messages

With the majority of the Democrats caving in to the Bush administration's demands for full immunity for the telecom companies for-profit collusion in the NSA's illegal wiretapping program, it seems to be clear that the Fourth Amendment and federal antiwiretapping laws are no longer enough to keep our communications secure. Laws stating that "thou shalt not listen to your customers phone calls" no longer seem to have any bite. Or at least, they don't as long as teleco lobbying coupled with massive political contributions can turn once critical senators into kindly old men willing to … Read more

Meebo released their Firefox extension earlier this morning. It lets you chat with people on six different popular chat clients, or sign in to all at once with your Meebo ID using a sidebar in your browser. The 64k extension is aimed at solving the problem of providing active notifications for friends and conversation activity--one of the most widely requested features from Meebo users, and the hardest to implement without something that has deeper access of your browser. If you've ever used Meebo before and been annoyed you can't tell a whole lot about what's going on when it's not your main tab or when minimized this extension solves that with colored taskbar pop-ups. And as an added bonus for the lazy, there's an option to automatically sign into the service every time you start your browser.… Read more

Meebo released its Firefox extension earlier this morning. It lets you chat with people on six different popular chat clients, or sign in to all at once with your Meebo ID using a sidebar in your browser. The 64k extension is aimed at solving the problem of providing active notifications for friends and conversation activity--one of the most widely requested features from Meebo users, and the hardest to implement without something that has deeper access to your browser. If you've ever used Meebo before and have been annoyed that you can't tell a whole lot about what's … Read more

Anyone who has ever yanked their hair at a maddening error message will appreciate the concept behind bug.gd, a Web app devoted to linking up error messages and user-contributed workarounds.

While the site has given the general public a head start by linking to Microsoft articles explaining common Microsoft error messages, bug.gd's role in providing distraught users with the right solution is a partial illusion. The database will grow most through user contributions. Bug.gd's team assumes that most users will figure out a workaround within two days.

If that's you, it means you enter … Read more

MySpace and Skype are set to announce on Wednesday that the eBay-owned telephony client will be providing voice chat services for the News Corp.-owned social network's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Through this deal, MySpace users will be able to link their profiles to Skype accounts, and will be able to place voice chat calls through the MySpaceIM client or the Skype client to both Skype and MySpace members--but if your MySpace profile is set to "private," you will be exempt from calls from people who aren't on … Read more

Macworld reports that Trillian is heading to the Mac, after being doomed to a Windows existence for many years. I'm not sure how welcome it is since Adium already fills that role (multi-protocol chat client) for OS X, but if it can give Adium a little competition, all the better.

It's still in the early stage of development, but I'll give it a spin when it comes out, and let you know whether it's worth a download.

This morning Web-SMS service Joopz is launching a new Outlook plug-in that turns your desktop e-mail client into a one-stop SMS hub. Once tied into your Joopz account, you can send and receive text messages like you would e-mail. The tool also syncs up with your Outlook contacts, to let you send notes to anybody with a phone number.

The service is flouting the new plug-in as a handy way to keep in touch with friends, but for business users who use SMS to communicate with their colleagues while out on the road, this could be a handy, finger-saving tool … Read more

Is Twitter going to turn your mundane messages about salads, cats, and Arcade Fire concerts into revenue dollars? Signs are pointing to yes, as oddball messages appended to Twitter's microblog "tweets" indicate that the company is dabbling in text message ads. Some other folks around the tech blog world are picking up on this, and they seem to be in agreement.

Like so many things, it all started in Gotham--and, in the interest of full disclosure, it involves yours truly. On Monday morning there was a bit of New York tech-scene chit-chat over Twitter, as local entrepreneur … Read more

Social-networking site Bebo announced on Thursday that it has struck a deal with AIM, AOL's instant-messaging arm. Through this partnership, users of either service can now easily invite friends to the other.

More specifically, Bebo users who have provided the site with their AIM usernames will now see an AIM icon displayed on their profiles so that other members can click on it to IM them directly through Bebo's interface. There's also a new "AIM Friend Finder" in Bebo so that members can invite the denizens of their AIM buddy lists to join Bebo, as … Read more