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.

Yahoo has gone open source, in a way. The brain trust behind the second biggest search engine in the world announced the creation of BOSS, a service that will allow perspective search moguls to roll their own search engine. BOSS users will able to perform a wide range of functions, from re-ranking search results to removing all traces of the distinctive Yahoo logo. Yahoo will eventually allow BOSS users to advertise their specialized engines on the Yahoo site. At press time, Yahoo’s web, images, and news engines are available for tinkering, with video search coming soon.

Anyone who has used the Internet in the past ten years should be familiar with the concept of “mirrors” - one website located on several different and independent servers. Doing this with blogs, however, can be the very definition of “headache inducing.” Copying and re-copying the same data on several different platforms is not the easiest thing in the world to do. This is where switchAbit comes in. SwitchAbit takes away the frustration of blog mirroring by automating the entire process. Copying your WordPress blog into your Facebook account is as easy as logging into a website. While the service is still working through a few bugs, the switchAbit team promises that everything will operational in the first stable.

Hot water is for squares, man! Well, not really, but it isn’t a necessity when washing your clothing. According to the lovely people at Seventh Generation, ninety percent of all the energy used in one load of laundry goes to heating up the water. If facts such as that bother you but still aren’t keen on giving your boxer shorts an ice bath, have no fear. They are here to help. All you have to do is take their “cold water” pledge and you get a copy of their book Naturally Clean: The Seventh Generation Guide to Safe and Healthy, Non-Toxic Cleaning absolutely free. Free reading material telling you how to save both money and the environment… sounds great to me.

Believe it or not, your cell phone can do more that take calls, send text messages, check emails, download music, and surf the web. It can now also record and stream video online. Qik is a handy little service that turns your average looking Windows or Symbian-based cell phone in miniature HandyCam. Just connect using your cell number and within seconds, you will be recording and streaming video for the world to see. The video output will then be available from either the Qik website or from previous Free Line all-star PicLens. A bit of warning though: Qik can eat up its fair share of bandwidth. So unless you subscribe to unlimited data plan, I’d think twice before starting production on the cell phone remake of Gone With the Wind.

To finish up the week, we have Plurk. Now on the surface, Plurk seems to be just another Twitter clone. Look closely, however, and you will see that it is much, much more. Utilizing a horizontal layout and cute graphics, Plurk is perfect someone who enjoys microblogging, but wishes to have a little whimsical fun while doing it. And honestly, everyone needs a little fun in their lives, even those towing the Free Line.

We all know that WordPress is a great tool for creating a website. It’s much more than a blog platform, it is an essential tool for anyone that wants a website that is easy to maintain and update. But as an essential marketing tool for social networks, a lot of added features for WordPress often get overlooked or ignored entirely. We’ve got some great plugins that can be leveraged easily in any social marketing campaign.

The key to get the word out about your website this day in age is posting about it on social networks. For every social network out there, someone has created a cross posting tool in WordPress. Our current favourites are the MySpace, Twitter and Facebook plugins, that take any post you put on your WordPress website and posts about it on the respective Social Network.

And of course, you want to make sure that your fans and readers have a chance to do the same thing. Check out the Sociable plugin- it makes it a snap to tell anyone and everyone about one of your web pages. It automatically supports Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Email, Facebook and lots of others. Its like the swiss army knife of social bookmarks.

Once you’ve got the word out, you’ll need to take advantage of the social aspects of social networks. If you just cross post your WordPress site without having an extensive list of friends you won’t be taking advantage of the social media platforms. Finding and adding friends can be time consuming. But it can go by a lot faster with the Yoono plugin for FireFox.

And of course, while we’re talking about social networking and WordPress, we might as well return to WordPress MU, also known as WordPress MultiUser, the version of WordPress that lets multiple blogs be hosted on the same website. Automatic, the creators of WordPress and WordPress MU just bought BuddyPress, a plugin that turns WordPress MU into a full fledged Social Network. This means that future versions of WordPress MU will contain all the stuff that BuddyPress added in, giving your WordPress install all the power of MySpace of Facebook.

Just when we think we know all the answers concerning Internet marketing, Google changes the questions. Internet marketing expert and StomperNet faculty member Ed Dale is reporting that Google has altered the way that the AdWords Keyword Tool reports keyword search volume. Each report now accurately states how many times keywords or strings of keywords were searched, all using real numbers. Thanks to the new update, the end user will be able to know whether or not a keyword or a string of keywords are worth pursuing. We are currently testing the system for accuracy ourselves. We will keep you posted on the results.

