I Played With Google Speadsheets

…and I have to say…not bad! Nice, easy-to-use AJAX interface. You don’t need be an Excel guru or know how to format a formula to use this program. Google Spreadsheets has a nice selection of mathematical, financial, statistical, and other functions available to use with a click of the mouse. Also, you can import your existing spreadsheets into the program. Although you can’t do any fancy Excel stuff like charts, graphs, zooming in and out, or serious data analysis, this is a good, basic spreadsheet for most people. The best part is the sharing feature which also allows for real-time collaboration. Who says Google isn’t releasing innovative stuff anymore?

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If you haven’t been using Gmail and Google Calendar, you are missing out. I will use Gmail for eternity or until Google is no more, whichever comes first. Google Calendar, their latest offering, is an online calendar that makes it easy to add events, share your calendar with others, invite people to attend events, make calendars public or private, receive alerts, and much more. Not too long ago, Google has added on some more features that make Google Calendar even more useful. You can now view your Google Calendar from your mobile phone. To do so, send a text message to 48368 (GVENT) with a quick command like "next" to see what’s coming up on your schedule. Also, if you send the details of a new event like to GVENT, the event will be added your calendar. (Google says they are working on full calendar sycning for mobile devices.) Another new feature is the Google Desktop gadget, which lets you put the calendar directly on your PC’s desktop. Sweet!

The Free iPod Book 2.0 is being offered by iLounge.com. The book offers answers to every major iPod and iTunes question and more. 194 pages and two versions - printable and widescreen - are available. Enjoy!

Oh no! Del.icio.us/popular got spammed today! See? Looks to be all better now though. Whew! Good work, Del.icio.us people. I suppose it was bound to happen at some point, right? Darn spammers.

Rumor on the net is that Google is testing a new homepage design. This design has a link reading "More you can do with Google" below the search box. Click the link, and links like "Images", "Groups," "News", etc. wil appear. You can see the flickr photo of this new design here. I kinda like it.

It’s been a long time since the announcement stating that Yahoo! and Microsoft were planning on merging their IM networks. In fact, that was all the way back in October of 2005! No, they didn’t forget…according to a recent post at the Windows Live Messenger blog, a team member says "As it turns out, it’s been a hard problem to solve, and the team has been working hard,  I still don’t know exactly when you’re going to be able to start adding those Yahoo! Buddies to your WL Messenger, but it can’t be much longer.  Last week I got to check out a fully functional version of WL Messenger which could exchange IMs with a fully functional version of Yahoo!" Bring it on!

In a move possibly designed to leave Yahoo’s fledgling video service in the dust, YouTube has added even more new features. These new features include the ability of users to create "channels" where you can gather either your own content or that of others. Other users can then subscribe to these channels. Another new feature is a blogging feature that lets users post YouTube videos directly to Blogger, BlogSpot, and LiveJournal blogs. Videos now include a clickable "blog video" link. Supposedly, support for additional blog platforms is on the way. A final new feature lets you see the history of the last 100 videos watched at YouTube.com. So does Yahoo have any shot at defeating YouTube? You can take a poll over at the GigaOM blog and see what others think!

Sharpcast wants to make photo sharing and sycning easier. Unlike Flickr, which exists soley as a website (though one with awesome features), Sharpcast Photos has a website, a desktop application, and optionally syncs photos to mobile devices. Flickr users can use an uploader tool to drag and drop photos to be uploaded to Flickr.com. Similarly, Sharpcast users can drap and drop photos into the desktop app; by using this app or by uploading picutres online, and the photos will be synced to your mobile, your computer, and online. To share an album with a friend, you just drag the album to your buddy list. The beauty of Sharpcast is the mobile syncing - something no one has done this smoothly before. Still, until I need my 100 pictures of Sophie on my cell, I’m sticking with Flickr for now.

In the future Sharpcast plans on releasing products that will sync calendars, contacts, and documents just like it’s currently doing with photos — now that may interest me. Especially if they could tie it in with my Google Desktop tool that let’s me search across all the computers I own…because god knows where I saved that file. Sharpcast is Windows-only at the moment and is in "alpha." (Flickr is in gamma!)

Ask.com, the company that owns Bloglines, has just released a new tool: a search engine for blogs & feeds. This isn’t just any blog search site, though, it definately has some nice features. Using the "binoculars", the little icon of which resides underneath each result, you can roll your mouse over the icon and preview the site without having to leave the page. (Like Google Reader’s Google homepage module). Also underneath each result is a "subscribe" box — with one click, you can subscribe to feeds using your preferred reader…conveniently, mine is Bloglines. Another button, "post to", lets you post the search result to digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine, or Bloglines. Would I be wrong to declare this the "best blog search engine ever" just yet?

According to this news article, the largest BitTorrent site, ThePirateBay.org was raided and shutdown by Swedish authorities last week. Servers from their data center were removed and 3 employees were taken into custody. Like TorrentSpy, ThePirateBay doesn’t host any copyrighted content themselves, they just point to it. I went and checked out the site this morning, expecting to find it down, but it was up and running. Brokep, one of the people behind ThePirateBay, had claimed that the site would be back up within a couple of days after the raid, saying that there is no legal basis for the raid, and that he is certain that the case will not go to trial. I guess he was right. In fact, I’ll bet TPB staff were totally prepared for a raid, probably had lawyers on standby and and backup datacenter in a secret location!

Online at ThePirateBay.org, the search functionality was not working as of this morning, so you would have to browse to find torrents. I downloaded a torrent file because the link was still there and I was curious; however, I didn’t actually open the torrent file to see if it was working and the tracker was up…because that would be wrong. Also, I noticed every torrent file was listed as "uploaded 0 minutes ago." It’s not that I recommend stealing, but until every TV show and movie and song is available online via legal means, it’s good to have alternatives. Just thought you should know.