Le Meur told us that a native Windows client was something that Seesmic's users had been requesting for quite a while. The Seesmic team worked on this new client for the last few months, though the company managed to keep this development under wraps and today's release comes as a surprise. While there are quite a few good native Twitter clients for OSX, the most popular Twitter clients on Windows are currently AIR apps.

Features

Being a native client, Seesmic can now also make use of some of Windows' built-in features like a system-wide spellchecker or Windows 7's location services. While Twitter hasn't launched it's location API yet, Seesmic will now be able to tab into this data quickly.

The new client will also allow users to drag and drop their friends' avatars into user lists.

Just like the current beta version of its AIR app, Seesmic for Windows will support Twitter's userlists and while the look and feel is similar to the AIR app, the Windows client also features vertical tabs in the sidebar that allow users to quickly switch between different views (all, accounts, userlists and searches).

Plugins for Seesmic

For developers, of course, the new plugin infrastructure also means that they can now offer their services directly in a Twitter client. The current version already showcases plugins from TweetMeme and MrTweet. According to Le Meur, this will also allow other Twitter-like services to build their own plugins and build their own columns in Seesmic without having to establish a formal relationship with the company. In a few weeks, Seesmic will launch a plugin gallery to showcase these extensions.

What About the AIR App?

Seesmic will continue to develop its Adobe AIR client for the time being, though chances are that the company is also looking at developing a native Mac client.

While the in-home kick-off concept is an interesting launch tactic, we have difficulty believing that the people in the campaign's imagery are actually huddled around the computer enthralled by the Windows 7 experience. Are you sure this isn't a YouTube party? Balloons, shrimp cocktail AND models? If it's going to be this kind of a party, let's just hope no one does any keg stands over your keyboard. To register as a party host visit the house party page.

The creators of Firefox had the sense to realize that their uphill battle against Microsoft's IE was not going to be fought between equal armies. Internet Explorer was already pre-installed on almost every PC, and the Redmond company had ten times the resources to spend on development and research than their open-source competitor. Spread Firefox began as an effort to harness the collective voices of the programmers, marketers and enthusiasts contributing to the Mozilla project. Rather than positioning themselves as a corporate competitor, Firefox likened itself to a political cause. Externally, the group referred to itself as a "movement", and internally, the very infrastructure of the community site was powered by CivicSpace (formerly DeanSpace). The site is a modified version of the Drupal content management system created for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

Spread Firefox became a rallying hub for open-source advocates and Microsoft dissenters. Since the very beginning, Firefox was humanized as the eager young candidate with a can-do attitude, while Microsoft's IE was portrayed as being bloated, corrupt and resting on his laurels.

In this world, the initial political platforms had nothing to do with health care or fiscal responsibility, but rather the impending threats of spyware and Trojan horses. Instead of putting signs on their lawns, volunteers put "Get Firefox" buttons on their personal websites. Instead of holding bake sales, they held hack-a-thons to build new extensions.

It's not unreasonable to compare the browser's fans to Howard Dean's leaflet-touting Deaniacs. While most enthusiasts opt to don t-shirts or work on web development, there are certainly zealots. One group of hardcore Oregon State University fans went so far as to create a 220 ft. Firefox crop circle.

Both Dean's campaign strategies and Spread Firefox are testament to small contributions and the power of the internet. The race to 1 billion downloads is a huge step in the browser territory struggle; however, as with Dean's campaign, it's still a long way from single-handedly toppling the status quo. Nevertheless, the Firefox campaign may be aided by Microsoft's antitrust case and the company's recent proposal to include rival web browsers in the Windows OS throughout Europe.

Mozilla's bid to become commander in chief, at least in Europe, may actually be achieved in the foreseeable future. It will be interesting to see if Opera, Safari and Chrome will step in to split the vote.

For more information on Firefox, visit the Spread Firefox site, or to download the browser, visit the product page.

According to Stat Counter, Internet Explorer currently holds the majority market share for browsers at 61%. The next competitor is Firefox with roughly 30% of installs and Opera, Safari and Chrome make up the difference. While non-IE users have had to install their browser of choice, Internet Explorer's rise to success can be attributed to having been bundled on every Windows PC. With the new multi-browser bundling, competitors will finally reap the rewards of Microsoft's distribution channels. As new PC's are purchased, it's likely that Firefox and Chrome will see a new opportunity to thrive.

