Qnext

Instant messaging is said to be one of the most popular forms of Internet communication for teens today, beating out email thanks to the lack of spam and instant feedback. With SweetIM adding support for AIM today, we thought we’d take a look at how the IM market is shaping up. And for those who think 90+ IM clients are too many for anyone to handle, we wholly agree: that’s why a good number of these are actually tools to aggregate all your IM buddies in one place. Popular IM Clients ***

Sun Microsystems and Google plan to announce a collaborative effort that some analysts speculate could elevate the profile of the OpenOffice.org and Java software packages. Details won't emerge publicly until Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun CEO Scott McNealy take the stage on Tuesday at a news conference in Mountain View, Calif. But one strong possibility is a partnership that could help shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into Google's. The partners have complementary assets for such a task. Sun has the open-source OpenOffice.org software suite and its close relative, StarOffice. It has Java software, which is well suited for network-friendly applications that run on any Java-enabled PC. As for Google, its products have become daily resources for a vast number of computer users, and it offers a growing suite of software. ***