neilhoughton.net

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The other two options on this submenu let you view messages as either “Original HTML” or “Simple HTML.” What’s the difference? According to MozillaZine, simple HTML blocks Javascript and remote-image display and interprets only “basic” HTML commands.

My previous post described how to create a quick-and-simple HTML e-mail newsletter. I mentioned that you should view the plain-text version of the newsletter so you could see how it looks to recipients who have HTML mail disabled.

You can also add e-mail addresses to your safe list by right-clicking the address and selecting Junk E-mail > Add Sender to Safe Senders List.

Next, allow HTML mail from sources you trust to appear by default. In both Outlook 2007 and 2003, click Tools > Options > Junk E-mail (under the Preferences tab). Choose the Safe Senders tab and make sure “Also trust e-mail from my contacts” is checked. You can also check “Automatically add people I e-mail to the Safe Senders List.” Other options in this dialog let you add addresses manually and import or export your safe addresses as a .txt file. When you’re done, click OK twice.

But what if you’re on the receiving end? How can you ensure that you see the full-color, fancy-format HTML messages sent to you by people or organizations you trust, but are protected from potentially malicious HTML mail from bad guys? In Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, it’s easy.

Check "Read all standard mail in plain text" in Outlook 2007's E-mail Security dialog box.

Make sure Outlook adds addresses in your contacts to its Safe Senders list.

Customize Outlook’s message view
Start by setting Outlook to view messages as plain text by default. In Outlook 2007, click Tools > Trust Center > E-mail Security. In Outlook 2003, click Tools > Options > Preferences > E-mail Options. In both versions, check “Read all standard mail as plain text” and click OK.

I wasn’t able to find a way to set Mozilla Thunderbird to view HTML mail from sources you trust and plain-text messages from everyone else. You can make the view change globally in Thunderbird by clicking View > Message Body As > Plain Text.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The economic stimulus package has passed the House and is now being debated in the Senate, where it is in danger of being watered down, said Steven Biel, Greenpeace’s global warming campaign director.

The primary purpose of the stimulus package–said to be in the range of $825 billion to $900 billion in government spending and tax cuts–is to jump-start the ailing U.S. economy.

Investments in energy efficiency offer the most economic ways to reduce carbon emissions and save money annually.

Biel said that tens in billions in loan guarantees for nuclear energy and coal-to-liquids would not have a short-term stimulative effect. Also, the ICT analysis found that spending on mass transit infrastructure would have a far lower carbon impact than new construction or even improving existing roads and bridges.

ICT said analysts were able to quantify only about half of the environmental benefits from the stimulus plan, which means that emissions reductions could be more than projected.

In the package is a provision to give $6.9 billion in state and local aid to retrofit municipal buildings to be more energy efficient, which would save $3 billion annually. Similarly, a proposed $2.5 billion to weatherize people’s homes would save $1.25 billion a year in utility bills and cut 87.6 million metric tons of carbon of the lifetime of the program.

But Davies said that it’s clear that the legislation was drafted with an eye toward short-term benefits and longer-term economic development. “This is smart money being put forward to build a clean-energy economy,” he said.

He recommended that the tens of billions of dollars set aside for energy efficiency and renewable energy provisions in the package not be cut. Also, the renewable energy policies, which are based on tax credits, should be altered so that more clean-energy developers can take advantage of it.

If implemented, the measures would cut 61 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from electricity, the equivalent of eliminating power use of 7.9 million homes or taking 13 million
cars off the road.

Studies by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the U.K.’s Stern Review have calculated that the effects of climate change hurt the economy, such as the economic fall-out from floods and droughts.

Greenpeace commissioned climate change consulting firm ICF International to analyze the environmental benefits from the energy and transportation portions of the bill. Overall, the report concludes that, from an environmental perspective, “it’s money well spent,” Greenpeace executives said.

“It’s a real sign that we’re starting to move the world beyond the era of fossil fuels and we’re setting an example for others,” Greenpeace research director Kert Davies said during a conference call with reporters.

The massive government economic stimulus plan now in Congress would reduce pollution that causes global warming and lower energy bills for many Americans, according to an analysis published on Thursday by environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

The report did not focus on the economic impact of the stimulus package, which is the source of debate among policy makers who question whether the spending will have an immediate impact on job creation in the U.S.

