Editor’s Note: This story is excerpted from Computerworld. For more Mac coverage, visit Computerworld’s Macintosh Knowledge Center.

iPad Family Complete Coverage »

Anyone who has spent any amount of time with an iPad will know that—like all computers—it sometimes doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. It could be a frozen screen, a system that overheats, or a refusal to recharge. The result is the same: You have to figure out what’s wrong with it and how to get it back on the straight and narrow.

A major problem is that the iPad doesn’t come with a detailed manual or any diagnostic software to figure out what’s going on under the skin. The downloadable user guide (available as a PDF) and Apple’s support site are good starting points, but even those resources are sometimes not enough when you have a possessed iPad.

What follows are some useful troubleshooting routines for the things that most often go wrong with an iPad, along with several tips and shortcuts for how to get the system to act the way you want it to. These can help when the screen is unresponsive or when you have trouble synchronizing your iPad to a computer.

In many cases, the fix resides in the iPad’s Settings page, which is where all the systemwide configuration choices are made. There are limits, however, to what you can do. For example, forget about changing the battery, adding memory chips, or recalibrating the touchscreen. You need to send your iPad back to Apple for such repairs.

With the tips, tricks, and solutions that follow, your iPad will run a lot smoother, and you’ll get your work done a lot quicker.

Troubleshooting tricks

Wi-Fi connection problems

A Wi-Fi network is the only free way to connect an iPad with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, there are many potential connection snags. The iPad’s Wi-Fi range is more limited than that of most notebooks—the iPad has a maximum range of about 65 feet, while most notebooks manage over 100 feet—so if you’re having problems, getting closer to the router will help.

If your connection gets dropped repeatedly, try renewing the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) lease. Go to the Network section of the Settings page, click on Wi-Fi, and then tap the little blue arrow on the right side of the row for the network you want to use; click on the Renew Lease button to refresh the connection with the router.

If that doesn’t help, use static IP addressing instead of DHCP. Create an IP address that isn’t being used by the router—it will have the prefix 192.168.1.xxx. (I generally pick a number at the top of the router’s range to avoid conflicts with DHCP IP addresses.) In the Settings page, click on Static and enter the address in the IP Address field.

Power problems

Most iPads get between seven and eight hours of on-and-off use per charge. Not getting close to that? Here are a few things you can do to keep it going and going and going:

* Dim the screen. Go to the Brightness & Wallpaper section of the Settings page to turn off auto-brightness and then set screen brightness to between half and three quarters.

* Deactivate Bluetooth. If you’re not using a wireless keyboard or speakers, turn off Bluetooth by going to the General section of the Settings page, clicking on Bluetooth, and tapping the switch to Off.

* Turn off the modem. If you’re not using the 3G modem, you can turn it off by tapping the Cellular row on the Settings page and then tapping the switch to Off.

Back to Square One

Every so often, for no particular reason, an iPad will lock up and stop responding to touch. Most of the time, that’s caused by a software problem, and there are three things you can do to help fix it:

* Close the active application by pressing the Home button so that the system returns to the Home page.

* If that doesn’t help, try a soft reset by pressing the Sleep/Wake button for about five seconds until the Power Off slider appears. Run your finger across it to shut the iPad down. When it’s off, press the Sleep/Wake button to start it up again, without the offending app running.

* Still having problems? It’s time to restart the system and start fresh. This time, press the Sleep/Wake button along with the Home button. The screen will go dark, and then the Apple logo will appear. The iPad should start up and—hopefully—run fine.

No charge

The most common complaint that I’ve heard about the iPad is that, after plugging the USB connection cable into a computer, the battery doesn’t charge.

The problem is that the ports on many USB hubs, smaller notebooks and even some desktops aren’t powerful enough to charge the iPad while its screen is on. The battery icon in the upper right corner of the screen shows Not Charging rather than the “+” symbol inside the battery.

This is an easy problem to fix. If you don’t want to use the AC power adapter that came with your iPad, you can plug it into a powered USB hub, which should work.

