As an amateur photographer, I like to have a nice image as my desktop wallpaper to provide me with some inspiration throughout the day. Thanks to a post on freewaregenius, I just discovered that National Graphic magazine makes a huge selection of inspiring images available for desktop wallpaper use for free.

You can get National Geographic wallpapers from two locations. The first is in the main photography section of the site. Wallpapers here are handily categorized (Adventure & Exploration,  Nature & Weather, Underwater, etc). Unfortunately, the images available in this section are only a maximum of 1280 pixels wide, which isn’t big enough for many of today’s monitors, although they should be fine on most laptops.

Fortunately, you can also use images submitted to National Geographic’s International Photography Competition, and these are available in larger sizes (up to 1600 pixels wide). These photos aren’t categorized — you need to browse by month, but flicking through the range of beautiful images isn’t much of a chore. I currently have this image of melting ice set as my desktop background.

If you’re still looking for more images, another great location to try is Flickr’s Explore page, which always has a huge selection of interesting and inspiring pictures.

Where do you get wallpaper images from?

Over the weekend, Adobe launched a revamped version of Acrobat.com, its web office and collaboration suite. This is the first major upgrade to the service since it left beta last summer (as covered by Thursday) and provides some much-needed productivity enhancements to this service.

An early concern of mine when Adobe made the leap to web services with Acrobat.com was that it was trying to be everything to everybody, but this latest version of Acrobat.com quells that doubt. Acrobat took the step of “crowd sourcing” its requirements gathering process for this new release, and incorporated over 35 ideas from Acrobat.com users into the latest version.

New Features & Enhancements

No longer do you have to suffer through the white-text-on-black background used in the previous release. The new Acrobat.com interface is more usable and spares you eyestrain (which is a productivity boost in its own right).

A major (and needed) restructuring of the file system organization is a highlight of this release. You can now organize your Acrobat.com files in collections (vs. folders), and a file can exist in more than one collection.

Other improvements include:

• Presentations (a web-based presentations application that Thursday wrote about here) and Tables  (a web-based data management application) now join the full Acrobat.com suite.
• Buzzword and Presentations now include web image integration, enabling you to insert images directly from Flickr and Google Images. However, you need to know this feature doesn’t yet support Creative Commons or other image licensing.

• New import and export options across the major Acrobat.com applications. You can now import .ppt/.pptx files directly into Presentations — my testing showed this worked well for even moderately complex presentation (without multimedia). Acrobat Tables now supports exporting to major formats including .csv, .xls and .pdf. While I am disappointed Tables doesn’t have spreadsheet functions, I can live with the export options until the application gains them.

If you are looking for a well-designed collaboration platform for your geographically dispersed project team, I recommend checking out this latest release of Acrobat.com.

Have you tried out the new version of Acrobat.com? Share your comments below.

PC performance optimization apps normally make me nervous, because they can mess with the registry and end up removing something I actually need. But my Windows desktop computer has been driving me insane recently, especially with its sluggish startup, so I decided to give TuneUp Utilities 2010 a shot.

The interface is well-organized and keeps things simple so the user can fix one set of problems at a time. Its five key functions are maintenance, performance, problem fixing, customization and something called “turbo mode.”

Maintain system: Maintenance addresses registry problems, removes orphaned shortcuts and unneeded files and moves data on the hard disk for optimal performance and defragmenting. Maintenance functions can run automatically or manually.

Increase performance: Analyzes system performance, Internet settings and visual effect settings for unused programs, identifies functions slowing down performance, and optimizes hardware and other settings.

Fix problems: Repairs frequent Windows problems and display errors, restores needed deleted files, reviews the hard drive for errors and improves running programs.

Customize Windows: Windows customizations can contribute to slow performance. This function helps customize Windows to your liking, while ensuring optimal performance.

Turbo mode: This new feature in the latest release lets you configure the software so that when you need the computer to perform fast, you can quickly switch to Turbo mode, based on your customized options.

I knew I had some applications being loaded on startup that didn’t need to be there. But to go through them one-by-one would have been very time consuming. TuneUp Utilities simplifies this by listing all the startup programs by the program names — something you don’t get in Window’s System Configuration Utility’s startup list — and whether they’re necessary, optional or unnecessary.

