Fring promises encrypted data transfer when you submit credentials of these services through the mobile interface, giving you peace of mind.

Once you are logged in, it automatically imports all your contacts. A green icon means the contact is online and available. Away, busy or unavailable buddies are marked orange. When a buddy is offline, the icon turns gray.

Fring’s intuitive interface makes you feel at home the first time you use it. As you see in the photo above, Chinese characters in my MSN buddy’s name are nicely displayed.

Fring client is currently localized into 6 languages, including Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish. As they are still in Beta, I expect to see more languages over time and more professional translations.

Now Chinese users may feel confused when they see ‘On/Off’ under the ‘Show Fring Signature’, etc. menus being translated as “连接/断开”(Connect/Disconnect). Some other problems also need to be addressed.

How much bandwidth does Fring use and how about the sound quality?

Fring Support says each 1M bandwidth equals to 15 minutes of Fring call (Fring to Fring). I tried it on my EDGE plan. The bandwidth usage of the one-minute Fring test call was around 90K, and the sound quality was amazingly good! SkypeOut and SIP (I use FWD) calls, however, were not as satisfactory – in other words, you can’t use them for any serious communication and they use too much bandwidth. 3G/WIFI connections should give much better quality.

You can set Fring to run in the background if instant mobile messaging is important to you. When you receive a message or a call via Fring, it’ll alert you with distinctive tones. But the software does eat your battery. When I had it in the background for about 20 minutes, the battery became hot too.

Overall, Fring is still useful when you are traveling but suddenly have something urgent to discuss with your friend on MSN or you simply want to catch up with the Twitterati while waiting for your plane at the airport.

Fring website

However, a few days later when a new version of ooVoo came into being, it only let me down. Instead of offering more useful features, it takes away some of the coolest and charges a fee if you want them back.

The standard (free) ooVoo option now only has these:

1. If you think text tweets are too boring and would like to share your snapshots on-site occasionally, give brightkite a try. Brightkite allows you to post your current location, notes or pictures via web, SMS (if in the US) or MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) – as an email.You may choose to link your brightkite and Twitter accounts so each time your update on brightkite, a new tweet appears on Twitter. Brightkite has a privacy option so you can always control how detailed your location should be shown to whom. Brightkite is currently in Beta and you need to wait for an invitation to participate. If you can’t get one from their website, leave me a message here. I’ll send one to your email on an availability basis.
2. Ever wondered who’s been following when you didn’t get follower notification? Or are you feeling frustrated when someone unfollows you after you followed them back? With Twitter Karma, in just a few clicks you will find all those information plus a couple of other functions.
3. If you are one of those twitterbuds who can’t stop tweeting even during sleep, here’s a good one for you. Tweetlater sends out pre-scheduled tweets at your own local time. You may also use it as a reminder service tweeting to yourself. But this only works when you use, again, a third-party service notifying you of such tweets. Another use of Tweetlater is auto-follow your new followers. However, since Twitter spammers are on the rise, take the risk when you use this.
4. Did you know many of the most active Twitter users don’t visit Twitter website to interact with other friends? There are many Twitter ‘enhancement’ applications, one of which is Thwirl. Thwirl is an Abode Air application that sits in your system tray. Besides all standard Twitter functions, it also gives you a sound alert when @yourusername appears in the middle of someone’s tweet body. This is a great addition. Twitter by default doesn’t send the message to your ‘reply’ tab unless @yourusername comes first in a tweet. Some other nice functions:
   • re-tweeting a useful message, spreading it far and wide;
   • keyword-searching twitterland messages;
   • shortening long URLs with snurl;
   • picture-sharing via TwitPic.

There are many other great Twitter extensions. But since I didn’t have a chance to try them out, I won’t be able to cover them until I update this post later.

Nice tweeting…

Today I found a new trick used by these followers. This guy created two profiles, one is used to mass follow other users, the other is used to ‘reap’ followers. See the following screen shots:

Spammer Profile 1 (If you are on Twitter, block this profile immediately)

Spammer Profile 2 (If you are on Twitter, block this profile immediately)

The first profile claims to be a service of Twitter called “Twitter Private Messaging Service.” When you click on the URL on this profile page, which is: twitter.com/friendships/create/InTouch, you will automatically follow the second profile. That’s why you see the second profile has 1,024 followers!

I think Twitter’s /friendshps/create/username function is actually a security loophole. I can’t really figure out why this function is there.

If you are on Twitter, watch out for this kind of trick. Spammers get enough followers to send spam or even do eviler things. Impersonation is a violation of Twitter TOS, but we see it’s prevalent on Twitterland. Failure to enforce the TOS gives green light to spammers. Twitter has to do something now before things become out of control and lose its user base!

Most users use a Twitter client such as Twhirl or Twitter web interface to send and receive ‘tweets’. But Twitter also offers an SMS service, which works just as your usual mobile SMS. You won’t be charged a dime unless you send them out. You may choose to receive a particular person’s updates or only Direct Messages (DM). You can also set it to ‘Sleep’ during certain hours. Local Twitter SMS numbers:

USA 40404
Canada 21212
India 5566511

International users may enable their mobile device via Twitter’s UK number: +447624801423.

Visit http://twitter.com/devices (after you logged in) to enable your phone to receive/send SMS messages from/to Twitter.

To receive a particular person’s tweets, go to that person’s profile page and choose so.

Happy tweeting!

*Update*

Twitter has stopped sending SMS messages to my mobile in China since a few days ago.

*Update-1*

Twitter recently experienced quite some technical glitches. But the good news is SMS service is back. Now you should be able to enjoy it for free again.