In response to user complaints, auction giant will offer more widespread phone support. Laura Rohde, IDG News Service Monday, February 07, 2005 In response to complaints from users, EBay will expand customer service in the U.S. and Canada while reducing some of the fees it charges sellers, the online auction company says. Within the next 90 days, EBay will limit automated e-mail responses to customer queries and increase its telephone support, says Bill Cobb, EBay president of N...

Microsoft has released the final version of MSN Messenger 7. Link

I am downloading now, it looks interesting. Yahoo's online music strategy has finally taken shape after a year of development with the launch of the Yahoo! Music Engine, the company's challenger to iTunes and subscription services such as Napster. While it may be late to the party, Yahoo threatens to shake up the industry with prices 60 percent less than its rivals. Betanews link. Link

Speculation abound late Monday regarding Google's oft-rumored plans to launch an instant messaging network that would compete with AOL, MSN and Yahoo. The New York Times reported that a Google communications service would launch Wednesday, and the LA Times confirmed it would go by the name "Google Talk." Although such rumors have long proliferated throughout the Internet and are usually taken with a grain of salt, Google has activatedtalk.google.com. In addition, a messaging service util...

I have some betas for this now.  The first two people to request them will get them. You must have a hotmail account to use this.

While what he did was very stupid and inexcusable, over 2 years in jail for it is ridiculous.  The sad thing is he got more time for posting hateful messages than he did for having child porn on his computer.  "A man who posted racist messages on a website in memory of murdered black teenager Anthony Walker was jailed for more than three years today. Neil Martin, 30, emailed at least six comments to the website - less than a week after Anthony was killed with an ice axe in a ...

YouTube is the top video submission site today, there's no doubt about that.  I use it to host my video demos and other video projects, but one thing I have never liked about YouTube was the "look" of the video player. Well YouTube has introduced a custom video player which  you can "customize" to your liking.  Looking through the options you can select and apply a new theme,  change the player layout, and choose the contents of your custom player. There doesn't appear ...

A few days ago Microsoft quietly launched a new translation service that is powered by Systran, which is a developer of language translation software. There wasn't much said about this service from Microsoft, and some users are reporting that not all the languages are working correctly.

I normally use Google Reader to view all my RSS feeds I am subscribed to.  I don't have an exact number of how many feeds I exactly subscribe to, but it's a decent number.  While I was looking through them today I thought it might be interesting to see what are the top 5 or 10 RSS feeds that our community members subscribe to. Here are some of my favorite feeds: CyberNet News MacRumors Mashable Scobleizer GameSpot News ZDNet News WinCustomize News If you...

I have used Flickr off and on for the last few months, and finally upgraded to a Pro account because it has become and invaluable way to share and organize my photos.  Recently I received a beta invite to Photophlow and have been trying it out for the last week or so. The concept is rather simple, but the developers are doing a fantastic job implementing it.  Basically Photophlow is a way for Flickr users to share in real-time their photos with other users.  This is done in ...

Since the political season is heating up even more, and politics is a hot topic on Twitter, we have created our own account for The Political Machine.  It will be regularly updated with links and comments about both the upcoming game, and articles on the PoliticalMachine.com website. There are also some great Twitter clients for both Windows and Mac. Witty Twhirl Visit our Twitter page and click follow to keep updated. The Politic...

Piracy, whether it be of games, movies, software, or music is a pretty hot topic these days.  On one side you have people against piracy who usually claim copyright should be protected and what people are doing is just plain stealing.  On the other side there are people who think attempts to squash piracy are against someones "freedom" and argue that piracy doesn't affect the bottom line in business. I have been looking through a bunch of websites that one could say the readers are ...

If you spend any amount of time on the Internet then I would probably bet you have be subjected to some form of talk about social networks.  Heck, even here on WinCustomize and JoeUser I regularly talk about the usefulness of such networks.  We have a growing group on Facebook about desktop customization , and several of us use Twitter as well. With all these current networks, and more popping up all the time, it can be difficult to keep track of them all.  I use quite a few...

After being in beta for quite a while, Microsoft officially released Windows Live SkyDrive. During the beta testing users had up to 1GB ofonline storage, but today it was upped to a whopping 5GB! In additionto the increased storage, SkyDrive also rolled out in 35 countries aswell. " You'vemade two things clear since our first release: You want more space; andyou want SkyDrive where you are. Today we're giving you both. You nowhave five times the space you had before — that’s ...

FriendFeed popped out of nowhere for me.  I hadn't heard or seen of it until I saw a blog post from Robert Scoble .  With so many networks out there like Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, etc. it's sometimes hard to keep track of all the people you follow.  FriendFeed helps out by displaying what exactly your friends and contacts are doing on other networks.  Once you signup (it's free), you just add as many of your own services as you like, and there are quite a few, and get conne...