Five Tools Everyone Working Online Should Have (IMHO)

The number of people whose work is touched by the internet these days is hard to imagine. Many of us have been working full-time online for a while, but for the vast majority of people online today that’s not the case. Here at RWW we communicate with people with a wide range of experience working online every day.

We’ve noticed that many people don’t use some tools that would make their lives online much more effective and efficient. Here’s our list of some tools we’d suggest are essential. Several of these tools will deliver huge value to your workday and take less than 10 minutes to get set up. Some will be obvious to full time web workers, but some suggestions may not be. They include: a multi-service IM client, cross platform screensharing tool, a custom search engine, a startpage and a blog with contact info.

Multi-service IM

Many people only have an active account with one IM service, often AIM or Yahoo! Messenger. It’s nice to not be that person when you want to have an IM conversation. There are a number of applications that will sign you in to accounts on all the major IM platforms every time you open the app. Everything can be made easier with IM, especially phone calls where URLs can be shot back and forth with ease.

By using a cross-service IM client, you’ll never have to miss out on an IM conversation with someone else who only has an account on one service.

The first step is to take a few minutes to set up IM accounts on AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and GMail.

Then, get an IM client that will log you into all of those accounts at once. If you’re on a Mac check out Adium, on Windows try Miranda. Once you take a few minutes to get this set up, you’ll never go back.

Cross Platform Screensharing Tool

WebEx is like Kleenex (a brand name, that is) but it’s not the only option for screensharing. Older Macs have a hard time using it. It’s really clunky and people who pay for it say it’s expensive. None the less, it’s really nice to be able to let someone view your screen for a real-time demonstration.

The Mac to Mac screen sharing that iChat offers is really nice, easy and powerful. For the rest of the world though, there’s a variety of options. I’ve been using Yugma lately and it works well for Mac to Windows sharing. Many people really like Yuuguu. What are your favorite tools for this? Whenever I’m looking for a popular way to do almost anything, I start by looking at a URL like http://del.icio.us/popular/screensharing.

A Custom Search Engine

Google Custom Search Engine lets you paste in a list of URLs and create a “miniature search engine” that brings back results only from those URLs you’ve selected. I use these all day long, every day. The next time you think “Damn, Marshall sure took some time to research details on this post” - you can know now that it was really just my Custom Search Engines at work.

Here’s how you do it. Select some key news and reference sites in your field and set up a CSE for them, drop a link to it in your toolbar and use it whenever you can remember to. It’s like an all-natural brain augmentation. My best personal custom search engines are closely guarded resources but try out some of these that we’ve posted here at RWW and imagine the possibilities. Check out our Mac Rumor Blogs CSE, US Government Watchdog Organization CSE and our very useful CSE of 100 Productivity Sites. You may not work in any of these fields, but ask yourself what the key reference and news sites are in your field and throw them in a CSE. It’s super easy.

Is it a stretch to call a CSE essential? Use one for awhile and I think you’ll agree that they really can become a key part of your use of the internet. The ROI of employing this tool is higher than almost anything else on the internet, honestly. I can’t think of any knowledge worker, in any field, that wouldn’t benefit greatly from a well-constructed Custom Search Engine. You can probably make one for yourself in less than 10 minutes.

Startpage

Every place I work I set up an RSS startpage for myself and my co-workers. Consulting clients, non-profits, anybody I can get my hands on gets a startpage before I’m done with them. I usually use Netvibes just because it’s easy to share pages, the OPML handling is pretty good and the mobile version is great. The new Ginger version breaks sharing for some people, though.

I put the highest priority RSS feeds that I subscribe to on that startpage, then put a link to it on my browser toolbar. I click on that maybe once an hour and see if these top sources have anything new. It’s quick and easy, much easier than opening up a whole feed reader.

What works well on a startpage? Depending on your job, some things are more important than others to be updated on frequently. Here’s what I put on startpages:
Top blogs in your niche
Vendor blogs, press releases
search feeds
* ask.com for blogs, yahoo and/or topix for news, live.com for web if you like, Summize.com for twitter
* try searching for your org name, link to your site, top exec names, competitors names, key terms?

