Last week Wolfram Alpha launched, and I immediately started playing around with it. Like every other search engine Wolfram focuses on being able to take your input and try to return the data you're looking for, but don't expect it to grab results like those you find at Google.

Do you remember when Twitter was a word that only the tech-savvy crowd have heard of? It was back in March of 2007 that I finally started paying attention to what Twitter was, only because there was so much buzz about it on the blogs I was reading. Between then and now, Twitter has experienced all kinds of growing pains, including outages from traffic overload.

Last week Download Squad dug up a real gem when they found a website called AlternativeTo. This website lists out a lot of really popular applications like Photoshop, Nero, Dreamweaver, and the various Microsoft Office products. Then for each of them it provides alternatives (both free and commercial) that users can choose from.

For a lot of users creating screencasts is too much of a pain, and so a lot of people will avoid them. This is especially true if they see software like Camtasia Studio that has a pricetag of $300, which is overkill for what most people are looking to do.

Are you looking to have some fun with photos of your friends of family? Look no further if you lack the Photoshop skills needed to do some fun stuff with their photos... just head on over to PhotoFunia. There are over 100 creative templates you get to choose from, and applying someone's face to them takes a matter of seconds.

Every now and again I use StumbleUpon to see what kind of unique sites I can find, and last week I found a rather nifty one called Keyboardr. It's a search engine that distinguishes itself by not actually having (or needing) a search button. Results are show to you in real-time as you type.

Over the last few months, Ryan and I found ourselves consumed with the process of buying our first home. Home-buying can be a daunting experience, there's no doubt about that, but it becomes a little less daunting with the help of the Internet.

Last week Hulu announced that they were going to be blocking access for Boxee and TV.com because of pressure from content providers. This obviously makes sense because Hulu still looks as though they are having a hard time capitalizing on advertisements when being compared to what they're able to sell on TV.

The odds are pretty good that you've come across the Experts Exchange site while trying to troubleshoot some sort of problem. You probably got frustrated when you noticed that the question being asked was visible, but you couldn't find the answers without registering first. That may not be a big deal if registering was free, but they actually charge $13 a month to get an account.

Google is experimenting with yet another new search feature called Google Preferred Sites. If you're one of the lucky few to have this option show up in your search preferences you can start taking advantage of this feature right now, but most of you will probably have to wait for Google to roll it out.