That description above doesn't really do the service justice - it's the user experience that makes ClikBall stand out. There's something magical about the grace of the app, and there's clearly a premium put on sharing links that lots of other people will want to click on and share.

There's lots of nice little touches here - like the most popular items among your circle of friends, apart from the most universally popular links. The application also installs a custom search engine into your browser, which augments the regular google results with items that you've shared on Clikball.

I'm going to try using this to share my links on Twitter for a little while, instead of doing it through Tweetdeck. There are a few things I'd like to see changed, of course. I'd like to be able to set sharing to Twitter as automatic and I'd like to have a choice in URL shorteners used, at least when posting to Twitter, as I have a strong preference for using the semantic and API friendly Bit.ly. I'd also really like some data export options and there doesn't appear to be any right now. This app could use some more visual elements to it, too. Enjoysthin.gs (our review) could be a good inspiration, and ClikBall for it, too.

One might ask, what's the difference between this and Pierre Omidyar's Ginx, which I gave a scathing review last week. I think there's something about the way that ClikBall seems to integrate with my existing workflow, and uses AJAX in some nice ways, that makes it much more pleasing to use. And, to be frank, ClikBall was built by the guy who made Userscripts.org - one of the best sites on the internet. That's exciting. Credit is also due to Anthony Young, the co-founder of Flock and Ex-flock crew Geoffrey Arone & Raj Paul.

DocVerse currently consists of a 1 MB Office 2007 plug-in that gives Microsoft's desktop software new collaboration and synchronization abilities. Once installed, every time you hit the "save" button in Office, a web version stored online is automatically updated, too. The web version also comes with a link you can share.

If that part sounds a lot like what's already available in Microsoft's Live Workspace, that's because it is. Like DocVerse, Live Workspace users can also install a plugin into Office that keeps files between computer and web in sync.

However, the key difference between DocVerse and any of Microsoft's current offerings is the service's online collaboration abilities. With DocVerse, a group editing feature lets multiple users edit one copy of the same document without having to check it out, then check it back in.

To begin using the software, you can share a document with others using either the URL provided or by entering in the email addresses of those you want to share with. As changes are made, they're synced back to the online version of the document. The DocVerse software then uses a confliction resolution system to deal with any potential conflicts between the updates. As the edits continue, DocVerse automatically creates new versions of the document while saving the older versions in case you need to revert back.

DocVerse users will also see their changes categorized in an in-file "News Feed" which appears in the sidebar of any open document. For users without Office, feedback can be given about the shared files straight from their web browser.

At launch time, the plug-in works with Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 only, but support for Word and Excel 2007 will roll out later this spring as will support for Office 2003. DocVerse is Windows-only.

Some Questions

Microsoft announced the upcoming Microsoft Office Web applications at their Professional Developers Conference in October. With these web applications, due in the next version of Office (Office 14), users will be able to create, edit, and collaborate on Office documents through the browser (IE, Firefox, or Safari). Despite some initial rumors, Office Web Applications will not require Silverlight to run and they'll even  work on the iPhone via the Safari browser.

That obviously made us wonder - how will DocVerse compete with Microsoft's own offering? Says DocVerse CEO Shan Shina, the key will be backward compatibility. Where the official Microsoft Office Web Applications will focus only on the latest and greatest version of Office (he presumes - no one really knows), DocVerse will aim to be compatible with Office 2003, 2007, and the upcoming Office 14. Given that 35-40 percent of the market still runs Office 2003 and 15-20 percent runs 2007, he imagines it will be a while before everyone upgrades to Office 14 - web apps or not.

While capitalizing on the "good enough" trend, the company will also focus on how they can best complement the newer Office 14 when it becomes available. In other words, no matter what Microsoft throws out there, DocVerse plans to provide the missing features.

Try it! (Invites)

To learn more about how DocVerse works, Web Worker Daily has a great hands-on review. Our readers can try DocVerse for themselves by clicking here: http://www.docverse.com?ic=RWW. There are only 200 invites available, so that link is first come, first serve.

Disclosure: Sarah Perez also writes for Microsoft's Channel 10.

In this latest version, the metadata you're able to see includes the number of FriendFeed conversations, the number of Diggs, and the number of times the post has been shared in Google Reader or Feedly. To the right of those informational icons are more buttons that let you share the post in Google Reader/Feedly, save the page for later reading (star in Google Reader), Twitter the page, or email it to a friend.

