online contacts

Let's say you wanted to find out what your friends or your business associates think of a new product. Google Social Search, now available in beta form to general users, lets you search for that information in the blogs, Twitter tweets, Facebook public pages, and other musings by your social circle.

Let's say you wanted to find out what your friends or your business associates think of a new product. Google Social Search, now available in beta form to general users, lets you search for that information in the blogs, Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, and other musings by your social circle.

Syed Saleem Shahzad in Common Dreams:

In sailors' parlance, it is called local knowledge -- the invaluable and detailed insights into a location's prevailing winds, hidden shoals and tricky tides and currents, accumulated through firsthand experience. Without it, visiting mariners can find themselves in peril.

In the wake of service outages earlier this week, Google is making good on a commitment to increase transparency and communication with Google Apps customers.

On Wednesday, Google launched the Google Apps Status Dashboard. As its name suggests, the new tool lets customers check the status of services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video for business.

Israeli company Fring is bringing its Voice over Internet Protocol application to Apple's iPhone. Dubbed fring, the application lets users talk, chat and interact with other so-called fringsters -- and their online communities -- using the iPhone's Wi-Fi connection.

A light, sneak-preview R&D version of the mobile VoIP application, developed in conjunction with the Holon Institute of Technology academic research labs in Israel, is available as a download from fring.com.