Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.

The one major new feature in this release of Acrobat.com is the file organizer. Before, files could live in three different places on the service. Now all files are accessible through one main interface.

The file organizer itself includes some handy features, too. Instead of using a traditional folder structure like you have on your computer's hard drive, the service introduces something called "collections." These are more like iTunes playlists than file folders (or even labels in Gmail) because files can be assigned to multiple collections instead of having to sit in just one folder.

Another key component to the organizer is a file search tool. Believe it or not, the online service had no way of helping you find your files until now. Although the current search capabilities don't yet offer full text search of your documents, Adobe says that may come further down the road.

Also new is the organizer's "import and edit" feature which lets you open external files directly into the appropriate program so you can begin to work on them online. In the past, you had to first launch the program, then import the file. This time-saving step is more akin to what rival Google Docs offers via their upload feature except that in Acrobat.com, you don't have to click a link to open the uploaded file - it happens automatically.

Other New Features

The various online office programs themselves have seen improvements as well in this new release. Buzzword is leaving beta and now it, along with Presentations, lets you import images from online services like Flickr and Google Images in addition to the images found on your computer. One drawback to this feature, though, is that the online image searches don't offer filtering by license type, so a user could easily get into trouble by adding a copyrighted or otherwise licensed photo into their document if they neglect to check permissions first.

The Tables app, still in beta, now has the ability to do more data sorting and filtering. It also adds new views including a print layout view that shows what the document will look like on the printed page.

Acrobat.com Comes to iPhone, Blackberry

One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called scanR, the mobile application lets users take advantage of their mobile phone's camera to add new files to the service. After taking the photo, the app uses OCR technology to convert the image to text. How well this works is unknown at this time because the app has not yet arrived in the respective app stores.

The app also lets users view their files in a read-only mode, convert them to PDFs, and share them with others via fax or email. There will be two versions of the app made available - a free version and a premium offering which will allow for more PDF conversions and faxes.

According to Adobe, the Acrobat.com service is faring well. They already have 6 million users and add around 100,000 more each week. While a lot of users are students and SMB owners looking for a free alternative to more expensive Microsoft Office software, the company says they're also seeing the service picked up and used in small workgroups at larger companies. However, Adobe admits that they're not an enterprise play yet and they also won't reveal how many people use the premium version of the service - only that they're "happy" with the number thus far.

If you want to try the upgraded online suite, you can do so at www.acrobat.com as of tomorrow (Saturday, November 21st) at 6 AM EST.

When thinking as to how the new uploader should function, Facebook had a few goals, most of them technical in nature. They wanted the new tool to no longer depend on Java, be compatible with future versions of Facebook's chrome, be easy to update and more. However, to the end user, the best part about the new uploader is that it allows you to start a photo upload and then leave the page to browse around elsewhere on Facebook (or even the web!) while the upload is underway.

To meet their goals, Facebook went with a browser plug-in that uses JavaScript APIs and a front-end created with HTML and CSS. The end result is a much improved experience. But like the Facebook blog post says, "while it looks like magic, it's really just a bunch of cool hacks." Hacks or not, regular Facebook users will greatly appreciate the upgrade.

Install the New Photo Uploader Tool

To install the new uploader, you must first visit the Prototypes page for the tool and activate it for your profile. Then, the next time you go to create a new album, you'll be prompted to install the Facebook plug-in. Once complete, you'll be presented with the new user interface which lets you browse through your computer's photo library and select the images you want to upload. This new interface is much easier to navigate - and more attractive, too - than the old Facebook uploader from days past.

Facebook says the new tool has several additional security mechanisms built in as well, one of the more interesting being a "kill switch" that can remotely deactivate the tool in the event that a security hole is discovered. While confident that the new uploader is already securely designed and architected from the start, the company has released it as a prototype first so people can report any security issues they may find.

