It’s WebWorkerDaily’s fault that I’ve bought an iPod touch (s aapl). (That’s my excuse, anyway.) As I looked at potential subjects to write about, I kept seeing cool apps, and I need to be able to test them, right?

But why not buy an iPhone, or a Palm Pre, which I’d had my eye on for several months? The Pre seems to be a good phone, but it doesn’t yet have the apps that the iPhone does. And the monthly fees for Pre service are considerably higher than what I’m paying now. The iPhone’s monthly fees are even higher, and many folks I’ve talked to don’t find it to be a very good phone.

So, keeping my current phone and buying an iPod touch seemed like a good compromise. I can get good Wi-Fi coverage in most areas where I live, so I’ll be able to go online, even without the phone function.

Many of my WWD colleagues already have iPhones. Aliza has recently written about good apps for web workers. Dawn’s shared her favorites, too. But with the holidays coming up, here are some of my ideas for apps to put on that brand-new iPhone or iPod touch:

Communication

• eBuddy. A multi-service instant message client for MSN/Windows Live, AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, Facebook Chat and MySpace Chat. Supports multiple accounts on the same service. Versions for web, Android and other platforms also available. Free.
• Facebook. A well-designed way for Facebook users to keep up with their friends while on the road. The app has had its issues, but they are apparently fixed now. Free.
• Gist. Scott and I have both found Gist useful, and the Gist iPhone app does a pretty good job of presenting a lot of information in a small space. Free.
• LinkedIn. This app keeps LinkedIn users, er, “linked in” from their iPhones and iPod touches. The latest upgrade adds some nice features, including an inbox for LinkedIn messages. Free.
• Nimbuzz. You can use this app to make inexpensive international calls over Wi-Fi. The app also includes a chat function, but it’s pretty rudimentary compared to eBuddy. Free app; rates for calls vary.
• RingCentral. If you’re a RingCentral user, you can use this app to manage your phone messages and more. Free for RingCentral users.
• Tweetie. There are lots of Twitter apps, but so far, I like Tweetie the best. It has a clean interface, and supports multiple Twitter accounts. Thanks for the tip, Darrell! $2.99.
• Waveboard. Mobile access to Google Wave. Will hopes for better access soon; I imagine that this app will become more sophisticated as Wave does. $0.99.

File and Idea Management

• Dropbox. This app is another reason to love Dropbox, which many of us at WWD do. As one would expect from Dropbox, it just works. Free.
• Evernote. My colleagues at WWD like Evernote, too, and I’ve finally seen the light. It’s a great replacement for PhatNotes, which I used to use with various Palm products. (The Palm versions are apparently no longer available.) Free.

News

• Reeder. A very nice and elegant RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. $0.99.

Just about every news source also has its own iPhone/iPod touch app these days. So far, I’ve been impressed with the ones from NPR and from some news outlets that have used the PodCurry platform.

Password Management

• 1Password. Manage and sync passwords. I’ve been playing with the brand-new version 3, and it’s good enough that I’ve moved from SplashID after many years. Use Dropbox with 1Password to make your password data available on multiple machines. $7.99.
• LastPass. Manage and sync passwords across multiple machines. The Firefox add-on for this service was included in WWD’s Add-Ons Collection. Apps for iPhones and other mobile devices available with premium membership, $12/year.

I’ve barely begun finding fun stuff, but I think I’m off to a good start with the Google Earth app, and TriPeaks Lite. I’m sure that I’ll find more, but I really need to get back to work now. Happy holidays!

What iPhone or iPod touch apps would you recommend for new users?

One of the reasons that I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard was the new ability to sync the Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail’s or Google Apps’ Contacts. This function has been around for a while, but for some reason, it was previously available only to iPhone users.

I really appreciate well-produced synchronization, because I’ve experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get right. It seems that software developers can never quite agree on how to organize contact information, so everyone’s databases are different. For a long time, for instance, one of the major makers of financial management software didn’t even create city, state and ZIP/postal code fields, opting instead for an address field where all of that information was run together, making the data very difficult to parse.

