Firefox 3 makes it easy to select a default email application like Outlook or Thunderbird. When you click a mailto: link on a web site, that application will automatically open.

On Firefox 3 RC1 you can also choose a webmail application like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail.

• Selecting Yahoo! Mail as your default email provider is simple. Just hit the Tools button, select Options, navigate to the Applications tab, and select Yahoo! Mail from the dropdown list next to “mailto.”
• Lifehacker, here are the steps to add Gmail:

1. Type about:config in the URL bar, and click the I’ll be careful button to continue.
2. Type gecko.handlerservice into the filter field and find the listing that ends with allowRegisterFromDifferentHost. Click this button to change the value from false to true.
3. Copy this line of code into the URL bar:
   
   javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”GMail”)

4. A window will pop up asking if you want to add GMail, say yes and you should be all set.

Next time you click a mailto: link on a web site, you should get a choice of services to use including Gmail. You can then set Gmail as your preferred email service.

Source: Lifehacker via DownloadSquad

Found two interesting posts about how Twitter becomes a real-time news media and how it contributes to spread news all over the World despite telecommunication networks breakdown and/or government censorship.

Smart Mobs author Mark A.M Kramer asks if Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could make humanity morally accountable ? Today, even with a very limited presence of the International community (politics, journalists as well as Aid workers) we continue to receive near real-time information from Myanmar through various multi-plateforms communication media such Twitter, SMS, RSS etc.

Ten days later, in China, an powerful earthquake shook the Sichuan province, information that Technology blogger Robert Scoble claimed that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.

Is Twitter's slogan "What are you doing" should be now replaced by "What's going on" ?

Sources: SmartMobs, BBC

Google Australia launched today a new a new feature, enabling you to search content on the internet before it is created.

About gDay™ technology

The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

gDay™ and MATE™ were developed in Google’s Sydney R&D centre

More infos on Google page