Once Syncplicity, an online backup and synchronization service, came along, I set up a folder by the name of "Standalone" to reside in the "C:\Program Files" directory and then set Syncplicity to synchronize this folder on my work PC, work laptop and home PC. The process doesn’t work as perfectly as the flash drive scenario mostly because the program has difficulties synchronizing files that are open at the same time on more than one computer.

I also tend to use this folder as a quick way to transfer files from my work PC to my home PC. Once I’m finished with a file or if I want to quickly transfer a picture or video file, I just drop it in the "Standalone" folder and Syncplicity instantly uploads it.  At that point, it’s available in my online account at my.syncplicity.com as well as ready to be downloaded/synchronized to any other PC I have that’s running the Syncplicity service.

In addition, it’s remarkably easy to preview many of the documents you backup/synchronize (by utilizing Syncplicity’s integration with Google Docs, Zoho Docs, Scribd, and Picnik) as well as restore previous versions of your documents.  Plus, if you accidentally delete a file from a folder that Syncplicity is keeping track of that you later want to recover, you can quickly browse the online Recyle Bin and recover the file itself or the entire folder.

Overall, the ease with which I can securely backup & synchronize virtually all of my important files - 40GB worth of files - more than makes up for the $9.99/mo fee that will come once Syncplicity leaves beta.  (That beta exit was originally scheduled for the end of June but was cancelled at the last minute and has yet to be rescheduled.)

I’ve personally reviewed other PC-to-PC synchronization utilities before (namely Microsoft’s FolderShare) but Syncplicity is definitely my favorite. Plus, incidentally, Steven Hazel, FolderShare’s original author, currently sits on Syncplicity’s Advisory Board.

Check out the Fans of Tech "Syncplicity" gallery:

A quick, simple and free download, this app (for Linux, Mac & Windows) allows you to examine an SWF and do find/replace edits for any links you might have included.

Any other niche applications out there that you use to modify/tweak/examine your SWF or FLA files? Drop us a line in the comments.

There are two plans currently available: individual access (dubbed “Outlook with Mobile”) with 2GB of storage for $9.99/mo and group access (dubbed “Group Outlook with Mobile”) with 20GB storage space for $56.99/mo.  The latter enables up to 5 users and both plans come with Outlook 2007 for each user to use on your desktop or laptop (MS Licensing may even permit both but don’t quote me on that).  Here’s a snippet of Microsoft’s official press release:

“GoDaddy.com Inc., the world’s largest domain registrar and largest hosting provider in North America, and Microsoft Corp. today announced that GoDaddy.com is delivering mobile and group e-mail plans with Microsoft Outlook, powered by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) improve worker productivity and communications regardless of physical location. The new e-mail plans from GoDaddy.com, including Personal Outlook, Outlook with Mobile, and Group Outlook with Mobile, give SMBs the ability to manage all of their online services from one place.”

GoDaddy certainly isn’t the first to offer hosted Exchange plans but they are a company you’re almost certain to see around tomorrow (although you can’t be too sure now) and that’s definitely something to consider when it comes to your email. You can find plenty of other hosted Exchange providers by just doing a Web search for “hosted Exchange plans.”

Microsoft Exchange, in my humble opinion, offers a much more pleasant and stable experience than, for instance, IMAP with Gmail.  (I can’t quite emphasize “stable” enough.)

Plus, of all the services you should be paying money for, email might just be one of the ones you should consider – especially given how critical it can be sometimes.  I mean, you wouldn’t want to find yourself, oh – I don’t know, locked out of your email account with no sign of support whatsoever… would you?

 Zeadoo launched in public beta just a couple of weeks ago and I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if you had yet to hear about it. 

Built around the now-blasé concept of link-sharing, Zeadoo doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles with which the average tech-enthusiast can fill up a blog post/news article.  Instead, the main thing you can say about Zeadoo is that it’s most likely the simplest bookmark-sharing Web app you’ve probably ever encountered: add a link, give it a description and you’re done.

At Zeadoo, there are no tags (although I personally think they should include it as an option for advanced users) or notes to mess with/worry about – just links.  If you do decide that you want to share a link with someone, just enter the email address.  Of course, the site also provides its users with a Firefox extension so you can easily add and share new bookmarks. (Every good sharing site out there should be providing this in my opinion.)

In addition to providing ultimate simplicity to its users, the company seems to given alot of thought on privacy options.  By default, Zeadoo doesn’t share your links with others.  (It’s the complete opposite with a site like Yahoo!’s del.icio.us – there, you have to specify that you don’t want to share your link with others.)  A snippet from the company’s first blog post best describes their stance:

“Not everyone wants everyone else to see their personal bookmarks. There are countless times at work and socially when sending links publicly is damned awkward. We don’t want everyone reading the helpful website we’ve found for the second cousin with the unusual rash, or looking over our shoulder (so to speak) as we throw ideas back and forth at work!”