Those identified as unnecessary are redundant startup applications, like iTunesHelper and Adobe Acrobat Quick Launch. Every startup program contains a description to help you judge whether to keep it or remove it from startup. I made the changes and it sped up my computer’s startup without any errors.

My newish computer had issues shortly after I received it, and TuneUp Utilities can only do so much in repairing performance. It performs best with computers that have had software installed and removed many times, something I haven’t done much of with my computer yet. In spite of this, I ran a performance benchmarking application before and after running TuneUp Utilities and it showed improvement.

I give TuneUp Utilities 2010 kudos for its simplicity and providing enough information so users can make informed decisions whether to make changes. It only recommended a couple of changes that I didn’t accept while I let it fix the rest. My computer has had no new problems after running the application for several weeks. We always must use caution when running performance applications like this, but TuneUp Utilities gives you what you need to make sound decisions. A full version of the app retails for $49.95, while an upgrade from earlier versions for $29.95, and a 30-day trial download is available.

Have you tried TuneUp Utilities? Did it speed up your computer?

e-tipi sounds like a weird name for a web-based service, and when you find out it stands for “Espresso Thinking Platform,” things don’t become much clearer. But once you find out what the app’s developers think “Espresso Thinking” is, then you start to get the idea:

“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”

It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi.

e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a workspace in which ideas can be born and explored. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. All of the ideas center around a central “challenge,” which the main problem or purpose of the tipi. Think of a challenge like a big picture problem that requires a multi-parted and multi-staged solution.

Along with your tipi page, you also get a unique email address that contributors can send their ideas to directly, for quickly adding to the tipi’s repository. You can also follow your tipi on Twitter, the stream for which is automatically updated with information of your choosing. I like both of these tie-ins, because they make e-tipi feel more connected with other networks, making it much more accessible, which is something I like in idea generation tools.

You can also export your data at any time as either XML or HTML, which makes it easy to plug into other tools, including database management software. It’s a nice way to help you organize the raw information you produce using e-tipi’s tools. A messy free-for-all is a good way to generate creative thought, but it may not be the best storage solution for more polished ideas.

Ideas are listed on their own separate page, and you can sort them by activity and date. Each idea listed shows votes for or against, total views, and the number of comments users have posted about each. You also get the idea’s title, its creator, any tags that may have been applied, and the status, if the idea has one. For each idea, an administrator can set the status to tell others how far along the process intis, using labels like “Accepted,” “Started,” etc. You can also filter your ideas list by keyword to narrow your search.

Each idea page looks a little like a Digg article page, complete with the text of the idea in question and comments made by other users underneath. You also get to see potentially related ideas listed at the bottom of the description page.

Other nice features of e-tipi include a tag cloud, and a member display, in which you can view a user’s profile information, and access information like how many ideas they’ve contributed to, including comments and voting, and how many documents they’ve contributed. You can also highlight certain areas in a Spotlight menu for quick access.

Overall, e-tipi is a very rough-cut tool, when measured against others I’ve tried in the past. It’s not exactly easy on the eyes, and at times it can even seem disorganized. Despite that sense of mess, or perhaps because of it, e-tipi does feel like something that could well operate as fertile ground for the generation and refinement of ideas. I like the sense of freedom inherent in the site, and the potential for unstructured, loose collaboration with a wide number of viewers.

Do you use a web app for idea generation and refinement? Which one?

Two small pieces of recent Google news were just announced that merit a mention, since both have ramifications for web workers. First, Google has put a date on a Mac beta build of Chrome, meaning there’s finally an end in sight to one of the company’s most egregious oversights. Also, a new change to Google Wave should reduce inbox clutter, and maybe make it more usable for those finding it hard to adjust it (like me).

Let’s get to that great news first. While the “new” web browser has now been available for download to Windows users for over a year (the beta was first released last September), Mac users only recently got access to a stable developer’s build of Chromium, and that’s far from a release version of the software. Luckily, the new Mac beta is said to be on track for an early December release.

I’ve been dying to use Chrome’s ultra-clean interface and separately-processed tabs for my work online, which often sees tabs numbering in the double digits, spread across many windows and three screens. If I was really diligent about documenting it, I could probably come up with a pretty solid number about how much productive time I’ve lost dealing with recovering or recreating data after a Firefox tab-related crash. That’s what you owe me, so-late-as-to-be-offensive Chrome Mac beta build!

