Facebook - the most visited site for Christmas

Just a moment ago I read on www.softpedia.com that on Christmas Facebook was the most visited site in the US.

For some time now, Facebook has been the second most visited after Google, however on the day of Christmas, and even the day before - Christmas Eve, Google had fallen to the second place, being outrun by the social service.

I guess that soon Facebook will return to being number two, however this achievement shows with no doubt, that social networks, and Facebook in particular, and gaining more ground in the Internet, providing means of contact between long-lost friends, relatives, co-workers and much more.

Facebook is down

Something happened to facebook just several minutes ago. As I was browsing my profile, the social web sited just crashed. When you type facebook.com in the adressbar it would redirect you to Google and if you try to load some other page (lets say facebook.com/home.php or www.facebook.com/magadanskiuchen?ref=profile, which is my personal profile) it would show you a 404 File Not Found Error!

I recorded a short screen cast to show you what I mean.

Google Chrome (4) Extensions

Finally I have installed Google Chrome 4 (it's still beta) so I tried some of the new extensions that the browser provides. First I had no idea that there were already so many extensions. But what made even greater impression to me was that not only they were many, but they were also good! I mean, for just half an hour I installed 15 and uninstalled only two of them but not because they were bad and I also disabled another two just because I think I don't really need them.

Some of the extensions I loved were Google Mail Checker and Google Reader Notifier (these two are just MUST-HAVE extensions!), the RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) is something that I've wanted for Chrome since I saw it for the first time, as well as XML Tree. SmoothScroll is something I also needed badly in Chome and now I have it along with everything else I wanted :). You could also check out Feedly, Picnik Extension for Chrome and Facebook Notifications if you are also using Chrome. The last one is actually quite small extension - it provides you only the notifications in Facebook - if you'd like to be able to also see what's happening on your wall, update your status, read the News Feed etc, you should look for another Facebook extension (I had installed two more - they were the two ones that I uninstalled - I did it because the idea behind Chrome and the reason I love it is that everything should be as simple as possible and that's why I left with the simples of the three Facebook extensions.

For desert I left my comment about the Beautify Facebook extension. There's only one thing to say about it: "WOW!!!". It's incredible! Have you seen Google Wave - it's greatest design and HTML 5 look and stuff? Well, Beautiful Facebook turns Facebook to such a kind of equivalent! That's one of the most beautiful things I've seen in my whole life! And I'm not just saying that - I really, absolutely love it! I even installed one more extension to check out if there is an easy way to make browser screenshots, so I could upload one here in this blogpost (I used picnic for that). So see it for yourself!

That's all I have to say for now. But if I have anything else to add about Chrome Extensions - I'll do it right away :)

Google sync

Just last week I bought a new mobile phone - LG KS20 to be exact - and I was more then happy when the next day I read in my feeds, that Google launched a new service for smart phones and pocket  PCs. That's Google Sync. The interesting part about it was that it could communicate with windows mobile based devices over the active sync protocol.

This was the perfect opportunity to me to transfer my contacts to my new phone, so I tested the service right away, even that Google's staff warned in the google sync's official web site that it's still a beta version and it may not work properly. Well I had no contacts or anything else that I could've lost, so I just connected my phone to the PC and setup my google sync. I was very pleased that the connection was easu to establish, all of my ontacts were transfered to my phone in just a minute and everything. It was great. However, then I tried to change the listing of my contacts, since they all looked like "Last Name, First Name" style and I hate that. I tried to list them first to see the first name and then - the last one (after all they are FIRST and LAST names, right?). The thing that I did not like was that after only several seconds, the names were listed back the old way. I had to remove my google sync conection in order to make them stay the way I wanted. I'm not sure if this is actually a bug, and whose fault it is, but to me it looks like I can read data from my google account, but I can't write back and I don't like this part. It's cool to transfer everything from my g account to my phone, but the opposite isn't working the way I'd like, so I guess that I'll be waiting for official version before using google sync again. After all - I got what I wanted and this make me feel calm and happy. Good luck Google, to making this service one of the best, like all of your other products :).

Happy anniversary

Hey everybody! I'm happy to announce that on this day a year and a week ago I wrote my first post in this blog :). I know I haven't written much - this is only my 18th post, but i think it's somewhat OK - this makes more than a post every month, actually, it's 3 posts every 2 months :P.
What I'd like to write here and now is that I thank all of you that like this blog and read it from time to time, also I'd like to thank everyone who posted comments or at least thought of doing it, but something came in their way. Thanks for the support people, I hope that in the next year I'll by writing a bit more occasionally and my articles will be regarding more information you'd like to read about.
Happy anniversary once again :)!