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We received a few requests to look over currency converters and pick our favorite. This sounds a lot easier than it is. There are literally hundreds of online currency converters out there, not including the plugins/widgets being used on various financial websites. So we narrowed the list by cutting out those that just don’t have the traffic to justify their website.

That left us with some pretty good picks. We tried each of these, wrote out pros and cons for each, and compiled the results. Here’s our top five, listed in descending order with the best being the last.
Expedia UK Site
This is one of the simpler currency converts on our list, but it’s also one of the most-used. I personally think that’s because of its location (it’s on Expedia, after all), but who knows? It’s extremely simple, converts just about every world currency into another, and is fast. It only does one at a time, however, so checking rates between, say, Euros, USD, and Yen isn’t possible.

Crrncy.com
You may recall Herb’s review of this not long ago on www.scommerce.com. The site is uber-simple, converts quickly, and updates extremely often to make it very accurate. It’s limited to only five currencies and can only do one to another, so comparisons aren’t easy. For simplicity and Google-like speed, this one is tops. It’s just not as useful as some of our other picks.

GoCurrency.com
This site, like the next two, is all about currency. It’s very well done with the first thing appearing on the page being a fast-loading exchange rates table with major currencies listed and defaulting to comparison with the USD. This allows for fast comparisons and the actual one-to-the-other converter appears directly to the left of that table, making it fast and easy to convert right away. For the ForEx trader, there’s a lot here, including historic rate charts to analyze trends.

OANDA
It was difficult to decide whether this or GoCurrency should be in this slot, but OANDA won out almost entirely for loading speed and looks. I know, superficial, but this site is much easier on the eyes and the layout is smoother. A quick converter for one-to-another appears right in the site’s header bar and a real time currency rate chart with the world’s four strongest currencies listed (USD, GBP, EUR, and JPY) in comparison. Both current and historical rates are available from easy buttons and this site definitely caters to the ForEx trader.

XE
The site with the million dollar address wins out as the best currency conversion site . Unlike OANDA, it’s not the prettiest site on our list, but it’s definitely the most-used. There’s a reason for that. The site loads extremely quickly and features a huge, prominent cross-rates chart that dynamically updates on its own. It compares eleven currencies and updates every minute. Below that is a quick currency converter (one to another) for fast checks. While this site also caters to ForEx traders, it’s also got some nice tools. The large table is customizable and historical tables can be made from the same tool, with a lot of sorting options. The site ain’t pretty, but it’s very useful and fast.

So there’s our choices for favorite currency conversion sites. For most people, any of these on the top 5 list will fit your needs. If you’re just looking to find out how much your dollars will be worth in Europe, then #4 is probably your fastest checkpoint. If you’re a ForEx trader, you’ll want to try any of our top 3.

The new Palm Pre is set to hit the streets, via the Sprint network, tomorrow.  Sprint is hoping this will be their new flagship smartphone.  AT&T and Verizon are hot on Sprint’s heels, waiting for the relatively short exclusivity contract with Palm to end so they can get in on the Pre action too.

Although Verizon Wireless’ CEO made claims last week that it would be putting the Pre on its network in about six months, the CEO of Sprint, Dan Hesse, says that’s inaccurate.  While he wouldn’t give a tim period, he says the exclusivity contract Sprint has with Palm is longer than six months.  You can see video of his press conference at CNet News.

Apple, meanwhile, has seen the potential threat and is planning to introduce a cheaper, lower-powered version of the iPhone.  That might happen as early as Monday and is rumored to be the new iPhone Movie, which would likely go into production this summer.  The new phone could be as much as $100 cheaper than Apple’s current low end phone .

AT&T still retains their exclusive deal with Apple as the iPhone’s only carrier.  Financial Times reporter Joseph Menn thinks the new iPhone will debut at Monday’s developer conference with a keynote by Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller.

Meanwhile, the Italian iPhone blog ispazio has published leaked photos of the new iPhone (seen left).

Both Apple and Palm are probably going to see each other more and more as rivals.  Currently, the iPhone holds about 11% of the world’s smart phone market and Palm barely registers, having lost their primacy long ago.

Sprint, for their part, is offering an extremely low-cost value plan for the Pre, including the $100/month “Simply Everything” plan.  No word on how much connectivity is included with that, but it’s a plan aimed specifically at smart phones like the new Pre.

This could get interesting.

Google has opened Google Squared to the public.  The announcement came on Google’s blog Wednesday afternoon, posted by Alex Komoroske, the Associate Product Manager for Google Squared.

Of course, you’ll probably recall that Google showed off this new spreadsheet-style search about three weeks ago.  Now that it’s open to the public, we at Rev2 got a chance to check it out and see what it can do.  While the fanfare around its announcement initially compared it to Wolfram Alpha and said it would revolutionize search, I think that’s a lot of hype.

Sure, I guess there’s going to be some use for this search style.  Comparing roller coasters, as Alex does, or looking at real estate listings maybe.  Mostly, though, it’s just kind of useless.  It’s not very flexible and unless what you’re searching for is inherently able to be compartmentalized, it’s not very pleasant to see the results.

I’m with ReadWriteWeb when Marshall Kirkpatrick said that it’s inflexible, gives odd-looking results, and it’s hard to imagine using it regularly.

Most things I’ve searched for–even the ones that seem like they’d probably benefit from being columned into tables–didn’t come out anything like I’d hoped.  Most were jumbled, almost irrelevant, and nearly all were confusing.

On the other hand, it might be a good start to something that will become infinitely useful.  Were the searches better able to be narrowed and the interface more flexible in how you can move data around them, this could become extremely valuable.  The icing on the cake might be an export ability–maybe XML or through an API.

