Smibs Inc, the Candian startup behind SmibsNet has launched the service to the public. The site offers a set of tools that resemble LinkedIn, but are supposed to be more focused on project and task management than personal connections and resumes. The public beta will also open the network’s directory up to users who are not members of Smibs, allowing them to search for members involved in specified professions (much as they would on LinkedIn).

Besides SmibsNet (which is the social networking side of the site), Smibs will be releasing applications running on its platform. Currently available is Doorbell, an app similar to Highrise that is designed to be a sales application for workers who aren’t typically involved in sales (it essentially allows smaller businesses to complete sales-oriented tasks without a dedicated staff). The service was originally annouced in June, and released a small private beta in October.

CEO Peter Urban has also given us a document that he has forwarded to a number of major VCs in an attempt to entice them to use the service (you can see it below). Judging from the responses (one VC replied “I apologize for being dense, but what is that you want?”), it is probably wise not to mimic this strategy.

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pimg alt="my6sense_logo_dec08.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/my6sense_logo_dec08.png" /Personalized recommendations have always been one of those technologies that look great on paper, but hardly ever work quite as well as advertised. This week, we got a chance to test a href="http://www.my6sense.com/"my6sense/a, which takes your feed subscriptions and then recommends interesting posts based on your own reading habits. My6sense's current focus is on providing a good mobile experience, though the company will soon also launch its service on the web as well./p pWhile it did take a bit of training before the application fully recognized our preferences and before it returned really good results, the overall results were very impressive./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12820amp;cb=12820' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12820amp;n=12820' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h2Features/h2 pSo how does it work? When you first sign up, my6sense can import your RSS feeds (from Google Reader, Netvibes, MyYahoo, or from a standard OPML file). After that, all you have to do is read your feeds through the web app and my6sense will automatically learn from your reading behavior (my6sense calls this "digital intuition"). You can also explicitly give a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' on any post./p pimg alt="my6sense_sshot.png" align="right" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/my6sense_sshot.png" /My6sense is also a very capable RSS reader in its own right, with the built-in ability to share items on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn, as well as by email. One very nice feature of the app is that it also allows you to see comments on posts from supported blogging platforms./p pCurrently, my6sense is only available as a web app, but the company expects to have a native iPhone application in the App Store by the time the service launches its public beta early next year./p h2Training/h2 pOn a mobile device, good recommendations can be quite a time saver. Having to scroll through numerous feeds can quickly become frustratingly slow. In our tests, it took a day or two of regular usage before my6sense started to come back with really good recommendations. As Kristie Wells, my6sense's VP of Marketing and Community Relations told us, the company is working on providing a better out-of-the-box experience that will learn faster, but given our positive experience, training the software off and on for a day or two is well worth it./p h2Attention/h2 pimg alt="my6sense_sshot_item.png" align="right" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/my6sense_sshot_item.png" /We also talked to the two co-founders of my6sense, Barak Hachamov and Avinoam Rubinstainem,/em earlier last month and we asked them if they were going to support any of the open attention profiles like the a href="http://www.apml.org/"APML/a, which would make it possible for users to take their attention profile and transfer it to other news readers. For now, however, the company says that it is focused on providing a good user experience for its alpha testers, though they didn't rule out support for the APML in the future./p h2Invites/h2 pOur experience with my6sense has been very positive, but you don't have to take our word for it. While the service is still in private alpha, they have provided us with 500 invites for our readers. Just a href="http://www.my6sense.com/rww"click here to claim yours/a and let us know if it worked as well for you as it did for us./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/my6sense_personalized_recommendations.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ID_kVHeyvYpxzR3EI4jmWFzwmKE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ID_kVHeyvYpxzR3EI4jmWFzwmKE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Agvohkui"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=0zNi1o8t"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=gKVtgLfD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=gKVtgLfD" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=T7VpZFYr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=T7VpZFYr" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=2wjeCgNY"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=2wjeCgNY" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=14oitEec"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=j8oxy5jO"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/IMcJw8X7qdM" height="1" width="1"/

Google Reader has just launched a major redesign to its interface, addressing many of the top concerns of users of the popular RSS reader.

In addition to simply looking way more clean and inviting, Google has introduced more collapsible navigation options, a new section for friends, additional feed bundles, and perhaps most welcoming to power users: the option to hide those intimidating unread items counts, which can quickly swell to hundreds or the dreaded “1,000+” when one spends more than a few hours away from the service.

