I will not be going to Facebook.com again for some time. The iPhone version of Facebook is great to use in any version (see it here) but I think it is better suited to a smaller screen. Hence it works perfectly as a widget. You can browse, post, change your status, check your inbox etc. And you don’t see any of the new application shit. It is simply marvellous. Ad free for the moment too.

Facebook just released their new applications product. And it is quite simply amazing. Facebook has become the first well implemented web based operating system. No one has any reason at all to leave Facebook now… everything can be done through it’s new platform.

It’s incredible.

Today Facebook have launched Facebook Mobile. The extra functionality is broken down into three sections - you can browse Facebook on your phone, you can upload content to Facebook on your phone and you can get text updates and send text updates to Facebook. I am only interested in the latter.

So what does this text service offer? Well you can search Facebook users, and get there info I assume delivered to you by text. And you can write on people’s walls, send people messages, poke people… etc. On January 7th I said that I thought that Facebook could do with acquiring Twitter or at least making use of some of their ideas on this Flickr Photo. And now it looks like that is what they have done.

The actual functionality of Twitter - sending you updates on what your contacts are doing - seems to be missing for now. I don’t think there is any sort of automatic message sending out - it only sends you messages to requests that you have made. But it is hard to tell without using the service which is something I am not doing anytime soon. I do know though that a feature where everytime a friend updated their status you got it on your phone (i.e. Twitter) would go down amazingly well among students.

Facebook Commands:

Twitter Commands:

If it is not there right now - it would be a great addition. And I am sure it will come.

I have terminated the Google Adsense adverts that used to run to the right hand side of this blog, and have replaced them with some Text Link Ads. You will notice that there is just one link there right now, but this is because of the way that Text Link Ads works. Sponsors actually have to buy the space on your blog. So it does take a while to build up revenue.

I will let you know how the campaign progresses - this is me optimising my blog for once, something you can expect to happen around January every year, as that is when I have to pay my hosting bill. If you think that you would like to join Text Link Ads because of reading this post then you can click on the links below. Choosing the affiliate link will benefit me, and this site through the Text Link Ads affiliate scheme, at no cost at all to you.

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Wow! The guys over at Stu.dicio.us have just posted a teaser screenshot of how the service is going to look in the upcoming 2.0 release. Lovely!

I am very excited about this product, and I expect to have a account running the new version very soon. The review will be cross posted between this blog, and Gizbuzz.

I had been using Google.com/ig ever since it was released. But since my default browser has switched to Safari I find that Google’s homepage doesn’t quite cut it for me. Also in the recent Mashable Social Networking awards I noticed that a lot of other start pages were getting a lot of attention. I tried Pageflakes, but couldn’t quite take that, and then played around with Netvibes.

Here is what some of it looks like:

This is pretty much the first non Google product I am using in a space where Google has got a decent product already. And it feels kind of good to do. I thought that I would have difficulties with my calendar (which is managed and edited in iCal but broadcast to Google Calendar) and my email etc. since they are all on Google. But no - thanks to open standards I was able to pull off all the data to this independent service.

There is one module/gadget/widget that I can’t find a replacement for. And that is the Google Reader one. Netvibes is great with RSS - it is basically built with RSS completely at it’s core - but it doesn’t have one module that will serve me up all the new items from all of my favourite feeds. I have to have a separate module per feed. Luckily Netvibes is pretty fast loading and I keep all of the feeds over on one tab so it is ok, but it is not perfect. However on the flipside, still in the area of RSS, netvibes does have one advantage over Google - it has an ultra lightweight feed display function for viewing full posts. Very simple, but very good. Just what I want.

Speaking of the tabs - they are one area in which Google’s homepage really doesn’t perform well. Switching between them seems to involve a request being sent to the server and correspondingly it takes far too long. With Netvibes you can choose to have all tabs load at once - or just the the first tab to. I have all of the tabs load at once so it is lightning quick to change between them. The final highlight for me is that Netvibes counts up all the new items that you have on your page and displays the total in the title of the page. So if I keep it open I will know when I have something new to see to. Whether that is a podcast has been released, or I’ve got an email, or there are new photos from my friends on Flickr, or a new post on a blog, or … Netvibes can handle it.