As for the Wave side of things, Google now allows users to “Follow” or “Unfollow” any public wave. That means that important ones will remain or reappear in your inbox as they are updated, while ones that you’re not particularly interested in will remain out of sight and out of mind. Experienced Wave users will note that “Unfollow” replaces “Mute,” allowing you to remove Waves you’ve started or been added to specifically, so that updates to them will no longer appear in your inbox. Google explains the new feature in detail at the official Wave blog (and if you’re still not sure what Wave could be used for, check out “Google Wave Explained” over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro)

Even though I’m mad at it for keeping Chrome for Mac from me for so long, I have to admit that Google has been on a hot streak lately when it comes to innovation for web workers. Even if I’m not automatically in love with everything it’s putting out there, I am in love with the fact that they’re putting out so much of it.

Are you looking forward to trying out Chrome on your Mac?

It’s that time of year again! Yes, the holidays are right around the corner. But I don’t care. I’m more excited about LeWeb ‘09, which will take place in Paris on December 9th and 10th.

And since the theme of LeWeb this year is “The Real-Time Web” (a hot topic that we’ve been covering in depth in the NewNet category over on our subscription research service GigaOM Pro) I thought I’d take this opportunity to stuff your stockings with a few real-time goodies.

First, something I can’t wait to get my hands on: WorkSnug. Boys and girls, this is the sexiest thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s an augmented reality iPhone app designed just for people like us. It will magically reveal the nearest establishments with Wi-Fi, from the donut shop down the street to full-fledged coworking spaces. Not only that, there will be reviews of the spots, even down to whether the coffee’s any good. Watch the video and register on the site to get updates. It’s starting with London, then San Francisco, and soon the world! And it’s free!

Next on the goodie list is SpeakLike, an app that uses a combination of machine and human translators to translate your emails and IMs in real time so you really can communicate with the whole world (or at least those who speak any of 30 languages). It also translates dynamic web content. It’s a pay service, but could be handy for clients and collaborators. Translators can sign up to work for the service here.

I just can’t deal with Google Docs, though I know many swear by it. But there’s another option for real-time document collaboration: EtherPad. They promise “really real-time” collaboration; EtherPad docs refresh every half second, while Google Docs refresh every 15 seconds. I don’t know about you, but I can do a lot of typing in 15 seconds. EtherPad also offers infinite undo capability. Even if you can’t think of a way to apply this app to your work, it occurred to me it would be great for helping the kids with their essays and reports, and there are probably lots of other practical and creative applications for it. So do check it out.

More about LeWeb ‘09

LeWeb is Europe’s largest, and the world’s second-largest web conference. As such, it attracts la crème de la crème of the web world. Even though it’s in Paris, it’s held in English, so don’t let that stop you from coming. There’s still plenty of time to sign up, and I can tell you where to get good falafel. Let me know if you’ll be there!

We’d love to hear about real-time web apps you use for work or play, and what you’d like the real-time Web to look like.

One of the banes of many writers’ existence (including my own!) is inheriting a slew of documents where the people working on them previously haven’t paid much heed to document versioning, leaving you trying to make sense of a mishmash of documents. On more than one occasion, I’ve been left hoping for a tool that would enable me to compare documents in bulk so I can get a mess of a documentation library under control before I can begin the real work on a project.

While word processors like Microsoft Word often include a one-to-one compare documents feature, what if you inherit a whole library of documents? Enter CompareMyDocs.com, a new web-based service from Nordic River, the makers of TextFlow, a version management tool. It enables you to compare multiple .rtf, .doc, and .docx documents.

Unfortunately, while it’s still in beta beta, CompareMyDocs.com works best on text-only documents (word processing documents without a lot of formatting) without images or tables. Therefore, while the service would work better on my draft WWD posts, it’s not yet suitable for the technical documentation I create by day.

I did like the ability to compare multiple versions of documents via the web interface. Bonus points go to the easy upload routine. However, I would have liked to see a bit more clarity in the interface, because, as shown in the following illustration, I only had access to Bold, Italic, and Underline controls, but to nothing else — including help. I can only assume this is due to the beta nature of the service.

Despite the limitations of the product in beta, CompareMyDocs.com is a promising tool that is worth a spot in every web worker’s bag of tricks when it comes to resolving document versioning issues, especially if you ever find yourself having to compare multiple documents at once where word processor compare documents features will take too long.

