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At Tuesday's Macworld keynote speech, Apple announced a handful of upgrades to existing software. Of the changes, one of the biggest is the budding online integration found inside two of its software suites: iLife and iWork. The "2009" versions of both of these software packages show a more balanced approach by Apple in integrating third-party services alongside pushing users toward its own online efforts.

In the case of iWork, is a tight integration with a brand new online component called iWork.com. The site, which launches later this month in conjunction with the software release, lets users upload files for sharing with others--up to 1GB. When using any of the three applications included in the iWork suite users are able to export whatever they're working on right from a link on the top of the screen. Once the item has been uploaded it can be shared with other users who can download it in whatever file formats you specify, or leave little sticky-note comments.

Apple's 'collaborative' element of iWork revolves around storing the files in an online share called iWork.com. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Apple Inc.)

This is far from online word processing solutions offered by Google, Zoho, Thinkfree, and others, but continues in the direction of 2007's photo galleries and Web e-mail applications that were offered as a part of Apple's MobileMe service. Notably missing from this new online service is a way to actually edit the document right in your browser, and instead requires downloading a local copy then re-uploading.

Additionally iLife's iWeb application has been updated with both Facebook and FTP integration. Now, whenever you make changes to your site you can have it send out a notification to your Facebook news feed, letting your friends see that you've made an update. And with the FTP integration there's no more messing about with third-party FTP applications to update changes you've made to an iWeb-created page. You can now simply plug-in your server information and have it sync up.

This is going to solve a lot of headaches for people who wanted to use the WYSIWYG site creation software without ponying up to pay Apple to host it for them.

Another big change is in iPhoto, which now offers built-in export support for both Facebook and Flickr--two of the most popular photo-sharing sites on the Web. Exporting to both of these services was previously possible with third-party plug-ins, however Apple's new solution works right out of the box. Any changes you make to uploaded photos within the software will be automatically sent back to these places. This means that you can replace a previously uploaded photo without manually having to visit the site and re-upload.

Users can now export photos to both Facebook and Flickr right out of the box in the new iPhoto.

(Credit: Apple)

Still missing from both of these suites is a true online companion. While iWork.com offers a free (for now) way to share big files outside of e-mail, and without the need for a subscription to Apple's MobileMe service, you still have to do all the work on your computer--and your computer only. With the Facebook and Flickr integration you can't pull down photos you've previously uploaded for editing on the software's new editing tools. I'm also sad to see that despite the promising integration with Google Maps in iWeb last year, there's still not a way to import and export from Google Docs and Spreadsheets in Pages and Numbers respectively.

Maybe next year.

Click here for more Macworld Expo coverage from CNET News.

SAN FRANCISCO-- At the MacWorld ShowStoppers event Monday night, I got a quick look at Newber, an iPhone app from Freedom Voice Systems that lets you redirect calls made to a new number you give out ("newber," get it?) to alternate numbers depending on your location. If you're in the office at your desk, the app can send calls to your work phone. At home? It rings the house phone. Neither? The call will ring on your iPhone. (See also: Grand Central.) The app uses GPS to suggest call routing, but ultimately you make the routing decision. Sounds like a cool idea, but if you want to try it, you can't.

Although Freedom Voice submitted Newber to Apple for approval to sell it in the iTunes store in October, Apple has not approved the app for distribution. It hasn't denied it, either. In fact, Apple will not tell Freedom Voice anything about the disposition of their review except that it's "taking longer than expected" to review the app. Freedom Voice marketing strategist Nick Goudy told me he gets e-mails to that effect about every two weeks. He talks to Apple once a day. He says he uses different phone numbers to prevent them from screening his calls.

When Steve Jobs announced the app store in October of 2008, he said all apps would be approved (or denied) within three weeks.

What's most infuriating, Goudy told me, is that activity logs for the Newber platform indicate that Apple has not yet started or tested the app at all.

iCall, which makes a VOIP app similar in many ways to the approved TruPhone product, is in a similar spot. This app allows users to make VOIP calls from WiFi-equipped iPhones and iPod Touches. CEO Arlo Gilbert told me that his company communicated carefully with Apple regarding not just approved use of the iPhone SDK and communications channels, but also got marketing advice from Apple on how to sell the app. Yet, once the app was submitted for approval (in early October), Apple clammed up, and won't tell the company whether the app is going to be approved or not. E-mail queries are not responded to and phonecalls get "ticket numbers" but no resolution.

