Net Neutrality: Measurement Lab Checks if Your Connection is Being Throttled
Google and a host of net-savvy partners have opened up a free set of web tools to help anyone determine if their net connection is blocking or throttling BitTorrent or otherwise limits their bandwidth.
At the moment, three tools are available—when their servers aren't jammed up, and they seem to be pretty popular at the moment. The Glasnost tool determines how your ISP is handling BitTorrent traffic and gives a readout on whether it's being denied, throttled, or otherwise impaired. Network Diagnostic Tool covers other problems that might affect your upload or download speeds. And the Network Path and Application Diagnosis tries to reveal the routing, network tools, and other "last mile" issues that affect net performance.
The tests are fairly simple, and each seems to require a working Java plugin to run. The Glasnost test, for instance, creates a fake BitTorrent stream between your connection point and the test's servers, then monitors what happens to the packets.
That's one reassuring block of HTML.
It doesn't take a senior analyst to see that Google is looking to shine some light on internet providers' moves against net neutrality, such as Cox Communications' "time sensitivity" throttling. In fact, the next two products due out of the "Measurement Lab" are DiffProbe and NANO, which will tell a user whether certain types of traffic, for specific applications or users, are getting priority over others. The side effect of the net giants' tussle, though, are some handy tools that (should) tell the user exactly why they are or aren't getting the speeds they paid for.
You can find a lot of great stuff on the bleeding edge, and 
Does exactly what it says, through Firefox's right-click menu. When you come across a link to a Word doc, PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet, or pretty much any file Google's online office suite can handle, right-click and hit "Open in Google Docs" to send it there. You can get a more fully-fledged handle on web documents, with support for the competing Zoho suite and online editors like Picnik, from the 
This one's great if you run into a lot of shortened URLs, especially 
Another real simple, real useful Google product tweaker, though more universally helpful. With 
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When you want to quickly compose and fire off a message with Gmail, you've got a lot of options. Chances are none of them are as fast as gCompose.
Need to do a little online detective work? Track down anyone from long lost schoolmates to the new friend whose number you've lost with this assortment of powerful people-search engines. Photo by 
Pipl is tenacious people-search engine. Pipl's claim to fame is the depths to which it can plumb the "deep web" to find information. When you search for a person using Pipl, you're not limited to a simple white pages search. Pipl scours databases and indexes that standard search engines normally don't touch. If it's there to be found, Pipl returns all manner of things about the person you're searching for, including blog entires, photos, publications, donations on public record, profiles on social and business networking sites, and other overlooked sources. Pipl supports searching by name, username, phone number, and email.
Specialized search engines you say? Heresy! Many readers eschewed fancy people-search engines—many of which often incorporate Google results into their own—preferring instead to get their hands dirty at the source. With more and more people cultivating an online presence, it's easier than ever to find people with broader search engines like Google. One of Google's strongpoints is that you can use additional search parameters that are unavailable at the other search engines. For example, it's impossible to search for "John Smith classic car restoration" to find an old car-obsessed friend of yours when all you can type in is Last Name, First Name. Additionally, Google can sometimes find incredibly obscure references to a person. (I once tracked down an old classmate through a single reference on an out of date softball team roster found through Google.)
Facebook is principally a social network, but its the first stop for many people searchers due to its widespread popularity. By Facebook's count, 150 million active users frequent the site, about a third of which are in the United States. Even if you take those numbers with a grain of salt, that's still an enormous number of people who have put themselves out there to be found. Therein lies the strength of looking for someone on Facebook: By joining the service, Facebook users have essentially put up a big sign that says, "Find me!"
Spock is another people-search engine that relies on multiple sources and aggregation to cull as much information as it can about a subject. In addition to indexing information from various news sites and social networks, Spock has a variety of notifications options available. Like 123people (below), Spock supports email notifications of changes to a person search, but you can also subscribe to an RSS feed for your search.
Like the 
