can already find at Hulu. That makes sense, since many of the TV episodes and full length videos are coming straight from Hulu.

What makes Sling.com unlike any other online video site is the way it works with the company's Slingbox hardware. If you have a Slingbox plugged into your TV set, cable or satellite box, or TiVo, you can use Sling.com to watch live video over the web. Sling Media has offered the ability to stream video over the internet since the company's inception. But Sling.com allows you to access live, pre-recorded, and web video all in one central location.

If you have a Slingbox, there's plenty of reason to choose Sling.com over Hulu. If not, the case isn't quite as compelling at the moment. Eventually Sling Media plans to roll out social tools that let users do things like record clips of TV shows and movies using a Slingbox and share them with other users at Sling.com. But that feature isn't available yet.

You can watch Sling.com's web videos in pretty much any browser. But if you want to watch live TV, you'll need to be running Windows and using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Mac support is coming soon. I also noticed a glitch during my test that caused Firefox to crash every time I switched from watching a live program to watching web video, and then back to live video again. Hopefully that issue will be worked out by the time Sling emerges from private beta later this month.

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.

Google Reader, Bloglines and other RSS readers make it easy to keep on top of the latest news from dozens, or even hundreds of web pages without actually visiting those pages. But if you want to read a web site that constantly covers news you're interested in, and just happens to be in a language you don't speak, in the past you've needed to exit your RSS reader and load the page in Google Translate or Windows Live Translate or a similar service.

Or you could use a service like Mloovi to translate the RSS feed, but Mloovi has a few limitations, like the inability to show pictures or full feeds. Now it looks like Google is taking things into its own hands, by combining Google Reader with Google Translate.

Here's how it works. Just subscribe to a blog or news site in another language (assuming you can find the subscribe button). Then go to the feed settings in Google Reader and select "Translate into my language." That's it. You only have to do this once per feed and Google Reader will automatically translate that page until you tell it to stop.

Keep in mind, these are machine-generated translations, so they're far from perfect. But if you don't have time to learn French just to read a few articles from Le Monde from time to time, this could be the next best thing. Or maybe the thing after that.