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Despite the obligatory missing vowel, bacn (pronounced "bacon") isn't a hot Web 2.0 start-up. It's "the middle class of e-mail," the stuff that isn't really spam because it's not totally unwanted, but isn't really wanted either. Case in point: Pownce messages, Facebook friend requests, Amazon "recommendations."

Unlike many dorky tech terms, the origins of bacn aren't especially apocryphal; we've got a real (electronic) paper trail. The term arose during a discussion at Podcamp2 Pittsburgh earlier in August and slipped onto my radar via Twitter feeds from … Read more

We've told you about Callwave already, but now we've had the opportunity to put the company's Vtxt application through its paces. Vtxt takes spoken voice mail messages and converts them into text. When someone calls and leaves you a voice mail, Vtxt will send you a text message and an e-mail with a transcript. You don't get the message word-for-word; rather, Vtxt gives you the gist of the message so you can understand what the person said.

The result is a useful and user-friendly service. Both the text message and e-mail arrive within seconds, so you … Read more

Facebook, according to a post on the company blog, has added new functionality to its internal messaging service that allows you to share select content and send messages to e-mail addresses rather than just other Facebook accounts. This means, effectively, that Facebook junkies can do all of their e-mailing through the social network's interface without needing to open up their e-mail accounts at all.

The person with the e-mail address in question will then be able to read the message and respond without needing to sign up for a Facebook account. Members can also use the enhanced messaging to … Read more

Are you the kind of person who posts a ton of photos and videos online but uses very little e-mail storage?

Well, Google is now offering consumers the ability to buy additional, or overflow, storage when they reach the free limit in Gmail or in Picasa Web Albums (2.8GB and 1GB, respectively), instead of having to pay for more storage in each program separately. Eventually, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets will be included.

Prices range from $20 per year for 6GB of overflow storage to $500 a year for 250GB.

The news was released by Google after … Read more

A longtime county bureaucrat whose ex-girlfriend turned her in for excessive use of personal e-mail has lost a lawsuit claiming she was fired unjustly.

Lynne Bray, who assigned work to road crews for Washington state's King County, was reprimanded in July 2003 for being customarily late for work. She claimed she was being treated for depression and irritable bowel syndrome, a disorder marked by constipation and diarrhea.

But what seems to have led to Bray's termination after 12 years as a county bureaucrat was a citizen complaint from her former girlfriend, Jennifer Bond, saying that she was using … Read more

This evening I received my first e-mail from Plaxo's new Pulse social networking service, which it launched today. What had surprised me the most about Plaxo initially was how it was far more different from social networking's queen bee, Facebook, than I'd expected it would be--in fact, it reminded me much more of fellow nascent service Pownce.

But then I got that friend, er, business contact request in my Gmail inbox. Here's a screenshot:

It looked pretty darn familiar--it looked just like the equivalent e-mails that Facebook sends when other members have requested to add you … Read more

As I watched Arsenal beat Ajax this afternoon, I kept an eye on an interesting piece of research from The Journal of Systems and Software written by Sowe et al. and entitled Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study [PDF]. The research revealed something that I suspected but had not yet seen data to prove: developer communities are great for developers, and not so great for anyone outside them.

What does this mean if you're an enterprise hoping to hitch a free ride on an open-source project? Well, it means that you're better off paying a little money for professional support. Free support is good up to a point, but if that point ends when your job begins, you may be in a world of hurt without it.… Read more

How long does it take you to type, "Now Playing"? And how can FoxyTunes, the popular browser extension, help?

Switching windows to your desktop's MP3 player takes up precious nanoseconds, too. Even worse, you might have to physically move and actually get up and look at your stereo. In the average e-mailer's day, that could add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of seconds.

… Read more

Patiently waiting for somebody to write that killer Thunderbird extension that does everything from sending spammers a DOS attack to washing your dishes won't get you much beyond a head of gray hair and a trip to Cuba for cheap meds to treat your high blood pressure.

No, there are no panaceas here, but we do have a platter of some newish extensions that not only make you slimmer and sexier, they also make Thunderbird better and easier to use with preview pane browsing, e-mail stickies, toolbar tweaks, and more.

… Read more