Keeping a close eye on the people in your social network is all we want. Most of us also know how hard and time consuming this can be. Last week I showed that Gist is a powerful application to keep up to date with the people in your social network. Today Google released their new Social Search which shows search results related to your friends.

You might think the IT industry is a very clean one from an environmental perspective, but it’s not. In fact the IT industry and the Internet are using such an amount of power that this is becoming a real issue. Data Centers where we store our servers, routers and switches to make our applications accessible are first of all using a lot of power to make all the machines operate and secondly to cool them down. If you want to do something green please support Treehoo!, the new search engine.

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the IT outsourcing industry is slowly expanding despite the downturn. Outsourcers continuously seem to be aware of the advantages of outsourcing. But what location do you choose once you have decided to move your IT development to a service provider? And how important is the location, or should you focus more on the service provider?

On Thursday, October 22, Microsoft will launch its new next-generation operating system. From that moment it will be available worldwide. Last Saturday already 777 people in the village Zevenhuizen (7 houses) in The Netherlands could get the new OS installed. Microsoft is really pushing Windows 7. They claim Windows 7 will finally fill the gap between them and Apple. And that’s something they didn’t manage with Windows Vista, probably the worst market introduction by Windows ever. Will Windows 7 provide what we are looking for?

Some weeks ago I decided to give Gist a try. This week I became even more interested after they released Gist for iPhone. By using Gist, which by definition means “the essence”,  both on your desktop and iPhone keeping track of your social network becomes very easy. Do you want to know everything about the people you really want to follow? Give Gist a try!

As mentioned some days ago Tweetie 2 is available for download in the iPhone App Store. As a fan of the previous version I immediately downloaded this new version. High time to share my experiences after experimenting with it for some days. The bottom line conclusion: Tweetie 2 is a lot better than the previous version which was already very good, but still something is lacking.

You need to provide a new managed-services model if you want to satisfy your customers. IT offshoring companies require innovative actions if they strive for maintaining the competitive edge. The long term price focused outsourcing contracts are definitely over.

Tweetie 2, Loren Brichter’s new baby, is finally available for download in the iPhone App Store. About two weeks ago the release of this new Twitter client for the iPhone was announced. The previous Tweetie has been rewarded the Apple Desing Award, which made me even more curious about version 2.

It’s clear the war is on between the big players on the mobile market. Already for a longer time it has been noticeable that iPhone is gaining market share. This week IntoMobile showed that both Symbian and Windows Mobile are losing market share to iPhone, Android and webOS. Some days later Microsoft released its new Windows Mobile 6.5, also named Windows Phone. The question is whether Windows’ recent mobile strategy will help them to regain market share.

When will the first users be given an access to the Google Wave preview? That’s today’s big question. As promised at the Google Wave presentation in May, today 100.000 users will get the access to this new phenomenon. Knowing what happened at the other side of the world it’s rather a cruel question. A quake combined with a tsunami damaged a lot, people got killed, they were not waiting for that wave.