Imagine that you're at home one night and want to send a message to your partner or roommate or someone else, but you really don't want to get out of your chair, and you don't want to yell loudly enough for them to hear you. So pick up your iPhone, but you don't want to send an SMS or call them. Surely there's an app for that...

Actually, there are several; some better than others. Take Texter for example. For 99¢ you can send messages back and forth with other people on the same Wi-Fi network. Sounds promising, right? After all, SMS costs are ridiculously expensive, so why not pay a $1 fee to buy an app to send messages back and forth.

The idea isn't bad, but the implementation is. First of all, Texter only works over Wi-Fi. And not just any Wi-Fi. Both users must be on the same Wi-Fi network. But maybe everyone in your family has an iPhone or iPod touch, so you're still willing to give it a try. Well, don't open your wallet just yet, because there's one more detail that we need to mention -- Texter doesn't support push notifications. Since Apple doesn't allow third party apps to run in the background, the end result is that you can only communicate with other Texter users if they already have the application open on their iPhones.

I can't even imagine a "use case" for this application. Who would sit around with their iPhone on, running an application in the hopes that maybe someone in the same home/office with the same application might want to chat with them? It simply is never going to happen.

If you want to avoid SMS charges, but still want to send quick messages to other iPhone users, why not use AOL's free (ad-supported) AIM iPhone app? It works over EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi, supports push notifications, and also allows you to connect with a slew of other people besides iPhone users.

Maybe you don't like AIM or SMS. Maybe you really like the idea of having an iPhone app that is quick and easy and doesn't require any login or giving away your cell phone number (like SMS does). If that's the case, checkout the 99¢ Ping! app for iPhone. It also works over EDGE, 3G, and Wi-Fi and supports push notifications. You'll also have that healthy self-satisfaction of knowing that you are only communicating with other red blooded iPhone/iPod touch users.

I'm sure there are a slew of other alternatives to SMS for the iPhone that work over EDGE/3G or Wi-Fi and support push notifications. Tell me about your favorites in the comments (bonus points for including an App Store link).

Reader John sent us a fascinating little trip back in time (thanks!) he took on his blog: he found a 1996 copy of MacUser about all of the amazing applications available on the Internet, and decided go look at what had become of them. Sadly, most of them have gone missing, but the old names sound familiar: CU-SeeMe for messaging, Lycos for search, and Happy Puppy for gaming. It's almost hard to believe there was a time before Skype, Google, and Steam, but 1996 was it.

Even Apple has moved on -- their "/documents/product-support" page, something you'd think would have survived all this time, is gone. It's amazing the turnover the Internet's gone through in just 10 years. It's hard to believe that in 2029, something like Google.com will be retaken by a domain squatter as everyone's moved on to the next big thing.

But then again, things are different these days -- Google has obviously successfully figured out how to monetize their free service, and most of the original web companies went down because they could pull that off. But you never know -- a site you visit all the time might be completely changed or gone ten years from now.

Location based social-networking is a concept that has been bouncing around the net for a while now. The idea is to make getting together and interacting with people easier by sorting users by--or simply displaying--their geographic proximity to you. Services such as dodgeball have become hugely successful in mobile markets, and Meetro is attempting to do the same thing for desktops and laptops. With Meetro, you create a buddy list, and are alerted whenever someone on that list comes within a user specified distance of your current location. I'd get into the magic internet voodoo that Meetro uses to figure out where you are, but their FAQ page is currently down.

Although Meetro is the first location-aware instant messaging service that I know of, I can't see it taking off. My issues with it are two fold; I have to create a whole new identity to use the service, and if I want to know where my friends are, I have to get them to do the same. Although the interface of the program has come a long way from when I first saw it in its early beta stages, its still not nearly as user friendly or intuitive as I would like. Ideally, I'd like to see a plug-in for iChat or Adium which allows me to see the location of my regular AIM/MSNIM/YIM buddies when I mouse over them.

In any case, Meetro is certainly an interesting concept, and worth checking out, even if only to get a taste of what surely will be many similar services to come.

Via MacNN

Hawk Wings has tracked down some details on a tantalizing v2.0 update to Thunderbird, Mozilla's email client. New features at the top of my list are message tagging, a tabbed message viewer and a built-in notification system. It's great to see more developers bringing the tagging paradigm to email, as Scott Morrison has done with his MailTags plug-in for Apple's Mail.

Check out Mozilla's Thunderbird development blog for the full (and lengthy) post of what's coming in this major release for Thunderbird, including plenty of Mac-specific features and fixes.