If you're looking for a more Gmail-like experience in Thunderbird 3.3 alpha, a new add-on should be able to help you out.

Dubbed Thunderbird Conversations, the add-on offers a conversation view in the e-mail program, allowing users to have all their messages to and from another party in one place, similar to Gmail. The app "fetches" e-mails across every folder in the user's Thunderbird installation. Users can reply to an e-mail inline, and access the add-on's "contacts auto-complete" feature to streamline its use.

Thunderbird Conversations was first made available at the end … Read more

A new virus is infecting Twitter users through the use of URLs shortened by the goo.gl service.

Apparently triggered last night, the virus is spreading as a result of users clicking on links that start with http://goo.gl, Google's URL shortener. TechCrunch is saying that the virus started on Twitter's mobile site and has been growing through different URLs, including http://goo.gl/od0az and http://goo.gl/R7f68.

The virus tries to redirect unsuspecting users to malicious Web sites, according to Techweet, which says that the messages are coming from new, disposable Twitter accounts as … Read more

Editor's note: This live event has concluded. You can read a summary of what was announced today in our story here. To see the complete live blog, with updates from CNET's Erica Ogg, Rafe Needleman, and Seth Rosenblatt, along with some questions and commentary from readers, you can replay it in the Cover It Live module at the bottom of this page.

Google has invited us to an obscure corner of San Francisco on Tuesday for a special announcement concerning Chrome. It all starts at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time, and we'll be live-blogging the event … Read more

Gmail's Priority Inbox, which launched in August and enables users to separate important e-mails from ones that can wait till later, is actually saving people time, Google said in a blog post yesterday.

According to the company, Gmail users who are utilizing Priority Inbox are spending about 43 percent more of their time "reading important mail." Google added that Priority Inbox users overall are spending 15 percent less time sifting through e-mail than those who aren't tapping the feature.

Priority Inbox separates e-mail into three categories: "important and unread," "starred," and "… Read more

Amazon plans to demo a Kindle Web app today as it tries to play catch-up with Google's new e-book effort.

An Amazon spokeswoman reportedly confirmed the demonstration in an e-mail to ComputerWorld, saying that the new Kindle Web app would "enable users to read full books in the browser and [enable] any Website to become a bookstore offering Kindle books."

The e-commerce company didn't provide further details. ComputerWorld said that the new app wasn't ready yet but quoted a Gartner analyst who said it could be launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The … Read more

After experiencing an outage that started on Sunday afternoon and stretched through most of the day yesterday, Tumblr has explained what happened.

"Yesterday afternoon, during planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster," Tumblr founder David Karp said on the company's blog last night. "This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online."

Karp also acknowledged that the site has been experiencing some "errors" as of late, and admitted that … Read more

A 3D version of Google Maps will accompany a Motorola tablet running Honeycomb, the next version of Google's Android, according to Google's Andy Rubin.

Rubin showed off the unreleased prototype tablet at the opening session of D: Dive Into Mobile in San Francisco today, the same day that the company announced plans to ship Gingerbread, Android version 2.3. Honeycomb and the Motorola tablet will arrive at some point next year, Rubin said, showing off the Google Maps application and eliciting more than one "oooh" from the crowd of mobile professionals.

He declined to provide any … Read more

Popular microblogging platform Tumblr is still suffering from an outage that started yesterday.

"We're working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters," Tumblr wrote on its Twitter page about 21 hours ago. "We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience."

Tumblr hasn't provided any information about how the company's database cluster was affected, and has only promised to "be back shortly." In a follow-up tweet released earlier today, Tumblr said that it is working through "a slow and painful recovery." It promised to share … Read more

Google has begun shipping a feature called False Start in its Chrome browser to speed up secure communications.

False Start essentially cuts out one set of the back-and-forth conversation needed to set up a secure channel between a Web browser and Web pages. Such secure channels use technology called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security), and a Web site using it shows an address beginning with HTTPS rather than HTTP.

"The latest releases of Chrome now enable a feature called SSL False Start," said Google programmer Mike Belshe in a blog post Sunday. "As … Read more