Less technically-minded folks can simply activate the tool and use it, reporting any problems they find as well as far as user experience issues, crashes or other bugs. Depending on the results of the tests, Facebook will be able to correct any problems prior to rolling it out to all users. If you want to give the new uploader a shot yourself, you can do so by visiting its page here.

You give Factery a list of links and a keyword and it will build an index of all the facts asserted in those links about your topic of interest, delivered in XML or JSON format. The service can run on top of a search engine but could also be used in any number of other ways. I've been feeling unsatisfied with other search engines all day since seeing a Factery demo Monday morning.

Compare that with the Factery results page - I don't even need to click through if I don't want to, I feel like I got a great overview of the story just from my search page. Perhaps that's a problem - for a publishing industry that already says it's scared of search engines - but as a reader it sure isn't my problem, it's great. Why would I want Google News to tell me where I can go to find information if someone else will just give me the information?

The company's test demo searches Twitter and Yahoo Boss - neither search is as exciting as I'd hoped 100% of the time, but it's often remarkably good. Factery is also testing an interesting integration with Silverlight stream reader Sobees, in which linked pages from Twitter or Facebook are annotated with automatically extracted highlights via Factery.

I expect a whole lot of companies are going to at least try this API out and I'm excited to see the results.

How This is Unlike Other Real-Time Search Services

Factery is talking a lot about its ability to analyze links shared over Twitter, but that's probably just because Twitter is easy for people to understand. The fact is, the service can perform on-demand analysis of text behind any set of links. That's what differentiates it from other real-time search engines like OneRiot, which also analyzes the text of pages linked to on networks like Twitter and offers an API to display real-time search results on other sites. Competitor Collecta analyzes Twitter streams in real time and offers an XMPP API to push new search results live to any page.

Factery is a different kind of animal, though. It's more like a smart search inside any other search. It doesn't even have to be search, though. The company talks a lot about how they make mobile reading more efficient by pulling the salient information up to the surface of a page, instead of requiring mobile readers to load multiple pages.

I thought of five or six different ways I'd like to use it just while talking to the company on the phone. (I'm not going to share those here, either. I think some could offer an important competitive advantage.)

I'd Love to See This Work Everywhere

Yesterday I was testing a new Android app from the Sunlight Foundation that lets you track members of congress. One tab in the app is a search for your congressperson in the news. Unfortunately, the page excerpts give no indication why the politician you searched for appeared in that news story - just that their name did, somewhere. That search is powered by a Yahoo API, probably BOSS, but it's not any fun to use at all. How unsatisfying, I thought, when I could have a list of key facts concerning my search query in the list of links that the search brought back. But that was yesterday, and Factery is just launching today.

The possibilities are truly endless. That's probably why Ron Conway, one of the leading investors in the real-time economy, joined others in investing in the company. With $1.2 million in the bank, Factery is a modest developer play with a whole lot of potential.

Give Factery's API a try and let us know what you think. It's free to use; the company says it may start inserting "sponsored facts" (isn't that an interesting phrase) into results later but things like business model and to a lesser degree de-duplication are still works in progress. I sure do love this idea.

While some early testers of the Waveboard app complained that it didn't do anything more than what the iPhone optimized website already offered, the next release of Waveboard may have those naysayers changing their mind. Waveboard 2.0 has a few new features, but the one that will grab everyone's attention is its ability to offer "push" notifications on the iPhone.

Quick Inbox

One of the new features of Waveboard 2.0 is something called the "Quick Inbox" view. Since Google Wave loads a little slowly on the iPhone - something developer Dirk Holtwick says is out of his hands - he's come up with a workaround for a speedier launch. The new "quick inbox" feature offers a fast-loading overview that displays the waves that have changed, as you can see in the following video:

Push Notifications

Even more exciting, perhaps, is the push notifications feature. In addition to displaying a badge on the app's icon showing the number of new waves, the push notifications feature will tap into the iPhone's ability to display pop-up alerts on your device. As new text is entered into a wave, the iPhone will display the additional text in a push notification message:

Of course, depending on the number of waves you're involved in and how heavily they're used, this feature could easily become an annoyance. Unfortunately, Google offers few control mechanisms for managing the waves you belong to at the moment - something that could lead to serious information overload for Wave users. For example, anyone can add you to a wave - even without your permission. This can lead to an inbox crowded with waves that you don't really care about following. For some, this feature is a key selling point for Wave, but for others it's just a chaos-inducing mess. That may change in future, though, when Google implements the "whitelisting" feature, which will allow users to create an approved list of fellow wavers, and only people on that list will be able to contact you.