There are several other real-time search products. Some are highly specialized, or have weaknesses that offset strengths, but many are still very useful for specific needs. For example:

As far as the big old-school search companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft go: Don’t count them out forever. I am 100 percent sure that they are all looking for ways to set their search offerings apart and have their eyes on some of these companies as acquisition targets. Why do you think there are so many start-ups chasing this problem, after all?

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

OneRiot only searches items that have links in them. This provides a good built-in filter for finding a lot of good info on the Web, but OneRiot won’t find text-only tweets. Save that limitation, it’s a very strong service, with options to switch between ranked and raw results, a special tab for shared video links, and a nice clean design. OneRiot searches Twitter, Digg, YouTube, and other services.

Tweetmeme is a stellar tool for discovering what’s hot on Twitter, since it’s all about the act of re-tweeting. It’s not a great search engine, though. See also DailyRT, which has a better search function, including the capability to search only within the network of people you follow.

Best three real-time search services

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Monitter gives you a multi-column view of real-time Twitter search results (with no ranking), which makes it useful for monitoring several queries at once. Its special trick is that you can easily filter results by the location that Twitter users report in their profiles.

Unfortunately, the Twazzup results page can be overwhelming to read, and it only searches Twitter (excusable for Twitter Search, not for other services).

To set the stage, let’s look at Twitter’s own search service. It’s not bad. It’s simple to use, presents results in a very clear way, and does a good job of balancing users’ needs to see results in real-time with their inability to actually read the stream of tweets flying by: It updates a counter at the top of the page as new tweets that match your search come in, but you have to hit a link to actually see the updates.

Collecta lacks an advanced query builder and I’ve found it’s sometimes slow to get cooking on a query, but it is shaping up to be an extremely useful tool.

Scoopler gives equal weight to what's new and what's popular.

Keep an eye on Itpints, Twitority, Twitalyzer Search, Twitmatic, and Yauba, which gave me uneven experiences but which could improve quickly. Some other engines search Twitter, but aren’t designed to provide real-time results; see Tweefind, for example.

Scoopler also scans Digg, Delicious, Flickr, and Indentica. It earns a spot on my top-three list due to its clear combination of raw and ranked results. (This paragraph has been updated from the original version of the story)

Scoopler is another deceptively simple real-time search product that, like Twazzup, combines raw chronological results with a column of results ranked by popularity. This service doesn’t have access to the full Twitter “fire hose” of data, but it does use additional methods to try to pick up more content than the Twitter Search API provides–especially items that contain links. Scoopler also lets you keep three search queries pegged to your page for quick access (although it doesn’t run them in the background like Collecta does).

Collecta (story) is a new real-time search service that scans Twitter and many other sources, including mainstream media sites (CNN, etc.) and blogs. Its best features are its super-clean and simple interface, and the fact that it lets you run multiple searches at once, so it’s great for monitoring a bunch of topics during the day.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Twazzup: As I’ve said before, Twazzup is a very useful and flexible Twitter search tool that provides almost all of what Twitter Search does itself, plus a few columns of algorithmically generated results such as most influential tweeters on a topic, related photos, and a great list of keywords based on your search results that you can use to refine your query.

Collecta keeps your queries running even when you're not looking at them.

Twitter's own search engine.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Other good real-time search tools

To follow what’s happening in the real world, you need real-time search. Google doesn’t have it (yet). Neither do Bing nor Yahoo. But a number–a large, growing number –of new search services scan Twitter and other sites in nearly real time, and will find for you the absolute latest update from the real-time social Web. I looked at more than two dozen products that search Twitter (and other sources) to find the best tools for uncovering the beating pulse of whatever topic you may be interested in.

CrowdEye gives you stats on your query, and popular links related to it, but the results page is static. It’s useful if you want to see how a search query is trending over time.

Also, Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop, and specialized online Twitter management tools like CoTweet have search functions in them that may fit with your Twitter workflow.

The downside to Twitter search is that it’s dumb, at least for now. Results are only sorted chronologically. There’s no algorithm to give you the most read, most authoritative, most linked-to, or most re-tweeted items. And it only searches Twitter.

Twazzup has a complex presentation, but it combines the best of real-time search with algorithmic results.

