We saw the future of Google Talk at CES in January and now you can test it for yourself. Of course, the biggest change is the ability to have avatars but there are also some other changes.

There are quite a few people that are excited about the new Windows Live Messenger and especially the face lift it has undergone. Microsoft has updated the GUI a few times throughout the course of the betas and now here is a screenshot of what to expect from the final release.

Fosfor Gadgets has put together a list of 10 keyboards that you will not find in every home. I found the keyboard above (prevents cramping in your hands) to be the most unique out of the list but I would say all of them are quite a site to see.

AllOfMP3 is one of the most popular Russian Music sites that offer music for just pennies. They charge $0.02 per MB and you can get the songs in many different formats. Now, AllOfMP3 has released software that will allow you to download from their site along with full-length previews of the song (at a lower bitrate of course). The software was obviously named after Apple's iTunes software.

Gaim is definitely taking the instant messaging industry by storm and putting up a challenge for Trillian to stay alive.

Many users that have been trying the latest version of Opera can now use the GMail Chat features that everyone loves. It is actually a simple process to do this:

It appears that Google is releasing a few more new features to GMail. The features being added are not as huge as the GTalk was but they are still nice to have. You will now be able to add smilies, create tables, insert images, and insert HTML into any message that you compose. Now, before you get excited and go to check it out I will let you know that not everyone has received these features.

PayPal is putting up a fight with the TextPayMe service with the recent release of a mobile payment service. This service will allow you to send money to another person or to make a payment for an item. If you wanted to send money to someone else then you could just text the payment amount and the phone number that you wanted to send the payment to.

If you are going to be creating a new site soon, then here are some great templates that you can use for starting. These templates are very well put together and they have a ton of them to choose from.

Microsoft has put together a very informative movie on the new Office 2007 that is supposed to be released in January 2007. They have many key points that they cover to help new users familiarize themselves before even receiving the software. Some of these key points are the Office Menu, the Ribbon, and the Contextual Tabs.

It appears that the person who took control of the Google Blog last night merely registered the blog...and how did they do that? Simple, Google deleted their blog by accident. This then opened the door for anyone to register that address. So I guess it wasn't as big of a deal as everyone thought it was, but it was funny anyways.

The image above was the result of the Google Blog being hacked just a short time ago. A friend of the hacker made a post on Digg which quickly made it to a Front Page article. I guess the hacker broke into the blog by guessing the password (they say the password was related to Microsoft). The Google Blog is currently replaced with a cached version of the blog, which is why there are no images.

Not that I am a big fan of the Yahoo! Toolbar, but I do know there are a lot of people out there that use it. Anyways, they have updated it and it does look like it has a nice feature set now. Similar to the MSN Toolbar it now has tabs for Internet Explorer 5 & 6.

Like most people you just want Adobe Acrobat without all the bloat. Well, just follow the link below to download the Enterprise Edition of Adobe Reader. This installation is as simple as it gets: no download manager, no Yahoo! toolbar, and a simple licensing agreement. Normally you have to put in your email address to get the link to this download.

Now, this is by no means a REAL fix for the Firefox memory leak, but it certainly does appear to help it quite a bit. This little fix will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, and as a result it will take up less than 10MB of memory while minimized. So far, from my experiences with using this today, when you maximize Firefox it will obviously increase the memory usage.

I'll keep this short and sweet. Shutterfly is giving away a 128MB memory card for taking a quick survey. This is the IMPORTANT part though, make sure when you are taking the survey that you select Windows XP for your operating system and Internet Explorer for your web browser. If you do not do this then they will say that the memory card will not work for you! Other details don't seem to matter.

An individual over at Download Squad has found a way to get the new Google interface that is pictured above. This interface was released months ago to random users (or what appears to be random) but not everyone could try it out. This is a cookie 'hack' that will trick Google into thinking you were meant to test it out.

Microsoft has released an Interim Build for Windows Vista today. The information on the ISO:

Microsoft denies the claims that Smarthouse made last Friday stating that Microsoft was planning to rewrite 60% of the Windows Vista code and that they had to pull Xbox programmers to help finish the product on time.

Since Microsoft isn't going to be able to pull off their holiday season release date of Windows Vista then hopefully Adobe will be able to cover them by releasing the next edition of Creative Suite.