One additional feature that Zeadoo highlights is a personalized home page.  Again, they’ve taken a concept made popular by online offerings like iGoogle and simplified it. There are no weather widgets or email snippets or news headlines – just search options (all of which can be customized.)  It’s not quite as simple as, say, the default Firefox home page but it’s close:

Sharing of bookmarks is quickly becoming an increasingly-crowded market but if Zeadoo continues to readily produce and provide more sophisticated options for aging Zeadooers (I totally made that term up – obviously) while continuing to provide an ultra-simplistic experience for new users, I believe they’ll succeed in the long run.

I’ve previously used Agile Messenger (ridiculously priced at $45) but there was nothing intuitive about it at all.  BeejiveIM, on the other hand, is beautiful and, dare I say, iPhone-esque.  For now, the product is free but if it follows the path of BeejiveIM for BlackBerry ($19.95) and iPhone ($15.99), you’ll probably be required to pay for it once it exits a beta phase.

Now, if Beejive decided to take the Digsby route and integrate some social networking functionality into the product (think Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in addition to instant messaging, I’d drop whatever cash necessary for BeejiveIM – especially since Yahoo! has yet to deliver a Windows-Mobile equivalent of the (brilliantly intuitive and slick-looking) Yahoo! OneConnect application.

BeejiveIM is a must-have for those of you wanting to remain connected to your favorite instant messaging networks while on the road – be it on your iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows-Mobile device.

Thanks to Long Zheng via Twitter for the heads-up on Beejive.

Taglocity, for those of you that don’t know, is a simple add-in designed to allow for “tagging” of emails, tasks, appointments, etc. in an effort to make organization of those items in Microsoft’s infamous email client a little easier. 

I’m personally a big fan so I was a bit troubled when I received a message this morning stating that my beta software had expired.  After downloading the most up-to-date version from taglocity.com, I was presented with a few big changes.  The two biggest changes in the new release are the “Taglocity Task Pane” and “Conversation View.” 

The first big change, the task pane, is where the Xobni reference comes into play.  The task pane, much like in Xobni, is displayed to the right of the message you’re reading and is an area where you can view snapshot information in regards to the individual who sent you the message.  (e.g., recently exchanged messages, files exchanged with the sender, number of emails to/from, etc.)  Those of you who currently use Xobni know exactly what I’m talking about.  In fact, here’s a visual comparison of the two:

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

To clarify,  I’m not saying that Taglocity has blatantly ripped Xobni off or anything because I think the new task pane fits perfectly into the features that they’ve been building up over the last few versions: groups/networking.

The other new feature, conversation view, is exactly what you might expect.  Clicking the conversation view button on the Taglocity toolbar brings up a quick window that neatly displays all of the messages related to the same subject.  It seems to work perfectly and is a great replacement to Outlook’s “Find Related Messages” which inevitably takes a while to pull up.  (Xobni also has this feature but it’s a little too slow for me.)

If you’ve yet to give Taglocity a try, you can sign up for the beta at Taglocity.com but I’d personally recommend reading about what all the software has to offer prior to doing so.  It’s designed to do more than just “tag” messages – although, admittedly, that’s primarily what I use it for – so far.  Also, a recent post on Taglocity’s blog also gives some great insight on what the company desires to achieve with its flagship product: “Saving Email – A Brief History.”

We here at Fans of Tech are launching a new campaign called "Better Tech for Living."  Basically, we want to spend the remainder of the year exploring the different ways that various companies or individuals out there are taking an initiative and using technology to improve different aspects of our lives. 

Every few weeks, we’ll offer up whatever expertise we can, in a variety of categories within the area of technology, and subsequently highlight companies or individuals in those categories that are leading the way to making technology not only something with which we can more easily deal on a day-to-day basis, but also something that improves our lives overall.

Earlier this week, we shined the spotlight on Akoha, the creators of a new “social reality” game built on the concept of “paying it forward.” Akoha is utilizing technology to put a new spin on and old idea and hopefully introduce a whole new generation to its general theme.

Be sure and keep tabs on fansoftech.com over the next few months and contribute thoughts and ideas as you think of them.  In addition, you can subscribe to the Better Tech for Living RSS feed to stay up-to-date on the companies/individuals we choose to highlight.  Those we do highlight will obviously be based on our own input but, of course, on our readers’ suggestions as well.

Now, having said all of that, what companies or people do you think are truly utilizing technology to change our lives for the better? Who out there is taking the initiative to bring to life the ideas we always thought of whenever someone mentioned “the future?” Leave us a comment below or e-mail us: bettertech [@] fansoftech.com.

devunity, a TechCrunch50 finalist, will soon be providing a safe-haven for all of those unsung, true geek heroes: coders. 

How exactly? By providing “the first social development platform” granting you and your fellow nerdlings a place to “develop applications together online – using popular languages like php, python, perl, asp, js, etc.” 

That’s right – there’ll be no-one to take your lunch money or stuff you in a locker over at devunity.

If you just spilled Diet Mountain Dew (or, dare I say, regular Dew) all over your keyboard because you just couldn’t contain your excitement, I highly suggest you sign up for the alpha-test going on now.