Have you tried out CompareMyDocs.com? Share your experience below.

I was very eager to get in on the Google Wave beta. So much so that I solicited invites from pretty much anyone who even mentioned it on Twitter for about two solid weeks. Eventually, my constant pestering paid off, and I was rewarded with an invite. After the standard delay period before my invite actually came through, I got to waving.

That was roughly a month ago. In the intervening time, I’ve been using Google Wave with a fair degree of consistency, although my time spent with the beta product from Google has dropped off significantly in recent days. I have a fair number of contacts, mostly professional, and it seems like the perfect tool for me, considering the nature of my work, which at the moment is exclusively based online.

So what did I do with Google Wave during the month I had access to it? The answer, sadly, is not much. Not much that I couldn’t already do better elsewhere, anyway. For whatever reason, I just can’t seem to surf the Wave.

All Muscle, No Finesse

I don’t deny that Google Wave is a powerful tool (for more information on just how powerful it is, see the report “Google Wave Explained” on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro). Nor do I deny that it has the potential to become even more powerful in the future, when it receives wide release. The fact is, though, that it has much more power under the hood than I need at the moment, and it’s lacking ways to tame and redirect that power productively.

Google Wave is particularly confusing to users without a fair degree of tech savvy to begin with, and possibly not worth the ramp-up time required to get users new to the app on board. Of course, later on, if Google opens Wave up to developers, custom installs and simplified UIs might ease the transition, but I’m still not sure it can replace other apps tailored to specific tasks.

Google Wave is an Island

Despite some add-ons and menu bar notifiers I tried out to keep me on top of what was going on in Google Wave, I still found the service far too easy to ignore. I realize that it’s really in a sandbox stage, and probably not meant to be fully interacting with everything else, but for something that’s essentially a social service, it feels boxed and separate from my other tools.

Not only did I feel it was easy to ignore Wave, but I felt it was easy for others to ignore my Waving activity, too. As with any tool, adoption will vary during the launch phase, but I’d say that more than half of the users I tried waving with seemed to eventually tire of the effort and turn their attention elsewhere. Reaching these same people through more traditional means posed no problem, by contrast.

Gadgets, Gadgets Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink

Potentially, Gadgets integration seemed like one of Google Wave’s most potentially useful features. I say “seemed” because it ended up not really being the case, at least not yet, anyway. The Maps gadget is really the only one that I used with any kind of actual purpose. The others are all very nice proofs of concept, but beyond that, they bring little to the table in terms of actually helping me to get work done.

In fact, I think many of the gadgets currently available stand as distractions, clouding the true value of Google Wave for doing web work. That said, I’m also they type of person who never uses Mac’s Dashboard widgets, or a personalized Google homepage, or Windows gadgets.

Many More Waves to Catch

All I really want to convey is that Google Wave might not be the killer app many are making it out to be. It has promise, and it has a long way to go before it gets a public release — we’ll likely see a very different beast when that finally does happen. But as it stands, this particular web worker isn’t exactly enthralled with his Wave experience. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on it though. It still has way too much geek cred to dismiss outright.

Have you managed to integrate Wave into your web work?

Twitter lists are a great way to group people into various categories, filter conversations, keep up with experts within a specific field and track a topic without needing to follow all of the relevant users — and can even be used as an RSS reader replacement. Despite being such a new feature, people are already using lists as a measure of influence.

I’ve spent the last few years working with online communities and collaboration technologies, and have come to expect to be able to collaborate with people when using online social tools. As a result, I wish that Twitter lists were more collaborative. Right now, Twitter lists and accounts have a one-to-one relationship. I create a list, and I’m the only person who can edit it. I started thinking about this limitation when Rael Dornfest created his Portland Food Cart list. I’m a huge fan of the Portland food cart scene, so I decided to follow his list instead of creating yet another one. The downside was that as there were some food carts missing from his list, I needed to send @replies to Rael to get him to add them — I couldn’t just add them myself.

The collaboration features that I propose would allow the owner of each list to open them up to allow collaboration/editing from other people. The list owner could always make tweaks, revert changes and have the final say on changes made by other users.