Less than tech-savvy users who've never questioned IE bundling with Windows may purchase new machines and choose their browser for reasons that have nothing to do with performance or popularity. A user may simply choose to run Opera because they're a music lover or Chrome because they're a car enthusiast. While it's too early to tell how consumer habits will change, if the EU chooses to settle with Microsoft, browser developers will see a major shift in the market place.

For now, the code has not yet been submitted to the Linux kernel and the community will most definitely look at it with a fine tooth comb. The Linux community's backlash against Microsoft is somewhat justified. In 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times and likened Linux to a cancer. He said, "Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source... Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."

Nevertheless, whether for legal purposes or business purposes, it appears that Microsoft is wholly ready to release the isolated device driver code to the open source community. The code would directly benefit the company in expanding Microsoft's market share amongst administrators running Linux.

The granddaddy of Linux, Linus Torvalds has not yet looked at the code; however he made the statement to Linux Magazine, "We all "scratch our own itches". It's why I started Linux, it's why I started git, and it's why I am still involved...Complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That's the point of open source - the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the 'your' in question happens to be."

UPDATE: In response to Stephen Hemminger's accusations, Microsoft spokesperson Sam Ramji made the following statement to Port 25, "Microsoft's decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license. For business reasons and for customers, we determined it was beneficial to release the drivers to the kernel community under the GPLv2 license through a process that involved working closely with Greg Kroah-Hartman, who helped us understand the community norms and licensing options surrounding the drivers." Too see the full statement, visit Port 25.

In the comments of the Yodel Anecdotal blog post and the Yahoo Search blog post about the toolbar's release, several commenters noted that the toolbar did not install on Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. Another complained that it crashed when installing to IE8. Later, a Yahoo employee jumped in to report that the team "made some adjustments" and asked the commenters to try again.

Unfortunately, as of this morning, I'm still unable to test the new toolbar on my Windows 7 PCs. Going to toolbar.yahoo.com brings me to a page where the download button is greyed out and the text beneath it reads:

We're sorry. This version of Yahoo! Toolbar requires Windows 2000 or later. It will not work on your system.

Nice going, Yahoo. Way to test your software before releasing it.

Toolbar Features

It's too bad that the toolbar is broken because it has a couple of features that look like they might be interesting to try. The first new addition is something being called "Preview and Go" which provides drop-down boxes reminiscent of IE8's "Web Slices" feature that deliver live previews of other web sites without you having to leave the page you're currently on. This is handy for checking multiple email inboxes, staying on top of your eBay listings, reading breaking news, checking stocks, weather, or movie showtimes, and more. Since Web Slices are IE8-only, the Yahoo! Toolbar could deliver similar functionality to those who prefer surfing in Firefox instead.

The other new feature of note is the toolbar's Inquisitor integration. If you haven't tried Inquisitor before, already available as a browser plugin for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, you're missing out on one of the cooler search experiences coming out of Yahoo. The toolbar, like the plugin, lets you search using traditional searche engines like Yahoo or Google, but also site-specific engines like Flickr, Wikipedia, and Amazon. You can customize Inquisitor, too, by adding other search engines to its list.

Sadly, I can't actually try any of these new features because Yahoo's Toolbar doesn't work on Windows 7 - in either Firefox or IE. Although Windows 7 has not publicly launched, its release candidate has been out for a while now. You would think Yahoo would want to support the millions of users who have downloaded the latest version of Windows. Apparently, Yahoo thinks they've fixed the issue so who knows when Windows 7 users will ever get a chance to try the new toolbar.

In a word, the release allows Microsoft-rooted corporate networks to keep information in a shared, collaborative environment rather than locked in individual PCs' "application silos." The suite includes Aurelia Reporter (for publishing and sharing versioned documents), Desktop Connector (for dragging and dropping files or directories into the MindTouch environment), and Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors (for one-click publishing of documents, threaded conversations, and attachments). These tools enable working via web browsers and permit collaboration without installed software.

"MindTouch is pretty unique in what we're doing," said MindTouch founder and CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, in a phone conversation last night. "Most people deploy our service behind a firewall and use it as a wiki. You don't have to be a programmer to deploy it, and it lets you connect systems and get real-time data from other systems, applications, and databases."

When considering the scope, scalability, and depth of the features MindTouch offers, Fulkerson noted that there is little comparison between Google Docs or similar offerings, which he feels only work well for small businesses.

This point could be convincingly countered by Google, which has been promoting its premier suite applications as suitable and scalable for large enterprises. As we wrote yesterday, auto supplier company Valeo is now deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.