There are three services that do a much better job than Twitter Search, and several others are also worth looking at for special cases. Here are the top three:

Twitter Search also has an extremely good advanced query builder, and you can subscribe to search results via RSS.

Topsy does a very good job of helping you find the most influential people on the topic you’re searching for. It ranks results by links to the items in question, which is useful if not exactly real-time. There’s no option for “live” results.

So let’s get this straight. First, it’s a new format. Unless it takes advantage of existing technology like Adobe’s Flash, that means users will have to download some new software or plug-in to access these files. Second, this format is meant to be consumed from your computer. But in my experience, the main reason to put digital music on a computer is in order to move it to other devices. Third–and probably most important–without Apple’s support, the format won’t be compatible with iTunes, the iPod, or
iPhone. You can count the market share of the other players in this field on your fingers. Finally, the entire premise assumes that people aren’t buying complete albums in digital format because they’re not getting the fetishistic experience they used to get–unwrapping the physical object, admiring the cover, reading the liner notes. But the sad fact is that a lot of albums aren’t and never were worth buying, and customers grew tired of paying $18 for one song they liked. (Chumbawamba, anyone?). Digital downloads free us from bundling practices that we never liked in the first place.

Unless there’s more to the story–a tie-up with another player like Sony’s X Series Walkman or Microsoft’s
Zune, for instance–how can anybody possibly think this will succeed?

Unfortunately, Apple’s not playing ball, but is rather working on its own competing format, code-named Cocktail.

Apparently, some folks in the music business still haven’t learned the lesson about Apple and iPod support, as demonstrated by recent reports that the major labels are planning to launch a new format for digital albums. Operating under the working name of CMX (as a friend quipped, “8-track” was already taken), the new format will allow users to browse album art, read lyrics, and so on. Basically, it’s trying to duplicate some of the fun of buying and unwrapping LP records.

Album art is fine, but I’m more excited about the music in the grooves.

Reading through Greg Sandoval’s detailed reporting of SpiralFrog’s demise, I once again found myself wondering–as I did many times during the late 1990s dot-com boom and subsequent bust–how anybody could possibly have thought this was a good idea. Ad-supported music downloads that are incompatible with the
iPod, the device that basically created the MP3 player market? Who would possibly buy such a thing? SpiralFrog seemed like such an obvious nonstarter, I wrote about it once in 2007 and never wasted time revisiting it. But investors were spending serious sums of money on it, right up until the end.

That wasn’t a problem. Bieber had asked Mohen for written authorization two weeks earlier, documents show.

Ever since ad-supported music service SpiralFrog shut its doors in March, former users have complained about receiving a glut of spam.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET Networks)

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET)

Mohen said SpiralFrog had stopped paying employees sometime in November 2008 and that Bieber had worked for an extended period without receiving compensation. On February 26, 2009, Bieber wrote Mohen that he was prepared to take legal action, if he wasn’t paid.

Click the image above to read our story on how a fractured management hurt SpiralFrog

“The users who signed up with SpiralFrog were given the clear impression that their e-mail addresses would not end up in the hands of spammers,” according to a former SpiralFrog employee with knowledge of the sale, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Companies routinely promise to protect privacy and very rarely break it. SpiralFrog kept its promise until the day before shutting down.”

Mohen then gave him rights to use the list “for commercial purposes on a nonexclusive basis” for six months. Bieber forwarded the document to the start-up that purchased the list. In addition, the start-up’s executives met in New York with Mohen, who confirmed that Bieber had the right to sell the list, the start-up’s attorney said.

SpiralFrog CEO Joe Mohen authorized former employee Tim Bieber to sell customer e-mails with no privacy restrictions. Bieber’s address has been redacted from this document.

In two interviews with CNET, Mohen acknowledged that in March, he “licensed” the user data. Mohen told CNET in June that to the “best of my recollection,” the licensing deals complied with SpiralFrog’s privacy agreement. Last week, however, Mohen said the agreement he had with Bieber, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, did not go far enough to protect customer privacy.

“Joe, I’ll be needing something simple in writing from you authorizing me to (be) selling this database as part of remuneration,” Bieber wrote in an e-mail dated March 12, the day before creditors took control of SpiralFrog. “So far, the list is useless without some paper authorizing its resale–even loose paper explaining the nature of how I came across the list…You dig. Let me know ASAP.”

