Is participating in social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook just a “phase” that people seem to go through? A new video by user “Super Josh” on Current.com claims just that. In his satirical animated short “Networking Wars,” cartoon representatives of MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Second Life vie for the attention of an average user. Very funny, and perhaps, very true.

Sometimes, running a brand new, top-of-the-line operating system isn’t possible. Systems made to run Windows 2000, for example, will not be able to properly support Firefox 3.0, as one of our commenters has already figured out. But fear not. Don’t let those old legacy systems die in the basement. Get WattOS instead. Based on Ubuntu Linux, WattOS is designed to get the best out of older, more “time tested” machines. It can do almost anything that its bigger brother can do, just in a smaller package. WattOS is completely free to use and is covered under the GNU public license.

Moving to the world of telecommunication devices for a moment, there’s TokBox. Powered by Adobe’s innovative “Air” development platform, TokBox is a Skype-esque way to keep in touch with family and friends. TokBox can be used from a variety of diverse places, from their website to Facebook. While the little upstart might not have the features of Skype at the moment, it is definitely one program to keep your eye on.

Those who own an iPhone are no doubt familiar with Apple’s MobileMe, a handy little service that syncs up all of your media devices. If you like the idea of everything working together, but don’t think that perfect harmony is worth $100, give Mail2Web LIVE a try. Mail2Web does everything that MobileMe does, from playing nice with your Blackberry to updating Outlook on your PC, only it’s free. And the kicker? The service is built upon Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange Platform. So give Mail2Web LIVE a try. We promise not to tell Steve Jobs.

These days, staying mobile doesn’t mean that you have to leave your social networking habits at home. For example, check out Moblog. It works kind of like Twitter, except it allows you to post pictures and video you’ve taken with your phone as well as text. And the best part? The Moblog team builds your private space for you. All you need to do is send a text message. Moblog makes networking on the road simple and easy.

Have you ever wanted the Linux operating system to control your home? If this is you, then your prayers have been answered. Linux MCE is the new, free operating system that lets you to stream media files, pause live TV ala TIVO, and even control your lighting and heating system from your mobile phone, all from one place. All you need is a computer to run it on and hardware that supports it. Suddenly, the future that was predicted in The Jetsons doesn’t look all that far-fetched.

Those of you out in the blogosphere who love to listen to free streaming music online, listen up. Streamzy lets your search for your favorite songs and then save them into a streaming playlist, all completely for free. Streamzy is the perfect tool for someone who likes to have their music digitally, but would rather not mess with any messy files. As always, Streamzy is a completely free service.

If you like to play music as much as you like listening to it, then the following announcement will be music to your ears. The International Music Score Library, the web’s number one repository for public domain sheet music, has reopened. The IMSL founder Edward W. Guo is also promising some big changes in the future, including a backup system and a few “collaborations” with a few “major organizations.” No matter what comes about in the future, there is one thing that we all can agree on: it’s nice to have the “joyful noise” back online.

Sometimes, it’s just not easy being number one. Just ask Twitter, who is still having scalability problems right now. User have seen the website more down than up lately, and some people have even started selling T-shirts with the infamous whale image you get when the site is down. The people at Twitter say that they are working on it, and we should see less and less down time as the changes near completion.

For those who have grown tired of Twitter’s “whale” of a problem, why not give another service a try? Identi.ca, for example, is focused towards creating a fully scalable microblogging network, which promises to be more stable and secure than Twitter without removing features. It also plans on supporting both OpenID and the microblogging-targeted OpenSocial network. While its status as a “Twitter killer” is unknown, Identi.ca proves once again that necessity, like Frank Zappa, truly is the mother of invention.