Blog With Your Name and Contact Info

This might seem silly, but everyone should have a blog of some sort. A dynamic web presence with biographical and contact information on it. A search engine-friendly place to let the world know what you’re interested in and how to get in touch with you. That’s not crazy, it’s a real good idea.

Blogging can take more time and energy than most people are willing to expend. How about using Tumblr or putting FriendFeed on a page with your contact info? (Like Robert Scoble does.) However you can get timely, pertinent content up on the web next to your name - you should do it. It’s a great way to demonstrate your engagement with your field and your intelligence. If done well, that’s far better than most resumes. It also provides great context for people who are just starting to interact with you.

I put my phone number on my personal blog, and I write for the 11th most linked to blog on the web. I get maybe 3 unwanted phone calls a week as a result. That means that just about anyone else should be able to put their phone number and IM on their blogs as well. It’s so convenient to be able to get a hold of people in a hurry. When an opportunity arises, do you want to be easy to reach or do you want that opportunity to be taken by someone else who is? Undoubtedly this is a calculation that’s clearer for people less subject to harassment based on gender or race, but except in complicating circumstances your personal contact info should be available online if at all possible. Bad things are unlikely to happen.

Conclusion

Those are some of the tools we find most important to use, and that we wish more people we interacted with used. The difference between working with powerful tools and working without them is huge. What would you add to or subtract from this list?

Tools photo by Flickr user geishaboy500. Thanks for using Creative Commons licenses!

Facebook Answers MySpace Data Availability With Facebook Connect

Yesterday, we brought you news of MySpace’s surprising Data Portability partnerships with Yahoo!, Twitter, and Ebay, which will allow MySpace users to port their public profiles, photos, videos and some friend data from one site to another. Facebook, not looking to be outdone, has announced plans to launch their new Facebook Connect platform, which has similar functionality to MySpace’s Data Availability.

What Is It?

Facebook says they’re “committed to enabling people to communicate and stay connected wherever they go” and looks to execute on this statement with Facebook Connect. The Facebook Connect platform will essentially be a new version of their API that was released back in May 2007. The new API will give developers the opportunity to develop tools that will allow users to port their connections, privacy settings, and networks from their Facebook account to other third party websites. Essentially, third party websites will have access to features that have only been available to third party applications on Facebook itself.

Digg looks like it will be the first launch partner for the platform.

Features of Facebook Connect

Trusted Authentication
A new implementation of a trusted authentication method for users when connecting their account to third parties. Activities that require any additional social context will need authentication from the user. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

Real Identity
Using a proprietary authentication method, users will be able to port information pertaining to their real identity to third party websites including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

Friends Access
Users will be able to take their networks of friends with them to third party sites. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites and dynamically notify users of their Facebook friends that already have accounts on their sites.

Dynamic Privacy
Facebook users privacy settings will settings will follow them to third party sites to ensure that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. All updates to privacy settings on Facebook will automatically update on third party sites.

What About Standards

Facebook is making a huge leap by following MySpace’s footsteps and opening what we commonly refer to as its “walled garden.” However, questions remain about the Facebook Connect platform. For example, there have been no announcements of whether or not Facebook will be using Data Portability standards, though it seems that won’t be the case.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted about MySpace’s Data Availability platform announcement yesterday,

We hope that all of the content at issue will be marked up with standards-based microformats, be made accessible with standards-based authentication and be freely available to any party that wishes to innovate on top of it.

Agreeing to and adhering to Data Portability standards will make the end goal of portable social networking identities and information across these sites a lot easier to achieve. We hope that someone takes the lead and begins to use accepted standards as part of these efforts.

What People Say When They Tweet

Everyone is talking about Twitter (to the consternation of many of our readers, I’m sure), but what are people talking about on Twitter? It is really just a flood of inane status updates and fragmented chat, or are people actually talking about things that matter to them via the service? We’ve talked about Twitter as a platform for serious discussion, but is anyone really using it that way? We teamed up with Summize to take a closer look about what people are talking about in the Twitosphere.

Summize looked at about 4 million Twitter status update messages (tweets) collected from the public time line over a seven day period running from April 27 - May 3. We saw approximately 200,000 active users (users that sent at least one message) during that period, of which 60% tweeted in English. Japanese was the second most popular language on Twitter with about 9% of the tweets that we gathered.