The start-up’s lawyer, who has asked to remain anonymous, said that after wiring $8,500 to Bieber on March 31 to obtain the user e-mail list, the company has not shared or sold SpiralFrog’s user information with anyone, and it has obeyed all laws in acquiring the list. To prove his point, the attorney said that when Bieber first approached the start-up about selling SpiralFrog’s user addresses, executives there wanted proof that he was authorized to sell the list.

“In retrospect, I should have added tighter language to that agreement,” Mohen said a week ago. “In the later days of the company, Tim Bieber was owed money by the company, and I struck an agreement with Tim to avoid litigation. To satisfy the liability, I licensed to Tim the user database.”

A review of SpiralFrog’s documents provided by a start-up that purchased the e-mail list shows that SpiralFrog’s founder and CEO, Joe Mohen, authorized the sale days before creditors took control of the company’s assets on March 13, 2009. Leading up to the sale, Mohen gave the list to Tim Bieber, a former SpiralFrog salesman, as compensation for back wages the company owed him, records show. Mohen did this despite SpiralFrog’s promise to protect users’ privacy.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Toysmart and eventually blocked the sale. As part of a settlement, Disney agreed to purchase Toysmart’s customer information for $50,000 and then destroy it.

In 2000, Arizona Sen. John McCain called for legislation that would prevent bankrupt Web stores from selling their customers' personal information without their knowledge.

Internet users often go to great lengths to protect their e-mail addresses from spammers. The history of the Web, however, shows that for dying start-ups, the temptation is to look upon the data as just another asset to be liquidated. The situation at SpiralFrog is similar to one that occurred when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

Plenty of consumers suspect retailers of secretly sharing their information, but because of the shadowy way in which spammers conduct their business, tracking down the responsible party is nearly impossible. And once an e-mail list falls into the hands of spammers, it can be sold and resold.

It is unclear whether Bieber distributed the list to anyone else.

“SpiralFrog will not share, sell, or trade personally identifiable information collected at the site with third parties, except as described in this privacy policy,” the company said in its privacy agreement. “On a confidential basis only, SpiralFrog may share personally identifiable information collected at the site with corporate affiliates, consultants, or third parties performing a specific service or function on our behalf.”

“Joe, hope (you) got good news from your conference call last night. I file a lawsuit next week naming (SpiralFrog) and 3V (the hedge fund that loaned SpiralFrog money for nearly two years), unless you provide me with funds and a payment schedule by end of week…I’m hanging by (the) ends of my fingernails.”

Documents show the sale of the addresses had nothing to do with a company working on SpiralFrog’s behalf. Indeed, the sale took place weeks after the music service shut down. Mohen acknowledged to CNET News that there wasn’t anything in his agreement with Bieber to prevent the former salesman from selling the list as many times as he wanted, to whomever he wanted. Bieber did not respond to numerous interview requests.

“I’m hanging by (the) ends of my fingernails.”–Tim Bieber, former SpiralFrog salesman, in an e-mail to Mohen

“SpiralFrog seems to have sold their members’ e-mail (addresses) to spammers,” a CNET reader commented in response to a May story about some of the company’s struggles. “I signed up for the service with a unique e-mail address. As soon as the service shut down, I started getting massive amounts of spam sent to that address. Anyone else have this problem? Pretty slimy.”

Nine years ago, CNET News reported that three dot-com failures, including Disney-backed Web store Toysmart.com, tried to auction off customer data the companies once promised never to share, such as credit card data and phone numbers. Members of Congress, including Arizona Sen. John McCain, argued that bankruptcy didn’t give companies the right to break promises to consumers.

It’s still unclear how many spammers obtained a list of e-mail addresses belonging to about 2.5 million registered users of the now-defunct service, as well as how they all obtained the addresses. But it is clear that at least one company obtained the e-mails by paying a former SpiralFrog salesman $8,500, CNET News has learned.

Editors’ note: Go here to read some copies of SpiralFrog’s correspondence.

Authorizing the sale

The sale of SpiralFrog’s user data began sometime around March 27, when Bieber approached executives at the start-up that purchased the list, according to that company’s attorney.