There's no word yet on if or how you'll be able to manage the new push notifications feature in the app's settings. If there were configuration options that let you exclude some waves (like public ones, for example), then it would be even more useful.

In any event, the app will now have some value-added features that make it worth the $0.99. Stay tuned to the GetWaveboard blog in the coming days for more details on the new features and how they work.

Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging Services

Topify

Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.

See also: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next

Seesmic Web

The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.

See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)

Tweetie 2

The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.

See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars

Aardvark

Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.

See also: The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing 3 New Cyborg Q&A Services

Chrome/Chromium

Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.

LazyFeed

LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.

Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.

See also: Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action

Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.

See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.

Does this mean Shazam is about to give Pandora and the like a run for their money?

The free Shazam application is best known for its nifty tune identification trick. Mobile users can hold their iPhones up next to a speaker or other source of music and the application "listens" to what's being played in order to identify the song and artist. It also lets you read track and album reviews, read artist biographies and tag songs to share with friends over Facebook and Twitter.

The new application, Shazam Encore, adds even more functionality including improved speed performance, trend lists that highlight what's popular among other Shazam users, a search function that taps into a database of 8 million+ songs, music recommendations and a "drive-and-tag" feature that lets the app recognize when it's in an in-car dock so it can identify what's playing on the radio while you're driving.

But How are Those Recommendations?

Out of all the new features, however, it's the music recommendations option which is the most interesting. Recommendations are the killer feature which can either make or break a mobile application these days. With services like Last.fm and Pandora already providing mobile users with playlists based on a user's likes or dislikes, Shazam needs to be able to do recommendations well - really well - in order to compete with these already popular applications.

In addition, the up-and-comer streaming music service from Spotify also partnered with The Echo Nest's music intelligence platform earlier this year to help improve on Spotify's playlist and music discovery functions. The end results of that partnership have been touted as being like the iTunes' "Genius" feature, only better. Although not yet available in the U.S., Spotify's mobile application is one of the most highly anticipated applications as it provides a new way to enjoy music - through playlist creations that can be listened to both online and off. It, too, will be heavy competition for any application entering into the music recommendations game, including, of course, Shazam.

So where does that leave Shazam Encore? At the moment, its recommendations offering provides you with a list of other songs you might like based on the one track you have pulled up. While this might help you discover new music, you aren't able to create a playlist based on those songs. Instead, Shazam's focus remains more on the sharing of music via tagging and posting to Twitter and Facebook.

As far as how good Shazam's recommendations are, we would need to do a lot more testing before giving a solid opinion - the app is just too new. In fact, it's so new that it wasn't even showing up in an iTunes Store search at the time of writing. The provided screenshot in the App Store doesn't look all that encouraging, though. (Really, a fan of indie band My Sad Captains wants to listen to Katy Perry singing about "kissing a girl?" I don't think so...)

But whether or not the recommendations are up to speed, it remains to be seen whether iPhone app shoppers will be willing to fork over the $4.99 US (£2.99/ €3.99) to have access to them, especially when there's no playlist option included.

Those interested in trying the new Encore application can find it now in the App Store by clicking here.

One of Orb's best features is the OrbLive iPhone application which connects with your home computer over the internet to provide access to your media library of audio, video, and photos. Through the mobile application, you can access any of your media files and play stream them over either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. In the Windows version of the software, PC's with TV tuner cards can also connect you to live, streaming TV in addition to the other shared media saved on the PC's hard drive.

