(Credit:
Xobni)
A few months ago, e-mail search app Xobni told us they were creating a version for BlackBerry. At the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday, we got a look at it.
Xobni on the Windows PC is an Outlook add-on that quickly finds e-mail messages and attachments. On BlackBerry, Xobni will integrate with your e-mail account, where it will extract addresses, phone numbers, and social networking details to automatically create a secondary address book for your phone. You'll be able to use Xobni for BlackBerry to quickly find contacts--including those you have not physically added to the native address book yourself. That expanded address book goes for everyone who has ever sent you an e-mail, been cc'd in an e-mail, or even mentioned in a message.
With the premium Xobni Plus Outlook add-on, you can access this secondary address book by typing into the Compose field. Integration isn't quite so tight in BlackBerry. On the Bold, Tour, and new Curve 8900s, you'll access contacts by flicking up on the track pad to get to to the stylized Xobni address book.
Then search by a contact's name, domain name, or by a keyword to speedily find the person you're looking for. As with Xobni on the desktop, you'll be able to send your calendar availability to a contact, get Facebook to supply contacts' Xobni profile picture, and view Twitter feeds and LinkedIn and Hoovers information from the BlackBerry.
In creating its own address book--instead of adding contacts to the native address book--Xobni makes a statement. Unlike Gwabbit, which adds the information from a signature block into a new record, Xobni finds e-mails and phone numbers anywhere in the message. Besides that, Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte believes that inserting contacts into your native address book means "you've already lost the battle." Instead of adding contacts one-by-one, Xobni builds you a social roster behind-the-scenes, and adds social networking plug-ins in the process.
As far as time lines go, Xobni is looking at a closed alpha release sometime in December. Bonforte expects a beta early next year, and the final release a few months after that. The pricing model is still undecided.
Xobni for BlackBerry will first be available on the Bold, Tour, and Curve 8900. Storm users will have to wait a little longer.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For almost all of its existence, Mozilla Messaging has been known for Thunderbird--e-mail software with the traditional view that a person's PC is the center of their computing existence.
Now, though, the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary's scope is expanding beyond the confines of the computer under your desk or on your lap. In the near term, the new Thunderbird 3 is becoming more integrated with the Web. And in the longer term, the Raindrop project has the potential to lift your inbox all the way to the cloud.
"For us it's really important to have Thunderbird. It's also important to not stay in the blinders of that scenario," Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said in an interview at the company's headquarters here. With Raindrop, "We're focusing on best experience for messaging in a Web application."
Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)The change reflects the changing nature of computing. Where Thunderbird's chief competition once was now software such as Microsoft's Outlook, it's now also got to reckon with Google's Web-based Gmail service and its ilk, Ascher said.
Thunderbird is still a priority. Thunderbird 3 is set to arrive next week in near-final form--though nearly a year later than had been planned--but Mozilla Messaging has high hopes the new version will be faster, easier to use, and more versatile through the addition of third-party extensions.
Universal inbox
Raindrop is something of an ultimate inbox in the company's vision, a Web application that draws not just from e-mail but from other communication conduits such as Twitter, Facebook mail, and instant messaging. Its goal isn't just to consolidate today's overabundance of communications channels, it's to help prioritize what's important and put off what's optional until a more convenient time.
"We're breaking the notion of one list coming in, in chronological order," he said. What just arrived isn't necessarily the most important thing to do, though human minds are prone to thinking it is.
Some aspects of Raindrop's future are more certain than others. It's way to early to say when the company might release its first version of the actual software, but one thing that's settled is that Raindrop won't be a service Mozilla offers. Instead, the software will run on others' servers--at Internet service providers, for example.
"Hosting a messaging system for the world is not something we can afford right now," Ascher said. Still, it's revealing that the company chose to create Raindrop as a server-based technology accessible through a Web browser rather than as PC-based software.
Will Raindrop rule the roost?
In the longer term--say 2015--might Raindrop replace Thunderbird as people's messaging interface of choice? Perhaps.
"I suspect some people will and some people won't," he said. "I think desktop software still has a bunch of user benefits that will last for quite awhile."
Persuading everybody to freely cooperate with Raindrop could be tough. Sites like Facebook like their central positions in people's electronic lives and like to serve ads next to their content. In time, though, Ascher believes they'll come aboard.
"I think in the long term, openness wins," he said.
Even without Raindrop, Thunderbird 3 will integrate with the Web. It's got Firefox's engine built in for displaying Web pages, a fact that means the software can display Web content.
