Beta Watch

Penelope: New Look for Thunderbird and Eudora

Penelope is not so much a full program as it is a free extension that can add new interface elements and features to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail app or to Eudora, the grizzled e-mail vet that's now based on Thunderbird. In addition to snazzier icons and shortcuts, you also get nice customizable toolbars so you can add a button that creates a message to a specific person, for example.

Animoto: Video From Your Images and Music, Automatically

Animoto has the potential to be seriously addictive. After you upload some pictures from your hard drive and an MP3 file that you think will go well with the images, Animoto puts them together in a video. The site's "creative artificial intelligence" puts clever transitions between the images and matches the movement to your tunes. Thirty-second videos are free; longer ones cost $3 each, or you can make as many as you want for $30 a year. Fun!

Diigo: Group Exploration of the Web

Like Del.icio.us, Diigo lets you bookmark and tag pages and store those bookmarks on the Web. And as with Ma.gnolia, you can set up groups of like-minded Web wanderers who share bookmarks. But Diigo, which is free, adds some nifty new features, including the ability to add sticky notes to a page, highlight passages of text, or blog your clippings and notes with just a couple of clicks.