The heat is on

The iPad’s lithium polymer battery is very sensitive to temperature swings—it doesn’t like environments colder than 32 degrees or hotter than 95 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, if you’re out in the sun for too long, the system runs the risk of overheating and automatically shutting down.

About the only thing you can do in that case is let the device cool down and then restart the system. On warmer days, use your iPad in the shade and never put it in a hot place, like the back shelf of a car.

And if you’ve just come in from the cold, you may want to let your iPad warm up a bit.

Sync or swim

No iPad is an island. It needs to periodically connect to a computer to update its software, load new apps and get fresh data. But there are potholes on the road to synchronization.

To begin with, if the iPad has a nearly dead battery, it won’t connect with a computer, so make sure it’s charged.

If the host computer doesn’t recognize the iPad, the result will be a major snag in the syncing process. The cause is often the AMDS (Apple Mobile Device Support) software that connects the two computers. Often all it needs is a restart.

If you’re syncing your iPad with a Windows PC, go to your Control Panel and open Administrative Tools/Services/Apple Mobile Device. Click to stop and then to restart the service.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, you may need to do something that’s more involved: Uninstall and reinstall AMDS and iTunes from the host computer. Simply go into Control Panel and do a normal uninstall; when you download and install the current version of iTunes, a fresh version of AMDS will be included.

For Mac owners, Apple suggests skipping the restart and simply replacing AMDS. The process is a little more involved on a Mac, but it follows the same idea: Get rid of AMDS and iTunes and then reinstall.

Use the Mac’s Finder to locate iTunes and put it in the trash to uninstall it. In the Extensions Library, find the AppleMobileDevice.kext file and trash that as well. In the Library Receipts section, find AppleMobileDeviceSupport.pkg and put it in the trash. Empty the trash and restart the system; then download and reinstall the latest version of iTunes. (If these directions don’t work for you, then there are support documents on the Apple Website that can help.)

Unresponsive screen

The iPad’s touchscreen is its main interface, and it gets a lot of use. Chances are that sooner or later it’ll get dirty enough to be nearly unusable. Time to clean.

Stay away from abrasive or ammonia-based window cleaners. Your best bet is to gently wipe the display with a damp paper towel. I also keep a soft microfiber cloth handy to clean the screen every few days.

Backtrack

One of the most useful things about the iPad software is that whenever it syncs with its host computer, the entire system is backed up. If the system is acting weird, try returning to the last synchronized data.

Plug the iPad’s USB cable into the host computer, and the iTunes software should automatically start. Click on the iPad on the left side of the computer’s screen and then select the Summary tab.

After clicking on the Restore icon, you’re ready to reload your iPad with data. Use “Restore from the last backup” so that all your music, videos and apps will return during your next synchronization.

If that doesn’t work, click on “Set up as new iPad” to start from scratch—although you will lose anything you’ve done or bought since your iPad came from the store.

The whole process will take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour, but you’ll notice that the app icons are now arranged alphabetically (rather than in the order they were installed).

Black screen

If your iPad’s screen goes black after about five minutes of inactivity and no amount of screen tapping gets it back, it’s probably not broken—just sleeping to save power so that the battery lasts longer. Some users find this annoying, but it’s easy to change.

You can adjust the length of time the screen stays on before the system goes to sleep.

Go to the Settings page’s Auto-Lock screen and adjust how long you want the screen to stay on before it goes blank—the choices are 2, 5, 10 or 15 minutes. If you like, you can turn this feature off altogether for an always-on system (although this will, of course, decrease your battery life).

Useful tips

Lock down

Are you afraid that the contents of your iPad might fall into the wrong hands if it’s stolen or lost? You’re not alone.

As a simple security measure, you can set a passcode that must be entered in order to unlock the machine.

Go to the Settings page, open the Passcode Lock section, and tap Turn Passcode On at the top of the page. Type in the four-digit code you want to use, type it in again, and you’re set. The downside is that you’ll need to enter the passcode every time you wake up your iPad—but at least your data will be more secure.

