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Outlook users can now use email plug-in Liaise to automatically extract action items, delegation and priority levels from the free text of email conversations. This is software that's so cool it makes me jealous of Windows users.

Liaise launched in September and won the Peoples' Choice Award for Enterprise Products at DEMO but is available to the public at large for the first time today.

Those of us who make a living by making things happen (i.e. who hustle) know that it is a people game. All of the tools in the world won't beat the chemistry and aligned motivation that come from creative win/win deal-making. The tools are like a hammer for a carpenter. You have to have them, but carpenters are not defined by their tools. However, something substantively different is happening online at the tool level, thanks to social media.

A good carpenter with a power drill will beat a good carpenter using muscle alone. A bad carpenter with a power drill is, of course, just a dangerous maniac! But we don't really have the equivalent of a power drill yet. We can see bits of it, but it is like having a drill, motor and battery that no one has put together. The pieces that make up this hustler's power drill are: email + CRM + LinkedIn + Twitter.

The beta launch of Google Wave has once again put the spotlight on the shortcomings of email. Wave tries to be everything for everybody, but others, like the recently launched Nurphy, have opted for a more focused approach. Nurphy, founded by Paul Horsfall and Neil Cauldwell, wants to be a replacement for email conversations with multiple recipients. The result is an interesting mix between email, Twitter, Yammer and IM that is aimed at both business and casual users.

Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think.

A recent study by industry group the Participatory Marketing Network has unearthed some surprising data on Gen Y behavior. Apparently, the members of this young demographic (ages 18-24) would rather give up their social networking accounts before they would abandon their email. Given that this generation is typically viewed as "plugged in" digital natives who don't have any use for email, the study raises many questions. Have the previous reports about Generation Y's disdain for email simply been wrong? Or has Gen Y grown up a bit now and has learned the necessity of the medium?

Yesterday's phishing attack in which several thousand Hotmail username and password combinations were leaked to the web now appears to be just the beginning of a massive phishing attack affecting users of multiple webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and Earthlink. The original list was posted anonymously on pastebin.com, a site generally used by developers sharing code snippets. Again, that site recently saw the addition 20,000 more login details from other webmail service providers, indicating what may the largest scale phishing attack to date.

Looking for a more affordable and more stable hosted email service than Gmail? According to Lotus, that's exactly what their new hosted email system called iNotes can provide. The company isn't being subtle about their desire to compete head-on with the Internet giant, either. Says Sean Poulley, an IBM executive overseeing the new service, "Google has shown itself to be weak. There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service."

Should Google be worried? Some analysts think so. "This is trouble for Google," said Matthew Cain of Gartner. Google of course, disagrees.

Liaise is an email add-on launching today that analyzes the free-text contents of your emails as you write them for task-related information, including assignee, deadline and priority. It then helps you manage all your tasks in an interface beside your email inbox, pulling up all the emails associated with a particular task or person you're set to meet with, automatically.

This impressive tool is launching today at the DEMO conference, where it may very well steal the show. Liaise is currently available only for Outlook, but if you're an Outlook user then it's worth your time to download. Outlook user or not, you'll want to check out the video demonstration below.

According to recent analysis by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), more people than ever are spending their time online visiting content sites which provide news, information, and entertainment. Despite the emergence of social networks, and in particular the rapid growth of Facebook, it's content sites which engage web surfers' attention the most these days - time spent on these sites is up 88% from only five years ago. That's not to say social networking community sites haven't grown too, it's just that their growth hasn't come at the expense of content. Instead, people are using traditional communication sites and services (think webmail, IM, and discussion groups) less and less and choosing to use Facebook and other social networks instead.

When we first looked at the personal relationship manager Gist back in October of last year, we were intrigued. Here was an online service that had a real purpose: to help you make sense out of your email's data. Gist does this by analyzing the relationships in the hidden social network that is your inbox and then determines who and what's important. It's like your own personal CRM system. At the time of our initial review, Gist was still in a closed private beta. Today, the closed trial has ended and everyone can now try Gist. The company has also added some new features to coincidence with the launch.