So I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Snow Leopard’s “sync with Google” function, especially because I have a fairly large address book, and most of its entries have photos associated with them, something that very few sync solutions even try to support.

With a little planning, you can easily sync your address book with Google. Here are some tips — some of which are also applicable to other synchronization systems, such as the one available for synchronizing data between Google and Thunderbird’s Address Book on a PC.

1. Clean up your contacts. It’s easy to get sloppy about how we enter information, so it’s worth looking through your Address Book to make sure that your data is accurate and well-formatted. Putting first names and middle initials together in the first name field can produce amusing results, as can forgetting to check the “company” box for such entries — I had one card titled “Daily, Web Worker”! I also discovered a bunch of messed-up entries that had apparently been caused by previous experiments with sync software and services. One such service must have been European, because I found lots of entries where the postal code preceded the city, as is standard in France, but which isn’t correct in North America or the UK. Be careful with international phone numbers, too. If you don’t precede country codes with the plus (+) sign, some programs will try to format the numbers in North American format.
2. Back up your data! At the least, use Address Book’s Export function, and save a backup in Address Book Archive format. If you want added safety, use a program like Address Book to CSV Exporter to save your data in CSV format, which can be read by lots of other programs.
3. If possible, don’t try to sync two sources with different data, at least for an initial synchronization. You’ll get best results if you can clean up your data in the Mac Address Book, and completely erase all your contacts in Google. However, if that’s not possible, the charmingly named Conflict Resolver will spring into action during the sync, and give you the choice of which records to keep.

Once you’re ready, enter your account information into Address Book’s Preferences. Go to Accounts, check the “Synchronize with Google” option, click “Configure,” and enter your Gmail or Google Apps email address and password. That’s really all there is to it. I’ve found that you need to be logged out of the Google web interface for the sync to start. You might also need to make a change to your Mac Address Book in order for the sync program to become active, but once it begins, the process is surprisingly fast.

The Mac-to-Google sync system does have limitations. It can sync with one Gmail or Google Apps account at a time, and although it offers sync with Yahoo Mail’s contact lists, I’ve never been able to get Yahoo sync to work. Sync is also available with Apple’s MobileMe service, but I haven’t tried that.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the results, and am happy that I can have immediate access to my contact information in several different places. As far as I’m concerned, one can never have too many backups of this vital data.

How do you keep your contact data synchronized?

As web workers, we are often asked to help friends and relatives fix computer problems. For me, the majority of these problems seem to be related to email. It’s ironic, as email is now less popular than social networks.

So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive.

• Get your email on the web. Dump your desktop email software, and switch to Gmail/Google Apps or another online provider like Yahoo. If your Internet connection is unreliable, Google Gears lets you work offline.
• Create a master inbox. If you have multiple email accounts, you can set up forwarding to receive and send email from one place.
• Use IMAP. If you need mobile access to your email, set up your phone software to use IMAP, not POP. By using IMAP, your messages will sync automatically in all of the places you check your mail.
• Use social networks. It seems like all of my friends under 30 don’t do email anymore, but they’re on Facebook a lot.
• Use instant messaging. For short, simple conversations, IM can be very efficient. In a few seconds, you can schedule a meeting or a lunch date. It’s much faster than email or phone conversations.
• Use file-sharing services for sending large documents. There are lots of such services, and new ones are popping up all the time, including Fluxiom and FileShareHQ. And Dropbox and the new Opera Unite service allow you to share files directly from your computer.
• Organize your electronic communications. Celine wrote about this recently, and I’ve talked about it, too.

Oh, and one more:

• Remember your passwords. This is obvious to you and me, but I’ve heard “I didn’t know I had a password” way too often. Online services like LastPass, or programs like 1Password, SplashID, or the free KeePass (Windows and phones; also available for Mac and Linux) can be lifesavers.