To some extent, Orb competes with Apple's own offerings since it provides access to music and video from either a desktop computer or an iPhone. That's why it was somewhat surprising that Apple ever approved the company's iPhone application to begin with. Even more surprising is that they allowed it to function over 3G when similar products - like Slingbox's SlingPlayer for iPhone, another live TV streaming app - are restricted to Wi-Fi only.

No Live TV for Mac Users Yet

Unfortunately, the Mac version is debuting without the live TV streaming functionality. According to Joe Costello, CEO of Orb Networks, support for live TV support will be added in subsequent versions. In the meantime, however, Mac users can install the Orb software to stream music, photos, videos, home movies and webcam feeds stored in iTunes to their iPhones or to any other internet-connected device including netbooks, notebooks, media players, game consoles and more. All that's needed is the new Mac OS X desktop software (works on OS X Intel 10.5 or later).

Those interested in trying out the new Mac version can grab the installer from here: orb.com/en/download_orb. For now, the Mac software is available in English only.

One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site's features including profile, contacts, groups, jobs, your inbox, and more. Click on any of these items and a drop-down menu will appear providing you with further options. This gives the most important navigational aspect to the site a more modern look than it had before when each section was displayed in clickable tabs of different shades of blue.

The company also touts how the new look and feel also makes room for more page content with less scrolling needed in order to see everything on the page. This is also true to some extent. However, on your homepage where network updates and group updates are featured, the amount of scrolling depends on the size of your network and how active the network members are. For example, under the "group updates" section, updates for the past seven days were posted followed by a section that included updates from the prior week. That actually led to quite a bit of scrolling to see them all. It's not necessarily a bad feature, though. After all, LinkedIn isn't the sort of site we're logging into on a daily basis so it's nice to be able to catch up when we're there... even if that means the homepage screen extends downward forever.

Also new on the homepage are moveable, collapsible sidebar modules which can display things like who's been viewing your profile, events, job listings, applications you've added, and more.

Cleaner Look Highlights Ads

One downside of the site's "cleaner" look is how much more noticeable the ads are now. Of course, to LinkedIn this may be an upside. Although the ad placements are no different than before, the new look makes them really stand out. Since everything is now black or blue text on a white background, the full-colored ad at the top of the screen is the first thing to draw your eye upon login. There's also a text link ad directly below the global navigation that demands your attention. It's in the exact place where a company message would normally appear and the font used is a darker, bolder blue than anything else on the site. Both of these elements are somewhat distracting, but we suppose there's nothing that you can really do about ads. Still, we wish that the network had taken a page from Facebook's book when it came to ad placement - when you log into Facebook, the first thing you notice is the content and the updates, not the ads.

LinkedIn says the updated design was based on years of data from usability research but what you're seeing now isn't necessarily the final product. They're still iterating and, based on user feedback about the new look, they may make some additional changes in this and other areas.

Still Needs Improvement: the LinkedIn Inbox

One thing that still hasn't improved, sadly, is the LinkedIn inbox. Although the homepage view of the inbox provides a handy "take action" button which lets you quickly accept, reject, or archive requests, the full inbox view still forces you to click each message to accept or reject requests - there are no bulk actions you can take from the inbox screen besides archiving or marking messages as read or unread. Even worse, after accepting or rejecting a request, the message remains in your inbox until you manually archive it, necessitating quite a bit of additional work if you've let those invites pile up.

What Do You Think?

Are you impressed with the new look for LinkedIn? Or did you prefer the old tabbed interface better? LinkedIn obviously hopes that by simplifying the navigation and site elements which help to better engage users that they will spend more time exploring and interacting with the various site elements. Do you think that will be the case? Or do the underlying features of LinkedIn need improvement as well?

This is a strange story, but no one said the path to the future wouldn't itself be strange. So consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.

Leapfish searches for user queries across 25 different services, from Google and Yahoo to Yelp, Digg and some Real Estate sites. The service determines which sources are providing the most relevant results and constructs a search results page accordingly. If users love Leapfish enough to marry it they can turn on as many as 35 different widgets to interact with things like their Facebook and Twitter accounts on the Leapfish home page.

