If you don't fancy hand-coding the look of your MySpace profile, the newly-rolled-out Profile Themes editor can do the job for you. Currently in beta, the tool is basic but functional, offering you a choice of themes in eight pre-designed categories such as Arty, Tech and Sports. You can customise the themes by changing colours, borders and background images. Access the editor by selecting Edit Profile from the Profile menu and then Profile Editor. [MySpace]

If you're a regular visitor to MySpace and you haven't already installed Gears, you might as well go ahead and do so before the site starts nagging you to get it. MySpace has used Gears for a while to provide localised message stores, but has only pushed the option to users with more than 5,000 messages stashed away. At today's Google Developer Conference in Sydney, MySpace revealed that it will shortly lower that threshold, prompting anyone with more than 2,000 messages. Shifting to Gears enhances your ability to sort and manage messages, which sounds like something anyone with 2,000 messages could use. Gears is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux (principally via Firefox, including 3; IE is fine, Safari is, at this moment, not).

Over at PC Magazine, columnist Sascha Segan argues that many of us are going to have a big ol' pity party down the line, when we realise that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook make it difficult to look through sentimental memories and messages like you can with paper or email. MySpace is bad enough, he writes, but:

Facebook is even worse, because so much Facebook information is metadata, a stream of "pokes" and "virtual gifts" and other non-e-mail-related information that adds up to a history of human interaction.

Segan raises an interesting point: How do we archive our relationships and significant moments when they happen on a social network? If Facebook, MySpace, and the like aren't around in five or 10 years, will you miss the personal history you've stored up on them? If you did want to "back up" your social network information for later viewing, how would you go about it? Share your ideas in the comments.

Windows only: Free music downloading software Freemusiczilla listens to what's playing in your web browser and makes it available for downloading as distinct mp3 files. We've featured individual music service downloading apps before, like Pandora's Jar, but Freemusiczilla seems to sniff out nearly any Flash or AJAX-based music player, be it Last.fm, Pandora, iMeem, MySpace, or many more custom or streaming services. The program limits you to 10 mp3 downloads per day, presumably in waiting for a fully-enabled "premium" version, but gives you three minutes into each track to decide if you want to download or not.

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Between your iGoogle page, your MySpace or Facebook accounts, your Mac or Vista desktop and even your iPhone, your computing life has a lot of room for widgets. Clever Hippo, an app and widget search site, could make it easier to find add-ons for all those platforms and more. The site lets searchers vote widgets up or down, grab search-specific RSS feeds and search from an iPhone-optimized version. If you can admit that you're a regular widget tweaker, you could save yourself some time by getting your fixes in one place.

Skype VoIP services will be offered to MySpace IM users under a new deal between MySpace and Skype's owner, eBay.

The Age wrote up the deal which will see MySpaceIM offer free voice chats between MySpace and Skype users, and let MySpace users link their profiles and photos to their Skype accounts.

The MySpaceIM with Skype software will be available for download in November. The Age reported that "In addition to free PC-to-PC communications, it will support Skype's fee-based services like SkypeOut (for calls to landlines), SkypeIn (a local phone number allowing users to receive calls from landlines or mobile phones), voicemail and call forwarding."

The story says MySpace has around 25,000 local users for its IM application - a figure I have to admit struck me (a MySpace newbie) as quite high. Have you used MySpaceIM, or would the new Skype features tempt you do so? Let us know in comments.