你曾yy过用Linux控制你的家吗？现在梦想实现了。·Linux MCE是一个新的免费的操作系统，它可以让你通过手机来控制家里的音乐系统，电视系统，甚至是你的供电和加热系统·。你需要的只是一台电脑和支持它的硬件。突然间是不是觉得动画片里语言的世界并不是那么遥远？

那些在博客圈里喜欢收听在线音乐的人们你们听好了。Streamzy可以让你搜索喜欢的音乐并把他们加入到一个播放列表当中。Streamzy对那些非常喜欢听音乐却不喜欢把音乐存在硬盘中的人来说是个绝佳的工具。别忘了，Streamzy可是完全免费的。

如果你除了听还喜欢演奏音乐的话，那么下面的消息一定会让你开心起来。“世界音乐素材网”，这个网络公共乐谱网站界的大哥刚刚重新开张了。·网站创立者郭·爱德华还宣布了很多将要改进的地方，比如一个备份系统和一些大公司的合作。·希望我们能在短期内看到成效不过它已经很cool了。

有时候当第一也不是件容易的事情。就比如Twitter，他们至今还没有解决稳定性的问题。·用户们最近竟然发现twitter当掉的事件比正常的时候还多，还有人已经开始抛售印有那条当机鲸鱼图案的T－shirt。Twitter的人说他们已经开始研究这个问题了，所以情况应该会慢慢有所好转吧。

对那些已经研究Twitter“鲸鱼问题”的人来说，为啥不试一下别的服务呢？比如， Ideni.ca，就是另一个全面的微博客网站，并承诺比Twitter来得更稳定更安全，又不失功性。·另外它也将支持OpenID和针对微博客的社交网络。虽然它是不是twitter杀手还不得而知，但identi.ca又一次证明了用户需要就是发明之母。

The founder of Microsoft is stepping down today. That’s right- Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft. According to Gates, he going to use his newly accquired “free time” to peruse his philanthropic interests. Love him or hate him, he completely revolutionized computing with his products. From DOS to Windows and from QuickBasic to Visual Studio, he’ll leave a lasting footprint on almost any computer in the world.

To commemorate the event, we’ve got a few links celebrating the big man’s leave of absence. Here’s a video from Wired, mashing up his greatest hits. And to show he has a sense of humor, here’s a video spoof starring the man himself, making fun of his last day in Microsoft.

Now that Bill Gates has officially “left the building,” who will step in to take his place? And in what direction will he or she steer Microsoft?  ZDNet does some quick speculation, and tells us that two people will replace Bill Gates- Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundy. As of yet it is uncertain as to the future of Microsoft, but lets hope things get better with time.

Of course, one of the biggest thorn’s in Microsoft’s side the last few years has been the free Operating System, Linux. Ubuntu has been making great strides, taking a once archiac and unfriendly architecture and making it sing. There is even a video comparing Vista and Linux, with the special effects of both taking center stage.

Just because Bill Gates is going away doesn’t mean that Microsoft will stop being a player in the tech sector. We’ve talked about Powerset off and on here at the Freeline. It’s the next big thing in search engines, allowing for an almost natural language search. Some people are even speculating that it might topple Google, once it works out all the kinks. It looks like Microsoft has been paying attention to all the buzz as well - Redmond has officially bought up Powerset. Many analysts predict that Microsoft will use the new technology to compete against Google. The deal should be completed by the end of the year.

Well, that’s it for today. So long Bill Gates, and good luck in the future!

Twistory is a cool Twitter mashup that takes in your archive and puts it into Google Calendar.

Flatworld Knowledge is an new web company with an aim to bring the Free Line to expensive college textbooks, by placing PDF files of its textbooks online, for free. They plan on opening their doors next January.

Esquire Magazine has a quick and informative interview with Vint Cerf, one of the masterminds of the internet from back in the early days.

SearchEngineLand has an informative article that gives a rundown for FireFox Plugins that can help with link development.

The new version of Ubuntu was just released a week or so ago, and it has finally gotten over those Linux hurdles that keep the non-geeks away. We’ve got links to a video showing you how easy it is to install, configure and run, as well as an article that explains just how important and polished this latest Linux download is.

Movino is a free Linux and Mac application for uploading a live streaming video feed from your *cell phone* to your own website or blog. It’s easy-to-set-up and easy-to-use, so you can use your cell phone as a webcam anytime you want.

Flickr FS is another Linux program that automatically downloads and backs up all of your photos from Flickr.

We’ve got a link to an article that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to combat such web thieves and spam blogs, and help reclaim your content.

The new YouFig platform allows users to simply and easily setup their own social networks, with an emphasis on work collaboration.

Last Wednesday, Google rolled out a quote search for Google News.