Most strikingly, we found that a whopping 5% of all Twitter (in terms of tweets) is powered by the top 100 active accounts. Those 100 users post updates 200-3000 times a day, which might even impress uber-Twitter users like Robert Scoble or Jason Calacanis.

What we saw was that the top Twitter users are not always people, but rather, they’re sources using Twitter as a feed publishing platform. For example, the most active user we saw was an account called “lejddfr,” which does “push journalism” (sending out frequent links to new stories) for French news service Le Journal du Dimanche. lejddfr has just 315 followers, is following no one, and has made over 101,000 tweets. Another example we saw is “GSSP,” which tweets links to stories on the news web site NewzOf.com. Our favorite high volume Twitter user, though is “chandraxray,” a space station that tweets its location up to 350 times per day.

To get a feel for the distribution of tweeting activity across the Twitter universe, we sorted users by the number of tweets per day and graphed that vs. the total traffic. 66% of the users only tweet once per day.

But that still doesn’t answer the question of what people are talking about. So we started analyzing tweets and came up with a list of the top five words people send. Apparently, the first thing anyone sends out on Twitter is a “test” message.

1. test
2. lol
3. working
4. 
5. sleeping

Unfortunately, while we can guess from that list that Twitter users tend to be sleepy workaholics who are generally happy, we still can’t tell much about what they’re really talking about on the service. So we next applied some fancy topic extraction and started calculating trends over our week’s worth of data.

What we found is that there are three main types of conversations going on. First, there are status updates of every day occurrences such as, “getting coffee,” “check out this post on X,” “going to sleep,” or other mundane life things. Second, there are short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during, or after it. These conversations are usually short lived — ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. For example a TV show like “Lost” will have some buzz, before, during, and for a short time after the show airs, but will drop out of the stream very quickly. We saw that happen with “LSD” when the drug’s creator Albert Hoffman died last week. The final type of discussion we see on Twitter, are long term memes. These are topics of interest that people talk about for days, weeks, or even months. Politics or new video games are great examples of these longer term discussions happening on the platform.

Below we selected a subset of the automatic trends found for the week to illustrate this phenomenon. Each column from left to right shows the days of the week. Topics on the top of each stack represent shorter lived memes, while topics lower on the chart represent items of longer term interest.

You can click on the links below to explore the memes on those days:

Sunday, April 27:
Obama,
GTA IV,
Mario Kart Wii,
Coachella,
Facebook,
NFL,
BBQ,
Ubuntu,
Spurs

Monday, April 28:
Obama,
GTA IV,
Mario Kart Wii,
Coachella,
Rev Wright,
iMacs,
Facebook,
Social Brew

Tuesday, April 29:
Obama,
GTA IV,
Iron Man,
Rev Wright,
Ben Jerry,
Celtics,
Lakers,
Deal or No Deal

Wednesday, April 30:
Obama,
GTA IV,
Iron Man,
American Idol,
LSD,
iGoogle,
Violet Hill,
Neil Diamond,
Spurs

Thursday, May 1:
Obama,
GTA IV,
Iron Man,
RSS Awareness Day,
Diggnation,
Baskin Robbins

Friday, May 2:
Obama,
GTA IV,
Iron Man,
DC Madam,
Hawks,
BSG,
Lost

Saturday, May 3:
Obama,
GTA IV,
Iron Man,
Kentucky Derby,
Free Comic Book Day,
Maker Faire,
YouTube,
Boris

Conclusion

While technology, politics, and geekery (sci-fi movies and video games) tend to dominate the long term memes, people are discussing all sorts of things on Twitter — from sports to pop culture to cooking. Could that indicate that the site it starting to have some mainstream appeal? Or maybe just that even us tech geeks occasionally find time to talk about things other than technology? Either way, the way memes flow on Twitter is an interesting topic and one that we had fun looking at.

Special thanks to Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, co-founder of Summize, a conversational search engine. Dr. Chowdhury did all of the data mining and analysis for the this post, as well collaborated on the text and created the charts.

oEmbed: An Open Format for Embedding Media

oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider’s API (or the need for screen scraping if they don’t offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a photo or video into XML or JSON that tells the user how to embed that media.

“oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly,” says the authors on the oEmbed web page.