When you've finished reading (and interacting) with the content on your screen, there's a "next" button which you can click to go to the next recommendation in your Feedly/Google Reader.

Integrated Twitter and FriendFeed

In addition to providing tools that help you better understand and share the blog posts you read, Feedly also reminds you how you came across them in the first place. If you originally saw the post on Twitter, a small notification will pop-up to remind you of that tweet and on the notification window there's an option to reply or re-tweet the information directly from the web page you're currently on.

Alternately, if the article you're reading is hot on FriendFeed, Feedly Mini's pop-up will notify you of a popular conversation around the blog's content occurring on FriendFeed. With one click, you can then join that conversation.

If you're not a fan of notifications or just want to dial them back a bit, you can do so from a preference knob called "Mini Friendfeed Notifications" which allows you to control and customize the behavior of these notifications.

How To Get It

All these new features will be made available today as part of a Feedly update to v 1.2 patch 170. If you're not seeing these features yet, don't worry - Feedly is good about delivering automatic updates to their users. In other words, you can install Feedly now, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. If you do end up trying the new version, you can let @feedly on Twitter know what you think. If you run into any problems, you can log it on get satisfaction where every ticket is responded to within 24 hours.

You never know what Feedly will add next. Past updates includes integration with Ubiquity, integration with your Google Search, and more. Based on the image below, it appears that Twitter and FriendFeed are only the start of Feedly's planned integrations for this increasingly useful tool.

In addition, you can post short text messages to your activity streams.

Box.net Is Now a Social Network

With this update, Box.net positions itself as a small social network for businesses. As Jen Grant, Box.net's VP of Marketing, explained to us, the reasoning behind this is that, according to Box.net, social networks work best when they are built around a certain type of content (like MySpace and music). Thanks to its integration with other online productivity services including Zoho, EchoSign, and Scribd, you could potentially run a large part of your business through Box.net and its affiliated services.

According to Box.net's press release, the company currently provides services to over 50.000 companies. As Jen Grant pointed out to us, these are usually small to medium-sized businesses, or groups within larger enterprises. The new features in Box.net will surely help the company to expand its business

Most importantly, Posterous' new bookmarklet automatically extracts videos from sites like YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, Revision3, blip.tv, and many others. It also recognizes music on imeem and SoundCloud, as well as documents on Slideshare, scribd, and Docstoc. The bookmarklet also picks up on photos from flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, and you can even include live video from Seesmic, qik, and justin.tv. In addition, the bookmarklet also recognizes embedded documents from these services on other sites and allows you to post them to your Posterous.

Autopost

Thanks to Posterous' auto-post feature, you can forward your posts to Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, as well as to most major blogging services, including Tumblr. Sadly, Posterous does not (yet?) support posting to FriendFeed and it can't save a copy of your links to more traditional boomarking services like delicious.

Taking on Tumblr

Sadly, Posterous still doesn't offer an API that would allow third-party developers to easily create applications on top of the service. Tumblr, on the other hand, has cultivated a rich ecosystem of third-party apps.

Posterous, however, has a dedicated fanbase and the simplicity of the service has served it well over the last six months. This new feature will surely help it to gain a lot of new users, as it massively expands the usefulness and functionality of Posterous.

Enjoysthin.gs lets you share all kinds of media, from images to videos to quotes to audio you call in and record from your phone. The interface is beautiful and the site is a real joy to use.

The user experience on the site is a real home run; from browsing through the beautifully displayed items from other users to interacting with the site's basic functionality. Creating an account is remarkably smooth and the plush, over-sized displays make us want to jump up and down and clap our hands.

Anyone can tag items, even those saved by other people, and you can view recent shared items globally by tag. Recent activities by your friends are displayed as another item in a big box when you are logged in. There's even an API for integration with outside services; though we dare anyone to try to make a cooler interface, it would be nice to see Enjoysthin.gs on FriendFeed.

There are clearly more features that are still needed, there are no RSS feeds or ways to view the most popular items, for example. Roden is hard at work improving the site, he added 31 new features in December alone. The new feature that lets you call in a voice recording is very cool - a message we recorded was posted to our profile page in just a few minutes.