My wish list for Twitter lists includes:

• Open lists: These lists would be open for anyone to edit, and would be a great way for people to add themselves to, say, a conference attendee list or to collaborate on lists of industry experts. To cut down on spam edits, moderation features would be a nice addition.
• Lists open to the people I follow: Anyone that I follow could contribute to my list. This is probably the option that I would use most often. Since I only follow people that I already know, this would be a great way to collaborate while automatically reducing the amount of spam entries added to a list.
• Specific people can edit a list: In the case of the food cart list, Rael could open it up to a few specific people who are passionate about the Portland food cart culture and have those people help him maintain it.
• Copying/cloning: This would be similar to how Yahoo Pipes lets you clone another user’s pipe as a starting point for something that you’ll repurpose for your needs. If someone has the start of a great list, but with a few things that I don’t like, I’d want to be able to copy it and add or delete people from it as necessary.

I’ve focused my wish list around community and collaboration features. What’s on your wish list for Twitter lists?

The folks at Ribbit Mobile are offering 100 invitations to WebWorkerDaily readers for the beta of their new communication service. Just sign up on the reservations page, and enter the invite code “wwd09″ in the appropriate box.

Ribbit Mobile has more features than Google Voice, and reminds me a bit of VoxOx, which I wrote about a few days ago. This service looks very promising, but, like VoxOx, it isn’t finished yet. I’ve been unable to test it fully, because it doesn’t yet support Sprint cellphones. I also can’t get my contact list to import, either from a CSV file or through Plaxo (the only options Ribbit Mobile supports). I hope to post a fuller review soon.

Try it out, and let us know how Ribbit Mobile works for you.

Nimbuzz has launched a premium calling service called NimbuzzOut that adds the ability to use the mobile messaging client to make calls to wireless and landline phones worldwide, as reported by Om over on GigaOM.

Om has been using the pre-release version of NimbuzzOut for about a month and recommends it for making cheap international calls — the call quality is good and the app is easy to use. Check out Om’s post for full details.

Have you tried NimbuzzOut? What do you think of the call quality?

Bill On Site offers the ability to manage invoices from your mobile phone. No matter where you are, as long as your phone has a web browser, you can send an invoice to your client immediately — you don’t need to have a computer at hand.

Invoicing on the Go

To make preparing invoices on your phone as easy as possible, Bill On Site allows you to set up clients ahead of time, although you can access client information via your phone. You will need to provide an email address in order to make sure that your invoice makes it to the appropriate client. You can also set up your invoices so that your clients can pay you immediately if you happen to be meeting with them when you send the invoice, as well as accept payment by PayPal, check or money order. You can automatically add taxes, fees and discounts to specific clients as well, though they do need to be set up before you start using your phone.

Bill On Site offers a mobile interface that you can use on any phone that allows you to access the web. It is a relatively easy interface to use, and you can turn out invoices on the spot.

The service has three separate pricing plans, ranging from $15 a month to $45 a month. The basic account is limited to sending out 25 invoices a month and is for solo users only. The other plans offer more invoices each month, as well as staff accounts so that multiple members of an organization can access the invoicing system. Each of the three plans includes a 30-day free trial.

Using Bill On Site

The ability to send an invoice from your phone is very useful — if you’ve had to go on-site to see a client or you’re otherwise away from your computer, it’s a practical feature.

However, many invoicing tools can be used on a smartphone. Some have created applications (like Freshbooks’ Minibooks iPhone app, for example) or mobile interfaces, but with a little perseverance, even those that have not can still be used.

One thing I’d love to see from Bill On Site that would make it really stand out from other invoicing apps is a way to send invoices from mobile phones that aren’t smartphones (maybe via an SMS or voice interface).

In general, Bill On Site stacks up well against other invoicing tools. It does encrypt all invoice and client information and transmits it over SSL. Data is backed up in three different locations, according to the company’s web site. The system also records all changes to each invoice, so that you can review how an invoice has been updated and changed at any time. The question worth considering is how different the mobile interface is for Bill On Site when compared with other invoicing tools, but if invoicing from your phone is a concern, it’s worth giving Bill On Site’s free trial a go.

What do you think of Bill On Site’s mobile interface?

37signals’ Haystack promises to make finding a web designer easy, offering a simplified way to search for clients looking to hire a professional. While it’s a useful tool for someone with a web design project, it can also prove useful for web designers.

Landing Work

While your first visit to Haystack may leave you with the impression that the site is only meant to help out clients, it’s already proved useful for many designers. Some web designers report landing projects within hours of posting a listing on Haystack. The general idea is that the site can better match prospective clients to your services who are browsing online — you might not be highly ranked enough to be found through search engines, but your skills can make you stand out among other web designers on Haystack. 37Signals takes care of promoting the site via advertising, blogging and marketing to its user base.