That ability means Thunderbird can, for example, show Yahoo and Google calendars in separate tabs. There's little in the way of integration with those services today, but it can be added, Ascher said. He expects plenty more add-ons will bring it closer to the cloud, too. He didn't mention it, but even Raindrop could be added in its own compartment.
Mozilla Messaging smells money
Mozilla Messaging is part of a peculiar organizational structure. In the beginning the non-profit Mozilla Foundation oversaw the open-source software that was the core of Netscape Communicator. Eventually, that software split into two main components: the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird e-mail software.
The foundation set up two subsidiaries to oversee the two projects, first Mozilla Corp. for Firefox in 2005 and second Mozilla Messaging for Thunderbird in 2007. Ascher has since 2007 led the latter, which employs six engineers and nine others.
It also draws on the expertise of many volunteers in the open-source world who translate the software, write add-ons, and help debug it. Because of this help, Mozilla Messaging gets by with only one quality assurance employee and one marketing employee, and Thunderbird 3 will arrive in more than 40 languages.
The subsidiary today gets its funding from its nonprofit Mozilla Foundation parent, which in turn receives the lion's share of revenue from search advertising revenue that results from searches Firefox sends Google's way. Ultimately, Ascher wants Mozilla Messaging to be financially self-sustaining. But how?
"I'm not sure yet. I think what we're looking for are rev models like Firefox--revenue models where the user benefits and doesn't have to pay anything, and somehow enough money flows into Mozilla Messaging to fund development long-term," Ascher said.
That may sound like a lot of hand-waving, but Ascher points out he has no investors looking for a big and quick return on the money they invested, so Mozilla Messaging is a relatively cheap operation to run.
Ads? No thanks
One route the company won't take is advertising, the approach that's vital to Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as to Firefox.
"I don't think people benefit from advertising in mail," he said. "One reason it works for search engines is people often are searching to buy. They're happy to see ads. It helps them. I don't think that works in e-mail."
Today, there are probably somewhere between 10 million and 20 million Thunderbird users, said Rafael Ebron, Mozilla Messaging's director of marketing. That's a far cry from Firefox, whose users total more than 300 million, Mozilla says.
But both projects can punch above their weight. Just being a freely available alternative--whether with Thunderbird or with Raindrop--can steer other products and services, Ascher believes.
"Firefox had an influence over people greater than its market share," Ascher said. "I don't think we'd need to manage everybody's e-mail servers for us to have an influence over the e-mail landscape and make sure everybody has a better experience."
So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.
It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.
This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas amid allegations that its traffic has plateaued. Facebook, for example, saw significant growth overseas when it started launching user-translated versions of its site.
To better inform the Twittering masses, we have gone to the trouble of plugging the term "fail whale" into Google Translate to see how you say it in Spanish. That didn't go too well with the algorithm, so we tried "whale of failure" and came out with "la ballena de fracaso." Unfortunately, that just doesn't have the same ring.
But this is not actually the first time that Twitter has toyed with launching a non-English edition. Last year, Twitter board member Joi Ito hyped up the launch of a standalone Twitter Japan site, powered by an investment from Ito's Digital Garage, that was notable because it was ad-supported (Twitter still hasn't rolled out ads or even said that it will for sure).
Biz Stone filled in CNET News on the status of Twitter Japan via e-mail on Tuesday night: "(It's) doing very well. A few of us were there a few weeks ago to launch a brand new mobile service. We had a really fun tweetup in Tokyo."
Twitter hasn't said what the next translations of its site will be, though presumably they'd pick a language that's already spoken by many users or one spoken in a region where it hopes to make big inroads. Or they could just be cutesy and launch in Klingon or Pirate.
This post was updated at 10:40 p.m. with comment from Biz Stone.
Last week, we shared three of our wackiest mistranscribed voice messages from Google Voice and asked you to pass along the funniest flubs from your own in-box. Your hilarious samples poured in through comments and e-mails. We've rounded up some fine specimens of voice mail meanings that were definitely lost in translation in our gallery.
In defense of Google Voice, computer-aided transcription technology is still maturing. While Google Voice's engine doesn't get it right all the time--or even most of the time in our case--it's better than nothing. At the very least, it produces amusing gems like the ones in our collection.
Scroll through the comments for more choice voice-to-text slip-ups and read about a fee-based alternative visual voice mail transcription to Google Voice, BT's Ribbit, that promises to get transcriptions right and doesn't require an invitation to join.