You can befriend me at Enjoysthin.gs on this page. I'll probably be using the service for at least the next few days. Not because it's particularly popular, secure, supportive of data portability or anything like that - just because it's so damn much fun to use.

Now, it can be. Today, SlideShare is introducing the "SlideShare Ribbon" an add-in that makes the sharing and social features of SlideShare accessible without even leaving PowerPoint.

Using the SlideShare Ribbon, users gain the ability to share presentations from within PowerPoint, update existing presentations with new content, search existing SlideShare presentations for examples, download SlideShare content for remixing, and view presentations from contacts and groups. User can also check their SlideShare statistics from within PowerPoint.

In short, SlideShare makes PowerPoint social.

That's what makes this release so interesting. SlideShare has taken the opportunity to move beyond browser development - the traditional home of social features - to work on a different piece of desktop software. And in PowerPoint, SlideShare has chosen an app that, by and large, has not been seen as a venue for social behavior, at all.

The idea of using PowerPoint to access Web resources isn't earth shattering. Microsoft has provided the ability to dynamically download PowerPoint clip art for quite some time. But that has always been within the realm of delivering Microsoft content to the user. This is the first time that those types of Web-based interactions have taken on more of a social-networking context - by delivering and sharing content from a variety of users. And that suddenly casts all desktop software in a new light - no matter how "unsocial" a particular app may seem.

No doubt this is just the first of many such add-ins that will imbue our most used applications with social features. And that will make even the most tedious of applications increasingly valuable to us.

To install the SlideShare Ribbon, you'll need to PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Windows Live Photos: This is one of the most interesting new applications, and we will publish a more in-depth review of it a little bit later tonight. Basically, this is Microsoft's answer to Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums.

Live Photos allows you to share your pictures with granular privacy controls, and thanks to the "What's New" feed, the new Live Photos service will also allow you to monitor the photos of your friends on Windows Live.

Windows Live Profiles: The new Live Profile aggregates and displays your activity on Windows Live and third-party services. Somewhat similar to FriendFeed, users can choose to aggregate their activities on other services like Yelp or Twitter on this profile page as well. In the next few months, Microsoft will also integrate a large number of other third-party services, including LiveJournal, Digg, Last.fm, iLike, Seesmic, and SlideShare.

One of the highlights of the new profile is that it includes extremely granular privacy controls.

These profiles, together with the updated Windows Live Groups, are the hub of Microsoft's social networking strategy around Windows Live.

Windows Live People: This is the central address book for all Windows Live services. It integrates directly with your Hotmail contacts and it will also allow you to invite your contacts from third-party services like LinkedIn (with more to be added later). Here, you can also organize your contacts into categories, and chat with them directly through the Windows Live Messenger for the Web.

Windows Live FrameIt: This is an interesting new service which allows you to to send photos and other content such as news or traffic information to digital picture frames. So far, Microsoft has not announced a lot of details about it, but we know that the hardware partners include Navteq, ViewSonic, and RMI.

Updated Services

Windows Live Groups: As rumored, Microsoft will also update MSN Groups and replace it with the new Windows Live Groups. These groups are tightly integrated with the other Live services, including the revamped Live Calendar, Live Photos, and SkyDrive.

SkyDrive: Microsoft's online storage solution has been upgraded from 5GB to 25GB.

Mobile

Microsoft is also releasing mobile versions of these new and updated services that should work on any mobile web browser.

This is Big

Overall, these new services represent a major upgrade to the online part of the Windows Live suite. Microsoft is clearly trying to challenge both Yahoo and Google with its new photo application, while the new profiles and groups tie all the Live services together into a very sophisticated social network.

According to Microsoft's PR materials about this release, its main mission in designing these new services was to give users a better way to manage their digital lives. Judging from what we have seen so far, Microsoft has definitely succeeded in creating a compelling set of applications that, thanks to its tight integration with Microsoft's desktop applications, will surely drive a lot of new users to Windows Live.

Monetizing a Button

The AddThis platform, which we also use here on RWW, should be a good fit for Clearspring, though it is not quite clear how Clearspring could monetize the service.

