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No particular single news dominated the social networking and online communications scenes this week.  Three topics stood out – the upcoming iPhone 3.0 OS, the release of Google Chrome in beta (again), IE8’s final version, and some new Gmail features rolled out by Google.  Interestingly there was not too much buzz going around the two hottest social sites today – Twitter and Facebook except for some minor buzz regarding Facebook’s call for users to support their governance policy, and Twitter growing really, really, fast.

So looking back at what has been the subject of tech blogs this week, we have the something about the upcoming iPhone 3.0 release. This is a much awaited upgraded iPhone OS especially since it promises to deliver new functionality to the iPhone which iPhone users have been waiting for quite some time now. These functionality includes among other things – copy and paste utility, MMS sending, video calls, and iPhone 3G teethering. Combining these three features would certainly elevate the iPhone to the ranks of the PDA/Smartphone mobile phone categories. As it is right now, the iPhone is best at two things – as a mobile gaming device and as a portable device for on-the-go mobile web browsing. The new iPhone OS 3.0 is slated for a U.S. summer release, can’t wait long enough for this new OS, personally.

Next up, the browser wars heats up anew. Well at least for Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. Google announced that its Chrome browser is going back to beta mode. And by doing so, Google is also introducing some new features to Chrome including faster loading time and some nifty features such as auto scroll, full page zoom and a new way to drag and drop tabs to view them side by side each other.

Microsoft on the other hand has just made available the latest version of its browser – IE8. It’s finally the official stable version and Microsoft promises faster loading time, some cool features including accelerators which is Firefox lingo means plug-ins, and a host of other security features for users’ browsing benefits. Already, the IE8 is gathering mixed reactions from those who have been using the official version. Yes, those reactions are both negative and positive. Although I must admit that based on my short time using it, I really noticed a significant boost on the browsers page loading time.  Which is not the case for Google Chrome, as I find the beta version became unstable again. I lost count of the number of times Chrome bailed out on me.

And finally, Gmail Labs announced two significant features this week – email previewing of various contents from YouTue, Flickr, Picasa and Yelps. By activating this feature on your Gmail Labs tab in Gmail Settings tab, you can now view YouTube videos, view Flickr and Picasa photos as well as preview review items from Yelps. And we mean tos ay preview these contents if somebody attached them to Gmail messages. This simply means that you don’t have to visit the site anymore just to check whether the content interests you.

There you go, 3 big news that happened this week in the world we all live in. Who knows what it is going to be next week?

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