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CircleUp describes itself as a "social-communication service." It's an e-mail and instant-messaging tool that allows users to send a single e-mail to a community and receive one, aggregated response rather than a flurry of incomplete or even tangential responses.

The Newport Beach, CA company is debuting here at Demo 07. It works like this: click that CircleUp toolbar embedded in your Outlook, AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Messenger window. Type in a question, choose how you would like to receive your answer from your community (examples: Who's bringing what to the potluck? What time works best … Read more

No, the Japanese "I'm a Mac" ads do not include Hello Kitty, Pikachu, or anything with tentacles. But they're quite funny in their own right, if only because I have absolutely no idea what the actors are saying in them but can still pretty much grasp the message that they're trying to convey. It's interesting, too, to see how the Japanese ads are much more reliant on physical expressions and gags, whereas the British Mac ads that Candace blogged here a few days ago are all about the wit (not surprisingly).

Additionally, I am … Read more

The group SMS service Twitter launched last year. Essentially it's a message board you can update from your phone via SMS, or from the Web or your IM account (the IM function is new). Twitter updates are limited to 151 characters each, which makes sense for an SMS service, but it does put a limit on depth, to say the least. Twitter's Web entry window even says "What are you doing?" which also encourages short and content-light updates, such as "I'm putting on my hat."

This raises the obvious question: Who cares? But … Read more

Yahoo released an update today to make its popular instant messenger more secure. But if you speed through setting up Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8.1, you're likely to get more than you expect--namely, the Yahoo Toolbar within your Web browser, which then sets Yahoo as your home page and your default search engine. CNET News.com explains the problem.

This is not the first time users have complained about intrusive extras from Yahoo's free IM program. Yahoo and other software vendors continue to insist that these kinds of surprises are for the benefit of users, but I … Read more

Meetro is a small program that brings together instant messaging and localization to let you see and get in touch with others near you. Next week, Meetro will get several new localization tools packaged into their home console, or what is basically an information page with services you can open up within the program. The biggest is a Google map in the corner that shows you local restaurants and bars within walking distance of your location. Clicking a restaurant name will pull up some basic info and highlight it on the map. Clicking the name again will take you right … Read more

We've never been huge fans of touchpads; call us old-fashioned, but we just like the feel of a mouse in our hand. But we also understand the aversion to carrying one more thing with your laptop.

Geniusnet has addressed at least part of that problem with the "Genius Navigator 380," a combination VoIP phone, instant-message device and optical mouse released in India.

While being used as a mouse, the closed clamshell handset can still ring or its LED will blink when someone is trying to reach you. It supports up to six instant messengers simultaneously in one … Read more

It's odd that Google gives away so many services for free--even 3D modeling and mapping software--but Google Answers charges $2.50 and more to pose questions to its experts. After four years of operation, Google Answers is cutting off new questions this week, although it will allow answers to stream in until the end of this year.

Since people have grown to expect free content on the Web, Google's fee felt like a fortune. That's partly why I didn't review Google Answers when looking at other similar but free services, such as Yahoo Answers, Answerbag, and … Read more

Do we really need IM clients anymore? Google and Yahoo are embedding chat functions into their Web-based e-mail apps, and there are services such as Meebo that let you connect to multiple IM networks at once from within a browser. Any new IM software is going to have to offer a lot of flash and sizzle to make it more compelling than a Web-based client.

So how does the new AIM 6 stack up? I've been using it all day and I can't find too much that's compelling in it. The most important feature is its offline … Read more

From News.com's Elinor Mills:

AOL was set to unveil on Wednesday its latest instant-messaging client, AIM 6.0, which lets people send messages to offline users to receive later and allows people to log and save conversations. The service also includes a new mobile dashboard that lets users manage mobile alerts and forward instant messages to their cell phones once they log off. AOL has doubled the number of contacts users can have in their buddy list to 1,000 from 500 and provided deeper integration with AIM Pages, AOL's social-networking service.

A Webware review is in … Read more