TwitterPeek sells for $99 or $199.
(Credit: Peek)A new gadget designed specifically for people who want to tweet on the go was launched Tuesday by gadget maker Peek.
The device, dubbed TwitterPeek, does one thing and one thing only: it lets people tweet. It doesn't access e-mail. It doesn't make phone calls. It tweets. That's it.
TwitterPeek, which looks like a smartphone, features a QWERTY keyboard and comes in black or aqua blue.
The idea behind TwitterPeek is simple. After buying the device, users need only to input their Twitter credentials to get going. The gadget lets them tweet, reply, retweet, send direct messages, and download followers. It supports one account at a time. Users can also view TwitPics by clicking the "view content" option from the TwitterPeek menu. The company claims its battery lasts three to four days with average usage.
Included in the price of TwitterPeek is a service plan. According to the company, users can access Twitter nationwide through Peek's own "mobile network," which accesses mobile-phone networks. If users choose to pay $99 at the time of purchase, they will get the TwitterPeek device and six months of Peek service. After that, they need to pay $7.95 per month for network access. If customers plunk down $199, they'll get the device and service for the life of the product. In either case, TwitterPeek allows for unlimited tweeting.
It makes sense that a device designed exclusively for Twitter would come from Peek. The company already offers the Peek and Peek Pronto, which are designed exclusively for mobile e-mail and text messaging.
But TwitterPeek, while an interesting idea, will need to convince consumers that it's really necessary in the marketplace. There are a slew of mobile apps that allow people to tweet while they're on the iPhone, some BlackBerry models, and Android-based devices.
It's also debatable whether even the most ardent Twitter users will want to pay $199 just to have access to a tweeting gadget. Evidently, the gadget was built for people who don't have access to mobile Twitter apps. It may also be useful for people who access Twitter from their mobile browser; that experience tends to yield more headaches than value when people want to post a quick tweet.
If you're interested in picking up a TwitterPeek, you can buy it exclusively on Amazon.com for $99 or $199, depending on your desired service plan.
But will you? Let's hear it in the comments below.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Google took an important step on Monday in the development of Google Wave, opening its servers up to outsiders who want their own waves to communicate with the outside world.
Wave servers belonging to Acme and Initech can now talk to each other with the opening of Google Wave federation.
(Credit: Google)A "wave" is a stream of messages that blends traditional e-mail, instant messaging, file sharing, and workplace collaboration tools. There have been plenty of supporters and detractors of Google Wave, Google's bid to reinvent e-mail as a combination of such services. But Google's implementation of Wave is going to be only one part of the story: outside developers will have the opportunity to build their own wavelike services using the Google Wave API set.
And those outside implementations will be able to communicate with each other using the Google Wave Federation Protocol, now that Google has opened up federation of wave servers. This means that if Company A built its own wave servers, it could interact with Company B's wave servers through a public peer-to-peer network facilitated by Google.
At the moment, this is just confined to the developer preview sandbox that was the initial proving ground for Wave. Since its launch, Google has opened up Wave to a wider audience for further testing and bug squashing, with a formal launch not scheduled until early next year.
Wave's complicated interface has not been a resounding hit with early testers, but the combination of external development and a federation service means that others could create more compelling ways to use the technology.
Earlier this week, I bashed Google's visual voice mail service for its inability to transcribe my voice messages into understandable English. (OK, most of the article really focuses on a new flexibility in Google Voice, which I do like.) To be fair, poor transcription isn't all Google's fault. They're offering a free service based on a computer-aided technology that improves each year. The real problem is that machine transcription just isn't good enough.
Up until yesterday, I hadn't received more than a handful of visual voice mail message translations imbued with any meaning in my native tongue. In fact, I turned off SMS forwarding because I couldn't handle the streams of nonsensical texts that would pour in for each voice mail left. Thankfully, I won't miss the yucks stemming from mismatched voice-to-text at all, not when I can still read the messages in my online Google Voice in-box over and over again.
Do you have any favorite mistranslations produced by free computer-aided transcription engines? Share yours in the comments--or better yet, e-mail me if you'd like to take place in our anonymous gallery--and I'll share three errata from my in-box below.
The longer the message, the more creative the transcription.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)
Despite its brevity, the only accurate word in this transcription is "hello."
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)
That's right! You go and procure the message, people!
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)
Trillain 4.1 beta for Windows amps Twitter and Facebook power.