To be doubly safe, you can turn on the Erase Data switch (located on the same page) so that the system will erase its entire contents after 10 unsuccessful attempts to enter the passcode. Just make sure you have a good backup on your host computer to rebuild your iPad if its contents do get erased.

Multiple mailboxes

The iPad can accommodate multiple Web-based and server-based e-mail accounts.

Let’s say you want to keep your business e-mail account and add a Gmail account. Open the Settings page, tap on Mail, Contacts and Calendars and then tap Add Account. There’ll be a list of six choices, from Microsoft Exchange to AOL. After typing in the account particulars, tap Save and it should now be in the e-mail accounts section below the first one you set up. If you have another account to add, do the same to get the iPad to start working with it.

Shortcuts

The iPad’s on-screen keyboard is adequate for most short typing needs, like e-mail or Web addresses, but it can’t compare to a good old mechanical keyboard for lengthier pieces. Still, it has a few shortcuts that can make on-screen typing a little easier, including these:

* Hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence to add a period and a space before starting on the next sentence.

* Hold down a letter key to get any special characters that are available for that letter. You could use this feature to, for example, add an accent mark to a letter.

* Need the euro (€) symbol? Press the dollar-sign key for a few seconds, and the iPad will give you a choice of five international currency symbols.

* You can hold down the iPad’s .com button to get .edu, .net or .org instead.

The app remover

With so many apps available at the iTunes App Store, it’s easy to overwhelm yourself and your iPad with software. You can get rid of an app that you aren’t using by holding a finger on the app’s icon. It’ll wiggle and a small X will appear in the icon’s corner. Tap on the X and click Delete to get rid of it. Be sure to delete the app from iTunes on the host system as well, or it will be reinstalled the next time you synchronize your iPad.

New signature

Out of the box, the iPad’s default e-mail signature is “Sent from my iPad.” That obnoxious declaration will appear at the bottom of every message that you send from the device. Once you’ve gotten over your new-iPad-owner’s enthusiasm, I suggest that you might want to think about changing that.

Go to the Settings page and click on Mail, Contacts and Calendars and then go to Signature at the bottom of the page. You can type in whatever you want to use as your signature, or you can leave it blank if you want to remain anonymous.

Quiet!

If you get as annoyed as I do with a computer that beeps when new e-mail arrives or clicks when you use the keyboard, you deserve silence to preserve your sanity.

Go to the Settings page, click on General and then Sounds. There you can turn off the sounds that play when you send or receive e-mail, get a calendar alert or lock your iPad. You can even turn off the especially annoying keyboard clicks. If you don’t want to turn off the sounds completely, you can at least turn down the volume.

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer based near New York and is the former editor in chief of Mobile Computing & Communications magazine.

Skype has formally announced its newest product for business users, Skype Connect.

Skype Connect, formally Skype SIP, is Skype’s play at the IP-enabled PBX and Unified Communications (UC) market. With Skype Connect, businesses can now integrate the service into their existing PBX systems.

In addition to making outgoing calls at Skype rates from desktop phones, Skype Connect also lets businesses receive phone calls from other Skype users, landline or mobile phones, or from other phones on the corporate PBX. Also, Skype Connect can be configured to route calls to mobile numbers.

This video gives an overview of just what Skype Connect does:

Skype is one of the most visible players in the consumer VoIP space, but it has a much smaller presence in the business world.

Skype first launched its Skype Connect Beta in March 2009, and according to its business blog now has more than 2,400 global customers. That’s not a bad start, but it pales when compared to some of the bigger players in this field.

Skype also faces stiff competition, not just from companies like Cisco — which has its own IP-PBX offerings — but from startups in the same space, including Bandwidth.com. Bandwidth.com offers SIP Trunking for businesses that want a cost-effective, in-house IP-PBX, and its Phonebooth Free and Phonebooth OnDemand products directly target SMBs.

Skype’s advantage, of course, is going to be that it has brand recognition with new customers. For small businesses that are transitioning to a phone system, IP or otherwise, for the first time, the Skype brand should have its own set of advantages.