The design of the site and results pages are quite nice and the fundamental idea is a good one. But how could Leapfish already be set to bank $10 million in revenue this year?

The Pleasanton, California company says it has 100 employees; 50 are listed on LinkedIn and almost every one of them are in sales.

The sales pitch is this: Leapfish is small today, but the keyword prices that companies (like this lady) are paying will be a bargain if Leapfish can really grow. It's an investment, and as such it's a very affordable one. Some companies have already resold the keywords they bought from Leapfish for a profit, the company says.

One part of what's being invested in is, no doubt, a vision of the future. Check out this absolutely cathartic video the company made about the real-time web.

Unfortunately, in our tests Leapfish doesn't work very well. Search results are often off-topic, there are software bugs in some of the most basic parts of the site on the day of its grand unveiling and the compelling vision isn't that exciting in reality. Check out our 5 minute tour of the site to see what $10 million in ads have been bought against over the last year.

The automotive industry has been an early user of this track and trace technology in shipping containers. According to IBM, many automotive manufacturers carry container inventories in excess of 100 million dollars. One use case is suppliers of car parts, who fill the containers with components and sub-assemblies. These are then sent to the manufacturer. A sensor with a unique serial number is attached to each container, so that manufacturers and their trading partners can track them as they move along the supply chain.

Networks of Sensors Gaining Momentum

Networks of sensors are becoming increasingly used to monitor and track things. The term Internet of Things refers to when real-world objects are connected to the Internet, for example goods in a shipping container.

It's early in the evolution of sensors, but they're already being used for a variety of tasks - such as management of water infrastructure, levee oversight management and flood control, monitoring highway traffic conditions, sensing changes in seismic activity and air quality, and more.

As IBM noted in its press release today, RFID tags (Radio Frequency Identification sensors) are becoming particularly popular for the purpose of item tracking and authentication. By 2010, IBM estimates that approximately six billion of these tags will be in circulation.

Who's Using Sensors?

Other than automobile manufacturers, IBM told us that about 7-8 other industries are using this kind of sensor technology to track and trace goods. An example is the medical industry, where InfoSphere Traceability Server is used by hospitals and doctors to keep track of the medical devices implanted in individual patients.

A specific example cited by IBM is a company called Implanet, which sells medical implants such as hips and knees. It attaches RFID tags to the device packaging, allowing hospitals to scan a tag and store information about an implant with the patient's records.

As well as tracking and trace use cases, IBM's software is used by pharmaceutical distributors and manufacturers to combat counterfeiting.

Image credits: runner310; jdnx

At the time of the sale, Newsvine was promising to integrate some of those web 2.0 features into the main MSNBC properties. CEO Mike Davidson told ReadWriteWeb in 2007 that "over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense." Has that actually occured? Let's check in with Newsvine to find out.

Newsvine is a "Citizen Journalism" site; a news publication built using the voices and recommendations of ordinary citizens. It also syndicates content from its parent company MSNBC, Associated Press and others. Newsvine has a lot in common with social news sites like Digg and Slashdot - only it has more mainstream topics.

Slow Development, But Keeping Abreast of Trends

What's new at Newsvine circa 2009? There is nothing overly different from what we saw in 2007, but the site continues to look elegant and is still packed with social features.

Newsvine appears to have kept up with current trends - we noted today a Real-Time Web feature, called Newsvine LIVE. This is a rapidly scrolling view of emerging stories, displayed as a pane on the right-hand side of the homepage.

However as with many startups that get acquired by big companies, the pace of development at Newsvine slowed considerably after being bought. A scan of the Newsvine blog this year doesn't show much development. There was some administrative work done on groups and a hook-up with Facebook. Not much else is noted in the blog, although Newsvine has been active in developing widgets for sites like Netvibes and Yahoo.

