webproendeavors.com

Another possibility is IAC/InterActiveCorp, a conglomerate of many online properties. However, while IAC wants to expand its advertising network, it also looks not to be in the mood for consolidation. It’s seeking to spin off operations such as LendingTree, Ticketmaster, and HSN.

AOL will push several other products harder in an attempt to boost revenue. Those products include AOL’s browser toolbar, its desktop software, its e-mail service, and its Truveo video search site, according to the July 14 memo.

Among those products to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive, a general-purpose online storage service; and AOL Pictures, where people could store and share photos, according to a July 14 memo from Kevin Conroy, AOL’s executive vice president of products and marketing. The memo was published Thursday by TechCrunch.

So AOL is trying to transform itself into a modern Internet company, with high-traffic properties and online advertising. The question is who might be up for a deal with AOL?

Packaging for sale
Time Warner is separating AOL’s two components, audience and access, the former being its online properties and the latter its dial-up Internet access business. The company is doing so “to increase the accountability and operational focus of each of those businesses, and…to enhance our strategic flexibility,” said Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes earlier this year.

It should be noted that AOL’s ad network, Platform-A, delivers advertisements to a larger fraction of U.S. Internet users than any of its competitors, according to ComScore’s latest statistics. Its reach of 90 percent is ahead of Yahoo, at 83 percent, and Google,OMEGA Watches, at 81 percent.

Kevin Conroy

And display is a smaller part of online ad spending: eMarketer projects that U.S. display ad revenue will increase from $5.5 billion in 2008 to $7.9 billion in 2011, while search ads will increase from $10.4 billion to $16 billion.

With the economy gone sour, it’s these display ads that are under more pressure.

AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to internal memos.

Cowen analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman on Friday lowered their forecast for display ad spending in the United States, saying that search ad spending is stronger. “We believe paid search spending is much less exposed to ad budget cuts than other media, based on our previously published analysis of the historical spending patterns on direct mail during recessions,” the analysts said.

Some of the cuts at AOL are of divisions that are aligned with the old dial-up business. For example, Xdrive is offered as one of the perks of premium subscription plans. And AOL Pictures was an early online photo option for subscribers.

Online ad growth
Here’s why, even with the current economic troubles, AOL is potentially desirable, despite its troubles: U.S. spending on online ads will increase from $25.9 billion this year to $41 billion in 2011, analysis firm eMarketer projects.

For search ads, AOL relies on Google’s technology and shares the resulting revenue. Yahoo and Microsoft, though, could swap out the Google ads with their own, adding significant heft to their search ad operations.

It’s not unusual for companies to cut products to improve finances, but AOL has a particular incentive: corporate owner Time Warner is trying to prepare the once-powerful subsidiary for sale or other strategic alternatives.

News Corp., meanwhile, operates MySpace and has an investment in online video site Hulu and has a strong interest in online advertising.

“These consumer storage products haven’t gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation,” Conroy said in the memo. Also to be closed is MyMobile which repackages various AOL services for use on mobile devices.

Probably more likely would be a more traditional media company such as The New York Times Co. or News Corp., both of which have shown interest in hitching their carts to the online bandwagon.

Splitting off the dial-up business is important. With broadband increasingly ordinary, dial-up is going nowhere but down, and selling access to the Internet is an operation most content and advertising companies would be loath to absorb.

The source characterized the cuts as part of AOL’s standard procedures to maintain profitability. Last year, the company cut 50 online properties, including its video download service. As with that change, AOL will provide users options such as partnerships with competitors or archival CDs and DVDs to preserve their data, the source said.

The New York Times’ advertising revenue decreased 17.8 percent in its most recent quarter, the company said Wednesday, “because of weakness in print advertising,” so online advertising could help even if it’s not a miracle cure. The Times also announced a partnership with online contacts management site LinkedIn and runs the About.com site.

Other buyers?
Who else might be interested? Google is showing more signs of interest in diversifying to traditional Internet portal activities such as e-mail, news, finance, and shopping, but it also appears to have the patience to build its own properties using its staggering cash flow. It’s got its troubles, but it completely lacks the odor of urgency that emanates from Yahoo and Microsoft.

