Online file sharing is undoubtedly one of the most convenient ways to get large files across to your friends and the people who need them. Email attachments have a 20MB limit (Gmail) and that’s surely not enough, unless you split the files up and send them one at a time, but what a hassle! I rely on online file sharing to share lecture notes, slideshows and photos with my friends and family. Here are some services which I use the most:

Dropbox was created by 2 MIT students back in 2007. Although they are now a three-man team. Its aim is to simplify file sharing, but it also has a lot of cool features besides the ol ‘upload-and-share’. It is still in private beta but you can get an invitation to join from getdropbox.com

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It seemed like the era of P2P might come to an end after all, in the near future. The Japanese ISPs have apparently agreed to disconnect any users that they detected to be using any P2P (peer-to-peer) program such as BitTorrent, BearShare, and Japan’s very own Winny.

They did have a go with an attack on P2P users a couple of years back, but the Japanese government told them that their plans could backfire and they could be violating the piracy law if they (the ISPs) went spying on the Internet usage of their users. With that, the plan was abandoned.

Just in case you are wondering (or for the new Internet users out there) but peer-to-peer files sharing software is a software that allows users to share files among themselves. Users that are sharing the same network will be able to download files if their peers have them and needless to say, this has created “headaches” for a lot of parties as they cannot control their product or materials from being passed around the globe, losing out on royalty and license payments.

Users are already able to find any kind of files from the Internet, even more so from the peer-to-peer file sharing network. File types from music to movies, from books to published research papers; these are all readily available to be shared on the network. For FREE!

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Not too long ago, Mozilla foundation announced the formation of the autonomous entity Mozilla Messaging to spearhead its projects in the Internet Communication Software space. The organization has trained its eyes on delivering the next major release of the e-mail client Thunderbird – version 3.0.

A quote from Ars Technica

“Our plan starts with building a great product. Firefox has shown that if you have a great product that tens of millions of people love to use daily, doors open and more opportunities become within reach. So we’ll focus on the product,” wrote Ascher in a blog entry. “We’ve started defining what Thunderbird 3 will be, because we think that there is enough consensus to make some of the first decisions on the most important changes to tackle first. Specifically, Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2.”

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Social Networks have been the buzzing web applications for a while now. There has been a significant shift in the online world towards bringing more services to the individual, and social networks have been the defining application towards this trend. At the same time, the success of online virtual worlds such as Second Life have shown that there are two worlds – one social and one virtual that will have to merge at some point down the information highway.

Avatars are virtual identities that with today’s better bandwidth and more graphics crunching capacities on machines provide a custom identity to the netizen. With the sprucing of more and more virtual services online, there is an increasing need for users to be able to take their avatars across services.

An excerpt from the Technology Review

Efforts to carry avatars from one world to another or out onto the Web are still plagued by the lack of interoperability among virtual worlds and inconsistent standards for graphics. Though more than 20 companies announced last fall their intention to develop standards for virtual worlds, those standards are yet to come. Patrick O’Shaughnessey, vice president of software development for the Electric Sheep Company, which makes content for virtual worlds and works with many different platforms, said at a panel during the conference that the interoperability forum is still “talking about how they want to talk about” standards. In the meantime, companies have gone ahead with their own efforts to connect worlds, supporting standards to whatever degree they now exist (for example, DAZ 3D supports COLLADA and FBX, two popular formats for 3-D images).

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Don’t You Just Love Google?

Well do you? I know I do. I don’t think I’ve gone a day without using Google. Because of the time period that I spent on the Internet, there are always things to be searched for; Music, movies, TV shows, books, how-to tutorials, you name it, I always end up using Google for my dose of information.

Being a student, Google is my life. 95% of my information for researches and assignments came from the Internet and of course to get to these information, Google is the perfect highway.

But for some people, sometimes googling can be a tedious work, annoying even, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I have friends who don’t use the Google much, and they do lose out on time and good (or relevant) information, time especially when there’s a dateline just turning up on the corner, and they don’t know where to start with Google returning more than 2,000,000 results.

But Google doesn’t only have to be useful to students or to get long-winded information. It can be handy for our daily tasks as well. This article will list out the more popular and useful Google search tricks, tailored to the usage of Malaysian Internet users of course (I hardly think that the “Zip Code Movie” information is relevant to us, it is more relevant to the US users).

1. The “phrase search” method

To start off, this is the more common and popular one, used to search for exact strings or phrases as entered. Just enter your search string with quotation (“”) mark. It is very useful, especially if you don’t want Google to search on separate words. It condenses and filters the results into more relevant and useful results.

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