King  Gary 

I just came back from watching Pixar’s latest movie, Ratatouille. I went in without reading reviews, and after viewing the commercial for the film a few times on television. The only expectations that I had were based on previous movie offerings from Pixar. I was severely disappointed with Pixar’s previous offering, Cars, considering the quality of their previous films, but I was very delighted with Ratatouille and they have won me over once again.

I must say, the television commercial for the move does not do the film justice - this is definitely a movie that cannot be judged based on what their marketing department can conjure up. When living in a world with movies such as “The Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End”, “Shrek 3″, and “Spider-Man 3″, - movies which made nearly a billion dollars, and walking out of the theater feeling ripped off - it’s not difficult to see that the quality of a movie can be vastly different from what the general perception is before walking in to the theater.

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An error message like this from Facebook can really slow down my Facebook Application testing and development.

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Well, since I’m out of b5media now, I’ve been busy with building Facebook Applications. Actually, a whole slew of them.

I won’t mention any specific Application names right now, but hopefully we’ll hit the half-million-users point soon in terms of the total number of users that we have across all of our Applications. A few of our applications are even in the top 100 most popular application list.

You may also have noticed that my Facebook profile has recently been having a major make-over. No, it’s not turning into a MySpace profile! I’ve just been testing out so many Facebook Applications that I end up just leaving them there

I’m also building a few Applications for other people as well; a few are in the education world, helping students with their notes, and others are more oriented towards the business-minded people.

Hopefully I’ll have fancy graphs and statistics to show in the near future

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Well, I’ve left b5media as of last Friday (a week ago today). I blogged about when I joined them way back in January.

First of all, I’d like to thank them for giving me the opportunity to work there. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I take away with me experiences and relationships that I will use for the rest of my life.

In a way, this event is perfect for me. Now that I have more time available to myself, I’ve invested it into my own projects that I have planned for quite some time (most of which are still under wraps!) I also have several projects that I have been working on but had to put on hold because of my work at b5media, so now I can spend more time to focus on them.

Anyways, thanks, muchos gracias, to everyone who has been involved with my experience over at b5media. It’s been fun, but I can only work at the same place for so long!

Plus, I get bored easily, so I try to spice things up by changing the platforms that I work on and such (I primarily used WordPress over at b5media). Which, leads me to my next point… I’m building Facebook Applications now. Read on by clicking here!

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Not many people that I know today know this, but I used to freelance and write modifications for the vBulletin forum software, which today is probably the most popular forum software that is not free.

I released 40 official modifications in total, all which can be found on my vBulletin profile page, and all of them are free.

In total, all of my modifications have been marked as being installed nearly 2000 times. If you look at the dates, you’ll see that they were all released within roughly a one-year timespan, and the last modification was released over 3 years ago.

Those were fun and interesting times. It was a time when I contributed a lot of free code to a project just for fun, when I suddenly had the urge to just release a lot of stuff for free to the public, as long as people would use them. I also wrote a simple-but-useful vBulletin tutorial on ‘how to create your own vBulletin powered page‘, which managed to garner nearly 100,000 views and over 500 replies.

I think I really need to find a way to get my groove back

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An anonymous letter from a Facebook Application developer was posted to Valleywag today, talking about how their hopes of the hyper-viral promises that Facebook brings were over-warranted.

This is unfortunate. I have had similar-but-not-as-bad issues with the Facebook platform and with Applications that I have on there, which I will post about hopefully sometime in the near future.

I think that it’s important to take advantage of the news feeds of your application’s users that are available to you because these are published to the friends of all of your users. This will have to be the next big goal for Facebook Application developers because Facebook has now add a limitation to only allow up to 10 invitations per application to be sent out by each user, per day.

This is very disappointing indeed.

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I’ve made a new post over at Blog Herald entitled “Keeping categories simple to keep readers happy“. I talk about what’s a great way to organize your blog’s categories, and I also use the categories that I have here at King Gary as an example.

Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever I write a new blog post, I always think about which category suits the post best. I keep the number of categories that I have at a minimal level so that an appropriate category for every blog post is immediately obvious to me.

My rule of thumb for naming categories is, if you’ve got two categories that can overlap each other in an obvious manner, then you’ve got to change something there. Either merge the two categories, or remove one and expand the remaining one. I also tend to review my categories every few months, and if I have a category with less than 10 posts, then I ax it and merge the posts with that category into another category.

Go check it out!

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I just visited Google Docs, and it looks like they had a make-over only a few hours ago. TechCrunch picked up on this and blogged about it.

It certainly was a surprise to see the changes at first. I used Google Docs back in the day, when it was still Writely (and I conversed with the team fairly regularly, giving suggestions, some which were implemented and still are.) So, I was used to the old view.

This new look incorporates folders, which are new, as well as tags, which existed before. Does this mean that tags aren’t working out as well as Google had hoped? TechCrunch poses the question to Gmail to see if they will also implement folders. I personally much prefer Google’s ‘labels’, as they call it, which are essentially just tags. I like these because they give me all the flexibility in the world, and I’m sure most of you who have worked with tags before know what I’m talking about.

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Looks like Friendster is back in the game, with a 40% increase in traffic in the last month, according to ComScore statistics and as mentioned by VentureBeat.

TechCrunch mentions that being a member of a social network is thought to be mutually exclusive, meaning that there can only be one major growth leader in the world of social networks. With Facebook booming as much as it has been lately, one would assume that other networks such as MySpace and Friendster would slow down in growth, but that is not the case. I somewhat agree on this.

The one thing that I do completely agree on with VentureBeat is that social networks are finding new markets in places where there previously were no real reigning social network to begin with. Places like the Philippines and Malaysia have people that are attracted to Friendster, which is probably partially fueled by the fact that Friendster is already one of the social networks of choice in China, whereas Facebook is not nearly as popular as it is in the United States.

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Looks like Dave Winer of Scripting.com fame is going to be releasing the ‘Twitter for audio’ soon, called TwitterGram. It’s basically like Twitter, but instead of sending short quips of text, you’re sending audio files that are 200 kb or smaller in size.

This isn’t going to be nearly as big as Twitter; not even a quarter of the popularity. Audio is just not as easy to glance over than text.

Podcasting, for example, has gotten relatively big, but blogs are still massive compared to podcasting, which is partially why podcasting startups such as Odeo didn’t do nearly as well as they would have hoped for. I would imagine that podcasts take up less than 5% of all existing blogs. The same will go for TwitterGram.

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