Another product that aims to simplify your digital lifestyle is launching today. Give Fuser access to your email and social networking accounts, and the website will organize all of the messages from those accounts in one place so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple interfaces to handle them.

Fuser is still in beta and I ran into a few glitches while testing the site, but it certainly has promise. You can pull in accounts from any IMAP or POP email service and the social networks MySpace and Facebook. Once you have loaded your accounts, messages from all of them appear in one collective inbox. It’s impressive to see posts to my Facebook wall displayed like email messages next to my actual email messages.

Not only can you view messages from all of your accounts together, you can also reply to them as with a normal webmail client. If you want to reply to a Facebook wall post, you can hit reply and either leave a note on your friend’s wall or send them a Facebook message. It’s quite surprising how much of Facebook’s functionality Fuser has been able to extract out of that social network’s website.

Beyond organizing all of your messages in one place, Fuser plays around with the social network data to add a little functionality. You can view a “leaderboard” of your social network friends to see who communicates with you most frequently. Friends are ranked according to how many times they have sent you messages or posted on your wall, and you can view rankings according to certain time periods. Nothing terribly revolutionary, but their attempts demonstrate how it is still possible to mash up Facebook data from outside of the developer platform.

Fuser is free and supported by discreet AdSense advertisements. Check out Orgoo for another message aggregation service. Orgoo, which presented at TechCrunch40 last week, differs from Fuser by integrating instant messages, video conferences, and SMS messages instead of data from social networking accounts.

Source : Digg here

A search on the site pulls up a basic Google map of the area and nothing else. But users can then drag in modules to add information – local foreclosures, recent sales, listed homes, schools, even fast food restaurants. Every module that is added by a user also adds the appropriate information to the map as well. It’s a very convenient way to get a feel for the neighborhood.

The original idea for the company came from seventeen year old Kamran Munshi, who is now a freshman at Yale. His father, Ashfaq, ran with the idea and raised $10 million in funding. The company has 32 employees (12 in the U.S., 30 in India).

Later today the company is launching a new feature – the ability to create a map with various modules included and then embed it on another website. So any site that wants to add a Google generated map that includes, say, local businesses and restaurants (a hotel, for example) can now do so easily. The tool is free, but will be branded with Terabitz.

Source : Digg here

Songs are delivered in MP3 format, meaning they’ll work on any music player, including the iPod. The store opens with 2 million songs from 80,000 artists represented by 20,000 labels. EMI is on board. The other major labels have no real choice at this point but to follow, and soon.

A software download is required to actually get songs to your hard drive, but it’s available for both Windows and Mac (with Linux coming). That’s good news – DRM requirements forced Amazon to make their movie download service work only with Windows machines.

Average quality is very high – 256 kbps, which is what iTunes uses for non-DRM songs as well.

Source : Digg here

With GarageSeek users will be able to share their experiences with mechanics and rate them on several different metrics. When live, the site will provide a potentially very useful service, the ability to check reviews and avoid hiring a shoddy mechanic. However, while a complete database of real reviews is useful, a lot of review verticals don’t offer a real reason to contribute when they start and fragment reviews across multiple domain names users may not care to remember.

Yelp largely solved the chicken and egg problem that comes with user review services, even if they allegedly paid users for reviews to start. They raised over $16 million and generated traction on the service through having a system seeded with content, rewarding top users with over-the-top parties, and focusing on a service that a wide variety of people use frequently, restaurants. The other large people-driven review site, Insiderpages, had the advantage of $9 million in financing and starting back in 2004. Despite this, Insiderpages went through a slew of layoff and eventually sold off to CitySearch for $13 million.

Yelp is already in the auto repair category, and is poised to expose their audience to other review verticals as well. They’ve already moved into non-geographical service reviews such as media outlets. The one question these review verticals need to ask themselves is “Can niche vertical review sites survive up against one general review site, Yelp or otherwise”? My feeling is no.

Source : Digg here

Today Amazon launched their MP3 service, so this interface is going to get a lot more usage as you can grab 256kbs non-DRM songs for 89 cents a pop.

There is a downloadable client for transferring the songs. I wonder how the user experience will compare to iTunes and having the entire experience in a web browser shell, as apposed to be able to do most of the work on Amazon.com itself.

The Works package offers word processing, spreadsheet and slide (powerpoint) functionality partially based on code from older versions of Microsoft Office.

The move by Microsoft to offer a free office suite comes as online office packages including Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Thinkfree Office and Zoho continue to grow market share due to increased broadband penetration, online convenience and lower costs.

It was not disclosed whether the new version of Microsoft Works would sync with or support Microsoft’s online services under the Live brand. Whilst the version was said to be released July 27, it was not clear where it could be downloaded from or accessed.

Microsoft Works first launched as a Mac application in 1986.

StreetAdvisor

The new StreetAdvisor provides a real-life “insider” view that provides users the ability to learn and share vital details about where they live, including noise levels, traffic, neighbors, entertainment, and public services in a similar way to travel review sites. Recommendations and negative experiences about local businesses, entertainment and services will also be supported.

StreetAdvisor’s street based reviews have been expanded to include cities, states, and countries.

Upgraded guidebooks now include four broad categories with the ability to create additional topics in a similar fashion to a Wiki.

Other new features include a member recognition system, “local expert program” and StreetAdvisor Billboards, a service that offers the ability to secure exclusive “run-of-street” advertising opportunities on a per city basis.

The site is currently in public beta and offers coverage for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

Facebook is down, and has been so since at least 10 am PST. Anyone notice it down earlier than that? We’ve emailed the company for their comment.

Update: Facebook is now back up as at 11:30am PST

Update: Statement from Facebook:

This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have

Tangler

Meebo

We first wrote about Tangler in February 2006, when it was deep in a development. They’ve been quietly working with beta partners for the last six months, and recently opened their doors to allow anyone to create a new forum. Last week, the 1,000th forum was created on Tangler.

Tangler forums are also decentralized. Any discussion/forum can easily be embedded in a third party website or websites. The discussion occurs simultaneously on all instances of the forum. See here for an example of an embedded forum.

Examples of startups using Tangler as their forum include Weewar, Particls and Omnidrive.

See our recent coverage of Meebo Rooms as well. It is interesting to see web chat and forums colliding towards the same end product.

The auction rules include much of what Google requested, including open devices and open applications. But open services and open networks are out, meaning third parties may not get access to the networks at fair wholesale rates. Will we see a tidal wave of innovation in the space? It’s too early to tell. The FCC hedged its bets to keep AT&T, Verizon and other incumbents happy. New players like Google may or may not participate.

This is clearly a compromise decision. History will decide if the FCC commissioners made the right choices. Perhaps their feeble attempts to stand up to AT&T, Verizon and their army of lobbyists will have been enough to get the U.S. back in the race with the rest of the mobile world. Or perhaps not. Just for record keeping purposes, Kevin Martin (Chairman) and commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps are willing to fight for openness. Commissioners Deborah Taylor Tate and Robert McDowell, who are parroting much of the nonsense that AT&T spewed last week, are clearly lining up with the incumbents.