For those of you who still want a bit more out of your data than what Google is giving, we suggest giving Woopra a try. From all reports, the featuring list on thing is nothing short of “massive.” According to developer iFusion Labs, Woopra is designed to do everything a developer would want, from tracking hits to sending real time notifications. Although still in beta, Woopra already has those “in the know” talking. Woopra, like most of tools featured on the Free Line, is completely free.

With the popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, the term “social media marketer” has become the Internet’s new buzzword. But as those of us in the business know, a real social media marketer is more than just a person with a smattering of SEO knowledge and a passion for friend’s lists. On Techipedia, journalist Tamar Wienberg talks about what it takes to be the very best with the people who know it best: actual social media marketers. “A social media marketer’s job never ends,” says media strategist Reem Abeidoh. “They usually work 70 hour weeks and need to be extremely flexible. There are days when marketers may have to serve as internal evangelist by introducing key stakeholders to social media. There are other times when marketers may have to launch a multi-platform outreach campaign. It just depends on the needs of the client.”

The practice of using social networks as a business tool are not limited to the “social media” kingpins mentioned above. Lawyers are now using Twitter as a way to find prospective clients. The key, according to Law Firm Web Strategy blogger Steve Matthews, is to remember that Twitter is based upon “pure, personal reactions.” By staying personal, the marketer or lawyer will have an easier time “exposing one’s practice and expertise online.” Great words to live by, no matter if your product is legal services or or web developing.

As many of you already know, hosting and maintaining a blog can increase visibility of your website. Hosting several blogs on varied, yet still relevant topics could be huge for your business, but could also cause massive headaches for either you or your IT team. Our solution is simple: WordPress MultiUser, or “MU” for short. WordPress MU makes it easy for users to host, track, and update several different blogs hosted on the same website. It also makes it a breeze to start new blogs when needed. So start blogging. The world is waiting to hear what you have to say.

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。

Last week we told you about LibraryThing, the social web site that allows you to catalog your books online and discuss them, all for free. LibraryThing’s biggest competition, Shelfari, has just received a new make over that they hope will keep users coming back. Some of the latest features include a more powerful search engine and “My Shelfari,” a tool that keeps track of everything from your personal information to your friends. One of the biggest changes is the new Authors Unbound section, where fans can edit information on their favorite authors, wiki-style. If you’re a fan of literature, then Shelfari is definitely the place for you.

Sometimes in business, it’s imperative to know where your company’s website stands against the competition. Sure ,you might think you’re pretty popular the world over, but perception and reality are often two different things. Thankfully, Google has you covered with Google Trends new site comparison feature. When we compared LibraryThing and Shelfari, for example, we found that while LibraryThing is more popular in the US, Shelfari holds the edge in India. Both easy to follow and powerful to use, Google Trends will have you comparing your sites with each other in no time flat.

Nowadays, statistics are getting harder and harder to verify. Take Avril Lavigne’s video for her song “Girlfriend” on YouTube, for example. On the surface, it seems as if video has 90,388,110 views. Look a little closer, however, and things get a bit more “sinister.” The number isn’t real. A bunch of net savvy fans are using a web bot to go and view the page once every five minutes, racking up the hits without YouTube even noticing. Their ultimate goal was to make Avril the number one most viewed video on YouTube. The kicker? They succeeded. As of this writing, “Girlfriend” by Avril Lagvine is the most viewed video on YouTube.

The best places to get new and interesting sites that haven’t been gamed for popularity are new web engines that are still in beta. One of the best new start ups for link discovery that we’ve seen in awhile is called Socialbrowse. This site lets you share links in a Twitter fashion, and lets you follow what other people are linking. This is definitely one to watch out for.

On a sad note, we’d like to talk about the recent death of George Carlin. The man was a funny man and a brilliant thinker. In tribute to  Mr. Carlin, we here at the Freeline would like to present the “Seven Words and/or Phrases You Can’t Say in a Marketing Email:”

1. Penis
2. “Free insurance”
3. “Click here!”
4. Enhancement
5. “Deposed dictator”
6. “Apply today!”
7. “Canadian pharmaceuticals”

For more on  George Carlin, his life, and his work, check out YouTube.

