Windows Live Messenger 8.1 Beta is now available for everyone to download and enjoy. It has a whole host of new features and comes to us just 4-months after the initial release, which is actually a pretty quick turn around.

The holidays are coming up and wouldn't it be nice to know how many days there are until they arrive? To keep track of those upcoming events you should get Timeleft. It will give you a countdown so that you can see how many years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left until the event.

Apparently Pluck decided that it wasn't worth the effort to continue their RSS reader services. They have announced to all of their users that they will discontinue the service starting January 5, 2007:

First I'll start with Google's acquisition of Jotspot. As if they didn't get there hands on enough when they bought YouTube Google went and paid an unknown amount to buy the wiki company known as Jotspot. As Google Blogoscoped points out in the screenshots they took Jotspot already has the look and feel that Google services currently have.

I know many of you were waiting for Fasterfox to release a Firefox 2 compatible version before upgrading, and now you don't have to wait any longer. The newest version also comes in 11 new languages  but doesn't contain any new features.

Okay, I am going to have a few things here to keep you occupied for a little while. The first thing that I wanted to talk about was Google's recent decision to start paying independent video publishers a share of the ad revenue that is generated from users viewing videos.

A few months back I gave Kororaa Linux a shot because it installed XGL automatically on my system without me needing to do a thing. Heck, the 3D goodness that Kororaa brought even worked flawlessly on the Live CD that they offered. It didn't take long for ATI and nVidia to go after them for distributing the drivers with the kernel which forced Kororaa to remove XGL from its CD.