Make music a social experience with these sites

We all like to share songs with friends, and we all have songs that share meaning with loved ones. Perhaps that's why there are so many music social networks out there. These sites combine both, and make music exploration and enjoyment something that you're not doing on your own.

From the well-known to the obscure, I've been exploring a variety of music social networks that you'll definitely want to check out:

Buzznet is a great way to connect with other music lovers. You can write status updates and view an activity feed that shows what your friends are listening to. You can also tell all your friends what your "song of the moment" is and post it to a profile that can be completely redesigned and themed using built-in tools.

Buzznet has some songs from major artists, but I would have liked to see more tracks. That said, the site makes up for it with music videos from YouTube. That adds a bit more value, as long as the recording quality is good..

Log all your Facebook chats in Firefox

Facebook's built-in chat service is convenient, but where it lacks when compared to software-based chat tools is in letting users log past conversations. Facebook intentionally does not save full conversations, however it does keep a few lines from the last time you chatted with someone so you can pick up where you left off.

If you're looking for more though, there's a new Firefox add-on called Facebook Chat History Manager that saves all of your conversations locally. As long as you're using the browser with it installed, it saves everything and puts it into a log that can be filtered by friend or date. There is, however, no search function, so if you're looking for a specific word or phrase from a past chat, you'll have to view all your chats on one page, then use Firefox's built-in search tool. Hopefully a later version will add a way to search from the local index.

Since the extension saves all of your chats locally, you're totally hosed if your computer gets lost, stolen, or suffers failed hard drive. On the flip side of that, the chat log viewer is password protected, so there are no worries of someone else gaining access to your entire chat history.

If you're a heavy Facebook chat user who does not access the service through a software chat client, this extension is one of the easiest ways to log your chats, and definitely worth the download.

Gmail mobile gets keypad shortcuts auto-complete

On Wednesday Google released two small but important updates to the mobile version of Gmail. New to the service are keyboard shortcuts and address auto-completion; two time-saving features that desktop Gmail users have been enjoying for years.

The keyboard shortcuts (obviously) do not work on the iPhone. For now, Google is limiting them to Android phones with a physical keyboard. These are exactly the same as on the desktop version, so you don't need to re-learn anything.

The auto-completion, on the other hand, is available to everyone and is quite a time saver. It begins pulling up names from your contacts as soon as you type just one letter.

Auto-completion only works in the "to" field when typing a new e-mail though, and does not work on Gmail's search like you're able to do on the desktop variant by using the Gmail labs add-on. Hopefully that feature will trickle down to this mobile version, since it's immensely helpful when trying to add search operators, or sort out messages from specific contacts.

One thing to note is that these new features are only available in the English version of Gmail mobile. Google has not said if, or when, they will make their way to other localizations of the service.

Manage your social life with these apps

Managing social network profiles is getting more difficult. As we sign up for more services, we need to split our time between multiple sites. But with the help of social aggregators, we can limit those issues. The following tools do a fine job of keeping your social life in one spot, helping you to monitor it more efficiently.

I should note, though, that these won't be your path to social networking bliss. Some folks find aggregators too overwhelming. They believe these resources only complicate matters. You might agree after trying some of these tools.

I should also note that Facebook Connect--Facebook's single sign-on service that competes with OpenID--might soon match these aggregation services. Users can already bring some items with them to Facebook. It might only be a matter of time before the service allows users to pull full social network feeds into Facebook.

Social network aggregators
Atomkeep Atomkeep is designed to help you sync all your profile information across multiple social networks. When you change your profile information on the site, all the networks you sync with it will be updated automatically. So, if you're moving to a new home, you can go to Atomkeep, change your address, and it will update that information on Facebook, Bebo, and other social networks. The site is in private beta, so you'll need an invite code to try it out.

Yahoo to distrbute its version of Hadoop

Yahoo announced plans Wednesday to release an open-source version of its take on Hadoop, a grid-computing framework used to run many parts of its business.

Yahoo is a major force in the development of Hadoop, which is principally overseen by the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop is essentially an open-source version of the software Google uses to run its Web indexing servers, and Yahoo uses it for much the same purpose internally.

Hadoop runs on tens of thousands of servers inside Yahoo, said Nigel Daley, quality and release engineering manager for Yahoo Grid Technologies, in a blog post Wednesday. That's a much larger implementation than other companies and organizations might wish to deploy, but at the same time they would like to benefit from the reliability tweaks that Yahoo has made to Hadoop in order to support its enormous Web properties.

"This distribution is largely a response to the numerous requests that we have received to share Yahoo!'s internally tested and scale-proven releases," Daley wrote. The code is available for download immediately here on Yahoo's site.