The usual fun and general frivolity of Twitter was put on the back burner Monday, as students used the micro-blogging service to report on the China earthquake. Twitter users casper o d j and In walked bud posted eye-witness accounts of both the quake and its aftermath, providing a point-of-view not usually seen in traditional journalism. While it isn’t exactly “a hard news source,” Twitter has proven instrumental in time of tragedy and uncertainty. During the 2007 California wild fires, for example, members used a combination of Twitter and Google Maps to directs victims to emergency shelters.

Turning our attention to Redmond, Microsoft announced a new social video initiative on Monday called “Messenger TV.” The new service is centered around giving Windows Live Messenger users YouTube-like functionality at the touch of a button. The service has already launched in twenty countries not called the “United States,” such as Canada, Australia, and Singapore. Curious Americans can try out the service by switching Internet Explorer’s default language to “Canadian English” and logging into the proper Windows Live site. Not a bad tip, eh?

Ever feel a twinge of jealously at the guy on the bus watching “Chocolate Rain” for the billionth time on his iPhone? Ever find yourself yelling desperately at your media device of choice, hoping that it will “get the hint” and allow to peer into a bit of that YouTube goodness? Don’t get angry. Get CorePlayer instead. CorePlayer is a media player designed to run on nearly any gadget thrown at it, from desktop systems to smart phones to even a few GPS devices. The developers are even working on iPhone, iPod Touch and Google Android support. Arguably its best feature, however, is its capability to stream YouTube out of the box. All of that user-generated content in the palm of your hand can be a powerful thing. But please, on behalf of everyone, refrain from doing the “Numa Numa Guy” video dance while driving. It demeans us all.

In other phone related news, the digital art gallery known as deviantART has announced compatibility with the iPhone and iPod Touch. Users from around the world are now able to look at deviantART’s interesting mix of fan art, anthropomorphic animal sketches, and a host of things that normal users would be ashamed to show to their mothers. The feature set is rather “basic” at this point, but the deviantART team promises to tweak and upgrade it in the near future.

Our final stop on the tour brings us to our old friend, peer-to-peer file sharing. For all of those who have been burned by the Napster debacle and Kazaa’s treasure trove of spyware, we here at Free Line suggest giving Alliance P2P a try. Unlike the others, Alliance works on a private basis - the user shares with his or her invited friends only. Alliance P2P is a great way to transfer materials from work to home, pass around home videos to family and friends, or even give those old “Fair Use” laws a good workout. But remember: share wisely. The law is still the law.

If you’re confused as to what Web 3.0 is, or rather, will be, we’ve got a link to a great article that explains what Web 3.0 is and how you’ll be able to reap the benefits of this future technology.

Following on the heels of MySpace’s announcement to allow websites to bring in profile data, comes Facebook with an almost identical feature. They’re calling it FaceBook Connect.  Although it won’t actually launch for a few weeks, it will be, essentially, an overhaul of their 3rd party API which will give outside applications access to the same data that Facebook applications have now.

Google has just released an new tool called Friend Connect, which will allow you to do exactly the same thing Facebook and MySpace are planning on doing with any Open Social network. It looks like we’re about to see the full realization of Web 2.0. Pretty soon, meeting up with your friend’s online will be even easier than meeting them offline — and soon, whatever third party site you’re on, all your friends can come with you — automatically.

Fans of Twitter with latest Mac OSX are in for a surprise–included with the development tools is a hidden treat! A screen saver that displays all of your Twitter friends, built right on top of the operating system. Running the screen saver is simple: just drag and drop and away you go. When it’s done loading, it shows a wheel with your Twitter friends and their tweets.

GeoGraffiti turns your cellphone into a web 2.0 tool, enabling you to leave voice message details for free about any place you want. Verbal tips, tools, reviews of a restaurant, description of scenery, or even directions to a specific place, and then save it all so that other people with GeoGraffiti accounts can find it for free.

We have a link to an article that lists some free tools that you can use to make any Word Document work for the web.

Here’s a link to Google’s new GrandCentral software. Currently it is in closed beta, but you can request a phone number from the website, and when it goes live you can get free phone calls from any device connected to the Internet.

Another link, this time to the top free tools for going in and fixing Javascript code.

Google plans to create an oceanographic map called Google Ocean. It will allow you to browse all the different places deep under the sea — in 3D.

After being down for over three days in a row, Twitter has announced that it will reprogram their entire site from the ground up.