Mike Davidson blogged in August that "things, for the most part, are going swimmingly [at Newsvine]." He admitted though that "building technologies and services for msnbc.com has slowed our development efforts on newsvine.com a bit, for the time being."

Traffic: Steady

When we last spoke to Newsvine, in July 2007 just prior to its acquisition, Newsvine was getting about 1.2 million unique visitors per month. It was said to be growing at an average rate of 46% per quarter. The top topics in Newsvine in mid-07 were Politics and Technology, echoing the popular topics in the blogosphere of that time.

Traffic over the past year at Newsvine has been fairly flat, at least according to Compete - which puts the US unique visitors at around 1.2 million and shows little growth.

However in an August 2009 post, Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson claimed that Newsvine now gets "over 4 million uniques a month." So perhaps Compete's statistics are too low (which wouldn't be the first time).

Conclusion

All seems fine and dandy at Newsvine, despite slow development of new features on the site.

However, as yet there is little evidence of Newsvine functionality on MSNBC sites - certainly the readers don't contribute much content to them. Hopefully we see more of that over the coming year, as Mike Davidson did say integration would occur "over the next few years" back in 2007.

Overall, it's good to see that Newsvine's community is still relatively vibrant. As of time of writing, a story entitled 'Dick Cheney was a Lying, Treasonous Coward' has 239 comments. Evidence that it is an MSNBC site after all!

According to Google's blog post about the beta release, the sync feature has to first be activated on each of your computers where Google Chrome is used. To do this, you'll need to download the beta build of the browser available here. Once installed, click the "wrench" menu (yes, the one with the wrench icon) in Google Chrome and select "Synchronize my bookmarks" from the menu that appears. Sign into your Google account in the dialog box that pops up. If you've already set up Sync on another computer, you'll then be prompted to confirm that your different sets of bookmarks should be merged together. In that case, click "Merge and Sync" to complete the process. Finally, click "OK" when you've finished.

Not only does this feature sync your bookmarks, it also creates a copy of your bookmarks file on Google Docs in a new folder called "Google Chrome." (Wonder what else will go in that folder in the future?)

What's in Store for Sync

For now, the Sync feature is only synchronizing browser bookmarks, but the framework behind Sync is ultimately designed to handle the synchronization of other kinds of browser data as well. As to what sort of data that could be, Google can't provide any official confirmation just yet. However, they did say that you could imagine that "this type of infrastructure could be extended to other types of user data such as passwords" in the future. We'll speculate that it will eventually include those passwords, your browser history, and whatever favorite websites appear as thumbnails on the New Tab page. After all, if Mozilla's Weave Sync prototype can handle those sorts of tasks already, there's no reason to believe that Google couldn't do the same.

Because the new Sync feature uses an XMPP connection to synchronize the changes, changes made on one computer are synchronized immediately to another. Not just quickly, mind you, but immediately. This is possible because XMPP is what's known as a "real-time" communication protocol - the same one that powers Google Talk, the company's IM service.

The use of this sort of technology hints at how Google plans to make their Chrome web browser the core of their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. The new OS will run web applications "in the cloud," a radical change from current OS offerings where many applications are still installed on the computer's hard drive itself. With Chrome (the browser's) ability to synchronize data in real-time between computers, it's easy to see how a cloud OS could operate. It wouldn't matter which machine you used, your data would be available, stored in the cloud, synchronized, and all accessible upon login to your Google account. That prospect is either amazing or terrifying depending on your trust level when it comes to Google. Perhaps it's even both. 

Chrome Gets Faster, Too

While Bookmark Sync is the most interesting feature to debut in the new beta, there are some notable speed improvements to mention, too. The latest build improves performance by 30% since the current stable release of Chrome and by 400% since the very first stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests. 

As noted earlier, speed was a major factor in Firefox's 3.6 beta 1, released just this Friday. Both companies are going head-to-head when it comes to browser speed, JavaScript performance and startup times, but no official speed tests have been done yet to compare the two new beta releases.

