Earlier this week, Salesforce announced the launch of a new customer service platform called Desk.com. The service is cloud-based and integrates social media as well as traditional channels including email and phone.

WordPress announced the launch of a new WordPress.com Chrome extension which gives you access to a number of WordPress.com features and notifications while you’re away from WordPress.com. This should prove to be pretty handy for a lot of bloggers. Users …

WebProNews had a little Q&A with Kate Brodock, the Executive Director of Digital and Social Media at Syracuse University about content curation on the web. She will be giving a talk on this subject at BlogWorld next week, but we …

Google announced a major refresh of Presentations in Google Docs, adding 50 new features, including transitions, animations, new themes, drawings, and rich tables. “A year and a half ago, we released completely new document, spreadsheet and drawing editors. Google Docs …

Facebook’s new Page Insights have a lot of brands excited, and for a good reason. The upgraded tool not only shows impressions and “Like” data, but it also goes beyond these metrics in order for brands to grasp the full reach of their marketing efforts on Facebook.

Many of us have wondered why Google+ didn’t launch with a search feature. I mean, it’s Google. Still, there are ways to search it that should suffice, at least until Google finally launches an official feature. Developer Andrew Shen, for …

Google announced this morning that it’s releasing a new new web performance tool for webmeisters called Page Speed Service. This follows several other offerings from the company in the page speed realm, including a browser extension, the Page Speed Online …

A couple of months ago, the Internet was blowing up about the hit show American Idol. This hype increased as global popularity engine Likester made predictions for the show through its Likester Idol technology. Likester was able to forecast who would be going home each week based on the number of Facebook Likes the contestants received both before and after their weekly performances.

Google just launched a new Google Labs project called “Swiffy“. It converts Flash SWF files to HTML5. It lets you reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (ie: iPhones and iPads). You may recall a similar tool from …

We all know that there is a lot of noise in social media. This noise is not only a result of more social media adoption by brands, but it is also a result of bad content. Unfortunately, noise impacts both consumers and brands.

Facebook has received numerous complaints over privacy, especially in the past year. Both consumers and privacy organizations have expressed their frustration with the social giant, and in one instance last year, even filed a complaint with the FTC.

With big news from Google Chrome and Firefox, the browser war has been anything but quiet lately. Norwegian browser Opera has also positioned its place in the war with several recent announcements. At SXSW, WebProNews caught up with Charles McCathieNevile, Opera’s Chief Standards Officer, to talk about the company’s recent efforts.

Last month, we introduced a tool called SocialDitto. The idea was to offer a tool that would do for Facebook posts what Blackbird Pie did for Tweets. It simply lets you embed posts into articles, blog posts, or any webpage. …

With the midterm elections taking place tomorrow, Google is highlighting some tools it offers to help voters make their decisions. This is not a new concept for Google, but it’s one that many may still find useful.

Google’s Election Center is available to users as an "experimental" service. It lets election officials provide data directly to Google for use in search tools. 

There’s a new kind of personalized, social search available that may trump any effort we’ve seen from Google to date in this corner of search.

Greplin is a new site that searches through "all your online data in one place, really fast" – or at least your the online data you have in the services that it supports, which is likely far from all of your online data. Still, the concept behind the site is pretty noteworthy, and it will likely add more services as time goes on.

Visa has released a new online shopping tool called Rightcliq which lets users bookmark products on shopping sites, add notes, and add them to a "wishspace". The company touts it as a tool that improves the way you browse and compare products.

American Express has launched a new search marketing tool for small businesses via its OPEN forum. The tool, powered by Clickable, is called SearchManager, and lets business owners manage paid search campaigns across Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Facebook ads from one dashboard.

As Google continues its push to get businesses using Google Apps, the company has now introduced the "Go Google Cloud Calculator". This is a tool that lets you enter your company’s name, tell it how many employees you have, and gives you Google’s estimates for how much money you could save, how much more productive you will be, how much more storage you will get, how many hours you will save, etc.

Google has put together a one-minute guide to using its Search-based Keyword tool. The tool was launched just over a year ago in beta. It lets paid search advertisers see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their site.

Google has released a new feature for its Website Optimizer tool, called Experiment Notes. The feature is designed to help users include documentation as part of their testing. For any experiments, users can now add their own annotations.

If you are unfamiliar with Website Optimizer, it’s a free tool from Google that webmasters can use to increase conversions by making adjustments to design and text elements to see what works.

Oddcast has released an interesting new audio status-updating tool for publishing your voice to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. You may recognize the company from its SitePal service, which provides animated characters for websites.

The new tool called AudioPal lets users create 60-second personal voice messages that can be posted to their personal web pages, blogs, and social networks.

If you use Firefox, you are no doubt aware that there are many add-ons that can enhance your browsing experience. Many of these can make your online life a whole lot easier and save you time. Following are some that I have found particularly useful. Which do you like? Tell us.

1. Fire Gestures