Gilbert can understand why iPhone network provider AT&T might not like the app, and that's why, he says, he was sure to talk to Apple during development of the product. iCall allows incoming calls to iCall numbers to route around the AT&T cellular network and run over WiFi and VOIP. As Gilbert knows from his experience running a telco, incoming mobile calls are very lucrative for carriers.

Unlike Newber, iCall has been tested by Apple, Gilbert says his logs show. He just wishes he could get an answer -- either yay or nay -- from Apple.

Newber and iCall want your support.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CBS Interactive)

Both Freedom Voice and iCall say they've invested about $500,000 each in developing their apps, and are wondering what to do next. The companies together have started a petition, titled, "Support developers with faster app store response and approval," and the companies are working on alternate versions of their products. Newber is beta testing a Blackberry version and has an Android app in development. iCall has various PC- and Web-based VOIP apps.

Certainly, it would be more fair for Apple to simply say No to Newber and iCall then to leave these products in limbo. I expect the reaility is that Apple/AT&T politics are behind the confusion. Either that, or Apple is developing its own suite of enhanced telephony services, and, as was the case with the over-the-air podcast downloader Podcaster which offered a service that Apple later released in iTunes, it doesn't want competitive products in its store in advance of the release of its own updates.

Previously:
Apple to Podcaster: No App Store for you
Google admits breaking App Store rules
Apple kills iPhone app, claiming API violation

With the overall economy slumping, the tech industry is taking its fair share of hits. We'll keep updating the chart below as news of company changes comes in. See our complete coverage of how the tech sector is faring here: Tracking the tech downturn.

Know of a layoff not listed here? Let us know on this form or e-mail us.

See also: The spreadsheet of sunshine: Who's hiring.

On Tuesday TechSmith released Jing Pro, a paid premium version of its free screen capture and casting software. The new service, which runs $14.95 a year upgrades videos to H.264 encoding, takes off the Jing watermark in the bottom corner of recorded clips, and gives users the option to upload directly to several popular video hosting sites including Facebook, YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo.

Of the news, one of the biggest changes is the move to the MPEG-4 AVC video format. It's the go-to format for iPods and iPhones, as well as set top boxes like the Apple TV and TiVo. Likewise, it's been adopted by YouTube, which makes a separate encode for each file for both Flash players and hardware that runs H.264 clips. This means that going forward your screencast may end up being able to be watched on a wider range of devices.

On the export front I'm a little surprised TechSmith is offering such a simple way to offload captured videos to third party hosting sites. It's really nice, but will no doubt cut into potential revenue from people who might have paid the extra cash for the company's video hosting sister product Screencast.com. This service has a higher cap on its file size (2GB up from most service's 1GB max), but limits how many people can watch your content to 2GB of streaming video.

In addition to the launch of Jing Pro, TechSmith put up a new support site called the Jing Help Center which has a handful of how-to videos and support document. This is available to both free and pro users.

Download Jing (via CNET's Download.com)

(Credit: Topherchris.com)

Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote. Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health and general inanity (i.e. "SEX ME") before finally succumbing to "technical difficulties."

It remains uncertain whether the pranksters actually brought down the site, or whether MacRumors voluntarily took it down to keep things under control.

It's pretty clear, however, that this was the work of 4Chan, which has gained both respect and notoriety (depending on who you ask) over the past year for its persistent protests against the controversial Scientology sect in the form of an offshoot group called "Anonymous."

Over on 4Chan's labyrinthine forums, a couple of threads (warning: contains explicit language) hint at members' collusion to take down MacRumors Live, and the hacked live blog was peppered with declarations of "4CHAN FTW" (that's "for the win," for those who stepped in late).

This year's Macworld Expo has gained particular attention because Apple has announced that it's the last in which it will have a presence. Additionally, iconic CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of the keynote presentation. Marketing executive Phil Schiller took his place.

The 4Chan skulduggery appears to have first been noticed by Twitter users and independent blogs like Topherchris.com, which took the screenshot above.

One Twitter user pointed to rumors on social-news site Digg that 4Chan members had been circulating MacRumors passwords on Monday night.

It's a silly prank, yes. But it could have a big impact on MacRumors: this is likely the site's biggest day of the year, and the event could have an impact on both ad revenues and server costs.

This post was updated at 10:39 a.m. PT.

Social-media pioneer LiveJournal is the latest company to announce a round of layoffs, trimming down its employee head count in its San Francisco and Moscow offices.

A statement from the company came after a rumor on gossip blog Gawker suggested that a shocking number of LiveJournal employees--20 out of 28--had been cut. LiveJournal clarified that it was "about a dozen" cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

"LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration, and the customer service teams will remain in the United States," the release explained. "LiveJournal's global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the U.S. and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal."