To download the latest build of Google Chrome beta, head over to the Chrome beta site here. The official beta requires Windows XP SP2 or higher.

With Xobni Enterprise, I.T. admins can manage the deployment and permissions surrounding the plugin's use via a web-based portal that provides access to user's profiles as well as a groups management feature. By placing different subsets of users into groups, I.T. can deploy custom versions of the plugin to different users. For example, everyone company-wide may get a plugin that offers LDAP integration, but only sales professionals would receive the version that connects to Salesforce. Admins can also choose to "switch off" other previously default integrations such as the Facebook and Twitter extensions.

To push the plugin out to end users, Xobni Enterprise offers an MSI file and registry settings that can be modified as necessary.

Extensions for Salesforce, SharePoint, and More

At launch time, Xobni's Solution Provider Program has partnered with a number of Enterprise vendors to provide extensions and integrations for their new system. The current list of partners includes Atlius Consulting, Cogent, Echo Lane and Interdyne BMI, which help Xobni integrate SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce CRM platforms among others.

The new service also comes with an Extensions Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows in-house developers to write their own extensions to integrate other platforms beyond those which are currently available. Xobni suggests this SDK could be used to deliver company news and information from an internal corporate portal, specific business application, or any other web service.

Other Features

Another general enhancement available with this version of the plugin is Xobni's expanded search capabilities that allows users to search calendar appointments, tasks and archived PST files. The search feature includes advanced filters which let users find results by limiting searches to email contents only or the To:, From:, and  or Subject: fields of their email messages. Users can also access their entire contact database from the auto-complete field in Outlook's "Compose" window.

Pricing

The company webpage for Xobni Enterprise does not include any pricing information, only a link to "Request More Info" from the company. This is likely because each Xobni system is being somewhat custom-built in terms of price because there are additional costs to run the pre-defined extensions created by the company. Depending on which extensions a company chooses to deploy and however many users will be using them, the overall cost of the Xobni Enterprise system will vary. However, the company informs us that the system starts at $30 per user per year with volume discounts available.

Xobni has seen over 3 million downloads of their plugin, including both free and paid versions, since their initial debut. This new offering represents the second revenue stream for the company, the first being the launch of Xobni Plus, a premium version of the plugin that sells for $29.95. They also claim to have a presence in 80% of Fortune 500 companies thanks to employee adoption outside of the traditional I.T. infrastructure, a trend known as self-provisioning and one that has steadily increased over the years.

Companies looking to maintain control over what their employees can do on their company computers often end up having no choice but to purchase the enterprise services provided by the startups their employees are already using in order to once again centralize control within I.T. If Xobni's adoption across the enterprise is as strong as they claim, they may soon have several companies looking to implement the Xobni Enterprise Service so they can do just this. Other companies may be tempted to try the product for the first time now that it offers I.T. friendly tools and enterprise level support.

More information about Xobni Enterprise is available here on the company's website.

In the latest edition of the Firefox browser, the team has introduced the following new features:

• Built-in support for Personas, Firefox's themeing system which lets you browse through a gallery of skins and apply different ones with just a click
• Plugin alerts: Firefox will now alert users if their plugins are out-of-date, a useful addition since older plugins can lead to performance problems and even security issues.
• Open native videos can now be viewed full-screen
• Drag-and-drop features: In the beta, you can drag and drop files from your computer into the browser allowing you to easily upload files from your PC to web sites. 
• Support for the WOFF font format
• Support for CSS, DOM, HTML5, and other developer features
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time

Why Speed Matters

Although Firefox and its rival web browsers are all fighting to best Internet Explorer in terms of install base, they still pit themselves against each other with their unique features, being first to offer support for new standards, and of course, web browser performance.

It's in this last area that Firefox has struggled recently. Past builds showed Firefox beaten by the up-and-comer Google Chrome in boot-up, page-loading, and JavaScript performance. Despite Chrome's low market share of only around 4%, no company can safely ignore the competition when that competition is Google (just look at what Google did to the GPS market last week!).