Still, Fulkerson by no means considers MindTouch to be dwelling in the shadow of a much larger competitor.

"Because we have a web-oriented architecture, IT and business users can do rapid application development on the platform, which takes weeks instead of months. Also because of the WOA, it makes it easy for MindTouch to develop the productivity tools on the desktop. And it's easy for users to adapt MindTouch to how they work and get more value out of other systems they're using."

"Whatever your workflow is," he continued, "MindTouch allows you to get more out of it. Microsoft Office docs can be published to MindTouch. It's taggable, searchable, editable from the web, sharable through a URL or email or Twitter DMs or chat IMs, and usable in a way it would never be if it was trapped on your desktop."

The Desktop Connector feature allows users to drag and drop any kind of document or even whole directories into MindTouch. All files then become web-based, searchable, etc. For richly formatted documents with images, even the formatting gets imported.

The new Aurelia Reporter in Desktop Suite is particularly impressive. It allows any Windows document to be published as a MindTouch page. That page is then accessible from a web browser and editable even if the user doesn't have the software on their PCs. As with all MindTouch pages, the content is editable, indexed for search, versioned, and able to be permissioned for specific users and groups.

And with Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors, email threads are publishable and searchable by any involved users and from multiple sources.

For the most part, though, the outrage over the outages and downtimes suffered in cloud computing are overblown. Even when they last for hours, there are few cases where complete data loss has occurred (e.g. Google Docs comes back up, but your data store is wiped clean)...well, unless you count Ma.gnolia.

But Gladinet seems to tap into that primal fear that comes with the loss of control accompanying cloud computing; the fear that your precious data will one day be lost to the ether. O.K. sure, that's not all the software does. It also connects your computers together so you can share files, provides a platform for different cloud services to interact with each other, and provides tools for easily moving your local data to the cloud. Yet, out of all its features, the fact that you can keep PC and cloud in sync - with a local backup for safekeeping - is probably one of the service's biggest selling points.

Is that the future of cloud computing, though? A combined cloud/PC experience? Or will cloud computing eventually make our hard drives, filled with locally stored files, obsolete? With the rise of netbook computing and mobile computing, it seems that the transition has been directly influenced by the number of web/mobile apps that now replace what local software once provided.

So where does that leave a software program like Gladinet? Is it a useful platform for hybrid computing? Or just a transitional piece holding us over until the cloud is all we use?

While earlier variations of the Conficker worm prevented infected machines from accessing the servers of most antivirus companies, this new variant also blocks access to sites that offer tools for removing the worm like BitDefenders bdtools.net.

Oddly, the Conficker worm now also includes an instruction that tells the worm to remove itself on May 3 (the hackers clearly like deadlines), though after that, it will keep a port open on these machines that will allow the hackers to get back into these computers at any time.

The Big Picture: Spyware, Spambots, Pop-Ups

According to both Trend Micro and Symantec, Conficker, after downloading its update, also downloads a variant of the well-known Waledac malware. Waledac is one of the world's most active spambots.

Security researchers are still trying to understand the connection between Waledac and Conficker's new E variant (only a small number of antivirus products can currently detect this version of Waledac, by the way). Some, however, speculate that this connection could mean that Conficker was created by the same group of hackers that created Waledac and its predecessor, the infamous Storm botnet.

Business Model?

According to Kaspersky Labs' Alex Gostev, Waledac will download a rogue antivirus application onto infected machines, as well as an email-worm that can steal data and send spam. The fake antivirus software will ask users to pay $49.95 for "Spyware Protect 2009," which, of course, is anything but an antispyware product.

Protect Yourself (and others)

Of course, if your Windows machine is up to date and if you have kept your antivirus software up to date then chances are very good that you are well protected against Conficker.

If you want to learn more about Conficker and how to protect yourself, have a look at this list of resources we put together last month. If you want to see if you are infected, head over to this site from the University of Bonn.

BumpTop has given us 200 free pro versions to give away to our readers. You can find details about how to claim yours at the end of this post.

We could describe BumpTop in every singly detail, but the best way to experience it is really to see it in action:

Among some of BumpTop's most interesting features are its innovative, free-form method of selecting items on the desktop, the ability to flip through piles of files (with your mouse-wheel, or through an actual flipping motion if you have a touch-screen), and its highly intuitive pie menu system, which you invoke to sort files on the desktop or to create new piles, for example. To search for a file on the desktop, by the way, you just have to start typing.

