Technology, Note From The Editor | featured news

Some features just make sense. Google Buzz is one of them. It's nothing new really. It's just Twitter integrated within GMail, and with commenting, it looks a lot like Facebook.

I was leaning towards the HTC Touch Pro 2 before Google announced the arrival of the the Nexus One - a "superphone" with a 1 GHz processor, 5 MP camera, turn-by-turn GPS, and 3.7" touch screen. That's not a phone; that's a desktop computer the size of a phone. I went to Google's website to order it, and here's when all the frustration began.

FireFox 3.6 is officially released today. After 3.5's browser freezing problems which caused me to downgrade to 3.0, I was kinda reluctant to upgrade. I did it anyway, and to my surprise, it was as advertised.

Like most, I originally thought News Corp was acquiring Flixster. Instead, it was Flixster acquiring Rotten Tomatoes. I think it's a great fit. Rotten Tomatoes's aggregated critics ratings combined with Flixster's user ratings, Rotten Tomatoes's premium content combined with Flixster's user-generated content. The combined audience of 30M worldwide uniques definitely puts them up there with Yahoo! Movies and Moviefone, the second and third largest movie sites on the web respectively. IMDB is number one, by far. And it's gonna be tough for Flixster/RT to surpass them. When you search for a movie or celebrity, IMDB is usually the first result on Google (and other search engines); and that's the main reason for its dramatic growth in the last couple years. If Flixster/RT can become a more authoritative source than IMDB and surpass its rankings in search engines, then it can become numero uno. If not, being number 2 ain't bad.

Yeah, I used Friendster back in the day. Although I have to say after the initial sign-up, friend connections, and testimonials, I stopped using it. They billed themselves as a dating site - a safer and more casual way to get introduced because you're meeting your friend's friends instead of a complete stranger like it is with Match.com. I wasn't looking for a date back then, and I felt too embarrassed to ask friends for introductions, so I had no reason to go back to the site.

A new tracking code from Google Analytics was released recently. GA is a free web traffic reporting tool that let's you track how many users are viewing your website. The new code snippet uses an asynchronous process, meaning your site would load up without having to wait for the tracking code to finish executing.

Recently I've updated the Alexa Sparky add-on for FireFox 3.0, which displays website traffic rankings on the status bar. It's a nice little plugin that not only lets you see how large other sites are, but it also helps improve your rankings a little bit. After updating the add-on, I started noticing some strange behavior while browsing the web.

Rupert Murdoch, and a couple of his fellow newspaper-owners, say that traffic coming from search engines and aggregation sites are worthless. They call it "drive-by traffic." These users only come, read one article and then leave. For an industry profusely bleeding users and revenue, you would think they wouldn't be so discriminatory when it comes to users consuming their content.

With the iPhone, it's all about the apps. At least that's what the commercials on TV tell us. Naturally, I wanna see what apps are available on the App Store. Disappointingly, it only shows a categorized selection - out of the 100,000 that's available. Directories died a long time ago; just give me a search box.

The fiasco over the weekend with T-Mobile Sidekick and Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, struck a cord with me. If you haven't heard, their server that held nearly a million users' contacts, emails, photos, and appointments went kaput.