The French parliament has said au revoir’ to Microsoft, according to a Yahoo News report:

After plenty of development, testing, and feedback, Yahoo has declared its Maps service ready to shed the Beta moniker and stand on its own.

ChaCha, which describes itself as “the world’s largest live search engine,” is now available in beta form. The interesting feature is the defining one – ChaCha can supply “a human guide who assists you in real-time via an instant-message chat.”

Last week, I commented that I think the release version of Internet Explorer 7 should still be regarded as a beta. I’ll be commenting more on that in today’s episode of the FIR podcast.

Techcrunch – Blog Archive – Facebook Beta Testing Social Bookmarking – Marshall Kirkpatrick has a post out saying that students with Facebook accounts from Berkeley and Stanford have been given access to a new bookingmarking feature on Facebook.

Microsoft has released another fine piece of software, Windows Defender for Windows XP. Some new features the final release has over the most recent beta:

A new beta version of the popular FeedDemon RSS aggregator for Windows is now available.

Adobe announced the release of the Flash Player 9 for Linux.

New Atlanta, recently released Beta 1 of version 7 of thier BlueDragon CFML application server.

Office 2007 has entered the RTM process, and should actually be released to manufacturing in the next few weeks, according to an email from Microsoft.

I had dinner with Ajit Jaokar, CEO of Futuretext, a publishing company that publishes tech books like Mobile Web 2.0 and Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger (he writes a VoIP blog over on ZDNet, but also has political blogs and other blogging jobs over on Weblogs Inc, among others).

It’s more than just a facelift, as Google took the existing Groups service that grew from its long-ago purchase of Dejanews into a more Googly look with an expanded set of features.

Their mobile web services available in the United States and the United Kingdom will see the beta launch of sponsored search results appearing on mobile handsets.

Yesterday, I saw some new features on MapQuest, including draggable maps.

Widgetbox, an online directory for syndicated web “widgets,” or small interactive services that can be embedded onto a webpage or blog, formally announced its launch on Monday, after completing a private and public beta.

Microsoft released a public update yesterday to the Office 2007 beta 2 suite of applications.

Yahoo has some 80 million users in the United States, and the next time they login to check their email they will be offered the opportunity to switch to the Outlook-like Yahoo Mail Beta version.

Here’s a roundup of a few Windows Vista news items:

Do you remember Microsoft FrontPage?

Windows XP users, download and enjoy beta 2 of Windows Media Player 11, just released by Microsoft.

Microsoft opened up its Windows Live OneCare Family Safety beta this week. Parents can sign up to test the service designed give them more control over what their children see and do on the Internet.