As an example http://flickr.com/services/oembed?url=http://flickr.com/photos/bees/2362225867/ returns:

<oembed>
	<version>1.0</version>
	<type>photo</type>
	<title>Bacon Lollys</title>
	<author_name>bees</author_name>
	<author_url>http://www.flickr.com/photos/bees/</author_url>
	<cache_age>3600</cache_age>
	<provider_name>Flickr</provider_name>
	<provider_url>http://www.flickr.com/</provider_url>
	<width>500</width>
	<height>375</height>
	<url>
		http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3040/2362225867_4a87ab8baf.jpg
	</url>
</oembed>

Early adopters of the oEmbed spec are Flickr, Viddler, Pownce, Qik, and Revision3. Viddler has created a form to test the web service, so you can see it in action.

Essentially, oEmbed makes it easier to access photos and videos with a simple URL. Standardizing how things are embedded means that, for example, a social network could allow users to simply embed media from oEmbed enabled sites just by entering a URL to a photo or video — and the “customer” site wouldn’t need to deal with multiple APIs from each provider.

Roofarena: Bringing Million Dollar Homepage to Manhattan

Roofarena is basically the Million Dollar Homepage concept built as a graphical layer on top of Google Maps. The idea is that any roof in Manhattan is for sale and users can “virtually” purchase a roof and add their own design. In a post about copycat ideas last year, we advised that if you “do feel the need to borrow an idea, you should definitely make changes and try to innovate and push the concept in new directions.” Roofarena definitely does that, but we also advised that you do something to “ensure a greater chance of success” — we’re not sure that the site does that.

One problem with Roofarena is that it requires too much user interaction to view ads. Google maps isn’t built to see all of Manhattan at close range at once, so users have to scroll to see the ads, which seems like an unlikely expectation.

The bigger problem, though, is that this idea has been done to death. While each iteration, to our amazement, seems to have some moderate success — especially given the extremely low barrier for entry — they’ll never equal the success that Alex Tew enjoyed for Million Dollar Homepage in 2005. The basic idea behind these sites is that advertising is sold on the premise that the method of advertising is so unique or wacky that it will garner mainstream press attention just for being sold — and thus make the ads themselves worthwhile.

We wondered in February just how many times this can work, and the answer is probably not very often anymore. Roofarena is a fun concept, and perhaps it is an interesting social commentary on the skyrocketing cost of New York real estate (though, probably it isn’t), but the idea just doesn’t have the pull anymore to really work.

Free Webinar on Social Technology Today

You’ve probably heard people talking about the new "it" book: "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies." The book discusses the current trend of people using online social technologies like blogs, social networks, and podcasts, among other things, and how enterprise must learn to embrace these tools. Along with describing how the public’s use of these technologies impacts businesses, the book also provides tools from Forrester to teach companies how to embrace social media as part of their business strategy.

For anyone interested in social media’s impact on business, Groundswell is a great read. If you want to learn more on this subject, then you may be interested in Forrester’s free webinar on the topic today. The authors, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff  will be discussing the core ideas laid out in the book as well as "going through the frameworks and strategies needed to approach and thrive in the groundswell."

On the agenda:

• What process should companies use to create social strategies?
• What business objectives can be achieved with Web 2.0 technologies?
• How should you get started?

Going through the sign-up form, it’s obvious that this seminar is aimed at business and not just the casual user, as the questions do pertain to your industry, job role, etc., but it definitely sounded too interesting to pass up. The webinar is today at 11 ET/8 PT and you can sign up here.

Update: Watching now…interesting stuff here!

The Ultimate Twitter Revenue Model

The perennial debate surrounding Twitter’s revenue model continues to live on. The micro-blogging service has succeeded in building a strong, loyal following, but failed to capitalize on it. Such a scenario, which lacks a revenue model, isn’t sustainable over the long-term, especially when investors begin to question the company’s intentions. If an acquisition isn’t shaping up, monetization will be necessary to keep Twitter afloat. Having said that, leveraging context may prove to be a great way to drive revenues while maintaining the integrity of the platform.

This is a guest post by Aidan Henry, a social media expert and blogger. He can be found on the web at MappingTheWeb.

