Microsoft?s Social Network and Relationship Finder is not the company?s attempt to set up a dating service, though it might help send your loved one?s e-mail to the top of the pile.

SNARF is one of many attempts at a reliable e-mail filter. This time the filter is backed by a company with deep pockets, so it might actually work.

E-mail filters are intended to help us cut to the chase in sorting through the increasing amounts of e-mail many of us receive each day.

The free, add-on program works with Outlook 2003 and up. It will sort your mail based on the people listed in your address book and how often you correspond with them. You can set your own parameters to separate the e-mail into various categories, a kind of triage. The interface provides a quick overview of unread mail, organised by its importance. SNARF (I know, it sounds like a bumbling cloak-and-dagger organisation from a James Bond movie) is available from Microsoft Research here: http://research.microsoft.com/community/snarf/.

Believe it or not, there is some serious intent behind the seeming frivolity of an entomologist?s decision to name a species of ant from Madagascar after a search engine.

In the first place it is an acknowledgement by AntWeb?s scientists of the help Google is giving them in their ant mapping project. The launch of Google Earth earlier this year has put ant identification on the fast track for them. Google Earth serves up photographs of various sections of the world through a special program you can download for free.

California Academy of Sciences entomologist Brian Fisher says the Google Earth program allows aficionados to plot all of the ants known to AntWeb on a three dimensional, interactive globe of satellite images. Then other ant nuts can look up ants by location, rather than by name.

For instance, if a team of scientists collects an ant in Argentina, they can pull up the South American map from Google Earth and rapidly determine whether or not the ant they found has ever been documented from that region before.

?What is so interesting is that we have been talking with NASA to try to create something like this for the scientific community, but in the end, it was a private group ? Google ? that came up with the tool,? Fisher says on AntWeb.

Fisher said he named the newly discovered ant Proceratium google for its bizarrely-shaped abdomen, which is an adaptation for hunting down obscure prey: spider eggs.

Now he?s calling on Google to continue applying its skills to serve biodiversity data to conservation planners and the general public. It wants the company to launch something called Zoogle, a means of searching for and locating any animal on earth.

I?ve always been a fan of IrfanView, one of the best little image editors around, even beating some of its paid-for competitors in ease of use.

Most digital photo enthusiasts will probably never need anything more.

But since IrfanView is only for the Windows crowd, Apple Mac users have been feeling a bit left out. Not any more. ImageWell is built for Mac users. There is no Windows version so it?s not just a added on version that attempts to transpose Mac over Microsoft. As a sign of its usefulness, CNet has awarded it as one of the top five favourites last month.

With ImageWell, Mac users with OS X 10.2.8 get two functions in one. ImageWell is designed to modify images and then post them to a Web server. Users can edit, rotate, crop, and resize images and then upload it to their iDisk (.mac account), FTP server, or WebDAV server. It?s only drawback seems to be the lack of a bulk uploading feature.

You have to upload your images one by one by one.

There is no need to launch There is no need to launch multiple applications to add text, labels, thought clouds, talking balloons, drop shadows, watermarks and shapes. The software also has a built-in screen-grab feature. CNet finds it useful for bloggers, eBay posters or for anyone looking for a flexible utility for editing and sharing photos. Go to XtraLean Software (www.xtralean.com) to download the program.