Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Windows Mobile, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, iPhone

If you’re not one of the 125,000 people who got a opportunity to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don’t despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the shut beta, with the caveat that you’re now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you’re a power-user, or someone who’s really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those pictures of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote’s text-recognition features.

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Filed under: Text, Social Software, web 2.0

A mind map is a graphical representation of words or ideas that are linked around a central theme. Putting down your ideas on a mind map really helps to concentrate your efforts to ensure you stay focus. But while mind maps are generally helpful, assembling one on your computer might require a map of its own.

Instead of figuring out how to put one together yourself, text2mindmap has developed a site where you can enter in your ideas in an outline format and Text2mindmap will generate a fully interactive map. You can move the segments of the map around to see how each word or idea is connected to another.

The site is in beta and configuration options are limited to font, color and sizing. What would be nice for future updates, is the ability to download your map to some sort of self contained application that will allow you to retain all the interactive aspects of the map instead of the static image download option currently available.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0, Browsers

Social web browsing plugin Yoono has emerged from private beta. The new version still wears a beta label, but it’s available to the public. Yoono is basically a utility that hangs out in the Firefox sidebar and gives you quick access to instant messenging services, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Piczo.

The public beta adds support for Firefox. It also packs a few new features:

• Filter your friends activity by network, group, or names
• Add FriendFeed and Flickr comments
• Send Twitter direct messages and replies
• Upload pictures to Facebook or poke friends
• Browse Digg video

Yoono will also be adding Google Speak and MySpace soon. There does appear to be a bug that prevents Yoono from working properly on Firefox 3 in some cases. The problem seems to show up if you’ve installed some other browser plugins. Yoono is expected to release an updated version addressing this problem within the next few days.

[via Mashable]

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Filed under: Debt, Saving, Shopping, Tax, Recession

What do you know? The check really was in the mail.

After a long wait for my economic stimulus payment, the check appeared in my mailbox yesterday, June 23.

After all the confusion about when we’d be getting the money, and in what form, I wasn’t exactly holding my breath June 20, when the paper check was due, according to the IRS website. And indeed, the day came and went and there was nothing but junk mail and catalogs in the afternoon mail.
I was prepared to wait another week or two before calling the help-line number. Not that I thought calling it would do any good.

But yesterday, I recognized the government-issue green check immediately, and tore it open carefully to check that it was indeed for the correct amount. It was indeed: An $1,800 windfall. I could hardly believe it had come through.

All manner of temptations ran through my head for how to “spend” it. (Hey, I’m a good American, raised to consume, just like the rest of you). A summer trip? New bunk-beds for the kids? Spa-week with the girls? How about just paying my rent for a month and socking the extra away?

Calm down all of you commentators. I’m just sharing my fantasies here. The truth is, the entire check will be spent doing exactly what the government doesn’t want me to do with it: It’s all gone to pay off the credit card.

OK, with maybe $100 set aside extra for me. I’m the taxpayer, after all….

Being out of debt might not make me a good American, but it sure feels freeing. Thanks, Dubya! My family salutes you.

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Filed under: Fun, Social Software, web 2.0

Do you’ve trouble finding like-minded people to follow on Twitter? Not sure how your favorite Twitter celebrities pick the people they follow? Now you can follow the same folks as your Twitter idol — it’s Merlin Mann, just admit it — by using a tool appropriately called Twannabe.

Twannabe takes your username and your idol’s username and tells you who they follow that you don’t. We think Twannabe is a useful service that doesn’t do itself any favors by framing things in terms of idols and hangers-on. If you just want to follow a bunch of people your best friend knows, it works just as well.

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