Today Virgin Mobile USA announced a new unlimited calling plan. The Totally Unlimited plan, which will be available beginning July 1, will give customers unlimited nationwide calling with no roaming or other fees for $80 per month. Add $10 to also get unlimited text messaging, picture messaging, instant messaging, and email.

Best of all Virgin does not require annual contracts, Hey Sprint – You watching this!!!!!

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When the chat feature first launched one of the first things my less tech-savvy friends expressed was that a lot more time was going to be wasted on the site. While I see their point I can still see the use of it. For one thing, it means you can now chat with the people you’ve added on Facebook but aren’t quite comfortable with yet to give them your actual IM accounts. C’mon, you know you have those friends!

Since everyone on your friend list are supposed to be your friends there isn’t any way to block certain people just yet, at least I didn’t find any way. You can a “go offline” but all it does is disable your ability to chat with anyone, so if you wanted to chat with some people and not with others you’re out of luck for now.

The chat can be popped out which is nice, meaning you can have the chat without actually being on the site itself though there aren’t any sounds or distinctive visual cues to tell you there is a new message when the window is minimized. Annoying for me when I want to get people’s messages, but a blessing for those who want to check for messages on their own time. Personally it just means I’ll be checking for a new message every 5 seconds, and no, I’m not nearly as popular to warrant such actions.

Facebook, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Pownce, Google Reader, Socialthing, Friendfeed, UNEASYsilence. I think the internet officially hates me. When will I ever get time to go outside?

Google Docs is finally allowing users to edit documents offline using Google Gears. Initially documents alone will be editable and spreadsheets will be readable with presentation documents to get similar functionality down the road. Online word editors like Google Docs, while useful, still have the stumbling block of people not being able to get their work done without an internet connection.

Interestingly enough, competitor in this space Zoho has had offline functionality with its word-processing application for a while now, Zoho Writer. Is this welcome news to anyone?

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dotSyntax, the Instant Messaging startup behind my favourite IM client Digsby today announced their public beta launch meaning no more invite codes needed, just to go to their site and download the program if you want to try it out. Along with the public beta, a major update will be pushed out with the program having the following features.

• One combined buddy list for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts with duplicate contact merging, tabbed conversation windows and two way SMS from within the IM window

• New e-mail alerts for Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts, as well as, an Inbox Snapshot view that allows users to perform actions like “Mark as Read” and “Report Spam” with one click

• Real time newsfeed for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter friend events like status changes, new photos, and upcoming birthdays, along with alerts for events like friend requests, new messages, and group invites

• Personalized look and feel with various application skins, conversation themes, and extensive buddy list layout options

So, no invite code is no excuse not to try my favourite IM right now! Tell ‘em Evan from UNEASYsilence sent ya!

Try It

After configuring my Facebook, Pownce and Tumblr accounts it was time to test it out. You can post from the site directly and by default, messages go to all services you enable which can be good and bad. While I may have no problem blasting the same thing to Pownce, Jaiku and Twitter, I really classify my Facebook status updates as being totally different and personal, not to mention something I post for Tumblr may end up being too many characters for Facebook. Also with Facebook, messages still stupidly have your name at the very beginning of messages, so posting “I had a great chicken sandwich for dinner.” still gives you “Evan I had a great chicken sandwich for dinner.” It’s pretty annoying for the OCD grammar Nazis like myself who want Facebook status updates to appear in proper English.

The site does accept what it calls “triggers” which is a way to post to specific services using a code to prefix a message, such as @fb to update just Facebook and none of your other services. So, using the @fb trigger and editing your messages to accommodate your name at the beginning of updates is one workaround to the problem mentioned in the paragraph prior.

Sure, the site is trying to save you time by letting you post directly to different services from their site, but what if you don’t want to be on the ping.fm site at all? You can email updates to a personalized email address you get with your account instead. Even better, I used the AIM bot, adding the contact to my AIM buddies in Digsby, sending the verification code in an IM and instantly I could update Tumblr, Pownce and my Facebook status from within an IM chat. Given the time it would save to go to the different sites individually, this is a welcome addition to my work flow. My only suggestion/problem is that I would really like to edit the “triggers” to whatever I want, allowing me to make specific triggers to go to only Tumblr and Pownce as well as editing the triggers that go for Jaiku, etc.

Speaking with Sean over at Ping.fm I’ve been told that we can look out for an Adobe AIR application, as well as possible Mac and Vista widgets. (I’ve had nothing absolutely confirmed.) Even if they do get around to doing these things, I’m so far happy with just the IM bot but with Pownce I can only post messages, not reply to messages or see other posted messages, all things I can do with the official Pownce AIR client.

If you’re into the Jaiku/Twitter/Pownce/No Social Interaction thing you may want to give this a try, and we got you covered. When signing up, use the code ‘uneasysilence‘ to get into the beta. Invites are limited, so act fast and let us know what you think in the comments.

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Though YouTube’s popularity is undeniable, the video quality has been lacking compared to other services. Revver and Vimeo come to mind. Well, YouTube is upping their game. Going to your Accounts Page in YouTube allows you to say if you want viewing videos to be in higher quality, lower, or let YouTube detect automatically. On a video’s page you’ll see the option to watch videos in higher or lower quality and the difference certainly is noticeable. YouTube seems to be on a roll this week, earlier announcing the release of new APIs.

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Hulu, the online video service offering videos from more than 50 content providers, including FOX, NBC and others launches today. After being in beta for 18 weeks, the site is now open to all. The downside is that you can only view the shows if you’re within the US, unless of course you discovered some sort of way around it. A circumvention if you will. I’ve been playing around with the site and have to say I am pleased. Watching full episodes of The Office, The Simpsons and Family guy is nice, knowing it shouldn’t be pulled down and the video quality is decent as well. Thoughts?

Try It

Quite a bit of stuff so I tried to get what was important. Check out live coverage by Engadget and Techcrunch if you like wading through all the info.

*made up the free money thing to get your attention