Likewise, while other hosted IP-PBX systems have click-to-talk systems like Skype’s own interface (meaning users can initiate a phone call from a button on the Internet), Skype is a ubiquitous part of many consumer and business desktops.

Skype’s disadvantage, however, is that because it has been such a consumer-centric service, it’s unproven in the business support and infrastructure arena. Skype offers a new dedicated customer support option for Skype Connect users, but it’s going to also off-load some of its support to channel partners and VARs. Depending on the business, this may not be ideal.

Also, we find ourselves confused about Skype Connect’s pricing plan. Rather than bundling together plans with minute buckets or extensions, Skype is charging by the minute and by what it calls “channels.”

Incoming calls are free, and outgoing calls are charged according to Skype’s standard rates of 2.1 cents per minute. Users will also need to pay $6.95 a month per channel. A channel is the number of concurrent calls you want to make or receive at once. So if you want to have five different extensions that can all be in use at the same time, you’ll pay $34.75.

We really think it would be in Skype’s best interest to create some unified or bundled pricing plans for its business offerings, if only to make comparison shopping easier.

What do you think of Skype’s formal entrance into the corporate VoIP space? Let us know in the comments.

No matter how carefully you build your founding team, questions will come up as you start your business that will make you want to turn elsewhere for advice. And so it’s good to have a carefully selected group of people you can turn to for help: your Advisory Board.

As Bernard Lumm notes in “Startup 101, “You may have any number of advisers – friends and family – who you turn to informally for advice and who expect nothing in return except your friendship. But we use Advisers here with a capital “A” to denote someone with an official, compensated relationship with the company.”

Who to Ask

When building an Advisory Board, you want to select people who bring knowledge and credibility and who have the time and willingness to help.

It’s important the members of your Advisory Board have some background in your startup’s field, and it’s good to pick people who have succeeded as entrepreneurs. The members of your Advisory Board should also be able to speak with experience to the challenges and the successes of being executives. In other words, your Advisory Board is not made up of your attorney and your accountant. The latter, you pay for their professional advice. And while you can offer members of your Advisory Board some compensation, their primary role is to offer mentorship, not to take on a fiduciary responsibility.

As you build the Advisory Board, try to draw from areas in which your startup could use the most advice. You want to balance the board and have its makeup compliment your founding team.

You can approach potential members informally, but you should put together a formal, written agreement to finalize the deal. Lumm recommends this be a formal invitation letter that can also include your business plan executive summary, the Advisory Board’s objectives and focus, and expectations for the length and level of commitment and involvement.

Seek Advice

Ask good questions that take advantage of the expertise your Advisory Board offers. Before a formal meeting with your Advisory Board, send them a summary of the issues you are contending with. This way, everyone is prepared at the meeting to discuss the key questions at hand. (And you can listen to their advice, which is the point.)

Follow up and follow through

It’s good to maintain communication with your Advisory Board beyond just your face-to-face meetings. After a board meeting, you can follow up with members, indicating specifically how their advice will shape your strategy.

Taking care as you shape your Advisory Board will pay off in the long run as you will be able to work with people that can bring credibility, insight, and experience to your startup. And as your startup matures, Advisory Board members can also make good candidates for more formal positions, as in your Board of Directors.

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they’ve identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

The eight technologies identified include the following:

Bluetooth 3.0

This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it’s expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there’s no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years.

Mobile User Interfaces + Mobile Web/Widgets

Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes.

Location Awareness

Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology’s earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we’re still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo, they’re just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you’re up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.)? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It’s something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets.

802.11n & Cellular Broadband

802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it “goes gold” so to speak, it won’t really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment. 

On the flip side, the other Internet connection technology, cellular broadband, has the potential to make Wi-Fi almost unnecessary, at least for achieving high speeds. In addition to mobile phones, laptop makers will likely continue to incorporate this technology into their netbooks and notebooks using modern chipsets that provide superior performance to our current crop of add-on cards and dongles.