Any web designer can post a listing on Haystack for free. That includes anyone from freelancers to big web design companies. The basic listing includes one portfolio image, the type of budgets you generally work with, the nearest big city to where you work and a contact email for your company. A Pro listing, priced at $99 per month, allows you to post more images, change placement and place for your logo. The Pro listings do seem to show up first in search results. Clients can search for web designers based on budget and location.

Scoping Out the Competition

You’ll find that Haystack has a few uses beyond landing clients. It’s an easy way to get an idea of what your fellow web designers are up to. You can check out prices, portfolios and services offered for a whole list of web designers in one place. You can tell quickly how well your prices fall in with your competition’s, as well as learn about how they’re landing clients — valuable business information no matter how you look at it.

There are some design reasons to look at what other designers are up to, as well. Need a little inspiration? Browse through some of those designs that have been posted on Haystack. You might see a technique or style that sparks a new idea for a project you’re working on.

Haystack’s Background

The minds behind Haystack are already well-known for creating tools. The site is a new offering from 37signals, the same company that created Basecamp, Backpack and other well-known tools. Haystack is a logical extension of these tools — 37signals’ original application, Basecamp, grew out of a tool that the team designed for their own use. With the 37Signals team’s roots in web design, it’s easy to understand how they would come to create Haystack.

That background has definitely contributed to the site’s overall usefulness. While it takes a slightly more subtle approach to inviting web designers to join than it does to inviting prospective clients to shop, Haystack is built to be an effective tool for the web designers posting listings.

Have you listed your company on Haystack? Has it generated any leads for you?

Internet-based communication is changing so quickly these days that there seems to be an endless stream of beta releases. Yesterday, Simon wrote about some of the latest browser betas; let’s look at a few products and services for interacting with social networks, Twitter and instant messaging.

I don’t generally like living on the bleeding edge, but some betas are very usable, and I’ve already incorporated them into my daily workflow. Others look promising, but are not stable or are lacking too many features right now. But all of the following are worth trying, and watching as they develop. We’ll review them more thoroughly as they mature.

Adium is my favorite IM client for the Mac OS. Its latest beta supports all of the instant messaging protocols, and also has rudimentary support for Twitter and Facebook Chat. Unfortunately, the latter is not working as I write this, although a fix is expected shortly.

VoxOx is an ambitious program combining IM; social networks (Facebook, MySpace and Twitter); SMS texting; faxing; private email; file sharing; video conversations; and voice connections. As I wrote a few days ago, it is very rough around the edges now, and desperately needs improved tools for managing contacts.

Imo.im is a web-based multi-system instant messaging client with some intriguing features, like shared whiteboards. This service is listed as being in alpha, so we can assume that it has considerable development ahead of it.

Brizzly is a web-based service that looks a lot like Twitter’s own web interface, but with improvements. It supports multiple Twitter accounts and has recently added Facebook support. The multiple accounts aren’t as well integrated as I would like, but I assume that will come.

Tweetminer is another web-based service that includes support for multiple Twitter accounts, tweet scheduling, and RSS feeds. Its interface is attractive, but features are minimal at the moment. There are also Adobe AIR or Fluid-based desktop versions, for those who prefer standalone apps.

Socialite (formerly EventBox, which Imran wrote about here) has just released beta 2, which seemingly broke support for Facebook updates. When this issue is fixed, Socialite could become my favorite, as it combines support for Facebook, Facebook Pages, multiple Twitter accounts, RSS feeds and Google Reader in one attractive interface.

Seesmic Desktop is another Twitter and Facebook program which has worked well for me, but it shares with many Adobe AIR programs some ugly screen fonts and a propensity for using large amounts of memory. Seesmic also has a promising web version, but so far, it lacks support for multiple Twitter accounts, and for Facebook.

Nambu only does Twitter, but does it very well, in what I think is the most attractive interface of any program of its type. I can choose three different layouts, and switch between them easily. Nambu’s development is very rapid, with a new beta released every couple of days.

I find the popular Tweetdeck to be totally unreadable and unusable, due to its AIR interface. I wish Adobe would make AIR on the Mac look as good as the native OS X fonts and windows.