(Credit: Cerulean Studios)Makers of the multinetwork chat application Trillian threw open doors to the company's latest beta, previously available onto to private beta testers, allowing any Windows user to test Trillian 4.1 beta before the code becomes final.
Chief among the changes in the beta are new social networking features and tight integration with Windows 7 for users of Microsoft's most recent operating system. Trillian 4.1 beta supports story links and avatar pictures in more locations on the interface, as well as Twitter hash tags and direct (@) replies. You can now also tweet from the contact list, follow and unfollow users, and edit a message before you retweet. Here's the full list of changes for Twitter and Facebook users.
Although the current stable version, Trillian Astra 4.0, works fine in Windows 7, the beta brings on optimizations, like support for jump lists, and an animated progress bar that displays during file transfers (see all new features).
Trillian 4.1 beta for Windows also gets an overhaul in the e-mail notifications department, with six additional features that span new views in which to organize your messages, to new things you can do with notification messages, like toggling through alerts and shoving them into any corner of the screen. The ability to manage incoming messages from the right-click context menu looks especially convenient.
Read more about Trillian 4.1 beta's e-mail enhancements, and a few extra tweaks to status control. Beta users should be forewarned that since 4.1 is still in the development process, you may run across some bugs and instability.
Trillian faces heavy competition from all-in-one chat clients like Digsby, which also incorporates Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail notifications into its communications application. Giving Trillian greater social networking capabilities will help keep Cerulean Studios' instant messenger competitive.
FoxyTunes unlocks access to a wide range of music players.
(Credit: Yahoo)FoxyTunes, the popular music-player plug-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Thunderbird, and so on, is now a plug-in supporting Yahoo Messenger for Windows, versions 8.1, 9, and 10 beta.
Maybe we should to call it "FoxyHoo."
With the plug-in installed, you can control your desktop music player in addition to sharing what you're playing in the status bar. Specifically, you can launch about two dozen supported music players from the Yahoo Messenger interface, manipulating everything from volume to skipping a song. Here's a sampler of integrated players: iTunes, RealPlayer, VLC, Windows Media Player, WinAmp, and MediaMonkey.
In addition to commanding your music player, the FoxyTunes plug-in for Yahoo Messenger can also open lone audio files. To check out song lyrics while a tune plays, there's a FoxyTunes Planet button you can click. The Web site features music news, lyrics, and videos.
We would have thought that FoxyTunes' integration with Yahoo Messenger for Windows would have been the first thing Yahoo did when it snapped up FoxyTunes in 2008 for its music division. After all, the ability to share musical selections via Yahoo Messenger ha been available for the Mac client since 2006, a Yahoo representative told CNET. However, one look at the Web site, which promotes a Download.com review from 2006, tells us that maintaining the brand isn't very high on Yahoo's list.
That said, FoxyTunes has been far from idle. Back in August, FoxyTunes integrated support for posting music choices to Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo Messenger's status bar, and Last.fm (Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.)
The easiest way to get started downloading the plug-in is to click "Add Plug-ins" from your Yahoo Messenger interface and select FoxyTunes.
Corrected on 10/30/09 at 3:10 pm: A Yahoo representative has clarified that Yahoo Messenger has been able to post FoxyTunes selections on Mac since 2006.
A look at the Facebook news feed in Brizzly. Check out the buttons at the top to toggle back and forth between Facebook and Twitter.
(Credit: Brizzly)Brizzly, a Twitter client that's still private beta, on Wednesday added the ability for members to follow their Facebook contacts as well through the Web-based service (unlike many of its competitors, Brizzly has opted to not take the form of a downloadable desktop app)--and to post Brizzly updates back to their Facebook profiles. For those of you who have Brizzly accounts, it should be live later on Wednesday if it isn't already.
It's a natural move: Most Twitter clients, like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, also support updates from Facebook to one degree or another. Brizzly, created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs and spearheaded by Blogger and Google veteran Jason Shellen, makes a Twitter feed look quite a bit like a Facebook news feed by expanding image and video links from services like TwitPic and YouTube.
Through Facebook Connect, Brizzly can pull in your news feed so that you can toggle back and forth between a Twitter view and a Facebook view. But it's a little bit limited for now: currently, it's just the revamped "top stories" news feed, not the live-streaming feed that had been Facebook's default until this week.
Of note: when you've clicked on Facebook view in Brizzly, the Brizzly bear mascot is wearing a Facebook-logo sweatshirt and waving a pennant. Now that's just plain cute.
UPDATE: We hear the bear's name is Phineas.
