Webware

Hopefully, you don't hand out your phone number to just anybody you meet on the street or online. But if you'd like to gab with people while retaining some anonymity, Jangl can hook you up. Launched today, this service provides users with virtual telephone numbers that route calls to your real phone number and messages to your e-mail in-box. Rather than being designed as a buffer between you and the masses you meet out on the town, Jangl (also here) focuses on allowing voice calls for relationships that begin on the Internet.

This privacy screen could add a … Read more

Zoho released its Notebook service today, better rounding off its suite of Web-based productivity tools. Zoho Notebook (more here) is really more like a scrapbook than a notebook. You can add spreadsheets and word processing files from your Zoho folders. Even more fun is Zoho's capacity to hold songs and video--as well as Web pages and RSS feeds--from a hard drive or from around the Internet.

The capability to share your stuff with other people makes Notebook a potentially cool tool for group projects at school or work. Chatting with other users in addition to recording and playing audio … Read more

Editor's note: This post has been updated from first publish. See note below for more.

This morning Justin.TV has relaunched itself as a live video platform. The site is planning to enable video livecasters to build out their own video broadcasting page, complete with a custom URL, branding, and chat room. Unlike uStream.TV, which has made similar functionality available to anyone and everyone for several months now, the initial crop of broadcasters who want to use the platform will be handpicked by Justin Kan and crew. Eventually it will be opened up to anyone.

For viewers, Justin.… Read more

Sadly, feeling ripped off is common when you need to fix some complex piece of equipment at home, in a car, or on a hard drive. Since Thanksgiving, I've suffered a long-distance tech support nightmare trying to get a four-year-old laptop to connect to the Internet. More tech manufacturers are dropping the ball on product support, so forget about free help from the company that made your computer. BestBuy's Geek Squad may be down the street, but $99 is steep just for a diagnosis.

While I've been without a PC for half a year, I've often … Read more

Love Twitter? Hate it? Chances are you'll feel the same way about Jaiku. But it's worth looking at the two services side by side. If you're trying to decide which service to use, or if you're thinking about leaving one for the other, check out Veronica Belmont's latest Prizefight video: Twitter vs. Jaiku.

>>> Play video >>>

See also: More Twitter coverage on Webware, and our Newbie's Guide to Twitter.

Josh and I just spent the better part of two days finding e-mail contacts for the products that were nominated for the Webware 100 awards. Many nominations came from people not affiliated with the companies that made these products. Fans, in other words.

To these fans, I say, thanks for taking the time to nominate the products you like. But to nearly all companies that have the fans, I blow loud and wet raspberries in your general direction. Do you have any idea how freaking hard it was to find contact information for you?

In far too many cases, there … Read more

Meebo, which makes a multinetwork IM Web service, is launching a chat-room service called Rooms tonight. Like the company's other embeddable component, MeeboMe (review), it's simple to embed a Rooms viewer in a blog post or Web page. But Rooms is a full-on, multiparty chat room, which makes it a lot more interesting. MeeboMe, in contrast, allows only one-to-one communication between a Web site visitor and the Meebo user who created it--useful, but not as fun.

I've embedded a Rooms widget further down in this post. As you can see, there's more to it than just chat. Rooms makes it easy for users to share media and Web sites. All you have to do to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr photo (or media from Metacafe, Google Video, PhotoBucket, or MySpace) is paste the URL into the chat window, then other users will be able to play media directly, without leaving the chat session.

Room owners can make their forums open to everyone or by invitation only, and they can separately lock down the posting of media and links if they want (I didn't, so please keep your links clean). The media feature of Meebo Rooms reminds me of Kyte.tv (review) and of YouTube's Active Sharing experiment.

Meebo Rooms is not the only embeddable group chat. We've covered several competing products: Weezu, Me.dium, Dai.sy, Chatsum, Yakalike, Planet Minibox, Yackpack, Yaplet, and Zpeech, for example. Meebo Rooms does take advantage of Meebo's slick, Web-based instant message service, though. You can easily invite people into a room by just dragging their name from your buddy list into the room. But Meebo doesn't force the chat/IM integration on you: If you want to invite people via e-mail, that's cool. And people who chat on the service's embeddable widgets don't have to be Meebo users at all.

Meebo Rooms users can also private-message the room's owner, who can then respond back to them in kind. This is a common feature in chat widgets, but I found Rooms' implementation of it exceptionally clear and intuitive.

… Read more

This nearly slipped by our radar last week, but in the latest build of the upcoming chat client Trillian Astra, Cerulean Studios has snuck in desktop versions of its widgets. Users can now place widgets in their Trillian buddy list or right on their desktop, similar to what you'd get with the Yahoo Widget engine, or other desktop widget tools. Users are also able to send them between the buddy list and desktop via right clicking, or they can simply drag and drop.

For now there are just five sample widgets, but assuming Cerulean Studios opens things up a bit, or goes with universal widget coding, Trillian users could get what is typically two applications in one, along with a wide array of desktop widgets.

Customizing the widgets is a little harder than it should be, as you can't just configure each one once it's on your desktop. Everything is handled through a preferences menu, although I'm assuming this will be changed as the application gets closer to release. Some sample widgets do look neat; the weather widget in particular is easy to read and fully animated. And the world-time widget shows when the sun is hitting your current location, which is totally nerd eye-candy.

Similar to other widget tools, Astra has a hot key that let users pull up all the running widgets at the same time. Pressing the Windows key and space bar accomplishes this easily, although it doesn't have nearly the same effect you get with OS X's Dashboard widget.

I wouldn't recommend you ditch your current widget engine just yet, since this is a brand-new feature on an application that's still in private alpha. I am, however, excited to see if this feature will be integrated into the forthcoming browser-free version of the app.

For more shots of the new widget runtime environment, keep reading.… Read more

We've clicked our fingertips nearly to the bone checking hundreds of e-mail messages and slaying spam in three different in-boxes. You'll find the fruit of our labors in this XXXL-size chart showing what's inside of Yahoo Mail beta, Windows Live Hotmail, and Gmail beta.

Microsoft released the new Windows Live Hotmail this week, but Gmail and Yahoo Mail remain in beta testing. What to choose? You can afford to be fickle since each free service offers similar features, with new goodies rolling out nearly each month. Each brand will import your contacts from elsewhere, in case you … Read more