The Excalibur, a new turbine-electric hybrid propelled VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) unmanned attack drone, has successfully completed another test flight after taking on two new onboard computers last week.

The demonstrator model, weighing in at 700 pounds, can hit 520 mph, making it one of the fastest drones around, according to the Aurora. The nearly autonomous flight control system allows operators to concentrate on finding and engaging targets instead of piloting the aircraft, according to the Manassas, Va.-based company. The Excalibur’s jet-borne vertical takeoff and landing and three electric lift fans providing attitude control and hover thrust, make it “runway independent.” After takeoff, it flies like a regular turbojet.

(Credit:
Parvus) The computers were supplied by Parvus Corporation from its COTS DuraCOR 820 line, a rugged, watertight 3-inch-high, 3-pound unit, featuring a conductively cooled 1.4GHz Intel Pentium-M processor and a solid state disk pre-loaded with a Linux or Windows XP Embedded operating system image. The system will handle everything from command and control to situational awareness, according to the Salt Lake City-based company.

There’s no mistaking the mini-jet’s intent. The full scale model is designed to carry a 400-pound weapon load; that would be four Hellfire Missiles.

(Credit:
Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. )

Developed by Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. for the U.S. Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate and the Office of Naval Research, the Excalibur is another radical robo-craft concept vying to fill the military’s burgeoning demand for specialized UAVs.

Indeed, the service can help people find pirated content, but so can a lot of search engines, including Google. The notion that the Pirate Bay would be pulled down because of a single copyright claim is sort of humorous.

The DMCA’s safe-harbor provision is designed to shield Internet service providers from being held liable for copyright infringement committed by users. But the provision has a certain set of requirements that ISPs must meet, and one of them includes promptly removing infringing material.

If that’s all that was needed to have the site kicked off, it would have happened years ago. The music and film industries, as well as other copyright owners, have complained about The Pirate Bay for years.

Google didn’t provide any details about what caused the error but at this point it doesn’t seem to be some kind of orchestrated effort to bring down The Pirate Bay–at least on Google’s part. According to Google, it was just a goof.

Peter Sunde-Kolmisoppi told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagblated that The Pirate Bay’s attorney sent a letter to both Google and the companies that are suspected of being behind the allegations and demanded that the Pirate Bay be returned to Google’s index. The Pirate Bay accused Google of censoring a competitor and of stifling free expression, the paper reported.

Update 3 p.m. PT:
To include an updated comment from Google.

Later, Google updated it’s statement: “The removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request.”

Separately, The Pirate Bay’s site appeared down Friday afternoon at 1:15 p.m. PT, at least in many U.S. areas.

The case is a bit ironic, in that it’s well-established that The Pirate Bay does not store any unauthorized copies of films, music, TV shows, or other content.

Google said on Friday that an error caused the search engine to remove The Pirate Bay from its search pages.

“Google received a (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down request that erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed from the Google search index,” Google said in a statement. “We are now correcting the removal, and you can expect to see Thepiratebay.org back in Google search results this afternoon.”

Support for extensions to customize Chrome, the top-requested feature for Google’s browser, has begun arriving for adventurous users.

The extension-programming interfaces have been changing, and more changes are coming to the user interface. Those who want to start developing extensions should look at the new Chrome extension documentation.

Chrome extensions are written with the same programming technologies as are used for Web pages themselves–HTML, CSS, and the like. Mozilla has a related extension effort called Jetpack under way for Firefox.

“We’re ready for a few more people to start using extensions–the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel,” said Boodman, who earlier in his career developed the Greasemonkey tool that permitted extensive customization of
Firefox.

Work is already under way for some popular extensions, including Yahoo’s Delicious for social bookmarking and Xmarks for bookmark synchronization.

Previously, extensions worked only for those who enabled the feature with a command line switch. Now the feature is enabled by default in the developer preview version of Chrome on Windows, Aaron Boodman, the Google engineer who oversees the extensions work, said in a blog post Wednesday.

Extensions are enabled by default only for Chrome’s Windows users right now. “We’ve also enlisted some help to get extensions up to speed on
Mac and Linux,” Boodman said.

But Twitter’s problems go beyond Internet attacks. In what might seem to some like a concerted assault by the forces of tradition on social media, the Marines and certain NFL teams have reportedly banned Twitter and Facebook.

