ReadWriteWeb

Yahoo's Exceptional Performance Team just released an interesting tool that optimizes images for publishing on the web. Smush.it is completely cloud-based and you can choose to upload your images directly to the service, provide Smush.it with a URL, or use a Firefox plugin that analyzes a whole page at once. Smush.it provides a one-stop shop for compressing images and works with JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and animated GIF files.

Meebone is a bit of a strange piece of software, in that it is an AIR based desktop client for Meebo. Meebo itself is a great web application that allows you to easily log into all your favorite IM services from the web, so having a desktop client for it might seem like a rather odd choice at first. However, it actually turns out to be quite a useful tool.

What Meebone basically does is display the Meebo web app in an AIR window, somewhat akin to what Fluid does on the Mac.

Technology, broadly, is a tool or set of tools aimed at making some aspect of life better, easier, or more efficient. On the web, that could mean scripting languages that make it easier for developers to create applications, or it could mean applications that make it easier for us to accomplish a task. Let's not debate the definition of the word technology, but rather, is web technology working for you? Are so-called web 2.0 applications making your life easier or overloading you with too much information?