In the battle of the social media sites, the two that seem to be everywhere these days are Facebook and Twitter. The hardest part of immersing yourself in any type of social media, be it for fun or for business, is managing it well. With all of the web based options available, most are geared towards managing a single site or account; it’s great to see Seesmic stepping up and making a very user friendly solution to manage multiple accounts for Facebook and/or Twitter.

The Seesmic desktop app is a free cross platform Adobe Air based application. This very usable Adobe Air based desktop application was designed by the same folks that made Twhirl. If you have used the Twhirl app before, you should definitely give the Seesmic app a try. It is a happy medium between having too many features which can make it hard to use, and too little features which would make it not very helpful.

A few days ago, Tavis wrote a great article on How to use SSH X-forwarding to Run Remote Apps. X forwarding is indeed a very handy feature of SSH, so I thought it would be a good time to expand on some of the other great uses for this excellent piece of software (and some related tools). Today, we’ll cover SCP and SSHFS.

To follow this guide, you’ll need the following:

- Client computer with openssh-client installed (for Windows, use Putty)
- Server computer with openssh-server installed (Available on any UNIX-style system)
- A working set of login credentials on the server

There are plenty of sites and programs out there that will let you upload your pictures or videos to one or two of your social media sites, but people like choice. Would 50 supported sites plus email and FTP uploading be enough? That should let you share enough stuff to make even your Kindergarten teacher proud.The whole point of the the social sites is to be social and show people whats going on in your life; ShoZu will help you do this on almost every popular sharing site out there.

When a picture or video and the accompanying text is uploaded, ShoZu will CC your email and/or other destinations you choose. If you upload the same thing to all of your sites, that feature alone will save you immense amounts of time. Below are a couple ways media can be uploaded a couple different ways:

Microsoft has recently announced that they will be releasing a free anti-virus software for their Windows platform. The free software, named Windows Security Essentials (previously codenamed “Morro”) would be available by the end of 2009 at the latest, but for those enthusiasts who can’t wait for the official release, the beta version is already available for download, though it is only available on a limited basis (capped to 75K download and available only for US, Israel, China and Brazil users).

To download the beta version of Microsoft Security Essentials, you need to first login to your Windows Live account and complete a survey. Once that is done, you will be able to download the respective software for your Windows version (Win XP or Vista/7).

At MakeTechEasier, we will take you through the software and show you what to expect from this yet another Microsoft product.

Opera Software recently released a Beta version of its new web browser, Opera Unite. The beta version offers some really cool features that are very new to mainstream web browsing. If you are not familiar with the Opera browsers, you may want to give them a look. They have been making a great desktop product since the mid 1990s; Opera is also the most popular HTML browser for your mobile phone.

Like many modern browser, Opera 10 (Unite) offers tabbed browsing, a download manager, add-ons, speed dials (up to 25 favorite sites shown as a thumbnail), bookmarks with tagging; you know all the basics. Of course there are plenty of ways to customize the look, but the layout of the browser window is similar to that of Safari, Firefox and others.

I’ve been a web-mail kinda guy since a long time ago. I ditched my email clients (Mail, Entourage, and Thunderbird) and prefer to keep my GMail handy on any computer (or sometimes cellphone) that I use, wherever I am. But Postbox might just change my mind.

This free open-source mail client (available for Mac and Windows) combines few great features that can help users manage their emails better.

If you work in a collaborative or public computer environment or share your computer with family members and want to keep individual user data separate, it’s handy to know how to lock your screen and keep your work away from prying eyes.  While the solution is simple, it’s not immediately clear to the new user how to activate.

Locking your screen can take a couple of different forms, but the one I’m going to focus on is fast user switching.  This allows multiple accounts to be “logged in” to your machine with processes running on each account.

Portable applications are modified versions of a desktop application that can be run on a USB drive. iPods, USB flash drives, external hard drives or any other portable device can be used. When the applications are stored on said device, the application can be used on any computer running the proper operating system by being plugged into the USB port on a computer. Most of the portable applications are still operating system dependent, but many have cross platform versions. Many open source and a few OEM applications have a portable counterparts. Numerous utility programs are available in a portable version as well.

For many years, editing digital video in Linux was not an easy task.  Linux users have long sought a nonlinear video editing solution that was both powerful and easy to use.  Kdenlive is the first video editor for KDE to combine both of these critical aspects into one package.  Its easy drag and drop functionality combined with powerful features make Kdenlive the number one video editor for KDE and arguably the most complete, user-friendly video editor for Linux.

A lot of games out there have some form of command prompt, often just for entering cheat codes. You know the type - you hit some function key and a bar drops down from the top of the screen letting you enter commands or codes or whatever else. Well some clever folks have taken that design and applied it to the command prompt in your Linux desktop. You can get a fully featured, skinnable terminal with split-screen views and all at the touch of a button. Yakuake is just such a program. It’s been around for a few years but has remained below the radar for most Linux users.