I’ve been taking part in the beta trial of SugarSync, the content-synchronization service that allows you to synch photos, documents and other content across multiple PCs, mobile devices etc. (the service was formerly known as Sharpcast, and only syncrhonized photos). I’ve got a limited number of beta invites available — if anyone wants one, post a comment with an active email address and I’ll shoot you the link.

At the mesh meetup we had at the Charlotte Room tonight, I ran into Jim Courtney of Skype Journal and he said he had just finished posting something interesting about the new Skype beta — and he was right. It seems that not only is the client being improved, but eBay is finally starting to achieve some of the synergies that many observers were hoping for when it bought the VoIP service for $4-billion or so way back when.

According to knowledgeable people like Jim and Iotum co-founder Alec Saunders, who posted on it here, among the things that Skype has improved is the sound quality of the application. Now, the sound is apparently just as good with the regular mike and speakers you get with a PC as it is with a dedicated headset or other equipment, which will be a big boon for regular users.

Jim says he suspects that Skype is making use of new codec technology they acquired awhile ago. They’ve also made it possible to take a snapshot with your video cam to use as a profile picture, and you can import contacts from more mail clients than before.

But for me, the biggest move with this beta is the fact that you can now click and send money to contacts via PayPal — which was one of the no-brainer synergies that I expected would have happened a long time ago. Maybe there was some technical issue holding it up, I don’t know. But finally it’s possible.

I’ve been meaning to write something about CoComments.com, the new comment-tracking tool that got launched with much fanfare (or blog-fare) recently. I got an invite and have been trying out the service since a day or so after it went live, and I have to say that I’m impressed. It is easy to configure and it makes nice use of Ajax on the site, such as expanding or collapsing the comment threads that you’ve taken part in on various websites. It was relatively easy to configure, and it wasn’t that hard to install the comment box in the sidebar of my WordPress setup (although just as I wrote this it stopped working – server issues?)

To use CoComments, you click on a bookmarklet before submitting a comment on a blog – or if you use Firefox, you can use one of the Greasemonkey scripts that are floating around, which removes the need to click a button every time. You can then track the comment thread on a single page, and load your recent comments into a comment box like the one I have (you can exclude comments on certain blogs from being displayed if you wish). Although CoComment doesn’t support all blog platforms, more and more are being added. The company also has plans to provide code so that people can add support to their blogs themselves if they run a modified version of one of the main platforms, or one that isn’t supported.

To tie the CoComments idea into another thread that’s going around about Web 2.0 and the “so what” factor, which I wrote about in relation to the recent launch of 3bubbles, I have to wonder if there is a longer-term business model for CoComments. Within days of the launch, word appeared of another similar service called MyComments, which appears to be the work of a single person, and now there is a third, called Co.mments.com, which gives you an RSS feed of any comment threads you want to be alerted about.

The speed with which these competing services appeared is definitely worth noting. Are they cool, yes. Useful? Definitely. And I like the idea that comments are becoming part of the larger conversation on the web, as I’ve mentioned several times in the past. But is this a business? Maybe not. Still, it is cool :-) Elsewhere on the web, Amy Gahran has some thoughts as well (bottom line: not there yet), and so do Neville Hobson and Kevin Lim. Kareem notes that it’s important to remember that users are lazy, and Pascal looks at both MyComments and CoComments.

Many of the reviews and comments about the new beta of Microsoft’s Internet Exploder Explorer, IE7, have focused on the RSS implementation. Adam Green at Darwinianweb.com got everybody’s attention when he said that he thought the browser would kill a lot of aggregators, and later amended this to say that while IE7′s handling of RSS wasn’t that great, it was probably good enough. As he put it — in a phrase I wish I had come up with

“Microsoft long ago mastered the trick of calculating exactly the minimal feature set needed to suck the air out of a market it wants to enter.”

That is exactly right. It’s not that IE7′s version of the RSS reader is that great — in fact, it is pretty much “just like favourites,” as Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 puts it — it’s that it’s probably just good enough for most people. Dave Winer might be right when he says that the “river of news” is a better model for an aggregator, but IE7 doesn’t really have a dog in that race. It just wants something simple that people can use without too much trouble.

Is the way they have done it good enough? That remains to be seen. RSS is still not easy enough, as my friend Paul Kedrosky keeps pointing out, and people are (in general) lazy. Not everyone wants to see if they can break Robert Scoble’s record for most RSS feeds subscribed to. Kent Newsome asks why he should care about IE7, and the answer is that he probably shouldn’t.

We are all “edge cases,” as someone has pointed out, and I would have to go along with Jeff Nolan – IE7 wasn’t designed for us. Simple as that. We can keep on using Firefox and Performancing and Greasemonkey and all those great things, but the fact is IE still has 80 per cent of the browser market, and it got that way by not being on the edge.

Amid all the buzz about Web 2.0 services run by AJAX, such as Google Maps and Microsoft’s new Windows Live , it’s interesting to see that Yahoo has gone with Flash for its new and improved Yahoo Maps site. But is it better than Google Maps? There seems to be some debate on that, with some saying they like it better and others complaining that it’s slower to refresh and harder to use. I thought Yahoo’s version looked a little better in terms of the user interface than Google’s, and it was also quicker to update the map when I zoomed in on key spots, such as the Rouge River marsh near Pickering, Ontario, which I run and bicyle past every morning. Dragging the map around seemed slower on Yahoo than on Google, but Yahoo had some cool features, such as a draggable zoom window.

Although he gets into the useability a bit in his discussion of Yahoo’s maps, Robert Scoble of Microsoft spends most of his time talking about how both Yahoo Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth are “doomed.” Why? Not because of the interface, he says, but because of how Google markets both its services and its open API — which allows others to create “mash-ups” and add-ons that enhance the value of the company’s map service. I think this is a good point. It’s not so much what you do, but how you do it, and what happens to it after you release it into the wild, so to speak. Google seems to get that better than others — so far at least.