We've had the same old business and people directory services for years, and the online versions of the major brands tend to be just digital versions of their paper-bound cousins.

That should change with the (re)launch of 192.com, the directory service specifically designed for the broadband generation. It gives you access to a massive database of companies and a number of important people, and allows you to search through them, listing contact details as well as their location via a Ordinance Survey map mash-up.

Click the title for more.

One of the big plus points with FriendFeed is that you can see what's going on on the service in real-time. As in, someone posts something, and it appears in your stream without having to refresh the page and immediately.

Well, now they've rolled the same functionality out onto their search result pages, meaning you can get a live feed on anything that's happening on the service.

Click the title for more.

There are literally hundreds of URL shorteners out there on the interwebs, some claiming shorter URLs than the rest (but at the expense of expiring links), some with those annoying bars along the top, and others that just don't feel short enough, but there is one that is fast becoming the de facto standard for link shortening; Bit.ly

Click the title for why you should use it.

There are a lot of things that the rest of the world don't get about England, and it seems the latest example is currently trending on Twitter.

Well, we say trending, it seems that Twitter isn't displaying tweets with the hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy (which is trending as the actress who played Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served? has died) in its search results.

Don't worry, just another example of how British jokes can get lost when crossing the Atlantic.

Twitter has raised the number of times you can ask it for information using the API from 100 to 150 times per hour.

This means, when you're using clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, TwitterFon etc... you'll be able to send/receive more messages, see more people's profiles, update your stream more often and generally have a larger buffer so you're never waiting for the the next hour to start unable to tweet (like we at RandomlyAccessed sometimes have to do).

However, this is quite a recent change, and we are unable to confirm at present whether this is a wholesale change of policy, or whether certain applications have been allowed access to more API calls.

As an avid follower of the gadget-reporting world (obviously), we're always interested to see what's going on on the web, and something we've been keeping a very close eye on is the launch of gdgt.

It's the new gadget social network mash-up launched by Ryan Block and Peter Rojas of Engadget and Gizmodo fame which allows you to pick gadgets, talk about them, read reviews etc...

It was launched today, but under overwhelming traffic due in no small part from huge press coverage on the net. We'll bring you a full review in the next few days, but if you are lucky enough to get a look in when there's a gap in the traffic, check it out.

Gmail is renowned for releasing new features that make things easier for you to use, and today they're announcing drag and drop for emails and labels.

All you need to do is pick up the message from the "::" logo by the side of the checkbox and drag it into a label.
You can also drag the label and place it over an email to assign that label to that message. Simple.

This will be rolled out, along with several other features, at some point today (PST).