>> MySpace doesn't want you to sign off -- ever. Gmail helps you with your honey-do-list and your cell phone might be getting a lot faster in surfing Wi-Fi. It's Tuesday December 9, I'm Natali Del Conti and it's time to get Loaded.
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>> MySpace made several announcements this week. They started by jumping on the open data portability bandwagon with MySpace ID which is basically their version of FaceBook's Friend Connect. It lets you log in to other websites with your MySpace ID and then have your activity on those sites go into your feed. They are also gonna support Google's Friend Connect which we discussed yesterday and finally they are launching a toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox for PC users only. This will let users stay logged-in as long as they're online whether they have a tab open to the site or not. They'll see a steady stream of activity from their MySpace like notifications, friend activity, status update, et cetera. Not sure this is preferable or at all good for productivity, but it's good for MySpace because it keeps to each other. If your inbox is anything like mine, you might have a plethora of e-mails coming from your Mom with to-do list: Order my vitamins, book my next flight, find me a new digital camera. Well now I can convert those e-mails into a real to-do list in Gmail. Google has added a to-do list to the Gmail homepage. It also allows you to create a task out of any e-mails, so that you have the details of that task clearly written in the e-mail. This is a lot like the way that you can drag an e-mail into your task application in Outlook. I like it. To enable it in your Gmail go to the Labs tab and select Enable next to a task. Mozilla made quite a few changes to Firefox with the 3.1 upgrade this week. The new version has better support for audio and video. A built-in service for telling websites a user's location and private browsing which allows you to surf around the web without any trace of where you've been and what you been researching. The JavaScript called TraceMonkey is also on by default now. TraceMonkey sounds a lot like spyware but it isn't. It just speeds up websites built in JavaScript. Certain ISP's in the United Kingdom had begun filtering access to Wikipedia. This came after the website was added to the internet watch foundation's black list because some of the material meets the criteria for child pornography. Needless to say there are a lot of unhappy British Wikipedia users who don't care why this happened, they just want it fix. Hopefully it will get sorted out soon. EMI is the first major music label to sign on to the next version of the popular Tapulous game. The Tapulous series is a lot like Guitar Hero for the iPhone where you use your fingers to tap to the music. The new version, it's called Tap Tap Dance and it will feature five EMI artists including Moby, Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk and the label plans to release the ten tracks included in the game as a sound track exclusively through iTunes. The creators of Tapulous are working with other major labels to launch other apps with songs from popular artists next year. The original game Tap Tap Revenge is free and scored the most game downloads this year. Sony is getting ready to launch a virtual world for the PlayStation 3. I guess they didn't get the memo that even Google couldn't make a virtual world work this year. We've known this was coming for awhile and it's supposed to launch on the next few weeks. Sony may have an advantage in that their virtual world will not exist in the browser or as a download, but in their existing gaming world. It will be called PlayStation Home and it will let characters move around, interact, shop, go to the movies, but also play mini games on the virtual world as well. What if your cell phone could surf the internet at 802.11n speeds -- it might soon. Broadcom just announced a mobile chip that can access the 802.11n Wi-Fi protocol as speeds of up to 50-megabits per second. It also integrates Bluetooth and FM radio and Broadcom claims it does all these without draining your battery, which I will believe when I see. The problem with this is that your mobile browser isn't fast enough to handle n speeds yet. So you won't exactly be zipping around the web the way you do on your PC. Then again it could enable some super fast wireless synching. Expect to see phones with this capability in late 2009. I ran out of time on yesterday's show, but I really wanted to discuss President-Elect Barack Obama's stimulus package particularly as it relates to technology. I am very encouraged to see that bridging the digital divide is on the agenda. There are just too many students who don't have equal access to information technology and it's a huge disadvantage compared to those who do. Obama plans to roll out broadband to places where it is currently unavailable citing the statistic that the U.S. is fifteenth in the world in broadband adoption. I'm hoping that this remains at the top of the agenda. If you feel the same way please write your congregational representative and tell them so. And if you have other ideas on how to solve this problem, share them with us, write in at loaded@cnet.com. Those are all your headlines for today, but I will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching. I'm Natali Del Conti with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded.
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