Here in United States, it is the Thanksgiving holiday. As you probably know, it is tradition to eat turkey. I had my first holiday turkey today in the DeviceVM kitchen. It was delicious and got me ready for tomorrow’s festivities which will include much more food. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I just wanted to say that I’m thankful for your interest in Splashtop and as we enter the Holiday Season we are working hard to create new and exciting products which will change personal computing in 2008.

If you want to impress your family during this Thanksgiving, take this turkey quiz and Happy Thanksgiving!

I have a great job. I get to play with the best web applications and then tell you all about them. Why? Because Splashtop loves web apps. They’re like chocolate and peanut butter or the Oreo crackers and the cream filling. I must be hungry. Anyway, today I wanted to tell you about Box.net, an online storage service that does some pretty incredible things.

First, storing files online gives you some great options when it comes to sharing files and having access to them from anywhere. Also, if you’re using the Splashtop browser, you don’t have a lot of file access from the hard drive (actually, you have none) so keeping your files online is a great option. The best of the best is definitely Box.net. First of all, you get 1 GB of online storage for free. That’s their “lite” option. If you feel like you need more storage, which might be the case after you hear about all the things you can do with those files, 5GB starts at $7.95/month. I pay more for a coffee and a scone at Starbucks. There is also more expensive options for power and enterprise users.

The guys over at Box.net have spent a lot of time thinking about how people (like us) use files online. What do we want to be able to do? Where are we when we’re using these files? The service has really become incredibly valuable. Sure, you can upload documents, music and photos. You can collaborate on a paper with your friend and you can certainly keep those important files available to you from anywhere. But, Box.net has also built in some special tools that let you do things like stream your music back to wherever you are. This small flash widget is incredibly useful, especially for Splashtop users.

This widget, pictured above is storing some music that I uploaded to Box.net (sorry it’s just an image of a widget, not the actual widget) via Facebook. I also have a Facebook widget on my Profile with the same music which will allow my friends to listen some Wilco when they’re on my profile page. You can do the same kind of social file sharing on nearly every other social network with customized Box.net widgets. Another thing I really dig is the fact that I can allow others to drop files off in my Box. That’s useful, especially when you receive a lot of emails. Sometimes files get lost in the shuffle. Plus, I can have access to it all the time on any machine.

Next week I’ll tell you about Box.net’s most killer feature where they integrate with other popular web applications.

Last night our source code went live. You can find it here. In case you are wondering it can also be accessed by the developer link which can be found at the bottom of the homepage. Admittedly, the developer portion of our site is too buried and we’re going to be launching a full developers area with a complete SDK soon. Phoronix already covered our source code release and can give you great details on what we release vs. what we didn’t release (yet). If you’re a developer, you know that properly packaging source code and offering a complete SDK is important. We’re working hard on getting that done and up as we’re very interested in building a healthy, flourishing developer community.

Just to review, at the bottom of the developers page you’ll see a link to download the source code. It’ll open up a form to fill out a bit of info (we promise not to spam you). It’s not a huge download (~12MB). Again, I am told to caution all developers. We really wanted to get something out soon for those who were really excited to dig into Splashtop. A more full featured release complete with SDK will come soon. If you can wait, we suggest it. Thanks for your continued interest in Splashtop!

Great news for developers interested in Splashtop. I just got out of a very cool (albeit technical) meeting where I was told that a code release on our website is imminent. This is exciting for anyone who is interested in using the Splashtop code for any purpose. However, I was told to caution anyone downloading this code that it is an initial release. A more complete SDK will follow it soon whereby developers can really play with the Splashtop environment. This will be very exciting for Splashtop! More soon…

Another great example of the way that Web 2.0 has advanced our browser-based experience can be seen in the realm of chat. Meebo is a great example of a company that has taken web-based chat to new levels. We thought it would be so useful that we put it as a default bookmark in the Splashtop browser. Meebo allows you to do many of the same things that your standard application-based IM client does through the web browser. It can work like a single IM client for AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN or you can register, create a Meebo ID and see/use all of them at once. This is similar to the very popular Trillion application without the application. It all happens right there in the browser. The user experience is excellent.

Meebo also has a feature called Meebo Rooms where you can create custom chat rooms on your web site and share images, links and even video. This can really take the whole chat room concept to a new level as you can place a room right on your MySpace page or blog. In addition, you can find many rooms on a variety of subjects. Here’s an image of Meebo rooms that was on Techcrunch:

One thing I love, in particular, about Meebo is that they have an iPhone version of their service that allows you to chat right from your iPhone. This was a feature that was missing from iPhone V1. Until they bring iChat into the iPhone, I’m a sold Meebo iPhone user. Here’s an image of the Meebo iPhone interface from Gizmodo:

Another company in this space is ebuddy. Ebuddy seems to do more with file sharing and, in my opinion, the interface is much cleaner. Ebuddy pops out a browser window so that the experience feels more traditional application oriented.

Whichever web-based chat application you utilize, they both allow you to login and chat from anywhere including Splashtop!