Chat and e-mail

Skype in the Classroom, a video networking service for educators worldwide, is officially out of beta, the company said today.

The service, which has been in beta since December, allows educators to collaborate with others around the world over video. The VoIP provider said it developed the service "in response to, and in consultation with, the growing number of teachers using Skype to help their students learn."

To set Skype In the Classroom apart from the company's basic service, teachers can use the tool to find fellow educators who may be teaching on the same topic. It … Read more

Google is getting ready to present "better ads" in messages delivered via its e-mail service.

The Web giant announced today that it intends to serve up fewer but more relevant and useful ads by better predicting which topics appear to be important to each user.

One of the tools that Google plans to use to accomplish this is its Priority Inbox, a feature launched last August that is designed to help clear the clutter from users' inboxes by filtering out e-mail deemed less important, Google said in a support information page:

Little by little, Google Voice has encroached on U.S. mobile operators' turf, most recently offering to port a subscriber's carrier-assigned cell phone number for use with Google Voice's service. But now for one carrier, potential friction has given way to partnership.

Sprint and Google announced today deep integration with Google Voice that lets subscribers use their Sprint phone number as a Google Voice number to access the service's features. These include transcribed visual voice mail (manage voice messages as you would your e-mail), call forwarding (calls ring through on your cell phone, home phone, office phone, … Read more

Once again there are reports that the long-rumored free version of MobileMe will arrive in April, some three years after the paid service became generally available and months ahead of initial estimates for when Apple planned to revamp its Web suite.

In a story this morning, blog iLounge cited a person it called a trusted source at a major educational institution as saying that the institution was unable to buy MobileMe subscriptions. Additionally, the source said Apple was planning to release a revamped version of the service as soon as next month. In the interim, Apple is said to be … Read more

Xobni is offering access to the first 100 CNET users who want to try out Xobni for Gmail. Sign up here, using the code XOBNI-CNET100. Once codes run out, you can still add your name for future access.

It's been a while since we've heard from Xobni, the company best known for its Outlook organizer and later, its BlackBerry e-mail add-on. Today, it pops into focus once more, with a new product: an e-mail extension for your Gmail account.

Called Xobni for Gmail, the free, limited private beta is an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that promises to go deeper than Google to bring context to the content of your Gmail account.

With Outlook and BlackBerry, Xobni's value proposition makes perfect sense--search was lacking, and Xobni's ability to pull together names, job titles, phone numbers, Facebook photos, attachments, and conversations surrounding any e-mail address to enter your inbox offers tangible benefits.

But Gmail already offers speedy search and threaded conversations. What does Xobni bring to the table?

More of the same with its organized sidebar capable of gathering supporting contact details taken from the contact's social networking profiles like Facebook and Linked In, as well as more-detailed contact information, and interesting stats about your social network--for instance, how often you speak electronically, and other people you speak with. Clicking a number can launch a Skype call, but Xobni doesn't currently connect with Google Voice.

Business users of corporate Google Accounts will also be able to use Xobni to aggregate contact details. In fact, you can link multiple Gmail accounts if you use Google's e-mail client for personal and work-related messaging.… Read more

BlackBerry-maker RIM hasn't always seen a rosy reception of its Facebook for BlackBerry app, but the version 2.0 beta might change some minds with its much deeper integration.

Facebook for BlackBerry 2.0, which launches today in a limited beta, gets a laundry list of new additions, big and small. There's Facebook Chat, which you can access from the Facebook application or launch from within your BlackBerry contact list. You'll also get notified of new Facebook chat messages in your message list.

RIM has also created a logical new way to get to all your menu … Read more

The ideas behind Google Wave, a real-time communication technology the Net giant ditched, are making something of a comeback as a collaboration tool in Google Docs and Gmail.

Google announced discussions in Google Docs today, a new ability to automate the communications part of collaborations. Google Docs already let multiple people edit a document at the same time and to append comments to a document, but the discussions feature advances those abilities.

For one thing, comments now can be hidden once they've been addressed, not just deleted, and they can be resurrected if necessary.

For another, comments are adorned … Read more

Microsoft has taken the training wheels off of Internet Explorer 9, debuting a full-featured browser that has proven to be the fastest, most standards-compliant IE version yet. There's a catch, though: IE 9's not for Windows XP. You'll need Windows 7 or Vista if you want this browser.

And if you're a Microsoft Outlook user prone to rash e-mailing, you might want to check out ToneCheck from Lymbix. This e-mail sentiment analysis app monitors your e-mail's composing window for potential errors of tone, just as spell-check scans for errors of spelling or grammar.

Finally, for … Read more

In Gmail, I love labels. I set up filters to apply labels to incoming e-mail so it's automatically deleted, archived, sorted as travel-related, flagged as important in various ways, or organized by senders I care about.

Evidently I'm one of those early-adopter nerds, though, because Google is taking steps today to get Gmail labels to appeal to a broader set of people.

To do that, it's got a Gmail Labs feature called smart labels. Essentially, smart labels do some of the sifting for you automatically, for example categorizing messages as bulk e-mail or mailing-list postings and filing … Read more