ReadWriteWeb

Ubiquity, the experimental Firefox addon that gives your browser a context sensitive command-line, just received a nice update from Mozilla. In this new version, Mozilla has mostly worked on making Ubiquity faster, but also added a new look and the ability to use different skins. The plugin now also sorts commands by relevancy, based on how often you use a given command.

As the world financial crisis has gotten gradually worse over the past few weeks, I've been pondering what this means for the web. ReadWriteWeb as a publication focuses on technology - web products and trends - rather than business and VC happenings. So with the exception of one of our feature writers Bernard Lunn, who has written a number of great posts on how entrepreneurs can survive this period, we've generally kept out of the Credit Crisis discussion thus far.

But we're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where web technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one web era is usurped by another.

According to some rumors today, Apple might be working on an online version of its iWork productivity suite. 9to5Mac reports that they have received information about this from credible sources, though as with all Apple rumors around this time of year, it is hard to discern truth from wishful thinking. However, given that online office suites are clearly an up-and-coming market, with Microsoft poised to join the fray early next year, it would make sense for Apple to be heading in this direction as well.

At ReadWriteWeb our mission is to explore the very latest web technology products and trends. We like to test out all the new web apps and spot the trends before others, and we're fortunate to have a great group of sponsors who support this goal. So once a week we write a post about them; here's who they are, what they do and what they've been up to lately. We hope you'll pay them a visit as a way to show your appreciation for their sponsorship of this site.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a particularly sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages which we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

We wrote a lot about the importance of Barack Obama's use of social media during the recent U.S. election cycle, and we have seen some evidence that the Obama administration will continue to use these communication channels in the future.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, this is also what Obama's supporters expect from their candidate. 46% of Obama voters expect the newly elected President to reach out to them directly through email, social networks, and text messages.

Feeling information overloaded? No doubt one of the sources of stress in your life are the unread items that await you daily in your RSS reader. No matter how many times you read through your feeds, new items always appear. Perhaps it's time to find a different way to get your news. An experimental Firefox add-on called Ambient News may be able to help.

Any number of companies - like computer giant Dell for example - have taken to "crowdsourcing" their R&D, asking customers what features they'd like to see and then letting the public vote the best ideas to the top. Now, it seems that Google is taking the opportunity to include its massive user base in the decision process with the release of Google Product Ideas, a new offering that allows users to - you guessed it - propose what they'd like to see Google build and vote on proposed ideas from others.

While the MD5 hack that puts e-commerce sites at risk by faking security certificates received most of the attention at the 25C3 conference in Berlin today, another interesting talk about using XMPP to ensure privacy and security on social networks by Jan Torben Heuer caught our eyes as well. Heuer demoed a social bookmarking service named Diki, which implements some of his ideas, though in the long run, the developers are planning to take this prototype and develop a full-blown social network with a focus on privacy and encryption around this.

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

MeasuredUp is a review service that allows customers to share their positive and negative experiences about local or online businesses, but until now, these businesses did not really have a chance to reach out to these customers through the service and rectify potential customer service issues. Now, MeasuredUp has introduced a new featured, Direct Connect, which allows companies to claim their identity on the service and reach out to their customers.