Yeah, you heard me: alpha test.  Meaning, of course, that the site isn’t available for mass consumption quite yet.  Sorry for the tease.  We signed up about a week ago and have yet to receive an invitation so we can’t say for certain how long you’d have to wait to get in on all the nerdtastic fun.  Sign up now:

P.S. - is it blatantly obvious that my worldview is derived entirely from Conan O’ Brien and The Simpsons?

Well, if you’re a Hotmail user that also has access to Microsoft Outlook, either at home or at work, then you’re in luck.  For a little while now, Microsoft has been offering Microsoft Office Outlook Connector: an Outlook plugin that lets you access and synchronize your Hotmail account(s) from within Outlook.

Much like with IMAP, E-mails that you send/receive/file in Outlook are mirrored in your Hotmail account online upon hitting that magical Send/Receive button. 

For example, e-mails that you send from your account in Outlook are, as you might expect, stored in the “sent items” folder right there in Outlook but also get uploaded to the “sent items” folder of Hotmail.  (Same for “deleted items,” “drafts,” etc.)  In addition, the tool also allows you to synchronize your Hotmail contacts and calendar.

In my opinion, this option acts even better than traditional IMAP access because, for the most part, IMAP remains a relatively flaky technology.  As an Outlook/Gmail user, I experience the following annoyances with my Gmail IMAP connection in Outlook 2007:  frequent disconnects, quirky synchronizations, LENGTHY synchronization times and my own personal favorite… the inability to take advantage of Outlook’s feature-rich flagging options on messages.

That last one is actually a problem with how Outlook treats IMAP connections, not a problem with IMAP in general…but allow me to explain.  You see, natively, you can right-click on a message in Outlook and “flag” it for follow-up by selecting one of many different follow-up options: Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Next Week, No Date and Custom.  That flagged message then appears as a “task” in your task list or in your To-Do Bar (new to OL2007.)  With IMAP messages, you only get one follow-up option: “Flag.”  Then, if you do decide to go ahead and generically flag that bad boy, it shows up multiple times in your To-Do Bar.  (That one’s actually due to the Gmail IMAP folder structure in Outlook.) 

Neither of these quirks exist with messages retrieved by the Outlook Connector.  Sure, that’s not a big deal but I personally find it highly annoying.

Anyways, I’ll most likely not be switching back to Windows Live Hotmail anytime soon (mainly due to that horrificly awful banner ad in place at mail.live.com) but I wanted to point out the availability and uniqueness of this particular tool to those of you using the Hotmail/Outlook (2003 or 2007) combo.  If you’re interested, you can find it for download here on Microsoft’s downloads site or packaged as an available option in the new Windows Live Wave 3 installer.

*Hundreds, few million…same diff.

(They also just happen to be the first nominee for our Better Tech for Living campaign – which officially launches this Wednesday, October 1st.  Check back with us then for more information.)

The aforementioned “real-world missions” can be followed online as well as by 3.5” x 2.5” (physical) cards and can include things like:

• invite someone for coffee
• thank someone
• make someone smile
• give someone a book
• buy someone a compact fluorescent light bulb

For instance, I received 13 missions on 24 cards (check out the images at the end of this post) in my “Akoha Mystery Starter Kit.” Those mission cards are tagged with a unique number allowing me to track them online. 

Now, let’s say I take one of the missions, “invite someone for drinks” and complete it.  At that point, I can not only mark the mission as complete in my online profile (in exchange for some “karma points”) but also give the card to the individual I invited out for drinks.  They, in turn, can track that card (along with its unique mission ID) and complete the mission themselves…and so on, and so forth.

Given the above examples, if your first reaction was something to the effect of “sounds like a game for hippies” then your reaction was remarkably similar to my own first reaction.  However, the concept has grown on me over the past couple of hours – ever since I received the starter kit.  I don’t foresee myself investing a lot of time in this “game” but I do think it could potentially be a pretty unique “hobby” and I sincerely hope it succeeds.

For me, there’s something unique and engaging about dealing with physical cards in addition to the online aspect and I think it was astute of the Akoha team to implement that type of element into the game.

Do I feel just a tad bit more lame now that Austin Hill, Akoha co-founder, has dubbed his new venture as “games for the Oprah crowd?” Yes.  Yes I do.  Will that stop me from engaging with the Akoha community? Absolutely not.  Again, I think it’ll be a unique hobby to keep up with and I think the most difficult element to the game overall will be explaining the concept to the friends/family members/individuals onto whom I pass these cards and subsequently convincing them to sign up for their own profile.

If you’ve read this much into the concept of the game, you may now be asking yourself: “what happens when I run out of cards?”  (Just humor me, okay?) Well, according to their site:

“Initially, decks of Akoha mission cards can be ordered through the Akoha store. In the future, you’ll be able to customize and order your own Akoha mission decks featuring only the missions you want to play, made just for you, delivered to your home. Special themed decks of Akoha mission cards will also be available in retail locations around the world; for instance, green mission cards to spread environmental acts of kindness.”

If you’ve already joined the Akoha community, you can check out my own profile or, if you’ve yet to get started, read just a little bit more about the company and about the project or request to be invited to the beta.

“Better Tech for Living: Akoha – a Social Reality Game” Image Gallery:
(click on ‘em for larger versions)