There are two obvious candidates: Yahoo and Microsoft. Both have significant cash, significant online operations, and significant troubles keeping up with Google’s rise to prominence. They would love the extra Web site traffic: each page viewed is an opportunity to sell advertisements, and adding all that extra ad inventory expands the clout of the companies’ ad networks during a time of consolidation.

(Credit:
AOL)

Update 8:41 a.m. PDT: A source within AOL has confirmed the authenticity of the memos and a plan Conroy mentioned to sell the Xdrive division.

AOL is likewise paring back some of the blogs it hosts, according to a different memo obtained by PaidContent.org. The DIYLife blog is being shut down,replica watches, according to that report, and bloggers there and at the Unofficial Apple Weblog and DownloadSquad, who are paid by the post, have been told to stop posting until July 31 to cut costs.

But AOL specializes in display ads, the graphical variety that cost advertisers when they’re put on Web pages. Google minted its billions of dollars in revenue chiefly on textual search ads, which are paid only when users click on them,wholesale jewelry, a structure that makes it easier for advertisers to measure performance and justify the expense of ad campaigns.

Hawker’s parents reportedly don’t like the idea of the life-size cutouts, and think police are using them as a way to appease the grieving family since they’ve made no apparent progress in the case in months.

Such a test case is currently underway in Japan as police try to track down Tatsuya Ichihashi, a man wanted in the 2007 murder of 22-year-old British English teacher Lindsay Hawker. Ichihashi barely slipped out of an arrest situation and has been at large ever since.

This is, though, the first time an audio playback solution has been utilized. By pressing a button on the cutout, a person can hear a recording of Ichihashi’s voice, hopefully prompting someone to remember speaking to him at some point. Two cutouts are located at a police station, with others set to go up elsewhere.

This isn’t the first time Japanese police have used cardboard cutouts instead of traditional wanted posters. Cutouts were used to try to track down three fugitive members of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult responsible for the 1995 sarin gas subway attacks in Tokyo, so far unsuccessfully.

Or you could cut through the sea of info by putting the identities right in the public’s face with life-size, talking, cardboard cutouts of the evasive culprits.

Bill Hawker, the father of slain 22-year-old teacher Lindsay Ann Hawker, displays a life-size cardboard cutout of the suspected killer, Tatsuya Ichihashi, during a press conference at the British embassy in Tokyo on Tuesday.

If you’re looking for someone wanted for murder, you could put up a wanted poster at a few post offices. You could set up Web sites with images of the felon or mail people the pictures. These days, however, we’re bombarded with information, and the bulletins could–and most likely would–get lost in the static.

(Credit:
AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

With luck it will work, Ichihashi will be found, and the Hawker family can get some closure. Using technology like this is a very Japanese solution to a common problem, and one we might see here in shopping malls, courthouses, and city halls in the future, though the idea of life sized, virtual killers all over the place might be too much for the American public.

LiMo also announced Monday that 11 new companies have come onboard, including chipmaker Freescale, PacketVideo, and Telecom Italia, bringing the total number of companies involved in the project to 50.

Seven new mobile phones have passed the LiMo Foundation’s certification process, and the group has a few new members to welcome aboard.

These are interesting times for the LiMo Foundation, coming off market leader Symbian’s decision to embrace an open-source model and the expected debut later this year of Google’s Android software. Many of the members of the LiMo Foundation are also members of the other groups, which could make for some interesting discussions as the LiMo Foundation works on future releases of the software.

The new phones, from Motorola, Panasonic, and NEC, are the latest to ship with Release 1 of the LiMo Platform, a Linux-based operating system for mobile phones developed by a consortium of wireless carriers, handset makers, and others. Panasonic and NEC’s phones will be available in Japan through NTT DoCoMo.

There are now 21 phones in the world running the LiMo software, mostly in Asia. But a few, such as Motorola’s Rokr E8, are sold in the U.S. The whole idea behind LiMo is to give handset makers and carriers the basic underpinnings needed to create a modern mobile phone, but with the freedom to customize the look and feel of those phones to suit their desires.