How do you keep email simple?

Image by stock.xchng user chris27.

It’s been a busy few weeks for the team at online meeting service Yuuguu, with the announcement of Linux and Flash clients as well as support for Google Talk users.

Earlier today the company rounded out its ‘Yuuguu Inside’ strategy by extending its integration of Google Talk buddies to users from AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo’s instant messaging networks, bringing cross-platform and cross-network support to the company’s ‘Yuuniverse’.

With a reach extending into hundreds of millions now, its easier than ever for users of the service to invite participants to a Yuuguu session, though it remains to be seen if removing previous barriers actually makes a difference in adoption of screensharing over face-to-face meetings.

Regardless, Yuuguu remains a useful free tool for web workers and one that now extends a little further.

UPDATE: Yuuguu CEO Anish Kapoor assures me that a bug in the acceptance of .Mac-based AIM screennames will shortly be resolved.

Yahoo Small Business is raising its domain renewal price from $12.95 per year to $34.95 per year effective July 1, 2008. The announcement was made through emails sent to account holders with domains set for renewal before the effective date.

This is Yahoo’s second price increase in under a year.

The $22.00 increase is a hard pill to swallow for web workers who have used Yahoo to register domain names for their web projects. Competing registrars are reacting. GoDaddy, for example, is offering a 30% discount on domain registration this week.

Have you had to settle for an email address that you just don’t like? Perhaps one incorporating your name or nickname with a string of random numbers at the end. If so, Yahoo! comes to your rescue as they announce the availability of two new domain choices for your email needs.

Actually it’s one new domain at @ymail.com, and the resurrection of an old classic with the renewed availability of @rocketmail.com addresses. For those unfamiliar, Rocketmail was a leader in the web based email market before being acquired by Yahoo in the late 90’s.  An @rocketmail.com address might hold sentimental value for some users and it’s great to see them being released back to general availability.

In conjunction with this announcement, Yahoo! also released some interesting statistics from a survey they commissioned. It seems that having a personalized and meaningful email address is important to many folks.

“Of online adults who indicated that they are not currently using their first choice email address, over half (54%) agree that they want their email address to reflect who they are, and about half (48%) would be at least somewhat likely to change addresses should their preferred choice become available.”

If that sounds like you, head on over to ymail.com or rocketmail.com later today to register your new address.  Accounts are free and give you all the same features and access to Yahoo! services that you would get with a yahoo.com address or ID.

Are you happy with your email address? Would you trade up if you could get the address you really wanted.

With Microsoft’s announcement this week that Outlook and Outlook Express will no longer support desktop access to Hotmail accounts raises some interesting questions on data portability.

After 30th June, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail application will be the only means by which desktop and offline access to Hotmail accounts will be supported. This effectively means that a Hotmail user’s messages continue to be imprisoned within a closed ecosphere of services and applications. OK, smart people won’t be using Outlook, Outlook Express or Hotmail, but millions do and many have years of messages archived that they may wish to continue accessing outside a web-based interface.

However, there are some unofficial mechanisms that can not only continue to provide offline and desktop access, but also standards-based access into most email clients

• IzyMail has close to a decade of experience in delivering webmail gateway services. A one-off payment of $17.95 buys a one-year subscription that equips any Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail account with a POP and IMAP ‘wrapper’, so users can send, receive and synchronise messages using most desktop clients, such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Outlook

• Thunderbird’s WebMail extension plays a similar role to IzyMail, though is of course limited only to Thunderbird and doesn’t necessarily support the various permutations of a service like Hotmail (Live Hotmail, Hotmail Classic etc.) but does support a wider range of services

• Apple Mail fans can use a similar plugin – HTTP Mail – to retrieve Hotmail messages and folder.