Word Count Journal is a blogging platform focused on doing a little bit everyday. When you sign up you create a journal like you would create a project. You specify some parameters that you think you can stick to. Say - maintain output for 1 year and increase the number of words in each post by one each day for the year, starting with one word. They are the default options, and are what I signed up for.

I am strangely attracted to the concept. And the added bonus of adding a photo to each entry is really nice. It becomes much more of a photoblog, especially when you only have 1 or 2 words to describe it. So far I have stuck to the limits and produced a post every day with the right number of words. Here are some of them.

There are a few little bugs in the system, and things that I would prefer to work slightly differently. For instance the images are not put in the RSS feed and they are awkwardly resized on the page (as seen above). But I got in touch with the people behind the service and they assure me there will be improvements very soon.

For the moment I am mirroring all the content on Flickr where I can store the photos in full resolution - in this friends only photoset.

I happened to be on the output point of Windows Live blogs at msreadr.com today, and I caught wind of an update to the Live Mail feature set that was live/going live at the time. Code named M7 I think. One of the features really caught my eye, it said that they were adding checkboxes. Now this isn’t an odd feature for a mail application what I thought was odd was that I hadn’t noticed they were missing when I first reviewed the product. But when I thought more about the interface that they have adopted it made more sense of course they hadn’t had checkboxes in their setup the messages are treated like much more square rectangles than anywhere else I have seen, and you are encouraged to drag them around rather than (I suppose) using checkboxes to select messages for movement. So I was sort of interested in how their checkbox implementation was going to work.

Luckily I have a Live Mail account that has a pretty constant stream of 6 or 7 spam messages every day flowing into it. So I have a place to play with the product, and mail to play with. I have to say it is a long time since I have seen anything as awkward as the way these checkboxes work. The first thing is that they are not always visible. They have them appearing in the place of the envelope which indicates whether a message has been opened or not when you hover over a message. So you hover over a message, the envelope vanishes and is replaced with a white square. Only on the message you are hovered over note, not the whole column. If you click at this point the box gets itself a green tick and when you move the mouse off the message it doesn’t regain it’s envelope icon. Instead the tick remains and it takes on a blue shaded background.

Here is the list of emails	Hover over the first email. Colour/Icon change.
Click the checkbox. Get a green tick.	Miss the checkbox. Lose your first tick.

Ok that doesn’t sound perfect, but it sounds reasonable in the circumstances. What is so hilarious? Well lets take a look at what happens if you miss the checkbox. It looks like you’re in luck, the message is still selected and gets it’s green tick like any other would. But the surprise is that any messages you have previously ticked on your way down the list marking the spam are automatically unticked. I have done some tests, and I havent been able to tick more than six messages in a row without missing one and losing the lot. This also means that when you have selected a message for reading just by clicking on it, the checkbox automatically gets ticked. Well this is no real problem, who cares if the box is ticked or not. Ok. Try this for a scenario. You check your inbox see you have an email from a friend and also four messages that are clearly spam. You click to read the message from your friend. Then you tick the boxes on each of the four spam emails and drag them to the trash can. Now you better hope that you notice that it says five items as you drag them over as your message from the friend will of course also be selected still. Oh heavens…

As an aside: the images above are real screenshots of the best view of the inbox you can get in Live Mail. Anyone else think it is just too limited? The information provided is cluttered with that terrible text overlap when someone’s name is too long. Compared to the snippets you can get in Gmail with the interface looking nice, it seems pathetic.

Yes finally today one of the longest rumoured Google services had been released. And the good news: it isn’t even a beta, this is straight away a full product. I think this is probably something to do with the nature of the product. Google is a huge brand name, it is very trusted. But people may be a little skeptical about entering their credit card information into a beta service. So what is this thing? It is almost identical to PayPal. It allows you to pay for goods at a variety (and I imagine an ever increasing list) of stores using your Google Account login information. So you only have to fill out your credit card information once, and then you just need your Google Account login, and you can buy your stuff.