Yahoo veteran Matthew Berardo, who was hired as general manager of the service less than a year ago, was affected by the layoff.

LiveJournal was founded nearly a decade ago by OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who sold the company to blog software firm Six Apart. But that led to widespread reports of management difficulties, and late in 2007, Six Apart resold LiveJournal, phenomenally popular in Russia, to the Moscow-based software company SUP.

Charles Schwab improved its online trading platform Tuesday with the introduction of new features for its site, StreetSmart.com. According to the investment firm, clients will now have real-time performance reporting for closed positions, new short-selling tools, and more order types. The app will also feature new tabs for realized gain and loss data and information on shorting securities. The updates are available now on the Schwab service.

Privus Mobile, a company that provides mobile calling services, announced Tuesday that its Caller ID app is now available through Handmark stores, as well as mobile stores that offer apps for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Palm devices. Privus Mobile's Caller ID feature gives users a cross-carrier option to find out who is calling, regardless of whether their name is included in the user's contacts. The app is available now without cost, thanks to a free trial period.

Move Networks, the company behind online video streaming for Fox, ABC, and a variety of cable networks, said it streamed 180 million hours of video last year. A hundred million hours of that coverage was in HD. The company estimates that it provided video for 55 million unique viewers during 2008 and it expects even more viewership during 2009 as more professional content makes its way to the Web.

TechCrunch is reporting that Clearspring, a widget distribution firm, has laid off several of its staff, though the company's CEO, Homan Radfar, would not say exactly how many employees were affected. Radfar told TechCrunch that the layoffs occurred during the "fourth quarter of 2008." For more layoff information, see CNET's Layoff Scorecard.

RipCode, a provider of Web and mobile video streaming services, announced Tuesday that it raised $12.5 million in funding to help it gain worldwide traction. The round was led by Granite Ventures, along with Hunt Ventures and Vesbridge Partners.

Skype 2.8 for Mac will ship on Tuesday, with new features including screen sharing and an integrated Wi-Fi hot spot connector.

Available only for Mac OS X at first, the new version will add screen-sharing capabilities to the app's voice, video, and chat communications features. Skype spokespeople told me that users will be able to run all four channels at once with acceptable performance.

Screen sharing is useful in business settings (I get a lot of demos over apps like Webex, for example), but it has personal applications as well: People could share photographs, and presumably videos as well, using the feature.

Skype is also getting a feature that will allow users to access WiFi hotspots on the Boingo network for 19 cents a minute. The funds will be deducted from users' Skype accounts. Boingo has about 85,000 hot spots worldwide, a Boingo rep told me. TMobile, the primary Wi-Fi provider at U.S. airports, is on the Boingo network.

The Wi-Fi access feature makes Skype a more useful product for people who use the VoIP app from their Mac laptops, and the per-minute payment scheme makes sense for highly mobile users for whom buying access by the hour or month would leave a lot of unused credits behind.

Skype co-founder Nicklas Zennstrom also started a Wi-Fi network called Fon, but Skype 2.8 doesn't yet integrate with that system.

Disruptive Telephony covered other new features in Skype 2.8, including a new way to update your Skype "mood" and to follow users in a Twitter-like fashion, bigger Avatar images, and a new way to manage and prioritize chat windows.

Also, regarding Boingo: That company announced a new Apple product: A connector app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For $7.95 a month, users of those devices can access the entire Boingo Wi-Fi network. For U.S.-based iPhone users on the AT&T network, this is not such a great product since AT&T-provided Wi-Fi is now free for them, but international users and travelers, and iPod Touch users (perhaps those who use TruPhone for VOIP calls) may find it a good deal.

I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.

But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more time on multiple services isn't nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services, right?

Social bookmarking keeper: Delicious

Social bookmarking services are extremely handy when you want to remember a site at a later time, but that doesn't mean they're all created equal. In fact, Delicious, the leader in the space, easily sets itself apart from competitors like Ma.gnolia, Diigo, and ZigTag by boasting a better interface, more users, and better tagging, which makes it easier to find and share bookmarks.

Although Diigo's highlighting options are useful, ZigTag's semantic technology tries to improve bookmarking, and Ma.gnolia aims at providing a more thorough solution, none compare to Delicious. Yahoo's social-bookmarking service now features a streamlined search function, which makes finding bookmarks simple, and its new design makes it the most intuitive social-bookmarking service on the Web. But Delicious' most useful offering--its Firefox add-on--has nothing to do with the site at all. By installing the Delicious add-on, users can tag pages on-the-fly without being forced to visit the Delicious homepage. Granted, its competitors have Firefox add-ons as well, but after using each, it quickly becomes clear that they simply don't work as well as the Delicious tool.