The “hide” options are handled on a per subscription basis, creating a lot of flexibility in terms of deciding how overwhelmed you want to feel inside of Google Reader. When there are new items to see, the links will still be bold, but the number will not show.

One thing that Google has left out of the new design: an option to go back to the old one. While personally I’m a big fan of these changes, it’s somewhat dramatic and will likely draw immediate scorn from some users who don’t like it. You would think Google would’ve learned a lesson from the new iGoogle fiasco, but alas, they’ve just come out guns blazing with the new look and feel, without any prior warning or public beta test.

The Google Reader team has a full explanation of the changes available on their blog.

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New Google Reader for iPhone: Still Neat, Not Very Social
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Google Reader Gets New Features

Psolenoid, a new startup launching today in public beta, is looking to help blogs connect with each other more effectively by offering an enhanced form of the popular trackback feature found on most blogs. The service generates attractive links that appear at the bottom of a post, each with a brief summary and thumbnail to help readers determine if the linked blog is worth reading.

While similar functionality can be found using standard trackbacks and pingbacks, Psolenoid founder Ethan Gahng says that these are prone to spam and are also not supported on some popular blogs like Live Journal. Psolenoid verifies its links through a central server, so it can automatically monitor for spammy links, and is also compatible with most blog sites that don’t otherwise support trackbacks.

Creating a ‘rabbit-hole’ between blogs is simple. If you stumble across a blog with a post relevant to one on your own site, you simply enter the URL of your site into the Psolenoid form in the comments section of their post (assuming they have Psolenoid installed). Psolenoid will automatically pull in a feed of the most recent posts from your blog, from which you can choose one, along with a thumbnail and brief summary. After pairing the two posts, Psolenoid will automatically insert links at the bottom of both of them without any intervention from the owner of the blog you’ve discovered (they can delete entries later through the service’s control panel if they’d like). See the video below for a demonstration of the process.

Psolenoid offers two install options: if you’re comfortable giving the service the administrator password to your blog, it can automatically install itself in a matter of seconds. More security-conscious users can also install the blog by adding a small snippet of Javascript to their site.

The biggest obstacles Psolenoid will face will lie in getting people to use it in the first place - there is little point in using Psolenoid if you can’t find any other blogs that have it installed (it’s a classic chicken-and-the-egg problem). That said, the install process is easy enough that the service could easily go viral, especially if it pops up on a large blog that users frequently link to.

Psolenoid from psolenoid on Vimeo

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Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is set to be released as a public beta version Thursday, Microsoft has confirmed. The program, which has been under limited testing since October, will become available on the Microsoft TechNet site. Heres what you need to know before making the upgrade. pa href=http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/cEpYjEkLgV0-6IzWAWX0--62DyI/aimg src=http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/cEpYjEkLgV0-6IzWAWX0--62DyI/i border=0 ismap=true //a/pimg src=http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digg/container/technology/popular/~4/gtEEdtpR41k height=1 width=1 /br[a href=http://www.pcworld.com/article/154912/vista_sp2_six_things_you_need_to_know.html title=linklink/a] [a href=http://feeds.digg.com/~r/digg/container/technology/popular/~3/gtEEdtpR41k/Vista_SP2_Six_Things_You_Need_to_Know title=moremore/a]