One thing it does well right now is compare data that’s closely aligned to numbers.  This makes sense, since spreadsheets are an accountant thing.  Right?  Looking for the latest certificate of deposit rates came up with some almost-useful results, but nothing that the aggregators that specialize in this kind of thing don’t already have.

Another search for WordPress themes yielded some OK output too.  Still, nothing you can’t get from the thousands of sites that already do this (but better).

It does show that there is some promise to Google Squared.  I just don’t think it will realize any useful potential for a while.

Adobe BrowserLab

Adobe is now offering a free preview of its new BrowserLab service, which is an answer to Microsoft’s recently-debuted SuperPreview.  Unlike the PC-only, single machine application that Microsoft is offering, Adobe’s new tool is Web-based and thus portable.

Both applications compare websites in multiple browsers so that developers can see how well their work is appearing in different browsers.  This comparison of sites in browsers is a big part of cutting-edge development and one of the most tedious parts of development work.

CNet News did a good job of outlining how this works in a recent article.

Adobe’s BrowserLab requires only that the computer connecting have Flash 10 installed and otherwise will run on any platform that can connect to the site.  For now, BrowserLab is in free beta preview.

MS SuperPreview

This new tool from Adobe may actually be a step above the Microsoft offering since SuperPreview, when it debuted earlier this year, had only Internet Explorer comparison functions working.  No new word from Microsoft on what kind of additional functionality their software will have, though they have promised multiple platform and browser in the final version of SuperPreview, which is due out later this year.

BrowserLab, however, is currently showcasing Mozilla browsers, Safari, two versions of IE, and even Chrome in its testing.

The only thing holding back BrowserLab from ultimate usefulness?  It doesn’t show sites in Internet Explorer 6 like SuperPreview does.  Uh-oh.

Joking aside, the new tool is a definite boon to developers and designers everywhere!

Bill Heil, a graduating MBA student at Harvard, and Professor Mikolaj Jan Pikorski have published results from their research on Twitter user behavior.  Through a random sampling of 300,000 Twitter users in May, they compiled data to see how people use Twitter and to gain statistics on user activity.

Men and women tend to follow a similar number of other Twitter users, but men tend to have about 15% more followers than women do.  This is due to the fact that men tend to have more reciprocated relationships (followed/following) than do women.  Women, by contrast, make up about 55% of Twitter’s userbase.

Despite the fact that both men and women tweet at about the same activity level (number of tweets per day), both men and women are more likely to follow men than they are women.  Strange results there.  I would guess that the social stereotype that women are more likely to use social networks like Twitter for banalities is at play here.

Oddly, this is anathema to most social networks like Facebook, where the opposite is generally true: women are more likely to have more followers than men, on average.  Over half of all Twitter users don’t send a tweet more than once every 74 days.

In fact, the top 10% of the prolific Twitter users account for over 90% of the system’s total tweets.  That’s compared to other social networking sites where in the top users account for only 30% of the total.  This fits the Twitter paradigm of being a one-to-many service rather than a one-to-one network.

Twitter is surely a strange phenomenon.  This latest survey only highlights that.  It does make it clear that not only do most Twitter users at least understand Twitter’s purpose, but that the service itself is unique amongst social networking sites.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has debuted, very quietly, and is already the talk of the ‘Net.  Contrary to what you might have heard, Bing does not stand for “But It’s Not Google,” though that might be a close approximation of what it is.

Bing is pretty, that’s for sure.  It has a very nice layout and a great way of organizing results.  Much better on the eyes, in my opinion, than Google.  It doesn’t yet have the ability, but it will soon have alternate skins available to customize the look too.

One of the very unique features is embedded auto-play for videos so that when you search for them (much like in Google: enter a search query, click the “Video” filter), most of them will play automatically when you hover your mouse over them.  Sound and all, though you can click a mute button to disable sound in the embeds.

Of course, TechCrunch shows this feature off in an article published this morning, showcasing how Bing doesn’t filter porn.  For now, anyway.  Microsoft has said they’re changing the filtering system and it’s disabling toggles soon.

To be honest, another TechCrunch article is right.  The demo video last week didn’t do Bing justice at all.  It’s much more robust than I’d expected and is actually a contender as a useful search engine.  I’d only choose Google over it based on trust.

In fact, the more I write about it, the more I consider that I may start using Bing for a lot of things.  Search for movie information, for instance.  I did a search for “The Wrestler” (starring Micky Rourke, 2008), which is a great movie, and saw some cool features Bing has.

Since the search is about a movie, Bing changes the options filters to things related to movies.  So now you can search for movie information, photographs from the movie, video, quotes, soundtrack, the cast, etc.  That’s something I should have expected, since Bing does this same sort of custom filtering for books, blogs, etc.

A few notes on Bing are appropriate if you’re planning to use it as more than a curiosity: if you don’t live in North America, you’re likely using a localized Bing that may be missing some features.  Go to the Bing Worldwide page and change your language to English-U.S.

Other useful options are the ability to save your search history into a stand-alone file you can carry with you on the go or lock away for security so you can keep your history without it being available to everyone who uses your system.  You can also send these via email or other sharing so friends and colleagues can use them.

Another great feature you wouldn’t consider useful until you’ve used it is the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed for any search query you’ve entered into Bing.  This makes just about any search subject into a possible aggregate RSS so you can keep up on its “news’ daily.  For me, this is a huge benefit because I do a lot of news hounding in various subjects as part of my daily routine.

For more great tips, check out this nice little article from Digital Inspiration.

Bing is a great search tool and it’s good to finally see Google have some serious competition.  I expect the upcoming rollout of the new Google updates to include some copycat additions to mimick some of Bing’s more popular functions.  I’m hoping that this is the start of a new search engine war that will breath some healthy competition and innovation into the search game.

For now, Bing definitely has some real bling!