(Credit:
http://www.pocketprotectors.com )

Writing about the ascent of the “alpha geek”–a contradiction in terms?–Brooks cobbles together a series of easy generalizations regularly tossed around as shorthand to explain more complex developments. Call it cliche as socio-economic analysis. To wit:

At last he didn’t peddle past the idea of the techno-elite as a tribe of bad-smelling, social losers with barely enough sense to wipe the snot off their faces. But Brooks’ assignment of a present-at-the-creation date for the “nerd ascendency” to Microsoft and the digital economy in the 1980s is subjective. He could just have easily moved the time line back to around the birth of Fairchild Semiconductor and the myriad successful tech companies later founded by its alumni.

And let’s not forget the likes of Hewlett-Packard and other sundry start-ups, which put Silicon Valley on the map. But that was long before the emergence of the era of 24/7 naval-gazing, so I suppose that doesn’t count as much today.

The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls–Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin and so on.

Over the years, I’ve become inured to David Brooks’ predictable platitudes about politics and culture. He’s been wrong so often on the big story of our times–the war–that I automatically tune out his musings on contemporary culture. But after stewing all weekend about his most recent New York Times column, I’ve got to get this off my chest.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the
iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

The iPhone hordes! Hide the women and children before they get “i-mashed.” Hoo boy. Brooks must have received special dispensation from The New York Times copy desk because this is rhetorical overkill to the point of being ridiculous. If there’s a political darling among the nerd set these days, it’s probably Ron Paul (though Obama definitely has the coolness factor). But defining a generation by the popularity of a commercial product is a Madison Avenue cliche waiting to be born. Maybe the ghost of Lionel Trilling will get so worked up about the cacophony of the blogosphere it will soon haunt the ramparts of Columbia’s Morningside Heights.

Um, sure David. On the basis of the most flimsy evidence, we’re expected to believe that a fundamental societal transformation is under way. I suppose that’s not as over the top as your Candyland declarations cheerleading our way into Iraq. But it’s as equally rooted in unreality.

If anyone has the address of this “geek cohort,” please pass it along. Until then, I think that’s utter hogwash. I’ve watched several generations of college-educated Americans under 30 and beyond and, truth be told, there’s nothing in that history to suggest the current crop’s presumed group sensibility is going to last into middle age. And the only “newly militant geeks” I can point to usually surface when Twitter goes haywire during another of its prolonged brown-outs.

commentary

Software vendors of the world, take note: Red Hat has just demonstrated a truly open-source friendly way to tackle patent lawsuits. In settling a patent lawsuit with DataTern and Amphion Innovations PLC, Red Hat protected its short-term interests in the JBoss software. But it also went much further.

Unlike other patent deals (Read: Every single one that Microsoft has signed), which try to create a walled garden of protection for the signing parties, Red Hat opted to go much broader:

In case you missed that, Red Hat’s policy protects upstream and downstream users of its software, regardless of whether they signed a patent agreement with Red Hat. Red Hat competitors like Novell benefit. Red Hat customers benefit. The open-source community at large benefits.

No, Red Hat isn’t completely out of the woods on patent lawsuits. It is still fighting IP Innovation’s suit, but it at least has shown us how it intends to fight the patent threat to open source (and all software).

“Typically when a company settles a patent lawsuit, it focuses on getting safety for itself,” said Rob Tiller, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP [Red Hat]. “But that was not enough for us, we wanted broad provisions that covered our customers, who place trust in us, and the open source community, whose considerable efforts benefit our business.”

This is how to do a patent agreement. It’s how an open-source friendly company works with patents. Consider it a primer for the rest of us.

At present, the Black Hat CFP lists more than 80 submissions. The submission period will continue through May 1, when final selection will begin.

Moss also hinted that future improvements to the Black Hat site may include online forums.