Display Technologies

Display technologies will also see improvements in the upcoming years. New technologies like active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors will have an impact. Pico projectors – the tiny portable projectors we saw being introduced at this year’s CES – will enable new mobile use cases. Instant presentations in informal settings could become more common when there isn’t large, cumbersome equipment to set up. The different types of display technologies introduced in 2009 and 2010 will become important differentiators between devices and will impact user selection criterion, says Gartner.

For more information on these above technologies, you can read through the full report available here on Gartner’s web site.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on how you think the mobile space will be impacted in the future.

Adconion Media Group announced this morning that it has acquired certain key assets from Joost, the ill-fated online video service started by the infamous Kazaa and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but it’s likely a firesale that isn’t bringing any returns to Joost’s investors.

Last June, Joost announced a change in its business strategy to focus on providing white-label video platforms, and Adconion says it plans to pursue this strategy. Notably, Adconion recently announced its first long-term licensing partnership as the exclusive display and video ad-serving solution for the Goldbach Media Group in Europe.

We had earlier put Joost on death watch, not in the least when its UK offices were dissolved and there was virtually no one left to comment on that story. It’s also worth noting that this morning’s news comes a mere two weeks after it was announced that Friis and Zennström had settled its lawsuits against eBay, the investor group that was purchasing Skype from eBay, early Joost backers Index Ventures and the online video company’s former CEO Mike Volpi.

On a sidenote: Index Ventures also happens to be a major investor in Adconion, having led its $80 million Series C round raised back in February 2008.

In a statement, Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius says about the Joost purchase: “Video is a top priority for our company, and through the acquisition of the Joost assets we will be able to provide advertisers, content owners and website publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution.”

Moebius added that the company would be contuining to operate Joost.com, providing clients with a destination site to showcase and distribute their branded entertainment content.

Prior to the acquisition, Adconion offered targeted distribution of content, including video and TV commercials, to audiences around the world via Adconion.TV. Through the Joost acquisition, Adconion.TV will add to its library of professionally-produced video content available for targeted pre-roll ads across 2,000 publishers. Adconion claims to reach nearly 300 million unique users on a monthly basis.

As for Joost, here’s how Michael Arrington so eloquently put it when the company said it would be refocusing its business last Summer:

Here’s what I learned from Joost’s failure – celebrity founders, celebrity CEOs and tons and tons of cash can be a recipe for disaster. Applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems isn’t an interesting business. And finally, knowing when to throw in the towel and just return what’s left of capital to investors is an important skill as well. That way everyone can move on and focus on real value add opportunities. There’s no room for Joost in the consumer online video space, and there’s almost certainly no room for them in white label video, either. Time to call it a learning experience and move on.

And the two Scandinavian entrepeneurs who co-founded Joost are now definitely moving on, having regained a stake and board seats in the new Skype and ready to launch a ‘new breed’ of online music service.

Facebook just made one of the biggest changes to the site’s user experience since the introduction of the News Feed three years ago. News Feed was the place in the very center of the site where all the activities of a user’s friends were displayed in reverse chronological order. That feature is now called the Live Feed and the News Feed has become a filtered display of activity highlights instead.

In September 2006 the News Feed was a radical idea; thousands of Facebook users revolted against the idea that all their friends would be shown every photo they uploaded, when their relationship status changed and other information as soon as it was available. Today we live in a different world. Almost everything is social and the new challenge is tackling information overload. That’s what Facebook just did today and it’s going to be very important for the future.

Everyone’s trying to solve this problem. There are inbox filtering services like ReMail, Threadsy and the experimental new Mozilla Raindrop. There are column filters in stream readers like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Google Reader yesterday introduced a “magic” filter view for the most popular items across the whole network. FriendFeed, a small but innovative social aggregator started by one of the creators of GMail and acquired by Facebook for $50 million this summer, offers a “best of day” view of any stream of updates you’re looking at.

That FriendFeed view is the closest thing to the new Facebook News Feed, but a Facebook spokesperson told us that the two products are unrelated.