Hulu, the free hi-def streaming website for many television shows is now going to let countries other than the US view their videos, starting with Australia, The United Kingdom and Canada.

Check out our list for the top 25 video games for Linux. Even if you don’t use Linux you can still play most of these games on Windows or Mac.

Jiffle is a new web application that makes scheduling appointments a snap.

AlertThingy is a new Adobe Air application that hooks into FriendFeed. It can run on any operating system and pulls in a constant stream of your FriendFeed data.

There is a new free application called CommentKahuna that lets you find any WordPress blog that is relevant to your website that doesn’t use the NoFollow attribute.

**中文版翻译：

Hulu，这个免费的高清晰流媒体电视节目网站现在正打算对世界敞开大门！目前为止它只允许美国用户浏览，不过不久之后他们就会对其他国家开放，并先从澳大利亚，英国和加拿大开始。

对于那些游戏玩家，我们今天为你们准备了25个热门Linux游戏。就算你不用Linux，好消息是，你仍然可以在Windows或Mac上玩这些游戏，因为他们都是被设计可以在任何平台运行的。

Jiffle是一个新的时间计划在线程序，它为安排会议时间解决了难题。它允许你与Outlook日程表进行同步并协助网络视频会议。Jiffle使安排时间变得容易起来这样你就可以花更多的时间在改善工作上了。当然它是免费的它的连接也就在FreeLineReport.com

AlertThinky是一个新的与FriendFeed联通的Adobe Air程序。它可以运行在任何操作系统并持续从你的FriendFeed中提取数据。你还可以直接在程序中进行回复，加入书签和添加新朋友。

我们的一个朋友，Jason Potash，发布了一个新的叫做Comment Kahuna免费程序。 Comment Kahuna可以帮助你找到那些跟你的网站相关却没有使用NoFollow属性的WordPress博客。这个强大工具会大幅度提高你网站的搜索排名。

Mint has co-branded a website for Motley Fool Users. This is a great boon for Mint, and will only get better in the near future, since it plans on doing more partnerships like this one soon.

Adobe started public trials for ad-supported subscriptions to popular television shows, using Adobe’s new Media Player.

Some of the more popular Linux distros have strange names, like Ubuntu and Mandriva and Red Hat, and this article clears up any confusion over what exactly Slackware or Freespire means.

ImageShack will download any torrent file of your choice to their servers and then allow you to download it to your hard drive in one big chunk rather than using Torrent technology. It’s completely free to use, the only limitation is you 15gb of space per month.

Powerset launches in the next few weeks and will offer a  natural language search, rather than keyword based searching. Currently it only uses Wikipedia and Freebase, but expect it to expand in time.

**中文版视频:

Mint, 这个新的在线理财软件，正在开始与Motley Fool展开合做，并且联合建立 了一个新的网站。这对Mint来说是一个很好的机遇，而这种合作也只会使这个免费的服务变得更加完善。

Adobe目前正打算进军网络视频市场， 他们首先提供的是对热门电视节目的免费订阅。目前电视节目只来自于少数的几个电视台如CBS和Viacom，不过内容会逐渐丰富起来。另外你需要通过Adobe的媒体播放器来观看节目。

我们今天为Linux粉丝准备了一片文章介绍品种丰富的不同版本的Linux名字，和这些不同的版本是如何被命名的。那些热门的Linux版本的名字都很特别，比如Ubuntu，Debian，和红帽，而这篇文章解释了这些名字的寓意，你不会在为这些名字困扰了。

对于那些喜欢BT下载的人来说你可能觉得为了下载一个大文件而花上4天的时间把电脑搁置一旁很不方便，ImageShack可能会解决你的问题。ImageShack会把BT文件下载到他们的服务器，然后你就可以从服务器上整个把文件下载下来而不是使用BT的方式。你可以免费使用它，而每个用户每月有15个G的限额。我不确定它们如何解决盗版CD和DVD的问题却一直运营着，但是这个想法很有创意。

最后，Powerset将在几个星期后发布，并且宣称会提供一种革命性的替代现有的搜索方式。它将使用自然语言搜索技术，而不是关键字搜索，而前者通常会带来更精准的搜索结果。目前它只使用Wikipedia和Freebase，不过按照预期其它的自然语言支持将及时跟进。