For users, AddThis is simply a convenient way to share and bookmark interesting sites. The problem with this, of course, is that a bookmarking button is extremely hard to monetize. Unlike some of its competitors like delicious or ma.gnolia, AddThis is not a destination site for most of its users, but simply a feature provided by the publisher.

Clearspring is clearly looking to expand its audience, but, as Josh Catone points out, it also gives Clearspring access to an enormous vault of data about sharing on the net, which it could use to build an advertising and marketing platform. Over time, it will be interesting to see how Clearspring plans to integrate these two products.

Some of these sites focus more on mainstream users and photo-finishing, while others stand out because of their extensive social features. Note: we've included a full table of features for the services listed (see below).

In our last round-up, we noted that there was a wide gap between mainstream photo finishing services with a social component like Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly, and more advanced photo sharing services like Flickr or Picasa which focus more on the social aspects of the experience. Today, that gap is still quite apparent, although Flickr, our favorite social photo sharing service, is starting to make some inroads with mainstream users since it replaced Yahoo Photos. Most of the mainstream services tend to emphasize photo printing over sharing, which becomes quite clear when you take a look at the feature sets of the services.

Click here for the full-size version of this table.

Flickr

Yahoo's Flickr is probably the most well-known photo sharing site in the Web 2.0 world. In terms of its social features and user community, no other service even comes close. However, development has been slow over the last two years and some of the newer services have surpassed Flickr's feature set. Also, while Flickr has no storage limits, you can only upload 100 megabytes a month. If you are looking for a free service, we still recommend Flickr over its competitors, not the least because it is supported by almost every desktop photo application.

Pros: active community; easy sharing; groups; Creative Commons licensing; RSS feeds for everything

Cons: might still be a bit too complicated for some mainstream users

Picasa Web Albums

Google's Picasa Web Albums profits greatly from its tight integration with Picasa, Google's popular desktop photo management application. Picasa also benefits from Google's minimalist design philosophy, which has kept the service extremely easy to use, even as Google has added new features over the last two years. The latest update to Picasa also added a lot of social features to the site, but we think it still doesn't match the feature set and active community of Flickr.

Pros: easy to use; face recognition; integration with Picasa; Creative Commons licensing

Cons: only 1GB storage with free account

SmugMug

SmugMug is our recommendation if you are willing to pay for your photo hosting. You do indeed get what you pay for. SmugMug is incredibly easy to use and is also one of the few services that accept uploads in the RAW format (if you enable the SmugVault). SmugMug courts professional photographers, who will especially like the fact that they can theme their accounts. Also, out of all the services we looked at, SmugMug had the best selection of theme templates.

Pros: easy to use; lots of options; rich feature set

Cons: not free (but worth the money)

Me.com

Apple's Me.com is a bit of an outsider here, as the gallery feature is only a small part of an extensive productivity suite. Thanks to its tight integration with iLife, its image gallery feature represents a good alternative for those who already subscribe to Me.com. We would not recommend Me.com to Windows users, by the way, as it integrates poorly with both Vista and XP. If you just want an easy way to share some pictures from iPhoto, you could do worse than using Me.com. If anything, the galleries are very well designed, even though the functionality of the service is quite limited.

Pros: tight integration with OSX and iLife; gorgeous galleries; very easy to use

Cons: very limited functionality; almost no social features

Photobucket

Photobucket is incredibly popular, but it also has some of the more stringent restrictions for its free accounts. Your pictures, for example, can't be larger than 1024x786. Thanks to its integration with Facebook, Photobucket is a popular spot for sharing pictures from college parties, but we wouldn't recommend it for regular use over Flickr.

Pros: easy to use; very easy to share pictures on social networking sites

Cons: lots of ads; limited functionality; no upload client; free account very limited

Kodak Gallery

Like many of its mainstream brethren, Kodak Gallery is squarely focused on getting you and your friends to print your pictures. Its feature set lacks depth for advanced users, but Kodak Gallery is easy to use and does have some surprisingly useful image editing features, including red-eye removal and photo cropping, as well as a limited range of effects and borders. As long as you make one purchase from the site per year, you get unlimited storage space and uploads, which makes it a good service if you tend to print pictures anyway.

Pros: easy to use; unlimited storage

Cons: no social features; limited sharing functions

Shutterfly

Shutterfly is also aimed at mainstream users, though it sets itself apart from some of the other services by offering a wider set of options for printing, including stickers, books, and cards. Its user interface is also very well designed.