Of these solutions, I’d recommend IzyMail’s standards-based approach, freeing the user to employ any both leading mail protocols with the widest range of clients. Indeed, IzyMail saw a huge spike in subscriptions with the launch of the iPhone last Summer as users utilised POP and IMAP webmail gateways to synchronise their email with their phones.

As covered before, working with calendars is another one of those business necessities that is crucial to running a business. Managing multiple calendars is tedious, but necessary to staying in sync with those in your work and personal life. For example, you may have calendars for each of your co-workers, your personal calendar, and perhaps even your family events calendar.

FuseCal, a new web application, allows you to combine multiple calendars and create one master calendar. Ideally, this means you can take any iCal calendar such as Outlook 2003/2007, Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, and Yahoo! Calendar and add them into FuseCal, granting you new functionality.

Specifically, once the individual calendars are imported into FuseCal, you can choose which events you’d like to add, filter events by keyword, and then add those into your master calendar. Once you have your master calendar built, you can easily import this new filtered and personalized calendar into Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or whichever calendaring application you use.

Another feature of FuseCal is aimed at those who have their own websites and want to publish calendar data, such as a business who wants to publish upcoming events or a softball team who wishes to display their game schedule on their website.

To get started, sign into FuseCal and click on the “Publish Calendars” link. Follow the on-screen instructions for building your FuseCal calendar for publishing. The final step will provide you with an embeddable snipped of HTML to put on your website. If there are any changes to your embedded calendar, users subscribed to your calendar will automatically be notified in their calendaring application.

FuseCal is currently in “Alpha” and the service is free. Considering how new it is, I wouldn’t suggest keeping business critical data within FuseCal’s system. However, in my initial testing the services has worked as promised.

Yahoo has unveiled a new personalized mobile web content management utility called onePlace. The tool, which will be launched in the second quarter of 2008 as part of Yahoo Go 3.0 (a previously announced mobile application that enables easy access to existing mobile Yahoo services), will be able to track on mobile devices emails, news feeds, web sites, videos, search queries and more.

For web workers, onePlace could be a great tool for on-the-go research and tracking pertinent mobile content.  For more, check out the complete post at GigaOm.

Use Skype IM within Pidgin

For those of us who use instant messaging to conduct our day-to-day business, we know the frustrations of having multiple friends spread throughout all the major IM platforms including Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and Skype. Pidgin is a freeware multi-protocol IM product that allows access to all your contacts from Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, and many more systems. However, Skype however was always closed off.

Not any longer, thanks to the Skype API and the Skype API Plugin for Pidgin. Using this free plugin, you can instant message back and forth with your Skype contacts within Pidgin. At this point, it isn’t possible to do voice calling from Pidgin. However every Skype contact is brought into Pidgin for easy access. Because Pidgin is cross-platform, this functionality is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In a move that is sure to strike fear in the heart of local news providers such as your newspaper or TV affiliate, Google News has added the ability to see local news based on your location.

Here’s how it works: simply go to Google News, look half way down the page you’ll see a text box allowing you to enter either a zip code or city/state. Do so and Google News will reload with your local city listed as one of the categories of news available for your reading pleasure. Aggregating local news stories from a variety of sources is nothing new for Google News, but this is the first time we have been able to see a specific city’s news items as a news category.

One obvious missing feature is the ability to search the local view. If you do enter a search term, you see the global search results. Additionally, at this point in time the local news feature only works in the United States and only in English.

Google may make a splash, but their not the first

Google joins a competitive space. Yahoo! News has had local news in Beta status for some time. To it’s credit, Yahoo! News is more pleasing to the eye when compared Google News. It cleanly breaks up news content based on originating source and allows easy access to local video reports. Additionally, Yahoo! leverages it’s assets by displaying user submitted photos for the area that reside on Flickr.

Similar to Google News, Yahoo! news does not enable you to search the local sources and retrieve results based on your geography. Google’s local news offering delivers local news from many more areas as Yahoo has not expanded it’s service beyond major metro areas.