Everyone’s trying to tackle information overload. Step one, get more people sharing information. Step two, figure out how to create a personalized, high-value view of all that information by surfacing the most important updates for each user. Step three, profit!

How It Works

The new News Feed view is based on an algorithm that scores every update coming in through what’s now called the Live Feed. That scoring is based on the number of “likes” and comments an item has received and how much you personally have interacted with the update’s author in the past.

A related algorithm was used in the past to create the “highlights” section on the right-hand side of the Facebook home page. That section was getting too little interaction and didn’t include things like important status updates, the company says. If your sister posted a status update saying that she’s pregnant, a Facebook spokesperson told us today, that wouldn’t show up in the old highlights view. It should show up in your News Feed now.

So three big changes: 1. The new Live Feed is linked-to at the top of the page and shows a number of new items since your last visit. 2. Highlights plus hot status updates are now the default, the new News Feed. 3. Birthdays and other important events have taken the place of the old Highlights section; they are of particular interest to users and will now be easier to see.

What It Means

Facebook says that after viewing your new News Feed, you can go check out the raw Live Stream of all the most recent updates from your contacts. That’s the opposite of the way FriendFeed did it and neither strategy should be taken for granted. Decisions like this impact a major method of communication for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

By showing the News Feed highlights as the default view, Facebook will probably encourage users to pay more attention to, interact with more and grow closer to the people they already have a history of interacting with and the events that are already popular. Weak social connections and your personal long-tail of content are less prioritized in this view.

The inclusion of a user’s past behavior as a criteria for hotness is key, though. It’s not just a popularity contest. Your News Feed is your little universe and popularity is defined in relative terms.

That, again, is a particular strategy. The new Google Reader Popular View, for example, appears to evaluate popularity across all users in total.

What It Could Mean In the Future

Someday social networking is going to be like the telephone. Today you can’t send messages from Facebook to people on MySpace or LinkedIn but that isn’t going to last forever. Just as you can call someone who uses T-Mobile from your Sprint phone, someday sharing and messaging between online social networks will be a given.

How will social networks retain users then? Why stick with Facebook when some smaller service offers a decentralized social networking service outside of Facebook’s control but still tied into your friends on Facebook and elsewhere?

These services will someday have to compete on user experience, when they no longer have your social connections locked-in. The service that does the best job filtering up the most important information you have coming your way will likely be the service you stick with. That’s going to be a key area of competition between social networks.

How well will Facebook do at filtering the Live Stream of content? We’re about to find out and it’s going to make a big difference in how we experience the web. That will only be more true as more and more people begin publishing content.

There’s been a lot of emphasis on the live stream of real-time web content, but Facebook now joins many other services in recognizing that the best value is sometimes built by combining real time and slower assets.

Google Squared launched to a lot of hype earlier this year, but the initial reaction from most pundits was rather negative. Squared, which gathers and displays structured data, often returned rather nonsensical results, and we would venture to guess that only a few people are actually using it now. Today, Google announced some updates to Squared that should make it more useful. Now, if you do a search on Squared, for example, the results will contain up to 120 facts – up from 30 in the initial release.

As Google points out, a search for US presidents, for example, initially returned a table with only five presidents and three categories. Now, however, this table includes data on 20 presidents and lists up to six attributes. Squared also now gives users the option to sort columns – a feature that was sorely lacking in the first iteration of this product.

Squared is now more selective about the data it includes. And it also learns from edits and corrections that users make.

New: Export Data to Google Spreadsheets and CSV Files

In addition, Google gives users the option to export data to a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file. This should make it a lot easier to actually do something interesting with this data. As an example, Google explains how to build a list of African countries and then create a scatter plot that examines the relationship between GDP and literacy rate in these countries.

Will You Give it a Second Try?

Overall, the data that Google Squared now returns does indeed look more accurate than in earlier versions, though some results are still rather strange (to be fair, this is still a Google Labs product). We do wonder how useful a service like this really is. Are you likely to head over to Google Squared for research? Would you trust its results?