You can share links, photos and videos directly from within Gmail and it uses your existing set of Gmail contacts. You can see what your friends are sharing and Buzz also recommends items based on your activity.

As comment updates occur, they appear in your Inbox, and you can reply to keep the conversation going. I can see this becoming problematic for those people with large networks, and I’m sure that the Gmail team will probably (have to) come up with a Gmail Labs feature to separate Buzz content from regular e-mail.

Buzz for mobile adds another dimension in that it can pinpoint where you were when you shared or commented.

Google obviously recognizes that they are hardly first to the social scene and have already included hooks for updating/posting to Twitter, YouTube, Picasa and Flickr.

Notably missing from that list is Facebook. There is absolutely no Facbook integration and to most observers that spells direct competition. Google will obviously have an uphill battle ahead of it, although it has a decent start with its 150 million users. However, if the rumor of an @facebook.com e-mail service came to fruition, Google could be in a lot of trouble, and Buzz will probably not succeed in prying users away from Facebook. Google should probably just play nice and implement Facebook integration.

For now, we say use both Facebook and Buzz. As someone that shares on various networks, I’ve just accepted that there will never be just one, which is why I use FriendFeed to aggregate my various streams.

You can take a look at the list on their site, or pull down the full PDF.

Now, this is not the same as your e-mail address, but something you need to sign into which works well because you don’t necessarily need to check your snail mail every single day, nor would I want all that advertising coming straight to my e-mail inbox.

The best part is that it’s free. In case you’re wondering what the catch is, they probably are able to resell their service to marketers and advertisers, so yeah, your virtual mailbox may end up being clogged with virtual spam, but hey, better than my actual mailbox.

Hit Zumbox.com to sign up and claim your mailing address.

So what’s the point of it? Let me paint you a picture: I’ve got desktop and laptop computers that I run Firefox on, and it’s a pain to have to re-implement, transfer and/or update settings, tabs, history, bookmarks, etc. whenever any of those changes on 1 or the other. Weave now takes care of that for me automatically.

All it takes is that you download the Firefox extension and once you restart FF, Weave will prompt you to sign in or create a Weave account. You can then sync your settings: bookmarks, preferences, history, tabs and passwords. You can opt out of sync’ing any of those.

Once you install Weave on another computer and sync up, you’ll notice that your bookmarks update automatically. However, your opened tabs don’t change automatically, which when you think about it is the best behavior. Instead, Firefox’s History menu will now have some new Weave options at the bottom that show you opened tabs on other systems. You can open any or all of these tabs.

Just one caveat. Weave obviously uses the ‘cloud’ to store your settings so that your other computers can get to and download them. It’s well protected and of course, you should choose strong passwords and passphrases.

However, if you’re not 100% comfortable with this paradigm, then you may want to opt out of sync’ing your browser passwords. As an aside, you may not ever want to store certain very sensitive passwords (such as for your bank or brokerage) in your browser.

About the only feature that I’d like to see incorporated into Weave is syncing of extensions. That can be problematic across different OSes, but I’m sure there can be a solution for identical operating systems.

So far, I’m quite happy with Weave’s synchronization and am looking forward to new services to roll out under the Weave umbrella.

You can get started here.

If you’d like one, hurry because they only made 3, and at the bargain price of under £200k, they’ll go fast!

Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: £199,995
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

I think after day one, I’d probably give up and just let the alarm continue!

Buy now!

Price: $16.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

I happen to use most of these and recommend them as well. At a minimum, you should be using antivirus, a firewall and backups.

1. Encryption. TrueCrypt [truecrypt.org] is a trustworthy encryption program that can protect your data against unauthorized access. 
2. Backup. Cobian Backup [cobiansoft.com] is reliable backup software that can protect your data against loss. One alternative is Mozy free edition [mozy.com], which is an online backup software with 2 Gbytes space, and there are many others as well.
3. Antivirus. AVG free edition [avg.com] provides protection against viruses, spyware and other malware.
4. Firewall. The built-in Windows firewall protects your laptop against hackers while you’re online. Ensure you configured it properly. By default, don’t allow anything in.
5. Alarm. LAlarm [lalarm.com] can help prevent your laptop from theft and is like a car alarm for your laptop. Also it can recover and destroy data in case of laptop theft and more.
6. Tracking. The Prey Project’s [preyproject.com] laptop tracking software can locate your laptop if it is stolen.
7. File shredder. Eraser [@ SourceForge] is a data sanitizing program that can permanently delete sensitive data such as files, passwords, Internet browse history, and more from your computer.

This also includes a built-in HDTV tuner so you can record from your TV/cable/satellite as well. It can also read and convert DV/Digital8 camcorder videocassettes. Includes an HDMI output.

A bit pricier than the other hardware/software options, but you may prefer the easier learning curve.

Buy now!
Price: $349.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

And now, the Pro can record video on the fly from your cable/satellite TV, your camcorder or from DVDs, instead of acting just as a repository. The Ultio Pro is a virtual Swiss Army knife of video, image and audio formats including: mp4, avi, iso, asf, wmv, flv, mkv, rm, ts, mpg, vob, mp3, wma, aac, ogg, flac, jpg, bmp and gif. To see the full list, download the Formats PDF from MvixUSA.

And of course, the Ultio Pro plays back media from your network and the Internet, including from your computer and from services liks Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and more.

Buy now!
Price: $169 without hard drive; $384 with 2TB drive. (You can buy the barebones version and insert whatever sized drive you’d like.)
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

You can also get FLO TV on select phones as well as in your car. The monthly rate is $14.99 and you get over 15 channels.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this takes off, given the limited # of channels and monthly fee. I’d much rather have a placeshifter like a Slingbox.

Buy now!

More info from the manufacturer
Price: $249.99 plus monthly service fee
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)