Pros: unlimited storage; great printing options; easy to use

Cons: limited sharing options and social features

Webshots

Webshots sits somewhere between the mainstream and social sharing market. The site offers a good number of advanced features like tagging, groups, site-wide search, and a large number of sharing options. At the same time, it is also very easy to use for less tech-savvy users and features a wealth of printing options. Its upload restrictions are similar to Fickr's, though it allows you to upload 1000 pictures in your first month (5000 for pro accounts) and then 100 for every following month.

Pros: easy to use; lots of features; large user community

Cons: upload restrictions; lots of ads on the site

Snapfish

Snapfish is squarely targeted at mainstream users, though its interface could be more intuitive and the service has not really improved much over the years. The social features of the site are limited to sharing links by email.

Pros: themed galleries; lots of choices for prints, including books, stickers, mugs etc.

Cons: no social features; convoluted interface

Phanfare

Phanfare turned out to be a nice surprise, thanks to its extensive feature set, including a good selection of gallery themes, the ability to import photos from other online photo sharing apps, an iPhone app, and a well designed user interface.

Pros: easy to use; nice shared galleries; geotagging

Cons: just 1GB of storage with free accounts; unlimited accounts are pricey

Bonus: Gallery

Menalto's Gallery is a bit different from the rest of the sites featured here, as it is a self-hosted application. However, thanks to the large number of plugins and themes being developed around Gallery, it is worthwhile to consider for those who are comfortable installing it on their servers. Thanks to the copious amount of storage that often comes with hosting accounts these days, Gallery can be a good alternative for those who don't care too much about the social features on the site itself.

Pros: free (if you already have a hosting account); extremely flexible; great themes and plugins; no advertising; easy to set up

Cons: self-hosted; no social features

Did We Miss Something?

Did we miss one of your favorites? If so, let us know in the comments.

Logo courtesy of Flickr user Penmachine.

Enhancements

FriendFeed has also updated the "All Rooms" page, which now hides any rooms that have been inactive for a while. This is especially handy now that a lot of people use FriendFeed rooms to live-blog events. Whereas before, these rooms would start cluttering your interface pretty quickly, they are now neatly hidden.

It's also now a lot easier to see who is subscribed to any given room, though the ability to search for rooms is still not available.

Also new is the option to immediately choose a friend list for any new friends you subscribe to (see screenshot).

Cleaner and Simpler

Overall, the new interface looks considerably cleaner. Our only complaint is that it is sometimes not quite clear if you are surfing the "Everyone" or the 'Home" tab. The color of the active tab changes from dark blue to black, which is just a bit too subtle.

In general, with very few exceptions, the reactions from FriendFeed users have been positive so far .

To upload photos to Photrade, you currently have to use the standard uploader on the site. Photrade is planning on letting you transfer images from Flickr directly, but unlike other online photo applications like Picnik, it does not establish these connections for you yet. Over time, we expect that Photrade will also support other sites like Picasa or Photobucket.

For groups, Photrade offers a very nice 'Events' feature. You can invite a number of your friends to upload their photos from a conference, for example, though it is not quite clear to us how the potential revenue generated from sales of photos in this group would be distributed.

One very neat feature of Photrade is that you can easily move pictures between different galleries by simply dragging and dropping them. Tagging your photos and adding additional information to your albums is also extremely easy, thanks to Photrade's easy to use interface.

Overall, the photo-management features of Photrade are very much up to par with its competition.

Making Money

At the heart of Photrade is, as the name implies, its system for selling, buying, and licensing photos. This is, of course, a very competitive market, with both free and paid competitors like SmugMug or even Flickr, but after our initial review, we can see how Photrade could create its own niche. Unlike most of its competitors, though, Photrade really emphasizes the sale and licensing of photos over just storing and sharing them, which gives the site a slightly different feel from SmugMug, for example.

As you log into Photrade, you are immediately greeted with detailed statistics for how often your pictures were viewed and how many of them were sold. To protect you photos from theft, you can also add watermarks to your pictures. As you upload your pictures, you also get to set a price for each one of them.

Besides printing on standard paper, Photrade supports putting your photos on all the standard merchandise, including mugs, key chains, shirts, and puzzles.