The denial-of-service attack was apparently the result of a coordinated attack on a Russian activist blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Google’s Blogger, and YouTube. The pro-Georgian blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

Also of note

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“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Hanging with hackers can make you paranoid Compromised ATMs, virus-infected USB drives, badges with built-in microphones and security experts getting hacked–no wonder it’s scary going to Black Hat and Defcon.

•  Hacking the Defcon badges

•  Defcon: What to leave at home and other do’s and don’ts

Photos: Defcon badge inspires hacks

The microblogging tool was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic time-outs (and more outright downtime). Twitter blamed an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack, but initially had little more to say. Social-networking site Facebook has also confirmed that it was targeted by a DoS attack that rendered some of its features slow or nonfunctional.

More headlines
iPhone grabs 32 percent of smartphone profit Despite only having only having an 8 percent share in the smartphone market, Apple walked away with 32 percent of the profits for the industry.

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The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN. Kinda figured with was coming.

NFL teams are also letting players know that they will be offsides if they tweet. At the beginning of training camp, Green Bay Packers players were apparently told that they would be fined $1,701 (the NFL maximum) for texting or tweeting during a team function. The Miami Dolphins do have their own Twitter page, but coach Tony Sparano told players to lay off the tweets in order not to create additional distractions.

“Personal Web sites and blogs that contain sports content are not permitted,” according to the memo. But, it says, “If ESPN.com opts not to post sports related social media content created by ESPN talent, you are not permitted to report, speculate, discuss or give any opinions on sports related topics or personalities on your personal platforms(.)”

•  Twitter warms up malware filter

•  Dead president has a Twitter account

Google launches Chrome gallery Google publishes a collection of 29 skins to customize its browser’s appearance. Mozilla, meanwhile, boasts it has more than 20,000.

•  New Chrome beta reflects bigger Google challenge

•  Chrome gives Google bookmark sync religion again

A Marine Corps order has made the Corps’ feelings known with characteristic subtlety: “These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user-generated content, and targeting by adversaries.”

San Diego to test mobile electric-car charger How do you charge your electric
car while on the go? San Diego Gas & Electric will test device that allows drivers to charge car battery and have usage added to their bill.

•  Tires to match your cellulosic ethanol?

Mac OS X 10.5.8 update is out A new batch of fixes improves security, Bluetooth compatibility, connection issues with AirPort networks, and increases RAW image support.

•  Apple fixes hole with Mac OS X image viewing

•  New Firefox patches authentication security holes

•  Apple censors a dictionary app

Social media site Twitter wasn’t always friendly to users this week.

ESPN employees will also apparently be out of bounds if they post any sports-related content on social-networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook without its permission. The news first came to light Tuesday when Ric Bucher, an NBA analyst for ESPN, tweeted that he had just received an network memo regarding tweeting:

They said that Apple not only tracked many of the most widely-used apps, they tracked many of the shareware apps, as well. If an application exhibited problems, the developers were notified of the incompatibility and were offered help to make it Snow Leopard-compliant.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard has been available for one week, and for the most part, users are reporting very few problems upgrading.

It’s true that Apple did not offer a public beta of Snow Leopard, but it did expand the seed program with this release. Some large and small businesses, as well as individuals were included in the beta program for Snow Leopard. Of course, developers have access to the code through Apple’s Developer Program, to test their apps through the entire process.

While not everyone is thrilled with the way Apple handled the release, it turns out that Snow Leopard is Apple’s most compatible operating system release ever. According to sources familiar with Snow Leopard’s internal testing process, Apple kept an enormous amount of statistics on third-party application compatibility.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems. CNET’s Rafe Needleman found several apps that didn’t work with the new operating system. Apple also posted a list of incompatible software on its support Web site.

BusinessWeek’s Stephen Wildstrom feels that the compatibility problems with Snow Leopard are “widespread but not pervasive.”

Wildstrom says that Apple should have done three things differently: it should have released a public beta; it should have provided a pre-upgrade compatibility checker; and he feels developers weren’t given enough time with the finished code.

Apple began working with developers in June 2008, according to my source. This gave developers the maximum amount of time to check their apps against the new operating system.

While complete data was not available for this story, anecdotal evidence suggests that upgrade problems with Snow Leopard are not widespread.