It also offers a few nice things like it claims that it will track the shipping of the products, although I personally would be hugely surprised if the shipping service they gave was accurate or up to date. I find whenever dealing with delivery the further you are from the original people who are posting it to you the more and more out of date the information gets. But we will see on that one. There is also an order history which I suppose is nice, and there is a way that you can review the people you have bought off.

The real killer for this service is, like so many of Google’s new services, its integration. Particularly this time with Google Search. If I can search for “Laptop” and have a product page with “Buy Now” buttons which use the checkout service that would be great. I can’t see this integrated into Froogle right now but that seems totally stupid so I imagine that it is, but just somehow subtly. The other key thing is how many companies take it up. I am not sure how this will work out. Google is becoming well known for good but unpopular products (I am not going to quote that Finance figure again), and this one looks good, so popular?

Update: Someone from Streamload has replied in the comments. Some of the issues raised in the post are in fact incorrect. Most notably there is no upload limit. The limit is applies to downloads. See the comments for more info.

There are plenty of cool things about having 25 GB free storage online, heck that is more than the storage I pay for. But what is never immediately clear is what the catches are. How can they be offering something so good without people like me moving their whole sites over to Streamload?

Well there is first of all an instant catch. You can only transfer 500 MB of stuff a month. So that means it would take you 50 months to reach the incredible 25 GB they advertise. That is over 2 years. And the way things grow storage will not be worth very much in two years time so I am pretty sure the investment that Streamload are making here is not such a significant one. They are really only giving you 500 MB of space today, and then 500 MB more if you stick with it for a month. The 500 MB catch also has other implications. It means that you have to be careful about how much you are uploading. It isn’t some massive 25 GB store where you can drop anything anytime worry free. It is more like a small letter box into a well size storage area.

Second problem is always going to be the experience. If you have to upload one file at a time then it is really worth paying for something more usuable. In the case that you were forced to upload a file at a time it would be clear that the 500 MB uploads per month was some figure they just plucked from the air. They could have offered 5 GB since no one could literally pass enough files through the system in a month to reach the limit on a one upload at a time basis. But luckily Streamload it not one upload at a time. They have this neat thing where you drag and drop files and they upload. Ace. So where is the catch then?

Man! What a cool company they have some sort of joke message after you have uploaded some files. And you can see the need to keep you smiling because it is no joke. Your files will not be in your file manager after you have uploaded them. I imagine they have some process backstage that they work through pretty slowly that gets yours files in the list. I uploaded some files before I started to write this review. And there is still no sign of them. This is a major blocker for me. If I am going to upload something I want to be able to see it online and I want it to be there straight away.

What you want is FTP transfer for an easy to use UI, and no worries about uploading lots at once. And I was amazed to find that they offer an FTP upload service. It is not well advertised, and so far I have had little success in making it work. I mean the files I have FTPed up are not there yet. And I am not sure they let you download by FTP which is odd. But if you want a go with FTP it is ftp.streamload.com with your streamload username and password.

There is also a maximum filesize that you are allowed to upload at once. I find their documentation difficult to follow but I think it is 25 MB. That is pretty reasonable I guess. Most people don’t have photos bigger than 2 MB. But for movies and big data files. They could be 50 MB or so. So Streamload will no allow you to upload your biggest files, but for most files I must admit this is really not an issue.

The final thing is this is not web hosting. I don’t think that you can make these files univerally available with a URL. Or if you can I think the amount of stuff you are allowed to place “in public” is very limited. Why would they limit this? One word: Bandwidth. If you have your photos stored on their servers that only costs them the initial transfer costs, the storage costs and the cost whenever you transfer back. But having something public more people can download it all the time. Several hundred download means a big bandwidth bill.

The overall user interface is pretty nice though. There is nothing major to complain about. Apart from the fact of course that my files still aren’t there.