Chrome may be a relatively unknown browser among mainstream users for now, but if Google holds true to their promises to launch their netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS, which uses the Chrome browser to run applications, there could be a whole new user base of Walmart shoppers who rapidly make a browser switch without even realizing it. And with Chrome's primary focus on browser speed, designed from the ground-up with the idea of running intensive web applications, Mozilla knows that one day Chrome could end up being serious competition...at least once the large majority of computing moves to the cloud. In fact, that day may have already arrived for some of today's web users.

To improve browser performance, Mozilla introduced a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.5. Many of the speed increases in 3.6 can now be attributed to this technology. However, TraceMonkey has to go up against Chrome's own system, V8, which Google optimized earlier this year to give their browser a 30% speed bump.

Of course, we'll need to see some formal tests completed before determining where the browsers stand today, but it's likely going to be a situation where the engines are neck-and-neck in terms of performance. While this aspect to the browser war may go unnoticed by most web surfers, it's the sort of situation where everyone wins. And the prize will be a faster web surfing experience, no matter which browser you choose to use.

We discovered that there is excitement about the potential for artistic collaboration using Wave. However the level of actual collaboration activity is still very low. Here's what we found...

We saw in yesterday's post that Wave is being used by educators mostly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. For artists, there is similar potential to use Wave as a collaborative creative tool. Cory Huff suggested a real time painting app that allows visual artists to work together on a new project, or an event planning tool for Art events.

Right now, there doesn't appear to be much artistic activity on Wave. The closest we could find was a public wave called 'Artists Wave,' created by Fernando Fonseca and others. That wave lists some videos, pictures and music works - which at least shows off Wave's multimedia features. However there was little evidence of collaboration, for example more than one person creating a new piece of art.

Wave & Filmmaking

There was more activity in Wave around filmmaking. Jonathan Poritsky wrote a post back in June outlining his thoughts on how Wave could streamline the movie-making process - specifically, post production workflows. He's now made that post into a wave called 'Google Wave for Filmmakers: Wave Edition.'

The following chart depicts how Poritsky conceptually sees Wave being used in filmmaking. In a nutshell, all of the participants in the filmmaking process would use Wave to collaborate. In Poritsky's words, "every job and step passes through the wave."

Poritsky admits that "not all of this is possible yet," because it requires faster computers and network technology to process such large video files in real-time. However he says that "the basic precepts of digital editing could actually be done over a network today."

Ultimately Poritsky is bullish on using Wave in filmmaking because "cinema is a collaborative art form." He cites the huge credits list at the end of every movie as proof of that.

Sanctuary: Short Film Using Wave

An early example of a filmmaking wave is a short film called Sanctuary. Their wave is entitled 'Sanctuary - remixable film - dev wave.'

Sanctuary is a "re-mixable Science fiction film" directed by Michela Ledwidge. It's been in production for a number of years, due to budget issues. The film is currently in post-production and Ledwidge is attempting to use Wave to assist with that process.

Wave has a couple of geeky features that may be used by the Sanctuary team. One is 'gadgets,' which are add-ons similar to the mini web applications you can install in your Firefox browser. Sanctuary is looking for two gadgets: a Shot tracker UI and a "Production lingo translator."

Another feature of Wave is 'robots.' These are automated participants on a wave. A robot, according to Google, "can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave's contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves." Sanctuary is looking for the following two robots: an "AI character bot" and a "trac notifications integration" (to show different shots from the movie).

As of now, the Sanctuary wave doesn't have much collaboration around the actual film in it - but this may change if the desired gadgets and robots get developed and deployed.

Conclusion

It's clearly early days for the artistic community in Wave. There's a fair bit of discussion on possible uses for Wave, mostly around collaborating on artistic projects. But not much actual collaboration on projects happening yet.

Filmmaking appears to be the most likely to gain traction in the short-medium term. So we'll check back on progress in 6-12 months.