Leveraging Context

Essentially, this would entail Twitter parsing over the Tweets of a given user, as well as the Tweets of the users he/she is following. Common keywords, themes, and phrases are then pulled from this data and associated with that user. As a result, highly-targeted ads can be displayed based on the user’s network of content (”web design”, for example). These simple text ads would look very similar to regular Tweets, but would be clearly marked as “Sponsored Content”. Facebook employs a comparable strategy through their News Feed, although ads are based on demographic information as opposed to context. These Twitter ads would appear every 20 or so Tweets depending on the frequency chosen by the company.

Integrating ads into the content stream is a delicate process. Caution must be exercised and full notification must be provided. One wrong step may prove costly. Nonetheless, if ad integration can be accomplished in a seamless, unobtrusive manner, it can be extremely effective.

Ad System

The ads would be generated via a proprietary auction system developed by Twitter. Advertisers would bid on desired keywords and phrases, somewhat akin to Google AdWords. These specified terms, or bundles of terms, would ultimately be assigned to the highest bidder each month (as an example). The ads would run until the advertiser budget runs dry or the month ends. If the former is the case, excess inventory would be allocated to the second highest bidder. If no bidders are left, superfluous ad space can either be filled with Google ads, ads from partner networks, or house ads.

Obviously, most of the ads would be tech-centric — after all, Twitter has yet to break into the mainstream. Its user base is filled with bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts. Armed with this knowledge, advertisers can directly target tech innovators, influencers, and early adopters while Twitter is able to command premium ad dollars.

Tiered Model

This strategy paves the way for a two-tiered “freemium” model. Any users that choose not to view the ads could be charged a small, yearly fee that would create an additional revenue stream. Ad-free account could be combined with premium features and added functionality beyond the basic offering to give users more value.

The combination of highly-targeted, contextual ads and a premium subscription should suit the needs of most users. Those who don’t want to pay for the service don’t have to. Those who don’t want to view the ads don’t have to either. At the end of the day, creating a flexible revenue model that doesn’t cause a user backlash is the ultimate goal. If personalized, contextual ads appeal to the user, I have no doubt that users will not only accept this new model, but embrace it.

Google Web Security for Enterprise Puts IT in Control

Yesterday Google announced a new product aimed specifically at Google Apps’ enterprise customers. The service, powered by Google acquisition Postini with technology from ScanSafe, is called Google Web Security for Enterprise and it offers real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. Essentially, it’s a big Google firewall in the cloud.

What It Does

Google Web Security for Enterprise provides three main areas of protection: 1) web virus and spyware protection, 2) web filtering and content control, and 3) protection for roaming and remote users. Services such as these aren’t anything new to I.T. administrators, but they often come in the form of expensive software suites, hardware appliances, or, more often, a combination of both. With the Google Web Security product, the goal is to provide enterprises with the same type of security and protection that they are used to, but all under the Google brand.

Controlling Web Access for End Users

How It Compares

The advantage of using a service such as this over a hardware firewall solution for example, is that with the firewall the protections offered to remote workers would only be activated when an employee is connected to the company network via VPN. With the Google Web Security for Enterprise service, which can’t be disabled by the end user, workers would always be protected.

However, when comparing the Google offering to some other enterprise level software products, like Symantec’s Endpoint Protection suite for example, the Google product comes up short in a few areas. Although this particular Symantec product doesn’t offer web content filtering, it does provide certain fine-grained application and device controls. These are tools which let I.T. admins lock down endpoints to prevent data leakage by controlling access to specific processes, files, and folders by users and other applications as well as by controlling what peripherals can be connected to a machine.

The Google product does not address these concerns which are still very much a factor in larger organizations or those that deal with sensitive data, so I.T. administrators would still have to utilize other software suites in addition to the Web Security for Enterprise product to provide complete endpoint protection.

Web Security-as-a-Service

That being said, this new service is definitely moving Google closer to being a true competitor in the realm of enterprise security, as they already offer email security and compliance tools. Plus, the convenience of having all the services available in the cloud makes this a compelling offering if the price, yet to be announced, is right.

MetaASO: A Bootstrapped P2P Startup From India

Anyone who has followed my posts on ReadWriteWeb, knows that I am interested in how innovation is going global, particularly innovation from India, and that I think P2P is the next great disruptive technology - the only one that could derail the Google steamroller. So it is no wonder that MetaASO caught my eye — via Pluggd.in, a site that tracks Indian startups.

