Google Wave, a web app which allowed for real-time communication and collaboration, is no longer being developed as of today by Google. On a blog post, Google said, “We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector (often referred to as OSC) has been long known to let you connect your Outlook contacts with social networks such as LinkedIn and MySpace. They have just added Windows Live and Facebook support. Just recently, Microsoft teamed up with Facebook to allow people with contacts on Outlook connect them to their Facebook profiles. And it works pretty well. By selecting an email, I was able to click on a contact in Outlook 2010 to connect to a social network. It the only social network available on the wizard should be “My Site” until you download some from here. On the site, you can download social network connectors, which now include Facebook and Windows Live. Then, on the wizard, all you have to do is enter your credentials and look the person up in the social network of your choice. Though I haven’t really played with it much, I did notice that the email you are trying to add has to already have a Facebook account to add them, so if the person has multiple emails, you may have to ask which one they use for their Facebook, which isn’t always the most comfortable thing to do. I know that Outlook itself is a very solid email client, and this just adds to its already socially-connected features.

David – Senior Editor

If you haven’t heard of the amazing HTPC application called Boxee, you really are missing out on a lot. It is an awesome application, that is connected to web services, but still works as expected at accessing your locally stored media. I really recommend this for HTPCs. Boxee features an “App Library” where you can pick from apps you want to use and put them on a screen of your favorite apps. The “App Library” features services such as YouTube, BREAK, Revision3, Netflix (with a subscription), FailBlog, Pandora Radio, and many more. For the most part, these all work as promised, though I have noticed that YouTube is just a blown-up Flash version and BREAK doesn’t show all the videos on the site. The Netflix app is absolutely amazing, it’s better than most of the console versions and other ports because you don’t have to add movies and shows to your Instant Queue to make them show up. You can browse through the whole Netflix Instant Play library and the quality is actually surprisingly good. Some of the other features are the ability to tune into your Facebook and Twitter feeds and see videos that people have linked. I wish that the Facebook and Twitter feeds had more functionality, but I’m sure there are some third-party apps that are capable of doing this. Another thing that I really like about Boxee is that it’s open-source and multi-platform. I have Ubuntu, WIndows 7, and Mac OS X and it works perfectly on all three.
I do feel, however, that for an application which is most likely an application that you always want to keep open on an HTPC, it is missing some functionality. I think that if they want to keep the user from switching to other applications, they should add some more things, such as: e-mail, Google Reader sync (though there is a built-in RSS reader, I like to keep all my devices in sync), ability to actually browse through Facebook and Twitter feeds without third-party plugins, and YouTube via H.264 or other native formats. Otherwise, this application mostly fulfills all my needs for HTPC use.

Click here to get Boxee.

David – Senior Editor

Firefox has for me, always been my browser choice behind Safari on a Mac or Chrome on Windows. It’s always fast and it just feels right. I have some strong feelings about the latest beta release of Firefox 4 and I would like to share them with our readers with a review. This release has a lot of changes, especially when interface comes in play.

One of the first things I noticed when I started it up, is that the tabs are on top of navigation bar, and the tools menu has been replaced with an orange button that has “Firefox” written on it. The “Firefox” button does stand out quite a bit, though it hasn’t really bothered me, I do wish Mozilla did what Google did with Chrome and put a tools button next to the navigation bar. Hopefully in the final release, it will take place of the “Feedback” button. There is a whole video explaining their reasoning for putting tabs on top, so I’m not really going to get into that. One of the new features I absolutely hate is the way Firefox groups tabs into the taskbar on Windows 7. This was a “feature” in Opera that I disabled. I’ve never really understood the purpose for this in Opera and I don’t get the purpose in Firefox. I primarily use the taskbar to switch to applications, not switch to elements within an application. Isn’t one of the main purposes of tabs to replace windows? If the tabs act like windows, then really, what’s the point of even having tabs? Imagine how obnoxious it would be  if you’re trying to switch to a specific window in Windows Explorer, and it showed you a bunch of different previews for items like Computer, Documents, etc.. I’ve seen a lot of bad feedback on the Mozilla site for this and I hope they get rid of it in the final release.

I don’t want this review to be only about interface, so now I’m going to talk about something just as important as interface: speed. I could tell this is one of the things that Mozilla really focused on when making this build of Firefox because this thing really is speedy. In a Windows 7 virtual machine on my Mac Mini, this was able to load Google faster than running Safari natively on my Snow Leopard partition. It feels a lot like Opera in terms of performance and looks. It’s a whole different experience from previous versions of Firefox. In fact, It feels a little too much like Opera. Both browsers have tabs on top, their “New Tab” buttons look very similar, the way the tools are grouped at the top of the window is the same, and tabs are grouped in the taskbar on both browsers. It’s all very suspicious.

So the final verdict:

PROS:

• very fast
• new interface is very appealing to the eye
• surprisingly stable, even at a beta release
• nice aero integration

CONS:

• Mozilla seems to have copied Opera in a lot of ways
• tab grouping in the Windows 7 taskbar can get annoying
• navigation and search bar should be unified like in Google Chrome
• orange “Firefox” stands out too much, should be integrated in the navigation bar

David – Senior Editor

David’s Google Voice Application has been updated! Featuring a new Send SMS button and, a bug fix. Download it HERE!

Since, I won’t be posting updates on the front page anymore, catch any new information in the Release Notes or at the Downloads Page.

Google Voice is a great service that I really enjoy. It offers free texting, calling, and voicemail transcripts. As much as I love it, the only way that I know of to use the service is through a web browser, which for me is very inconvenient. So, I tried searching for an application that would allow me to log into Google Voice without having to use my web browser and, what I came up with was… nothing. Apparently, not many people are actually interested in a Google Voice application, so of course, I had to make one myself.

Armed with only a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, I made the program within about 20 minutes. The program itself is written on Visual Basic .NET and was pretty simple to make. I won’t give you the source code but, I’ll give you a basic idea of how it’s done. I made a web browser in Visual Basic that does not navigate to any pages besides the Google Voice Mobile site (I used the mobile site to make it fit into a small window.) I then made the buttons link to pages on the site. I’m planning on implementing some more services into the program such as Gizmo5.

Well, this is the first build of my application and I hope you enjoy it. Download the file HERE. If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to email me at: fruitpunch36@techreevu.com

David – Senior Editor, TechReevu.com