One of the best things about Twitter is that most of the best things about Twitter have been invented by its users. Such as the idea of addressing other people by using their @names and sharing their tweets by retweeting them. Little by little, Twitter formalizes these inventions as part of the service, and a new blog post by Twitter cofounder Biz Stone reports that retweeting is going to become a true feature.
Right now, you retweet by copying someone else’s tweet and affixing “RT” and that person’s twittername at the front. Sometime in the next few weeks, tweets will get a Retweet icon you can click which will insert the original tweet (along with a “retweeted by” tag) in your twitterstream, where your Twitter followers will see it even if they don’t follow the person who Tweeted it in the first place.
It sounds simpler and more elegant than the current, made-up-by-users approach. It also sounds like it’ll have some major implications for third-party Twitter clients and services. Twitter says it’ll work on communicating these implications to developers in the coming weeks.
Assuming Twitter pulls it off smoothly, it’ll be nice to see retweeting formalized. I wonder what Twitter’s users will come up with next?
The Applesphere seems to have stopped debating whether there’s going to be an Apple tablet or not. There even seems to be some consensus about form factor and price range. What’s left to toss around? Release dates. The question seems to boil down to this: Fall/Holiday 2009 or 2010? (As you may recall, we 
For today’s T-Poll I’m going to ask you to play Microsoft pundit. (Don’t worry, it’s easy–or at least it’s easy to be just as accurate as the folks who get paid big bucks to do it.)
Google’s Gmail has trained a lot of us to think of an inbox as a place with near-instant access to all our e-mail. reMail–an e-mail search application for the iPhone that’s 
ReMail works with Gmail and IMAP e-mail accounts, and begins by downloading all your messages. (It’s estimating that it’ll take about seven hours to download about 13,500 messages from my Gmail account via Wi-Fi.) It compresses messages and trips out formatting and graphics, so a boatload of mail doesn’t take that much space: It estimates that those 13,500 messages will occupy about 88MB, which is practically a pittance on my 32GB phone. And reMail says its search is five times faster than Mail’s.
I’m happy to report that I’m working with my pals at PC World on some upcoming coverage of Windows 7. One of the great big questions about Win 7 is, of course, whether it’ll convince Windows XP holdouts who avoided Vista (and who are legion) to upgrade. Only one group knows the answer: Windows XP holdouts! So we’ve put together a survey for people who still use Windows XP as their primary operating system. (Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Windows 7 yet–we still have some questions for you.)
Like 5Words? 
Microsoft has announced that the 
The business unit within Microsoft responsible for Mac apps (which Microsoft likes to call the MacBU) is as old as the Mac itself, and it’s never behaved like it had been fully assimilated into the Redmondian Borg. Office for the Mac has long been a distinctly different product from its Windows counterpart–sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. One of the most striking differences has been that Office for the Mac has never offered Outlook; instead, it includes Entourage, a sort-of-like-Outlook, sort-of-different application that got great reviews when it debuted but which has also suffered from iffy compatibility with Outlook and Exchange. It’s also faced increasing competition from within OS X itself, as Apple has beefed up its Mail and iCal apps (and moved to build compatibility with Microsoft’s Exchange server directly into Snow Leopard, the imminent OS X upgrade).
I’m still curious whether Office 2010 for Mac will include integration with the Office Web Apps, and whether it’ll adopt a full-blown version of Office for Windows’ Ribbon interface. (Office 2008 for Mac has a sort of halfway-there version of the Ribbon.) Microsoft didn’t say anything about these questions today. Me, I’d vote for a Mac Office that bore at least somewhat more resemblance to the Windows one, not just for consistency but because Office 2007’s interface is superior to that of Office 2008.
For years, the 
Early this morning, Best Buy had a deal on its site that was not merely a best buy but a mindbendingly, impossibly cheap one: a 