MSNBC’s offering is even more limited than that of Google or Yahoo!. After being prompted for your zip code, MSNBC’s home page displays a paltry 3 or 4 stories and your local weather provided by the Weather Channel. An individual city’s news page requires massive amount of scrolling and, as expected, shows a few stories from local news sources including newspapers and local TV affiliates’ news departments. Again, leveraging their assets, MSN displays a Virtual Earth map showing local traffic, a view of local company’s stock activity, local sports scores, and lottery results. To my surprise, MSNBC adds a unique view into local blog scene by featuring recent posts from local blogs. As with Yahoo! and Google, no local search is supported.

Topix is a winner in the news aggregation scene and is sure to feel some pressure from Google’s News’ newest feature. Topix’s claim to fame is mixing traditional media with citizen journalists. Topix presents a well laid out website with main news stories dominating the page with weather, traffic, and a poll appearing on the page. Like Google News, Topix pulls from numerous sites. Their tagline on their site is “Local news continually updated from thousands of sources on the web”. Topix has developed a strong audience by delivering pertinent information to a local audience. Each article has “Related Topix” that give a tagsonomy to the website and creating linkage to each article. Topix, like Google News, features many geographic area because of the reach of it’s new sources.

Conclusion

Google’s local news service has a massive amount of potential and represents a fantastic way to stay up to date on news in a geographic area. However it’s clear that if they utilize other components of their online offerings, Google’s local news sites would be more valuable for users. For example: offer Google Maps with it’s easy to use Traffic view, embed Picasa photos that have been tagged or geo-tagged with the known local city name, and offer blog posts that have been discovered by Google Blog Search.

Editor’s Note: There’s no question that Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is game-changing in the tech world. But how does it affect us? WWD writers Mike Gunderloy and Bob Walsh see different sides of the same coin, speculating on the potential impact on the individual web worker and independent developer.

Mike Gunderloy: So, you start it off: what’s the upside?

Bob Walsh: Well, I see three major benefits to web workers if this deal goes through: Google gets some real competition, Microsoft gets a big dose of Open Source culture and flickr and del.icio.us get some innovation. First off, as much as I like Google – both as a web user and a microISV – they’ve had it way too easy for way too long. Having a real competitor – not just Microsoft’s currently lame efforts – would bring some much needed focus to the company.

Mike: Competition for Google would be a good thing, I agree: the sheer domination of Google is starting to make people doubt their “don’t be evil” mantra. But can you combine two also-rans in the search market to make a serious competitor? And there’s more to competition than size: innovation is what we’ve been missing from #2 and #3 in this market. I see more search innovation in small companies than I do in either Microsoft or Yahoo.

Bob: True enough about the competition coming from startups and microISVs – but what has Yahoo done with flickr and del.icio.us since they bought them? Not a thing. There’s a huge amount of potential in how we work, live, learn in the web still to find; Yahoo hasn’t been doing a thing in this regard.

Mike: So which web companies has Microsoft purchased and integrated well into its own operations? Hotmail, I suppose – but it took them years to improve it. And even there much of their effort was devoted to getting rid of a perfectly good infrastructure just because it was running on non-Windows servers.

Bob: True enough– but that was a decade ago. This is going to be a very good test if Microsoft has really changed. Will it actually try to move all of the Yahoo properties over to Windows Server 2008? Or will the “new Microsoft” leave well enough alone and concentrate of building up Yahoo?

Can Microsoft even make Yahoo search run on Windows servers?

Mike: Microsoft has a long history of making everything run on Windows – the question is how well it will run. Part of what I fear most in this combination – particularly for web workers – is Microsoft’s continuing antipathy to open source. We’ve heard many times about Microsoft developers not even being allowed to look at open source code, lest it taint their ability to patent things for the company, and we’ve seen a series of products come out of their developer division that are pale copies of open source originals. How can they possibly reconcile this continued “not invented here” stance with the open source culture that has increasingly been coming to the fore at Yahoo?

