Despite intense popularity of the BitTorrent system, Gnutella clients aren't dead yet. LimeWire 5 for Windows, Mac, and Linux keeps its hand in the file-sharing pot by borrowing your Google contacts to create a friend network and a snazzy redesign that surfaces the most important information first.
LimeWire still has ads that pop up into the main interface.
(Credit: CNET Networks)If you're not a fan of the Gnutella file-sharing protocols, I doubt this will be enough to grab your eye. Torrents run faster, depending on the number of seeders, and torrent content is rarely faked in the way that plagues the Gnutella networks. If LimeWire lights you up, though, there's probably enough here to excite you, and definitely enough to make it worth upgrading to.
The new interface is very Web 2.0ish, with two search bars on top and two left-side navigation bars. The uppermost search bar is the global search that scans what everybody is sharing over the P2P network, while the secondary one on the right searches your library.
A new sharing options window should help new people from accidentally oversharing.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The sidebars are set up in a similar way. Both are on the left, with the outer one offering three options: your library, the global P2P network, and your friends. Click on My Library and your inner sidebar shows your collection of music, movies, and documents.
The P2P Network option shows what you're uploading and downloading, while the Friends option is a hard tack toward social networking. It lets you share your library specifically with your Google/Jabber and LiveJournal contacts, which you can import. Search results themselves can be presented in both the new Web 2.0-style that surfaces just the most relevant information, with an Information button to dive deeper or the "classic" spreadsheet view.
The Advanced Tools feature is also new, letting power users drill down and get highly specific information about who they're connected to. This basically takes the kind of information that torrent clients like uTorrent have been surfacing for years, and applies it to the Gnutella world in a clean layout. This data includes IP addresses, bandwidth, the program being used, and its version.
The redo of the Options window as a whole should make the program safer by not confusing newbies.
(Credit: CNET Networks)LimeWire 5 makes it easier to see which files you're adding and to configure library-scanning behavior. From the Tools menubar, go to Options. Big icons greet the user, making it easier to discern what you're changing. Once you've chosen a directory to add, you can configure LimeWire so it adds only specific file types from that directory, or only adds the files currently in it. This can restrict mixed-use directories from accidental oversharing, as well as prevent files added to the directory from automatically becoming available to all.
The new features and overall functionality make this by far the most mature version of LimeWire to date. Despite the typical performance flaws found in all file-sharing clients and the need for users to be exceedingly cautious with both sharing and downloading, LimeWire 5 continues to offer solid performance and good looks across the board.
Facebook Chat might've had a simple and quiet launch, but a month later, the social network is already announcing plans to upgrade.
Engineer David Reiss announced Tuesday evening on the Facebook Developer Blog that Facebook Chat will soon have an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) interface--that's better known as Jabber. This will mean that external clients will be able to incorporate Facebook Chat, currently restricted in most cases to the browser.
Universal IM clients Digsby (which is PC-only) and Adium (which is Mac-only) have already worked in ways to support Facebook Chat.
Through Facebook's official Jabber support, which is coming "in the near future," Facebook members will be able to not only chat with their friends, but also see friends' profile pictures through the IM client and set their Facebook statuses.
Google Talk users have yet another way to chat with their Gtalk buddies. The new "labs edition" which was quietly released on Friday brings to your desktop several features that previously could only be found in the Web version. Most importantly, the group chat feature which made its way into the Web version of Google Talk last year, yet was oddly missing from the desktop application until now. Also new to the desktop version are emoticons and notifications from Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as Google's hot-in-Brazil social network Orkut.
Oddly enough, with these extra features there are a few features missing compared with the regular nonlabs version of Google Talk. Important things such as voice-chat and file transfers are not present--features which were the primary reason for installing the piece of desktop software over simply using the pop-out version in Gmail, or the iGoogle gadget.
As Ionut over at Google Blogoscoped notes: with the introduction of the labs edition, Google now has four separate first party tools to access the Talk network; each with overlapping, or version specific features. Something tells me a lot of folks will stick with the plain old Web version that's sitting in their Gmail in-boxes or iGoogle pages instead of dealing with either of these confusing desktop variations. Moving forward I'd like to simply see Google add experimental features to the regular software and mark them as such. Having different versions of the same software is a very Microsoft thing to do.
Google Talk labs edition throws in notifications for Gmail, Google Calendar and Orkut (not pictured).
(Credit: Google)
No, not really. Sorry.
Google yesterday announced in its Talkabout product blog that there's a new way to connect your site or social page visitors directly to you: a Google Talk chatback widget that instantly connects the visitor to your GTalk or Jabber IM client.
I like giving my readers a chance to connect with me directly in real-time, so I'm all about products like this. But the implementation of this little product is so lightweight and so lacking, that I understand perfectly why even the Google blog post announcing it shows only a picture of the widget instead of a live version of it.
Proof that Google is about to buy TinyURL.
The two big problems that I saw right away are these: There's no way to tell people who see your chatback widget that you're unavailable without also turning off your availability to people in your buddy list; and the product doesn't ask people who want to reach you to identify themselves. There's just not enough control of the chat session before it starts to make it enjoyable.
Then there's the product's gaping user interface weirdness: When someone wants to chat with you, you get a giant unreadable link in your instant message window, which opens up the discussion in a browser-based chat window. Why it can't just run the chat in your existing IM client, I don't know.
However, my Twitter friend Ryan says it does do a good job of parsing photo site URLs and will display the images they link to inline.
As I said, I'm in favor of giving my readers a good way to reach me live, but this tool doesn't cut it, which is why I, too, am showing only a graphic of it and not the thing itself.
If you do like this idea but not Google's implementation, check out MeeboMe (review).
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