Taking all that into account, I simply don't know why it's worth using another service besides Delicious. It's a superior tool with more convenient options, offering the same basic functionality as its competitors. It's the cream of the social-bookmarking crop.

Micro-blogging keeper: Twitter

I'll be the first to admit that I complain about Twitter as much as the next person, but after using competing services like Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Plurk, it's not hard to figure out that it's the only worthwhile micro-blogging tool.

Granted, Twitter still doesn't offer groups and I wish it had an element of open source like Identi.ca, but the sheer number of users who comment each day on Twitter makes it the best choice for your social-networking portfolio. If you want to be a part of a community that's both lively and engaging, you won't find it anywhere else but on Twitter. And now that it's more reliable and the Fail Whale is an occasional annoyance instead of a daily occurrence, Twitter has become an even more compelling service.

As the best place to find friends, colleagues, and thought-leaders in any industry, Twitter is the obvious choice as the only micro-blogging service that should be found in your social network portfolio.

News Aggregation keeper: Reddit

Trying to find the ideal news aggregator on the Web can be difficult. Depending on your definition, there's conceivably hundreds of services that package the best stories into one page. But it's the "social" news aggregation services, like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon that lead the pack. And although Digg is the most popular service in that grouping, I'm a firm believer that Reddit deserves to stay in your portfolio as your chosen news aggregation service.

Normally, I would pick the social site that offers the largest and most engaged community. But when it comes to news aggregation sites, Digg simply doesn't cut it. Sure, it's the biggest and arguably the most important to content sites, but that alone doesn't make it the best. Instead, I find Reddit's site design, while simple and ugly to some, incredibly useful and designed to help users find the best stories as quickly as possible without gaudy extras. But the most important differentiating factor working to Reddit's advantage is its community. It might be smaller than Digg's, but generally, the comments on each story are more edifying and lack the invective that has become a staple for Kevin Rose's brainchild.

Reddit may not be the biggest, its site design may be odd, and its community not as rabid, but in terms of providing interesting stories on a slew of topics without as much "gaming," it leads the pack and deserves to be in your social network portfolio.

Social Network keeper: Facebook

Choosing the single social network to use while ditching the rest isn't easy, since most of us have friends scattered across Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace. But it's because of those few friends still clinging to the past that we hold on to all those social networks. Enough is enough. It's time to rebuff the rest and stick to Facebook.

Why choose Facebook when MySpace is still the world's most popular social network? It's simple: Facebook doesn't have the awful design found on MySpace profile pages, offers a huge, engaged community, and most importantly, it's growing at a rapid rate, which means all those friends who still hang out at Friendster, LiveJournal, or even MySpace are starting to make their way to Facebook.

MySpace still provides value and Hi5 could be a significant competitor in just a few short years, but for now, Facebook, with its addicting features, applications, and growing community, should find its way to your portfolio as you leave the others out.

Video site keeper: YouTube

Maybe YouTube is the safe choice for the only social video site you should keep in your network portfolio, but I simply don't see how anyone can choose anything else. Vimeo is nice, but much of its content is barely watchable and while Metacafe is still an interesting site worth visiting, it doesn't provide the professional content that YouTube does.

And it's that professional content that I find most valuable when it comes to YouTube. Sometimes, I want to find a music video that isn't available elsewhere and YouTube will have it. And when I'm feeling nostalgic and I want to watch an old clip from The Wonder Years, it's sitting on YouTube waiting for me. As a bonus, some of the user-generated content is pretty good too, though most of it is strange.

I know that anyone can make a case for why practically any user-generated video site on the Web should be the exclusive service in your portfolio, but when it comes to finding the obscure, professional, or just plain weird, YouTube is the only place to go. All the others are practically useless.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez wasn't really high on crack this morning, and the reason his Twitter feed said so wasn't the phishing scam that's been going around--it was a lone hacker, the microblogging service said later on Monday.

"The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend," a post on the Twitter blog explained. "These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the e-mail address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck. We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."

The same hacker was responsible for compromising a number of Twitter's most popular accounts, including those belonging to pop singer Britney Spears, media outlet Fox News, and President-elect Barack Obama.

Twitter has said, meanwhile, that the phishing scam--which used messages from Twitter friends to trick users into entering their user names and passwords into a bogus log-in screen--is under control. "Our on-call team was able to attend to the matter quickly and prevent too many people from being affected," Twitter's blog post read. "Our support team is definitely going to have a busy week because we reset a bunch of passwords just to be on the safe side."