There are lots more betas out there, of course. What beta software and services do you use?

Image credit: Stock.xchng user OmirOnia

Much of the time, we don’t see a lot of our fellow web workers. Every once in a while, though, we have to put together an event that lets us meet in person. Constant Contact has launched a new web-based tool, Constant Contact Event Marketing, to make it easier to organize events for small businesses, freelancers and organizations.

Constant Contact Event Marketing is a little different from the many event invitation sites already out there. It’s a professional tool — among other benefits, it won’t spam your contacts simply because they RSVP-ed to one event, once. It offers options to invite attendees to to your event, as well as create open registrations. If you’re planning to charge for attendance, you’ll have a built-in PayPal payment processing option. You can also track registrations and other information.

In addition to the planning tools included in Constant Contact Event Marketing, the application makes use of Constant Contact’s background in promotion and marketing. The application allows you to create a page for your event as well as promote it via email and social networking sites. While you’ll still have to do some legwork to promote your event, the process is simplified by the fact that you won’t need to build a landing page.

In order to create a new event, you start by filling in the event details: location, time and so on. Constant Contact Event Marketing uses those details to automatically fill in templates for event invitations, registration pages and other event elements. Once these elements are complete and approved to go live, the application collects registrations. You can check in on registration information online, as well as export it as a PDF or Excel spreadsheets. At any time during the registration process, you can update invitation information, add new invitees, remind attendees or email out updates.

Constant Contact has a long history as a provider of email marketing and online survey tools. While you can use the new Event Marketing tool on its own, it is full integrated with Constant Contact’s other tools. If you already use Constant Contact for an email newsletter or other purpose, you can also access your list of contacts for use through the Event Marketing tool, which can make setting up your event significantly easier.

While Constant Contact Event Marketing isn’t free, it is an affordable option for a freelancer or a small business putting together an event. Pricing starts at $15 per month — at that level, you can organize five different events at once. The different pricing levels are based on the number of events you organize, rather than the number of attendees registering for your events. There are no advertisements on either the tools to plan your events or the pages you can use to invite attendees to your events. Constant Contact also offers a free 60-day trial.

Have you tried Constant Contact Event Marketing?

As a web worker who routinely switches back and forth from Windows to Mac, I look for web conferencing services that are Mac-friendly, because we no longer work in a strictly Windows world.

Citrix’s GoToMeeting, part of the Citrix Online collaborative suite, is one such service. It also meets one of my other prime requirements — the client is easily installable by users of all levels. One thing that will spoil a web conference before it’s even started is when participants have a hard time installing the local client so they can’t join the conference. This issue can happen to even the most experienced web worker, not just the technology neophyte.

I am sticking with the Mac client for this post, but Citrix also provides a similar user experience and features in the Windows version. Neither client is a permanent install.

Web Workers and Web Conferencing
Today’s web conferencing tools have to be more than just a venue for team meetings — they need to be full collaboration tools to help web workers and their project teams communicate seamlessly.

Citrix GoToMeeting Features

Citrix GoToMeeting for the Mac supports up to 15 conference participants, and includes the following features:

• Screen Sharing. Screen sharing is useful for online demonstrations, collaboration on documents and spreadsheets, and online training. As travel budgets remain tight, screen sharing and some creativity can help geographically dispersed project teams stay in sync on projects.
• Meeting Recording and Playback. Taking meeting minutes is an archaic, mundane, and bureaucratic task, and GoToMeeting includes meeting recording and playback which keeps an audio and screen recording of the entire online meeting. This is a better record, because it spares the misunderstandings and gaps that can sometimes creep into note taking. It is also more efficient for an online team to move to meeting recording because participants can better focus on the meeting. UPDATE: the Mac version of GoToMeeting doesn’t support meeting recording — it’s only available on the Windows version.
• VoIP and Telephone Support. Web conference attendees can dial into the conference via a VoIP or landline phone. Currently, GoToMeeting offers free VoIP and phone conferencing. You also have an option to use your computer’s mic and speakers for conducting audio communications.

Launching meetings takes place within a few clicks, making GoToMeeting an ideal choice for teams that need a web conferencing platform that users of varying levels will have no problem using.

GoToMeeting is available for purchase from GoToMeeting.com. (A free trial is available.) The site includes the latest licensing and pricing information.

Which web conferencing tool do you use?