Approved talks will then be programmed into a dozen topic-based tracks, including Zero Day, Zero Day Defense, Application Security 1.0/2.0, Bots and Stuff, Covert, Deep Knowledge, Forensics & Anti-Forensics, Hardware, the Network, New Hotness, Over the Air (OTA), Privacy and Anonymity, and Turbo Talks. A new track, Un-Track, will be an opportunity for attendees and presenters to talk after a session, and was tested after sessions in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday, Black Hat officials opened their Call For Papers (CFP) site to paid attendees registered for this summer’s Black Hat USA 2008 Briefings and Trainings.

In February, speaking at Black Hat D.C. 2008, director Jeff Moss said his idea is to make the redesigned Black Hat Web site more interactive between speakers and attendees. The first improvement is to give future attendees a voice in choosing what speakers and presentations they’d like to see. Black Hat USA 2008, to be held August 2-7 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, is the first conference to offer this function.

Moss said in an e-mail that the “ratings will help us create the show you want to attend, and even help focus presentations as they’re being created. We are excited to see what kind of information we learn about what interests our delegates and what kind of talks meet their needs best.”

Stone said the greatest business model could be something that no one has thought of yet. he said that an important facet of the company is assuming it doesn’t know where things might go.

CARLSBAD, Calif.–The D7: All Things Digital opening night keynote, often reserved for tech legends like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, was handed over this year to the team behind Twitter. CNET News is offering live coverage, so check back for frequent updates.

7:10 p.m. PT: Back up after some networking problems. To make a a long story short, Swisher and Mossberg have been hammering them on how many people regularly use Twitter as well as about their past company, which specialized in podcasting and got “crushed” by Apple, according to Mossberg and Swisher.

7:44 p.m. PT: Back to business model stuff.

7:25 p.m. PT: Swisher asks them what it is like to be the hot company.

Swisher: What if Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi or someone with Google came up and said “a billion dollars, here you are.”

7:15 p.m. PT: With so many third-party applications for Twitter, Swisher asks them what pieces of technology they plan

“We are going to start trying some stuff,” he said.

Do you Twitter, Swisher asked her mom. Why would I want to that, the elder Swisher said.

“Lucky them,” Swisher’s mom said.

7:35 p.m. PT: What’s the next big thing?

“We’re that creative,” Swisher chimed in.

6:40 p.m. PT: Singer Jill Sobule takes the stage with a song written for Rupert. Kara Swisher comes out to hold the lyrics.

That said, Williams said the company will try some revenue-producing ideas.

After avoiding it for nearly 15 minutes, Swisher has started to ask about a business model, which actually qualifies as admirable restraint in my book.

“Trying to make money from an overvalued microblogging service,” they said. “We’ve got an app for that,” they added, showing a picture of the Twitter fail whale being harpooned with dollar signs.

Williams notes the company invested a year ago buying a search engine. “We plan to work on search a lot.”

He also suggested that they need to find a way to scale their business faster than they have been. “I can’t believe that 45 people is the right number of people… I think that you’ve created the coolest thing in a long time.”

6:47 p.m. PT: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher take the stage.

They thank the audience. “We’ve decided to declare the end of Web 2.0 right here,” Mossberg said, declaring the start of, you guessed it Web 3.0.

They talk a bit about “opportunities for discovery,” but don’t really say anything new on revenue.

Swisher asked about their talks with Facebook and other companies about selling the company. She noted that she has this thing about sustainable companies.

7:18 p.m. PT: So advertising, is that the business model, Swisher asks.

“Crushed, I don’t know,” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said. “We took a different route.”

Mossberg said that the polling D did showed 30 percent of people would be willing to see banner advertising.

She asks if real-time search is the answer. Williams notes that Twitter is just doing search of Twitter itself, not the Web. “It’s a completely different thing,” he said.

“Why would I want people to know what I am doing?” she said. “It’s nobody’s business.”

“We are not doing a TV show,” Williams said, shooting down the rumor du jour. He said that people can build Twitter apps for TVs, much like they do for phones and computers. Or someone can have a TV show with Twitter feedback built-in.

“We’ve doubled since January,” Williams said.

“I think its probably the least interesting thing we could do,” Williams said, but added he said it probably wouldn’t offend him as a user.