You can choose the exact markup you want to charge for each picture. If you just want to give your friends a chance to buy pictures from a party, for example, you can choose not to charge anything over Photrade's standard price at all.

One issue we noticed though, was that, by default, Photrade activates sales for all sizes of photos, even when we just uploaded a very small picture that would not look good at any size over 4x6 inches. As you cannot really see pictures at a full resolution, a user might easily get fooled into buying a poster version of a less than VGA sized picture.

Besides selling pictures, Photrade also shares the profits it makes from advertising on pages with your photos on it.

Verdict

Overall, we can see how Photrade could appeal to a large number of photographers who want an easy way to sell some of their photos. One feature we would really like to see from Photrade would be the ability to theme albums, which would give professional photographers the option to keep their own branding intact.

Photrade is going up against some strong competition, including iStockphoto and stock.xchng, but Photrade seems to be courting amateur photographers a lot more than these sites.

iLovePhotos is desktop software for the Mac only (Windows version coming...well...maybe one day). Designed to compete primarily with iPhoto , iLovePhotos aims to make it easier to organize and share your photos with family and friends.

According to the company, the software "automatically detects the faces of individuals in each picture." That's true to a point, but that statement implies that the software is recognizing faces and associating names to go along with them after an initial bit of training. At least, that's what we think "facial recognition" should mean. But that is not the case with iLovePhotos.

Instead, iLovePhotos recognizes the faces of various people in a photo and draws a box around them. Then, in a special view (the "tagger" view) which displays just the faces, you can identify a face as belonging to a name and then quickly tag the rest of the faces that are of that same person. But get this straight - it's you that's doing the tagging, not iLovePhotos. The software just has an interface that makes that process less painful than before.

Facial Recognition in iLovePhotos

Besides people's names, photos can be tagged with other words, too, like "vacation," "beach," "dogs," "party," "wedding," etc., just as you would any photo on flickr. Tagged collections of photos are represented with an image of your choosing and display in the right sidebar of the app. After you've tagged your photos, you can easily pull up all the photos associated with that tag by dragging and dropping the photo representing that tag into the toolbar at the top of the app. Drag other tags alongside it to narrow your results. For example, drag a tag for a person and a tag for an event into the toolbar and the app displays all the photos of that person at the event.

But Sharing Is Automatic!

The tagging aspect to iLovePhotos is easier than in some other applications, but it's not ideal. Automatic facial recognition would be so much better. They tell us that they hope to include that in a later release, though.

Something that is automatic about the app is its sharing feature. You can specify that all photos with a particular tag are automatically emailed - you don't have to do anything beyond the initial configuration. Now that's an automated feature we like.

Setting Up Sharing

Slideshows Are Automatic, Too...And Smart

Finally, the software creates personalized "intelligent" slideshows which can be embedded on any site or watched on your iPhone, iPod, or AppleTV. These slideshows use an algorithm to determine what photos you haven't seen lately and displays them for you. If you have just uploaded new photos, you may see those in the slideshow, but even if your collection has been static for a while, the app knows to show you those photos you haven't seen for some time.

Would You Use It?

Because your computer is often the midway point between camera and cloud, desktop software for organizing your photos can still be a useful tool. But does iLovePhotos offer enough features to make it something you would want to try? Let us know what you think.

Qtask Overview

Like SharePoint, Qtask offers a number of features for team collaboration including discussion boards, wikis, file sharing, form creation tools, RSS, calendaring, and full contextual search. With its comprehensive tool set, projects can be created, managed, maintained, and tracked. Because all the information relating to various tasks is online, new team members can get up-to-date quickly on the status of various projects just by signing into Qtask.

Getting Started

When you first sign into Qtask, you're presented with a global dashboard from which you can see an overview of all the most important items, including tasks and their status, meetings you've been invited to and those you're scheduled to attend, recently updated wikis and files, your schedule, team members and other important top-level items. The layout of these items is similar to that of iGoogle and its widgets, which makes it easy to see at a glance everything that you need to focus on.

Global Dashboard

At the top of this dashboard is navigation that can take you deeper into the site - to discussion boards, team calendars, project homepages, and more. Like the global dashboard, each project's homepage focuses on just the key items (meetings, tasks, files, etc.) for that specific project.

