LimeWire v5.2 has officially launched and it adds new features and functions that make it worth a second look from file-sharers who may have left the once popular P2P program for faster and safer applications like BitTorrent.

It now allows you to import contacts from Facebook, gMail, and other domains and thereby create lists of people with whom you want to share content like music, videos, pics, programs, etc..

LimeWire v5.2 makes file-sharing with friends much easier, especially with those who are less than tech savvy when it comes to P2P. It requires they run LimeWire too of course, but it doesn’t require elaborate setups like port forwarding, etc.. Simply start it up, login, drag and drop files to share, select who you want to share with, and you’re done.

More than anything, it makes for a safe and secure way to share content with family and friends.

The Facebook feature also means you can communicate via the social networking site about a particular song or album you heard and really liked for example, and then make available to those who want to check it out for themselves.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

DOWNLOAD LIMEWIRE v5.2

Gmail opened up to all comers in February, with Gmail’s market share of US visits climbing 17% from February 2007 to April 2007. However, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still much bigger by comparison, says Hitwise: Yahoo had 13x the market share, and Hotmail had 6x the marketshare of Gmail.

The good news, if you’re a Gmail user, is that you may be part of the elite: while Yahoo and Hotmail users are decidedly average, Gmail users tend to be young, have a high income, and be early adopters of technology. 54% of users are between 18 and 34, while 18% have an average annual household income between $100,000 and $149,999 (compared to 15% for Hotmail and 13% for Yahoo Mail). Another stat, probably related to the young age of GMail users: they’re more likely to be Facebook users than those on the other services.

Available for over 300 models of Java-enabled phones, smartphones, and PDAs from gmail.com/app, the new applet will start shipping preinstalled on phones from Sprint/NexTel, T-Mobile, Cingular, and BellSouth in the near future.

First impressions around the Orbiting HQ boil down to “cool, this is good if I remember to check it, but I wish it told me when I had new mail.” The application does look and feel a lot like the PC browser GMail, but fails to use new mail notification features—at least on BlackBerrys.

It’s also a lot faster than going through the phone’s browser to gmail.com, mostly thanks to a prefetching feature that preloads the first ten messages in your inbox for instant access when you click on them. If you’re worried about bandwidth issues, that prefetch mode can be turned off. Functionality has been streamlined too: archiving a message used to take 11 clicks in the old Java client, but now takes just two.

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When you receive an audio file as an email attachment, click the play button and Google will play the audio file for you in a popup window. Very neat implementation (see screenshot)

Now digging into the GMail Mp3 player code, I discovered that it’s actually the Google video player that’s playing the audio file. Infact, you can play any MP3 files from the embedded Google Video player without even having to login to GMail. Here’s the secret URL (works perfect in Firefox)

http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=MP3_URL

Replace the MP3_URL with the actual location of the MP3 file on the web and play it inside Google Video. Odeo, take note. Google is entering your territory.