The first thing Twitter could do, Williams said, is authenticate it really is Dunkin’ Donuts. Doing that will require manpower on Twitter’s part. “We’ll probably want to charge money for that,” Williams said.

She pressed them on whether they, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have the ability to say no to such an offer. “It doesn’t matter that much because the board and investors are feeling the same way we are,” Williams said.

6:37 p.m. PT: Rupert Murdoch takes the stage to kick things off.

10:00 p.m. PT:
I got a chance to interview Williams and Stone, after their chat. Click here to read about it or check out the video embedded below.

“That is not going to last,” Stone said. “Pretty soon everyone is going to hate us…maybe by the time we are done speaking. The worst thing we could do is get all caught up in this.”

Now they are mocking their presenting companies with iPhone apps that they could benefit from.

Twitter's Evan Williams and Biz Stone (far right) on stage with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the opening keynote Tuesday of D: All Things Digital.

Location-based information is another possibility, they said.

6:58 p.m. PT: As a prelude to the Twitter execs, Swisher interviewed her mom.

“It’s going to be sold for a zillion dollars,” Swisher said.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET)

Mossberg asked if they plan to build their own clients, either for computers or phones.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET)

They went on to mock Microsoft’s search engine, Yahoo’s occasionally foul-mouthed CEO and MySpace.

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher take the stage Tuesday at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif.

“I have a big thing about building sustainable companies too,” Williams said.

7:22 p.m. PT: They are talking more about the possibilities for commercial accounts. After some debate, they settle on using Dunkin Donuts as an example.

Williams spoke more positively about commercial accounts, but reiterated that the company has nothing to add that front.

The next big thing, Stone said is building the company, scaling it to become a larger company.
7:37 p.m. PT: They open it up for questions. Venture capitalist Roger McNamee offers a couple of comments. “Don’t ever do another planned maintenance in the middle of the day on a week day.”

“We’re pretty device agnostic or interface agnostic,” Williams said. “I don’t think we should build a desktop client any time soon. We’ll work on the Web site.”

6:50 p.m. PT: Now they are musing about the econolyse and plugging their
iPhone app.

7:13 p.m. PT: Another thing that was noted while my computer was misbehaving, Twitter has just 43 full-time workers. And even that is a big jump, Biz Stone noted.

“Rupert I met you last year at this conference,” she sang. “Do you remember me. They took our picture. you gave me a warm hug. It was really disconcerting. I’ve never been a big fan.”

Give XP’s hidden administrator account a password
This administrator account is a well-documented security risk in Windows XP because by default it doesn’t have a password, which means anyone can log into your system via this account, change the passwords for all the other accounts, and perform other mischief. To give the account a password in XP Home, restart the PC, press F8 before Windows loads, select Safe Mode, and press Enter.

Tomorrow: Your options for moving Excel data to a Word document.

Still, this back-up administrator account can come in handy if you encounter some problems logging into or otherwise using Vista. To enable it, right-click the Command Prompt on the Start menu (it is likely listed under Accessories), choose Run as administrator, type net user administrator /active:yes, and press Enter. You should see a message stating that the command completed successfully. Type exit and press Enter again to close the Command Prompt window.

To disable this administrator account, follow the steps above to return to the Command Prompt in administrator mode, type net user administrator /active:no, press Enter, type exit, and press Enter again.

Enable Windows Vista's backup administrator account from the Command Prompt.

There’s a much simpler way to make this administrator account visible on the Welcome screen in XP Pro: Open the Tweak UI Powertoy, click Logon in the left pane, check Show “Administrator” on Welcome screen in the Settings window on the right, and click OK. Note that you’ll still have to log into this account and follow the steps above to add a password for it.

Select the Logon option and check this option to add the hidden Administrator account to the Welcome screen in XP Pro.

You probably know about the “hidden” administrator account in Windows XP. It’s the only account on XP systems on which no other accounts have been created.

The only selection will likely be Microsoft Windows XP. With this option highlighted, press Enter again. You’ll see a Welcome screen with an account labeled Administrator. Click this account, choose Yes at the warning, open the User Accounts applet in Control Panel, click the Administrator account again, choose Create a password, enter the new password twice, enter a hint (if you wish), and click Create Password. You may also be asked if you wish to make this account’s files private. Make your selection and click Finish.