It's All In The Details

Although there are many portals for team collaboration like this available today, it's the little details in Qtask that make it worth a look. For example, in the discussion threads, discussions can be set to public or private, unread items appear in a different color, and you can flag items as "hot" to draw attention to them. Team calendars feature thumbnails of the members faces and discussion areas where members can work out details, discuss agendas, etc.

Editing the Meeting Deatails

Other great features include version control for uploaded files and syndication (via RSS) of file shares and wikis - and both of which can even be shared with those outside the company. A site-wide search box lets you perform searches and also offers a number of advanced options to help you find just what you need:

Other Features

Built-in tools for form creation are also included with Qtask as is a mail feature which can be used for internal communications. Outside email like that from Gmail or Yahoo can be integrated with Qtask via IMAP support.

However, one of the most useful features in Qtask is its ability to track changes. File history can be tracked as to who uploaded, downloaded, or accessed a file and when. Tasks, meetings, wikis, and discussions can be tracked as well. This feature has made Qtask so popular with lawyers, that the company will soon be releasing a customized version just for them. (Out of Qtask's initial crop of 2000 users, many are lawyers).

Keeping Track of Changes

Finally, Qtask is available via a mobile browser - a must have for today's on-the-go workforce and remote workers. Whether you use a Blackberry, iPhone, or a standard mobile of some sort, you have access to everything on the site.

On The Horizon

In addition to the upcoming version of Qtask customized for lawyers offices, the company also hopes to create more customized versions for several different types of companies, including perhaps doctors or real estate offices, as those are other popular users of their program.

They also plan to release an enterprise version later on which can be implemented on a company's own servers as an alternative to the SaaS solution they have today.

Affordable And Feature-Rich

Qtask offers plenty of features which will appeal to the SMB market looking for a project-focused web-based tool for team collaboration. The service is very affordable, too: free for 5 users for the first year and comes with 5 hours of free training. Additional users are $50/each per month. Prices include the ability to create unlimited projects, access to online training and online technical support.

At launch time, Qtask is offering a special: charter accounts will only be charged $25/year for additional users.

You can learn more about Qtask from visiting their web site, available at www.qtask.com.

Besides the closer integration with Twitter, Socialbrowse also switched from flat files to using SQLite as its database back-end. This, according to Socialbrowse co-founder Zack Garbow, resulted in a 10x speed increase over the old system.

Also, the sidebar now features a 'Hot' tab which displays the most popular and active shares or discussions in your network.

How Does it Work?

At the core of Socialbrowse is a Firefox extension that displays your friends' activity on the service in a sidebar. It's important to note that Socialbrowse does not aggregate your online actions the way FriendFeed does. Instead, Socialbrowse adds three icons to your Firefox navigation toolbar that let you toggle the sidebar, share and tag a site, or comment on it. Every time you share something or comment on a page, your updates will instantly appear in your friends' sidebars.

Twitter

In this newest version of Socialbrowse, you can also send your links directly to Twitter to share it with your social network there. Interestingly, Socialbrowse is using its own URL shortener in these Twitter posts.

Sidebar

In the sidebar, you can chose to either see all of your friends' updates, or you can chose to only see their latest shares or comments. It would be nice if you could comment on a page as you are sharing it, but for now, Socialbrowse is keeping these two activities completely separate from each other.

Once you close your sidebar, you will still get update from your friends through little pop-ups at the bottom right of your screen. This is a nice feature, especially if you have a small screen and you don't want a sidebar to take up a lot of your space.

Ranking

One other interesting feature in Socialbrowse is its ranking system. You get a 'social point' every time one of your friends shares a link you discovered first. Based on this ranking, Socialbrowse then creates a list of highly active users that new users can chose to follow when they sign up.

Annotated Links

One really nifty feature of Socialbrowse is that it analyses every page you surf to and then adds little icons to links that your friends have already shared or commented on. As you hover over these icons, Socialbrowse will display a list of your friends and the comments they left. To us, this feature itself is worth the price of admission.

Invites

Socialbrowse is still in private beta, but Socialbrowse gave us 500 invitation to hand out to you. Just follow this link, sign up, and you will get an invitation immediately.

If you want to follow me on Socialbrowse, my profile is here.