Twitter and Facebook on Your Desktop

Since its last couple of releases, BumpTop has added a number of new features, including drag and drop support for Twitter and Facebook. Now, you only need to drop a picture onto the big Twitter or Facebook icons on your desktop, and they will be uploaded to Twitpic and/or your Facebook photo account. You can also now subscribe to any Media RSS feed (from Flickr, for example), and the photos on your background will regularly update with new pictures from this feed. After you zoom in to a picture, you can use a simple swiping motion with your mouse or finger to move to the next picture.

Reinventing the Desktop

BumpTop, at its core, is trying to reinvent the desktop as we know it. While we have our choice of desktop environments today (Windows, OSX, KDE, GNOME, etc.), the core experience between them doesn't really vary too much. The basic principles, like organizing files in folders, for example, might look different, but the basic functionality is always the same.

With BumpTop, however, users can recreate their own physical desktops, which aren't usually organized in neat folders. Indeed, most computer desktops, are also cluttered with random files that were just saved on the desktop without any regard for organization.

That's where the power of BumpTop comes in. While organizing files in folders might sounds good, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=288392.288596">studies from Microsoft going back as far as 1998 has shown that we are usually far better at recalling information from our spatial memory than at recalling information from texts.

Agarawala acknowledged that BumpTop might not be for everyone. He did, however, also stress that BumpTop does not use any gratuitous 3D effects for the sake of it. And indeed, the 3D part of BumpTop is relatively subdued and only really comes into play  when you zoom in to the pictures on the wall or when you create (and destroy) piles of files on your desktop.

Coming Soon: APIs, Connected Desktops, and, at some point, a Mac Version

Agarawala and his team also have big plans for BumpTop's future. Not only are they planning to open up an API which will allow developers to create widgets on top of BumpTop, but BumpTop also plans to connect multiple desktops with each other over the Internet in the future, which would allow coworkers to easily move documents from one desktop to another.

The BumpTop team also plans to release a Mac version in the future, but given the size of the team, the company is currently focusing on the Windows platform first.

Verdict

There can also be no doubt that there is some novelty factor to the application, though unlike many other similar projects, BumpTop doesn't feel gimmicky and actually provides a number of very useful features. It is easy to get sidetracked by the cool visuals, but underneath all of this, BumpTop actually provides some very compelling functionality.

In our interview last week, Agarawala freely acknowledged that BumpTop might not work for everyone. While it is easy to suspend your disbelief as you are working in the BumpTop environment, any application that you start outside of the app will quickly bring you back to reality (though the BumpTop team does have some ideas for how to solve this problem as well). If you are interested in trying out a new desktop, however, then BumpTop is definitely worth a try.

Get Your Free Pro Version

BumpTop comes in two versions: a free version, which only includes support for two post It notes, and which doesn't feature pile flipping, multi-touch support, and another cool feature that automatically makes frequently used files. BumpTop Pro version, which will sell for $29, includes all of these features, as well as the ability to 'toss' files to USB keys and CDs.

If you are one of the first 200 readers to follow this link and leave your email address, BumpTop will send you a license key for the Pro version.

Update: You can find direct download links here, but without a registration key, your beta version will expire in 30 days. Microsoft's registration servers are still down.

Update 2: Looks like Microsoft is going to delay the release of the product keys for a little longer. They must have seriously underestimated the demand. No ETA for when the servers will be back up.

Update 3: As of Sunday morning PST, product keys and downloads are finally available on the Windows 7 page.

TechNet and MSDN subscribers can already download the beta, but the general public will have to wait until noon. However, if the current state of Microsoft's servers is any indication, you will have to be very lucky to get your copy anytime soon.

Demand for the public beta is clearly high. All day long, neither the Windows Team blog, the Microsoft Partner homepage, nor the TechNet download have been working properly. Even the official Windows 7 site was unavailable for a good part of the morning.

By limiting the download to the first 2.5 million users, Microsoft has created an artificial scarcity that is driving users to the site early. While this is clearly a sign that users are eager to get their hands on the (legal) beta and that Microsoft's marketing did a great job, Microsoft's infrastructure clearly wasn't prepared for the current demand.

If you manage to get a hold of the download, let us know in the comments.

Now, Microsoft is proposing to solve that problem with a new antivirus package. The product, code-named Morro, is slated to hit the market late next year. It will offer protection for viruses, spyware, rootkits, and trojans. Even more important? It will offer that protection for free.

