Fuser is a tool that lets you ‘fuse’ several e-mail and social networking accounts into one; or, better put, have them all in one place. You can read, send and receive e-mail from multiple accounts directly from fuser, and organize it with folders. You can also send and receive MySpace and Facebook messages directly from your Fuser account.

Fuser supports AOL, Exchange, Gmail, Hotmail, SquirrelMail, Yahoo and Yahoo Beta, as well as MySpace and Facebook social networks. And, therein lies a flaw: it’s just not enough. I like Fuser, but any service of this type (err, that consolidates other social networking services) must support more than just two social networks. I hope the folks at Fuser will soon add support for Twitter, YouTube, Last.FM and other services because at this point, it feels like an e-mail service with some socnet features thrown in at the last moment.

If you’re asking yourself, how can one RSS feed be better than the original, and why should you care, you’re right up to a point: there’s nothing spectacular here. Still, if you’re not happy with Digg’s RSS feed having only 40 items (more news items usually pass through Digg’s front page in 24 hours), you should consider DiggFeedr.

DiggFeedr uses Digg API and Ruby on Rails to create a new RSS feed for Digg, which has 100 items, with each item containing a bit more details than the items in the original RSS feed for Digg. Furthermore, clicking the titles bypasses the Digg comments and leads you directly to the story, which - although quite easily achievable with some scripting knowledge - can be a great feature for some. Last but not least, DiggFeedr seems to retrieve items a bit earlier than the original Digg feed. Check out a screenshot (taken from my Netvibes) below.

Google has yet another free service up - Shared Stuff. It’s simple, even by Google’s standards: add a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, and click it when you find something you want to bookmark or share with others. You’ll get the option of saving this site to your personal Shared Stuff profile, email it to someone or bookmark it with some of the existing social bookmarking services, like Delicious or Digg.

A company known for innovation, Google actually walks a well trodden path here. Shared Stuff is a cute app, but Delicious it is not. Furthemore, one would expect such a service to integrate with practically every other Google service, but this is currently not the case.

Don’t get me wrong: Google Shared Stuff does what it does quite well; it won’t replace the tools I already use but it’s nice to know it’s there. Its existence is not meaningless, however; although the response from most bloggers was lukewarm, I don’t see Shared Stuff as a blunder. With Google’s huge user base, it was probably the case of “why not”, anyway.

After several periods of downtime, Digg has finally reappeared with a number of new features, which - as announced by Kevin Rose himself - should bring Digg closer to social networking sites such as MySpace.

In reality, though, the new features are nice enough, but they’re a far cry from bringing real social networking to Digg. In other words, this is no revolution, folks - it’s evolution.

First, the important news: users can now comment on other users’ profiles. This is one of those much sought features which Kevin&co had adamantly refused to add; now that it’s here, it doesn’t seem all that dangerous at all. Sure, there’ll be a little spam and perhaps some users will nag others to Digg their stories, but you can simply set the comments to ‘Friends only’ and you’ll have all the peace and quiet you need.

As far as other good stuff goes, you can now add up to 25 photos to your profile, as well as write a short biography. Your activity and favorites, as well as your friends’ activity and their favorites are now much better organized, and friends’ activity can be filtered by several criteria. There’s a lot of small details that make the whole experience of wading through your profile more enjoyable: for example, in the list of friends’ activity little icons are showing you what other friends have dugg a particular story.

All in all, new Digg features are more than welcome; however, a new MySpace or Facebook it is not. The social networking features - photos, shouts, friends’ activity - are the mere basics for any social network, and it would be far fetched to say that Digg is moving to this direction. The new features and fixes should be viewed as they are - general improvements to Digg’s usability - and anyone who thinks that Digg will somehow change for the worse because of them is wrong.

Finally, as Kev says on the official Digg blog, this is just phase 1 for the new, social Digg. These new features can be expected in the near future:

* Digg Images: A dedicated images section (with thumbnails). Still on track to launch in late October.
* Revamped Comments: No more ajax loads, new clean and lightweight design (similar to the old comment system).
* Digg Alerts: Alerts will give you the ability to create customized email alerts - when a story becomes popular, summaries of popular stories on specific topics, and when your friends recommend stories.
* Story Suggest: Dozens of servers crunch the math to provide you with real-time recommendations (stories and friends) based on what you’ve dugg in the past.

Check out some more screenshots of the new features below.

If you’re the private type, you can easily stop anyone from sending you shouts.

Several criteria are available for filtering friends’ activity

The new user profile holds all the important info in one place

Finally, a lack of a feature that has been bugging me since I’ve started with Pownce has been remedied. You can now mass accept or deny friend requests, which is very handy if you get a lot of those, or you’re simply too lazy to do them one by one, so you wait a week or two and want to do them all in one batch.

According to the official Pownce blog, several other minor bug fixes have been made - most importantly, the login on the home page now works fine. Also, YouTube videos now work in Safari, and events in the upcoming events are listed chronologically.

On a side note, Digg was also supposed to have a major overhaul today, but after a period of downtime, it turned out exactly the way it was before. I’m guessing that the update had failed, and we can probably expect the new social networking features soon.