Yahoo itself runs on FreeBSD, same as HotMail did before the great rewrite. Merging that into Microsoft won’t be simple. I fear a Microsoft takeover would also kill further progress in things like the Yahoo UI and design pattern libraries, which have contributed quite a bit to the progress of Web 2.0.

Bob: Good points Mike – but the average consumer (not our readers, they’re not average!) think open source is something you put a bandage on – they have no conception (yet) of how Open Source has changed the developer community.

Is Ray Ozzie making the big technology decisions at Microsoft now or not? I don’t know. I do know this – both Flickr and del.icio.us are not exactly hotbeds of innovation any more.

Besides, no one has a problem with Microsoft having control of their non-public del.icio.us bookmarks and protected Flickr Pro photos, do they?

Mike: To their credit, Microsoft has consistently had some of the best privacy policies in the industry, and no serious breaches that I’m aware of.

What about branding? Can Microsoft possibly combine Yahoo! and Windows Live under one umbrella without hopelessly confusing things or alienating customers? Especially cutting-edge customers like our readers who are nimble enough to find competing services and switch instantly?

Bob: I don’t think Microsoft is going to be as foolhardy as to stick the two brands in a blender and see what happens. After all, they are buying Yahoo because they want eyeballs, not technology.

Mike: Yes, but if you look at their press release they claim they’re going to save a billion bucks a year through, among other things, eliminating redundancy. Can they possibly keep both Hotmail and Yahoo Mail? Windows Messenger and Yahoo IM? A wave of consolidation and rebranding seems inevitable – whether to all Windows or all Yahoo.

Given the visceral negative reactions that many people have to Microsoft, I wonder whether Yahoo might not be the better brand to keep.

Bob: Part of the issue is that Microsoft wants to buy the Yahoo that does searches and the one that’s a media company: Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Games. They are going to have to deal with a whole lot of media partners as well.

Online advertising – the media side of things + search advertising – is why Microsoft wants the Yahoo. If Microsoft moves too fast/far in absorbing Yahoo, they end up buying an empty building next to Highway 101.

Mike: Precisely. And that doesn’t bode well for the parts of Yahoo that are closest to the web worker world: the web development, flickr, and delicious pieces. Those are just sideshows if Microsoft is focused on search and ad dollars. The best we can hope for is for them to be spun off, the worst is for them to languish and die under their new Microsoft overlords.

So which side of the aisle do you fall on? Let’s continue the debate in the comments…

Related posts from the GigaNET:

• Dear Yahoo, I Pwn You. XO Microsoft.
• Google Drives Microsoft’s Hostile Bid for Yahoo
• Microsoft Offers to Buy Ailing Yahoo for $44.6 Billion
• What Would Micro-Hoo Mean for Video?
• WWD Debate: Microsoft Wants Yahoo, What do Web Workers Get?

In a surprise move, Microsoft proposed today to buy Yahoo! for approximately $44.6 billion in cash and stock. “We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft in his open letter to the Yahoo!’s Board of Directors.

Yahoo, squeezed by Google on the search engine side and Facebook and MySpace on the online community side, confirmed a week ago to various mainstream media it was poised to lay off 1,000 workers in an effort to revitalize the company and its flagging stock price. Earlier this week, Yahoo’s shares fell almost 10 percent after three analysts cut their ratings on the company.

They buyout offer of $31 a share of Yahoo common stock – a 62% premium to the current price – would see approximately $44.6 billion change hands and be structured as a half cash, half Microsoft stock deal.

Microsoft cited in its bid the chance to create a online advertising titan equal to Google: “The online advertising market is growing at a very fast pace, from over $40 billion in 2007 to nearly $80 billion by 2010. The resulting benefits of scale along with the associated capital costs for advertising platform providers make this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners.”

What do you think of this development? Should the deal be accepted, aside from storing your bookmarks on Microsoft del.icio.us and getting your photos from Microsoft Flickr, will it affect the way you work?