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beta

Posted By: Sarah Perez | Jun 3rd @ 4:37 AM
A post on Nick MacKechnie's blog reminds us that the public beta of IE8 is just around the corner - third quarter of 2008 to be exact. When this happens, there will be tons of new users trying out the browser for the first time. Thanks to popular demand, IE8 switches on the standards-compliant mode by default, which means sites that have been coded to work with previous versions of IE may display differently. For website owners that means you'll need to make sure your site is ready. To help you prepare, you can access the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit online, which is a great resource for both web designers and developers. The site offers up information about the new features, the release notes, resources and links, and, most importantly, a great big list of testing tools you can use to make sure your site works with the new IE browser.
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Posted By: Sarah Perez | May 12th @ 1:54 PM

Last week, the startup Xobni launched their public beta, so now everyone can get their hands on the Outlook plugin that turns your inbox into a social network. Xobni (that's "inbox" backwards!), taps into the hidden social network you spend time with every day: your inbox. The plugin runs in a sidebar where it analyzes and extracts info about you and your relationships.

During their private beta, they tweaked several things, fixed bugs, and even decided to streamline the plugin a bit by removing the "organize" tab, instead choosing to focus on their core product's offerings - super-fast search and relationship management. Using Xobni, you have access to features like threaded conversations, analytics, user profiles, a "related people" feature, shared attachments, and other automatically extracted info - like phone numbers for your contacts. To get in on the Xobni public beta, just visit the Xobni homepage and sign up.

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