MetaASO is a self-funded, bootstrapped startup that claims north of $1 million in revenue. In fact, being self-funded, that means they’re very likely profitable. I commented about this with some skepticism and here is how one of the founders responded:

“Some facts:
MetaASO is the name of the Company. Mermaid is the name of the Product Suite.
We started in Oct 2002 and our Release 1 happened 1.5 years back in limited circle beta. Full public Beta Release 2 happened a few weeks back.
There are 5 founders and the engineering team is of 20 people.
We can do a belle dance in front of customers but we never say ‘Give us work.’ We just mention softly that besides giving away software for free we also develop custom P2P softwares for organizations. And that typically costs around $300-$400,000 per software we develop. We have 3 enterprise customers. This is besides the money we make from ads on our softwares.We are not proud that in the 6th year of operation we have 3 enterprise customers. We could have made a lot of money by providing services but that would make us a yet another services company. Which we are not and don’t want to be. So just enough to sustain ourselves, but our emphasis is on product development. We plan to do away with all services very soon and concentrate purely on product development.”

This is smart self-funding. I bet they learn a lot from each enterprise job as well as getting cash. This is the classic “3 custom jobs to a product, iterating and generalizing on each project” that the enterprise software business has been built on for decades.

MetaASO stumbled at the first hurdle for me, which was that you need Silverlight and that means a PC (I use a Mac). So I would be interested in any first hand experience with their product. PC is still the best shot for volume, so I don’t doubt the strategic wisdom of going that route.

The other requirements:

“Mermaid softwares can be used on the LAN e.g. at office, campus etc. with out any internet connection. To use them on the internet you require a “Globally Routable IPV6 Address” for your computer. Ask your ISP for one and it should get done within 15-20 minutes. They will do whatever is required. You don’t have to do anything.

Apart from that a powerful computer always helps. And even though Mermaid softwares will run on 256MB RAM systems 1GB is good and 2 GB is awesome.

As far as the internet connection speed goes. We recommend a minimum of 256Kbps (for all our audio/video based applications) for the rest 128Kbps would do. But nowadays its best to get a 512Kbps or 1MBps connection if you are starting your own TV Station.”

So one can see that an “enterprise first” strategy makes sense for MetaASO. I am not sure about getting “Globally Routable IPV6 Address” from your ISP. Has anybody had experience with that?

Get past those hurdles and the big message is “no servers needed.” That’s right, no supernodes, no nothing. Real Peer To Peer. Your very own TV station. Sounds like YouTube — except you don’t need a server farm costing gazillions.

This is the same idea that got me excited about Faroo. Two other similarities: both use Microsoft base technologies (no surprise, given the P2P focus), and both originate outside USA (Faroo from Germany, MetaASO from India). The latter maybe to do with the fact that funding is a bit tougher if you don’t live in the Valley, so you tend to focus on things that are big enough to warrant the years of bootstrapping.

Go to MetaASO and check it out. Listen to their welcome message on their Pickle Player (no download). Is real serverless P2P viable for search or video?

Google Says Goodbye to Hello

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped noticed today that Google announced that it will be shuttering its Hello photo sharing and chat application next week. Hello was an instant messenger-like desktop photo sharing application that made it easy to send photos to friends via an encrypted connection. The Hello.com web page has been replaced by a shut down notice and the service will cease to work on May 15th.

“We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello. We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come,” wrote the Hello team on their now defunct web site.

Hello, which was part of Google’s 2004 acquisition of Picasa, seems to have been neglected in recent years. According to Compete, Hello’s traffic has fallen by over 50% year-over-year, and Wikipedia says that Hello shut down its “Bloggerbot IM” service in favor of Picasa’s “Blog This” function in 2006.

The Hello team encourages users to use Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Talk, and it seems likely that redundancy is what killed Hello. Google Talk already has file sharing and Picasa albums are viewable within the chat client (though Google Talk doesn’t encrypt files and chats the way Hello did). Could we see tighter integration between Picasa and Google Talk now that Hello is out of the picture? And more importantly, what will Google do with such a cool domain?

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