No matter what your opinion is on MySpace, the announcement of the MySpace Music store and service is big news.

Perhaps the real question should be, “Why so long?” After all MySpace was the place to be  for Death metal bands and sincere singer/songwriters for the last 5 years. In fact it still is the place to be, however the quality of the MySpace music services has been really lagging when compared to other services.

The last year seems to have been spent with MySpace fixing up many of the issues which turned people off the service and onto Facebook. A more consistent, redesigned website, applications, MySpace IM, auto-playback of profile songs turned off by default and other annoyances.

Growth has still been flat now for the last 6 months and MySpace is the initiative News Corp hopes will bring MySpace back into the spotlight and boost revenues.

MySpace Music is a joint venture between MySpace, Amazon and the three major music labels; Sony, Universal and Warner Music. Essentially music will be offered for unlimited free streaming and will the service will introduce new social features for music sharing such as features borrowed from Muxtape (shut down by the RIAA) and playlist creation and sharing.

For song downloads music can be bought through Amazon’s music service which provides DRM free music downloads, although only to America at the moment, I don’t know if this will change with the launch.

The service will be very prominently sponsored by huge companies such as Toyota, McDonalds and State Farm.

Whatever your opinion of MySpace is (and my own isn’t that favourable) this launch is very significant. It goes a long way towards providing users with music discovery and streaming tools, it gives greater exposure for  Amazon’s mp3 download service which in turn will perhaps provide some decent competition to iTunes. It may also turn around MySpace’s lagging growth and provide some decent competition to Facebook’s seemingly unstoppable growth.

I’m watching with interest.

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Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail is a great little program, a desktop mail application which provides a simplified Outlook kind of experience, Wave 3 will continue to develop this and complete the process of turning it into a Personal Information Manager (PIM) with Windows Live Calendar synchronisation (Finally!).

Windows Live MovieMaker

No MovieMaker isn’t great, but it’s good enough for say… people like my Dad. Although it’s been known to be coming for a long time now Live Movie Maker will be released for the first time with Wave 3. Emphasis will be on creating simple, easy to make movies which can then be published to sharing websites online, similar to what Live Photo Gallery offers for Flickr publishing.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Google stole Live Labs’ thunder by introducing people tagging in Picasa first, but it’s still good news Live users are getting it as well. If you’ve used Facebook photo tagging you’ll know how it works, the big feature however is that ones you’ve tagged someone, Live Photo Gallery will be able to recognise people and tag them in all your other photographs.

It will also connect up the people tagged in your photographs with their Windows Live contact details, if they have one. Now I think that is pretty darn cool.

Windows Live Messenger

An old Live Messenger 9 leaked ages ago, however I won’t get too excited about it until it includes multi-client support, and I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen =( More unknown features are coming in the Wave 3 final build.

Windows Live Writer

A lot of the new Writer features are already available in the Technical Preview, however the final Wave 3 release will also include support for Windows Live Events (and I know we all use that), uploading videos to YouTube, Soapbox and possible other video services and also has a slightly redesigned UI. Thankfully that includes this:

  … which for me is going to go right down with ‘word count’ as the most useful features in Live Writer =P

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The Online Calculator eCalc comes in two shapes. A basic and a scientific calculator. The basic one misses a lot of features like the history, conversions and scientific functions that are available in the scientific calculator. Both look colorful and can be used with the mouse only. Some chars can also be added with the keyboard.

The calculator offers additional functions that cannot be found in the ones that ship with the operating system. It contains an impressive list of units that can be converted easily. If you ever wanted to convert carat into grain this feature is for you.

The calculator does provide access to constants that can be used in the calculator, base conversions and an equation solver that is divided into an root and linear solver.

I’m not using calculators that often and will most likely make no use of eCalc but it could be a nice online service for users who use calculators regularly.

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Some of you where pretty interested in the topic and there where a few debates in the comments over which was the best, so I’ve decided I’ll share a list of every online OS that I have found up to now.

Enjoy.

Since last week I have discovered one Webtop which is worthy of a special mention- iCloud. You’ll need an invite to access the iCloud beta, but apply and it’s likely you’ll receive it within a couple hours.iCloud comes with a UI that is well designed and varies a little more then the other Windows clones. It also comes with some very handy applications, check it out.

G.ho.st
DesktopTwo
myGoya
Ulteo
GlideOS
Jooce
iCUBE
youOS
Starforce
Purefect Desktop
ZimDesk
Online Operating System
CosmoPOD
Webdesk.in
MyBooo
goPC
Psych Desktop
AstranOS
SSOE

If I have missed any let me know.

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This service is used by several backup applications to create backups of files that are currently in use, on the fly backups so to say. I knew that I did install two backup applications in the last week, Cobian Backup and MozyHome and I suspect that one of these was responsible for the change.

The real question however is if I need this service at all. It was using a little bit more than six Megabytes of RAM without any real benefit. I decided to stop the service and run a backup to see if it would go through and backup all the files selected. Since I’m not backing up any Windows system files I suspected that it would not make a difference.

I stopped the Volume Shadow Copy Service and the file vssvc.exe disappeared from the list of open processes. The backup completed without errors afterwards. Vssvc.exe has been set to disabled in Services.msc so that it does not get started accidentally if set to manually.

It would be different if you would backup system files regularly in Windows. Those files can’t be processed if they are in use at the moment of the backup if the Volume Shadow Copy Service is not running in the background.

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They have decided to add advertisement to their service. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad about 10% of the users are receiving a nine second advertisement once a day. This looks like testing the waters for me. If few users complain about the ads they might introduce this to all listeners and probably even increase the amount of ads that are displayed each day.

I personally think that it is not such a big problem if you compare it to terrestrial radio stations for instance. It could become one if they would decided to increase the advertisements. One should also consider that websites that offer such services have to generate money somehow to be able to pay the bills for servers, bandwidth and service.

A alternative would be finetune.com which can also be used to get new suggestions.

What is your opinion on the matter ?

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