pimg alt="visual_explorer_logo_dec08.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/visual_explorer_logo_dec08.png" /Today we came across a href="http://www.visual-explorer.com/"Visual Explorer/a, a new browser that wants to provide users with a better, more tightly integrated browsing experience. Similar to what a href="http://flock.com"Flock/a does with Firefox, Visual Explorer is built on top of Microsoft's a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx"Internet Explorer/a and provides users with a new user interface, as well as a number of new features. While Flock focuses on integrating lots of social media services, Visual Explorer tries to provide its users with a more extensive set of general browsing features such as live previews for tabs or an enhanced download manager./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12804amp;cb=12804' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12804amp;n=12804' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pBecause of its dependence on Internet Explorer, Visual Explorer is only available for Windows. There, however, it will run on any version of Windows, including Windows 98, ME, NT, and 2000./p h2Features/h2 pAmong Visual Explorer's more interesting a href="http://www.visual-explorer.com/feat_user.htm"features/a are its built-in themes, content filters, and its ability to use IE add-ons. Unlike the latest versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome, Visual Explorer does not feature any private browsing modes, but it does feature an interesting 'cloaking mode' which hides the browser after it has been inactive for a set amount of time./p pimg alt="visual_explorer_1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/visual_explorer_1.jpg" //p pSome of Visual Explorer's other interesting features that are not available in IE7 or the latest public beta of IE8 are its ability to a href="http://www.visual-explorer.com/feat_gen.htm"save web pages as images/a, an enhanced download manager, and easy access to RSS subscriptions (though no integration with third-party RSS readers)./p pOddly missing, however, is a bookmark bar where you can drag-and-drop your most often used bookmarks for quick and easy access. Visual Explorer also doesn't support IE8's a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/features/accelerators.aspx"Accelerators/a./p h2Just as Slow as IE8/h2 pJust as expected, when we ran Visual Explorer through the a href="http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-results.html?%7B%223d-cube%22:%5B237,239,240,242,241%5D,%223d-morph%22:%5B187,187,186,186,187%5D,%223d-raytrace%22:%5B267,271,270,269,267%5D,%22access-binary-trees%22:%5B176,176,177,178,179%5D,%22access-fannkuch%22:%5B503,499,497,495,510%5D,%22access-nbody%22:%5B260,263,262,263,261%5D,%22access-nsieve%22:%5B128,126,130,130,129%5D,%22bitops-3bit-bits-in-byte%22:%5B122,120,121,121,120%5D,%22bitops-bits-in-byte%22:%5B182,179,177,179,177%5D,%22bitops-bitwise-and%22:%5B322,315,316,311,314%5D,%22bitops-nsieve-bits%22:%5B212,210,209,205,205%5D,%22controlflow-recursive%22:%5B140,141,141,143,140%5D,%22crypto-aes%22:%5B207,212,201,209,210%5D,%22crypto-md5%22:%5B112,112,112,113,111%5D,%22crypto-sha1%22:%5B113,112,112,112,112%5D,%22date-format-tofte%22:%5B255,261,262,255,259%5D,%22date-format-xparb%22:%5B235,236,233,236,237%5D,%22math-cordic%22:%5B274,273,272,274,275%5D,%22math-partial-sums%22:%5B226,182,183,182,183%5D,%22math-spectral-norm%22:%5B154,153,153,156,155%5D,%22regexp-dna%22:%5B271,266,264,267,270%5D,%22string-base64%22:%5B929,928,924,921,925%5D,%22string-fasta%22:%5B267,267,268,270,270%5D,%22string-tagcloud%22:%5B200,205,197,202,198%5D,%22string-unpack-code%22:%5B215,218,217,214,214%5D,%22string-validate-input%22:%5B210,214,215,219,209%5D%7D"SunSpider benchmark/a, the results were identical to those for Microsoft's IE8 - and just as unimpressive, especially when compared to Google's Chrome or the latest nightly releases of Firefox 3.1. It is worth pointing out, however, that the Visual Explorer, just like IE8, feels just as fast as Google's Chrome when browsing regular web sites./p h2Can it Find its Niche?/h2 pThe browser market is obviously huge, so even getting a small piece of this pie would be a huge success for Visual Explorer. Other companies like a href="http://www.maxthon.com/"Maxthon/a and a href="http://flock.com"Flock /ahave been able to carve out a niche for themselves, and Visual Explorer might be able to do the same by giving users who need to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer more flexibility and useful features than the original product./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/visual_explorer_new_browser_on_top_of_ie.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/cytzamUwNdRfwW12sLwO5OwXYiI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/cytzamUwNdRfwW12sLwO5OwXYiI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=q49AOcY4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=eh2YNriK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=As1rc69E"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=As1rc69E" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=tyXKFTEz"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=tyXKFTEz" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=g8JOwX92"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=g8JOwX92" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=QY8AYTFJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=w4vzb6B8"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/kD7AxeSNBaA" height="1" width="1"/

SmartCause Blog: "For several years, I worked at a Linux software company. For those of you who don't know, Linux is an operating system, like Windows or Mac. But while Windows is made by people in cubicles at Microsoft and Mac is made by people in more stylish cubicles at Apple, Linux is developed by thousands of volunteers all over the world."

Posted by Dennis Sellers

Helium Foot Software has announced a public beta of Highbrow 1.0, a Mac web browser management utility.  Highbrow enables anyone to utilize each installed web browser more effectively on the Mac by eliminating the annoyances that arise from using multiple web browsers, the company says.