Linked-in

LinkedIn is a business-oriented networking site mainly used for professional networking. It had 16 million registered users over 150 industries in Nov 2007.

The main purpose is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know & trust in business. A contact network is built up consisting of their direct connections, each of their connections' connections (2nd degree connections) and 3rd degree connections. It can then be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities.

Gizmo

Gizmo project uses the Internet connection to make free calls to anyone with a Gizmo account, just like the Skype does. Furthermore, it allows to call other voice networks for free with the one client: Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live, Google Talk and of course Gizmo project. It is also possible to chat with AIM & MSN buddies directly from Gizmo project.

With inexpensive Call-Out feature, user can call any normal phone (mobile or landline) at some 2 cents per min. With its Call-in option, at about $3 per month, user gets a phone number in over 50 US/UK cities that goes (roams) with him and lets people call him at local rates. Other features like file exchange, chat history, voicemail with customisable messages, Instant messaging (IM), conference calling and call recording are pretty useful too.

Except the chargeable Call-In add-on, the free Access Numbers (unfortunately they're all US/CA numbers) enable the user to receive call to his Gizmo account from the traditional phone system.

Unlike Skype, it always assigns a SIP number (looks like 1-747-XXX-XXXX) with your Gizmo identifier so you can make calls to and receive calls from over 100 VoIP networks all over the world, for free.

GizmoProject introduced 4.0 beta with video calling and a new look in Dec. Except free video calls, it allows Meta-IM to chat with AIM, Yahoo, Windows Live, GTalk, iChat and more. Chat logging and tabbing are also of interesting features.

Gizmo project is also available on Nokia & Treo handheld, called GizmoVoIP. It saves money making Internet calls with the WiFi phone. The GizmoVoIP plug-in is tested with N80, N96, E61i & E65. A special version for N800 is available.

Gizmo5 beta is recently released to generic mobile phone users. Note that calls are charged differently than with Gizmo project (it charges for the two legs of the call). For example, USD 3.8 cents per min. for calling China from Singapore, as compared to USD 1.8 cents with Gizmo project.

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking website that was launched in Feb 2004. The name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that some colleges & schools give to incoming students, faculty and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus. Initially the membership was restricted to college students but has been extended to anyone since Sept 2006. User can select to join one or more networks e.g. high school, place of employment or geographic region. It reached 55 million active members worldwide and 7th traffic ranking in Nov 2007. It is the number one site for photos in the US, ahead of public sites such as Flickr.

User with a valid email address can register a facebook account, for free. He may then join various networks (sometimes requiring to verify an email belonging to the network e.g. institution's email, or referrals from that network) and create his profile & photo album etc. I have registered an account using my gmail address and started to upload some of my personal photos, and accordingly invite all my friends here to login & be my facebook 'friends'. Let's keep in touch via facebook and have fun!

Flickr

Flickr is a photo sharing web service. In addition to being a popular web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by blogger as a photo repository. It is now part of Yahoo! and available in eight language flavors.

Flickr allows photo submitters to organize images using tags, which enables finding images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. It also allows to organize photos into sets, which represents a form of categorical metadata. Sets may be grouped into collections. Flickr provides both private and public image storage. Private images are visible by the uploader and optionally by friends and/or family. Many allow their photos to be viewed by anyone, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos.

I created a Flickr account and started to upload my recent tour photos. Welcome to browse my photo gallery.

WidSets

WidSets uses multi-applications called widgets to push updates of pre-selected web service directly to your phone. User can find news & information, stay in touch with email & blogs, play games, share pictures and more. He can keep his favorite web content with him in his phone memory and read news update, blogs or mails at his convenience, e.g. offline.

There are currently over 2700 widgets in the library to choose from, such as the BBC News, AccuWeather, eBay or Wikipedia. User can also easily create his own widgets in a few min. which works with the web feed.

A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an Internet aggregator. In the typical scenario of using web feeds, a content provider publishes a feed link on their site which end users can register with an aggregator program (also called a feed reader or a news reader) running on their own machines; doing this is usually as simple as dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator. When instructed, the aggregator asks all the servers in its feed list if they have new content; if so, the aggregator either makes a note of the new content or downloads it. Aggregators can be scheduled to check for new content periodically.