Big Google news day, again. First, there was the announcement of Google AdSense advertising program for mobile devices. In other words, if you have a website created to be seen on a mobile device, and want to earn a buck or two out of it, you should use mobile AdSense. The program is available in US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and soon Japan.

This announcement goes pretty much hand in hand with the growing popularity of iPhone, which is turning to be quite a little platform, with tens of new applications and sites created specifically with the iPhone in mind appearing every day.

The other Google news bit is about Google Presentations (or Presently as it was once called, but I don’t see that name anywhere anymore), the last piece of the Google Offi… err, Google Docs puzzle. I’ve tried it out, and if you want to see a detailed review, I suggest you jump over to Mashable, where I wrote a comparison between Google Presentations and PowerPoint.

If you want to hear the short version, though: here it is: it’s neat, it works, and no way in hell it can replace PowerPoint for any serious work. It does have some nice options that PowerPoint lacks: easy sharing with anyone with a Gmail account + chat via Google Talk while viewing the presentation.

Check it out here, along with the other Google Docs programs.

I remember the time when having your own radio station was reserved only for radio enthusiasts who had enormous amounts of weird equipment in their garages. Nowadays, there’s a hundred ways to create one.

I’ve just been tipped about MediaMaster; and it’s another net radio/music storage service. While the premise - share your entire music collection, add music from various sources to a single playlist, and stream it from your web browser to create your own radio station - is simple, MediaMaster manages to add some novelty to the mix. After you register for the service, you can vote for your favorite station, and the best station are presented in a list with Digg-style voting.

As far as storing your music online is concerned, MediaMaster doesn’t let you copy other users’ music; you can only stream it. Thus, they should avoid getting sued by the copyright owners, and while it does give the users some sense of security, I’ve seen companies getting sued for less.

Overall, the service doesn’t go very deep: everything is kept quite simple, but that can be viewed as a positive thing. While it shows promise, I fear that it might not have the competitive advantage to fight the likes of Last.FM and other big music services. Check out the screenshots below.

Fairly recently, in a talk with an older colleague, also an IT journalist, I’ve discovered that the guy thinks that RSS is a horrible idea. It’s like letting anyone out there steal your content. His stance on portals that syndicate content from various sources in one place via RSS, was even more severe. Popurls? Netvibes? Thieves, he said.

I was outraged at his outragedness. I could not believe that anyone can have something against RSS; after all, no one is forcing anyone to have an RSS feed. Hell, no one is forcing anyone to even be online.

The same sentiment strikes me at Prince’s lawsuit against YouTube. Dude, you should be happy that people want to see your videos. It’s as simple as that.

Read a longer analysis of the whole affair over at muhammadsaleem.com.

Wow. I still remember the days when people steered clear of Wikipedia because it was inaccurate. Well, it still may not be perfectly accurate, but it blows every other encyclopedia away with sheer volume of content.

2 million articles. For quick reference, Encyclopedia Britannica boasts 120,000 articles in its online version.

But, it’s not only about the volume; you go to Wikipedia because no other encyclopedia can even think about adding insanely detailed data about the light saber from Star Wars or obscure Nintendo DS games. Wikipedia, simply put, owns every other encyclopedia out there, and I don’t see this situation changing ever again.

[via]

Remember our in-depth review of online photo editors? Well, as we’ve said at the initial announcement of a free online version of Photoshop, they might be out of business if Adobe does their job well.

And how do I know that the online Photoshop is nearing completion? Well, there’s the screenshot below, and the fact that it was shown to the crowd attending the Photoshop World event.

Again, Adobe’s John Nack is careful not to confuse the real Photoshop and the online version. Here’s a quote: “Photoshop Express isn’t meant to duplicate/replace Photoshop CS3 or Photoshop Elements. Rather, it’s a new member of the Photoshop family that’s meant to make Adobe imaging technology immediately accessible to large numbers of people.“.

As far as functionality goes, well, I definitely don’t like the fact that it doesn’t have Photoshop’s recognizable interface. Without it, it’ll probably be on par with the other free online photo editors, and it will definitely have a harder time proving it’s the best.

Two days after the replacement of Netscape’s RSVC (Read Submit Vote Comment) site with a good old 90ies style portal, Netscape reveals where their Digg clone is moving to next - propeller.com (not yet online).

Let’s just quickly go through the things that are slightly off with this entire affair:

- no Netscape branding on the new site, at least not in the name and logo
- why wait two days before announcing the new site?
- propeller.com sounds completely generic, like a domain Netscape/AOL had in stock somewhere for years (and perhaps now decided to blow the dust off it, slap some service on it, and sell it in a couple of months?)
- AOL has a history of killing off their services after a while

Based on all this, I’d say that Propeller doesn’t have too bright a future.

In an interesting interview over at Read/WriteTalk, and as noticed by the ProgrammableWeb, Twitter’s founder Biz Stone claims that Twitter API has 10 times the traffic of Twitter itself.

This doesn’t really come as a big surprise knowing how many cool Twitter-related apps exist out there, but it definitely shows the importance of having an open API. The list of companies which have gone this route and practically wiped out the competition is overwhelming: think Facebook, Google Maps, Digg, Flickr…

Twitter’s biggest competitor, Pownce, still doesn’t have an open API; they might want to hurry up or face the fate of always playing second fiddle to Twitter.