Until you add a new account, you zip right to the desktop when you boot the OS, with no stop at the Welcome screen. Once you set up one or more new accounts, the default administrator disappears, though you can bring it back in both XP Home and Pro. (More on this below.)

When you restart Windows, you’ll see a new account labeled simply “Administrator.” The first time you log into this account, Windows will tell you that it’s preparing the desktop before the system’s default desktop appears. Click Start > Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Controls > Change your Windows password > Create a password for your account, enter your password twice, add a hint (if you wish), and click Create password. (If you use Control Panel’s classic view, the settings to create a password are in the User Accounts applet.)

Vista ships with this account disabled, which is not such a bad thing because every user on the PC should have his or her own custom account, even if “every” translates to “one.”

If you own a digital SLR camera or some other device that uses CompactFlash media, now’s your chance to stock up on storage: Adorama has a 4GB Kingston CF card for $0 after a $40 mail-in rebate. Shipping runs $5.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Yeah, there’s a rebate, but at least we’re talking quality media here: Kingston is a top brand, and the company backs the cards with a lifetime warranty. Plus, the rebate itself is through Kingston, not Adorama, so it’s probably a safe bet. If you’re interested, don’t wait: The rebate deal expires Friday (February 8), but I’ll be surprised if the inventory lasts the day.

(Credit:
Kingston)

(Via Gizmodo)

Despite having raised $5 million in venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners and signing a deal with Microsoft, Social.fm never found its niche. It originally started out as a peer-to-peer Web radio and music search site, and CEO Srivats Sampath once made the dubious claim that his company “beat Steve Jobs to the
iPhone” by letting people share music wirelessly through its smartphone-based “M” service.

Social.fm, a music site that was known as Mercora until last year, has officially folded.

Disclaimer: Last.fm is part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.

The shutdown was first reported by GigaOM.

With its makeover as Social.fm, Mercora cut its subscription fee and focused more on social music. But with significantly larger competitors in the space–Pandora, Last.fm, Imeem, and iLike–Social.fm’s traffic tumbled.

“We regret to inform you and apologize for this inconvenience, but Social.fm will be shutting down the system on July 31st, 2008,” a message on the site read.

It works. I couldn't get my own screen grab. This one, which shows the first two lines of an IM chat evaporating, came from BigString's own site.

BigString just released “Self Destructing Instant Messaging,” a plug-in for AIM that lets you convert an ordinary IM discussion into one where the messages literally vanish from the screen moments after they are sent.

Despite the serious privacy the product adds to IM, the interface is overly cutesy. I would like to see an option for a more graphically-straightforward version of the evaporating e-mail.

The tool is useful for terrorists, thieves, and child predators, not to mention teenagers, job-seekers doing their seeking from the office, paranoid government types, anyone in financial services or health care, and possibly reporters’ sources–just to make their jobs a little more difficult.

To initiate a self-destructing thread, you have to start from AOL’s IM client and install the BigString software add-on. Then, from within AIM, you get an option to “Go BigString,” which if the company were not so enamored of its branding, would say instead something useful, like “launch secret IM window.” At any rate, once you select this option, a browser window pops up on your computer, and the person at the other end of your chat is sent a URL to pop up a similar window. The two of you then have your IM talk in this browser-based chat. In the window, the messages vanish from the screen after a predetermined period of time (default is 10 seconds), and they cannot be copied from the screen nor even screen-grabbed before they go.

The company is working on a Meebo-like Web-based client that will support several IM networks, but for now, as I said, you need to use the AIM client to initiate a secure chat with the product.

The service is free, and will be supported, presumably, by disappearing ads.

(Credit:
BigString)

You can, of course, take a picture of the screen to record your chats, or just write things down. But there’s no on-computer way to actually record a BigString IM conversation.

Oddly, the URL the product uses for its disappearing Web chats is not secure (https:), so I am not sure that chat contents cannot be intercepted en route. But at least you’ll know that no records of your IM are being kept on your PC.