Hulu plus is a wonderful way to see your favorite TV shows in rich and beautiful HD quality on a variety of hardware. Problem is a ton of people have complained that the $10 a month fee for Hulu plus was too expensive considering how it is LITTERED with product ads. Well, today that changed.

Thanks for being a subscriber to Hulu Plus during our preview. We’ve been hard at work refining our existing applications, expanding the device coverage, and extending our content lineup. We’re excited to announce that today, Hulu Plus is officially launching out of preview to anyone in the U.S. for just $7.99/month.

Since we’re now offering Hulu Plus at a lower price than during the preview, your subscription fee has been lowered to $7.99/month, and on your next billing cycle, we’ll also automatically credit your account with $2 for each month you’ve been a subscriber. In addition, we’re now offering a 1-week free trial for all new subscribers, so we’ll be issuing you an additional $2 credit since the free trial wasn’t in place during the preview.

We’d also like to offer you the chance to earn more free time on Hulu Plus by helping us spread the word about the service. For each friend who uses your referral to join Hulu Plus, we’ll give you two additional weeks for free, up to 20 weeks total. Each of your referrals will also receive two weeks free on their first month’s subscription. For more details on the program and to invite your friends, please visit http://www.hulu.com/profile/referrals.

With Hulu now at $8 a month, will you subscribe?

Today Google announced that it is now giving users the option to turn off GMail’s threaded “conversation” view in its web email client.

And just as an outspoken minority has banded together in unison to declare their distaste of one of nature’s most delicious herbs, some of you have been very vocal about your dislike of conversation threading. So just like you can order your baja fish tacos without cilantro, you can now get Gmail served up sans conversation view. Go to the main Settings page, look for the “Conversation View” section, select the option to turn it off, and save changes. If you change your mind, you can always go back.

The setting is propagating though GMails servers and they expect all users to have the option in a few days.

Count me as one who did not like the threaded view! Are you one of the vocal minority thats turning off the conversation view?

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The MVNO Virgin Mobile, which resells Sprints network has seemingly undercut Sprint in pricing their unlimited plan.

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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Facebook has been the source of a lot of angst among people just wanting to get work done. Who needs to do a company report when you can poke your friends and tell them what you really think of them in their honesty boxes? Luckily, the people at Facebook have added the ability to chat with your friends on the site, which is sure to alleviate a lot of the productivity problems people claim to be having. Just kidding, this thing is probably going to get your fired.

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

I was looking through posts by my Pownce friends today and found someone was complaining about people testing posting from Ping.fm, so I had to check it out. The idea is a simple one — that posting the same thing to multiple sites would grow tedious and ping.fm would help alleviate this issue. Setting up an account is no hassle at all and configuring your accounts is as simple as putting in your login information. Hooking up my Facebook profile took a little more, but it’s just a matter of an application being installed.

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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Apple has released version 3.1 of their Safari internet browser for both Mac and Windows. There are no real visible changes to be seen when you get the update, with the only updates worth mentioning being support for CSS Animations, CSS WebFonts and HTML 5′s audio and video tags. I wasn’t prompted for an automatic update, so I suspect some people may not know. You can run Apple’s software update program to get the update or just download the latest version from Apple’s site.

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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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