"Built on Microsoft's award-winning malware protection engine, 'Morro' will take advantage of the same core anti-malware technology that fuels the company's current line of security products, which have received the VB100 award from Virus Bulletin, Checkmark Certification from West Coast Labs and certification from the International Computer Security Association Labs."

An added benefit? Morro will be designed to run on a much smaller footprint than its predecessor, ensuring that computers receive adequate protection without sapping much-needed processing resources.

As a result of the new offering, Microsoft will be shuttering their paid virus protection service Windows Live OneCare, which has been provided on a subscription basis at a cost of $49.95 US for up to three machines.

Just in Time or Too Little Too Late?

This isn't a new problem, by any means. It has existed ever since users starting pulling a disk or tape out of one machine and putting it in another. The Internet only exacerbated it. Now, more than a decade after the problems started gaining momentum, Microsoft is taking more definitive action. Better late than never.

Microsoft sits among a group of companies who have made a business out of attempting to reduce the number of systems being exploited by nefarious programs. And yet Microsoft holds a unique position compared to the others. As a company, Microsoft actually has the ability to fix the problems and exploits at their source - within the operating system itself - rather than simply covering those holes with band-aids as outsiders have struggled to do.

The release of this free product promises to help Microsoft better bookend that problem, corralling viruses from both sides. But what does giving the product away do to a market that has grown up around Microsoft's vulnerability? And does the potential cannibalization of that market raise red flags from the antitrust watchdogs? Hard to say. It's likely that some of the current antivirus companies will survive by providing additional features and functionality - or by employing their technology in other ways. But - clearly - selling antivirus solutions just got a great deal more difficult.

Regardless of the business and market impact, working to make the antivirus software more accessible to a wider group of users will likely help stave off larger problems. And if the Microsoft solution actually begins to make a dent in reducing the number of costly outbreaks, isn't it worth it? At the very least, it's a step in the right direction.

Windows in the Cloud

Given how many companies rely on Windows servers to run their business, adding support for this operating system makes good sense for Amazon. The pricing for these Windows services, however, is considerably higher than that for running Linux instances on EC2.

As Mary Jo Foley notes, Amazon will also attend Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference next week, which is interesting, given that Microsoft is also expected to unveil its own cloud computing platform at this conference.

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This week, Fairtilizer has launched the first part of their new distribution platform: an embeddable player which allows indie artists to share their music anywhere on the net from web sites to blogs to social networks.

We told you about Fairitlizer over a year ago, when the company was still in private alpha. The easiest way to describe the site is to say that it combines the discovery aspects of Hype Machine with the distribution model of Tunecore. At the time of our initial writing, the company let artists upload tracks which visitors could browse through to find music they liked. Now Fairtilizer has opened its doors and is launching the next phase of their service: distribution.

Artists can now use one unified interface provided by Fairtilizer to distribute songs to blogs, web sites, social networks, and digital music stores...yes, even iTunes (The digital stores piece is coming soon, the others are available now). The distribution is aided by an embeddable player which can be added to any web site. The player comes in four different sizes and has shuffle and autoplay options as well as the ability to stream a customizable playlist. Once embedded, artists can then easily track analytics like downloads and plays per country.

The Fairtilzer Player:

Additionally, on the Fairtilizer web site itself, each track page comes with customizable URL, artwork, space for description and links (like to artist web sites, stores, and booking contacts, etc.), and a comment board for listeners. Tracks can be set to streaming only or made available for download, and soon artists will be able to mark them for sale, too, if they so desire. The tracks can also be set to public or private.

That private setting is designed to help artists in the initial phases before the launch of a new tune. Traditionally, launching a new track involves three steps: production, promotion, and distribution. With record companies today, leaks can occur in both the production and promotion phases as tracks are sent back and forth between artists, producers, DJs, journalists, and other taste makers who receive a first look before the track becomes publicly available. To combat those leaks, Fairtilizer provides these "private streams" instead. Artists will be able to send the track to specific people just as they did before, but the track will be protected from piracy and leaks.

The Future of Music

Although Fairtilizer will provide tools for artists wishing to sell their music, the focus isn't just on music sales. Instead, it focuses on providing all the tools an artist would need to get their music discovered, downloaded, shared, and distributed.

In the future, says Olivier Rosset, a former music exec and co-founder of Fairtilizer, it won't be about who owns the rights to a recording anymore. Music will instead center around the URL. And at Fairtilizer, they want to be the company that best helps an artist get that URL, that single track, onto the most sites across the internet.