He wants them to add “Through the web” as another choice.

My feeling is that most people don’t use the option of choosing how you know someone on Facebook, even though I’ve advocated positively for this feature before, the reason being because many people add new friends on Facebook on a fling and so in fact, do not give value to new friends added.

Even for the few that DO use this option, though, personally I think there are actually too many options to choose from right now. Facebook should consolidate the options so that there are few, and with few overlaps so that the option that you should choose is obvious. This should be done primarily because Facebook’s userbase is quickly growing to be composed of more people than simply college students.

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has posted his thoughts on how he thinks the battle between WordPress and Movable Type will play out, now that both will soon be open sourced. WordPress has really taken a strong foothold and has now become the blogging platform of choice among millions of users worldwide.

When I first started blogging (way back, even way before the oldest post in my current blog’s archives), I jumped between using Blogger, Movable Type, and WordPress. I finally settled on WordPress when it was still in its infancy at version 1.0. The default theme back then was horrendous. I couldn’t stand it, but I still stuck with it because I thought WordPress suited me best, especially since I was a PHP developer back then and WordPress is written in PHP, an extremely popular web programming language, so it would have been easy for me to change things to suit my own needs.

Over time, WordPress has evolved, and it definitely shows in its default theme, its functionality, and a lot of new things that are implemented in the application’s backend.

Whenever I hear ‘open source’, I often imagine something that’s made well, but that looks really bad. When you’ve got a group of developers building an app, it’s not easy to unilaterally decide on a design that looks well, so you usually end up with an application that has a lot of functionality but that lacks in the design department. An excellent example of this is Azureus. For what it lacks in its design, it makes up in features.

WordPress is the first open source application that I’ve encountered that, finally, looks as though it was made by a small company. It is a polished application, it looks great, and it’s not too heavy on the features that it offers. A lot of this can be attributed to Matt Mullenweg, the project’s founder, and so I tip my hat off to him.

In my opinion, there’s going to be no showdown between WordPress and Movable Type. The battle ended when WordPress opened up its hosted blogging platform, WordPress.com, and when it released WordPress 2.0. Other applications such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad will still play significant roles in the blogging world, but in the open source blogging platform arena, WordPress is already king.

Let’s face it. Here we have a company which rode atop a gimmick that was birthed during the dot-com bubble heyday; I’m talking about Ask Jeeves. Other search engines that also had a mascot include sites such as Mamma (one of the few that I can recall), and most of those have died off enough so that they hold a negligible share of web search. Ask is still around because they’ve managed to reinvent themselves as a search engine with a pretty good domain name, and I would say that that’s what’s kept them in the game thus far. If they were named something more web 2.0-ish, like Mahalo, then they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did.

I applaud their attempt to again reinvent themselves in order to stay in the game, in the competitive search engine territory. Google’s got 50% of the search engine market share, and that’s still a long ways away from search engine dominance worldwide, so Ask isn’t done yet. They’ve definitely made a statement with their recent advertising blitz, but I agree with others in saying that it’s a fairly pointless campaign, and as a matter of fact, it’s more of an inside joke, because only geeks would think of algorithms when talking about search engines.

In spite of what I think they’ve done well, I still think that they pulled this latest reiteration of their search engine pretty poorly. I was baffled when I searched for something and saw that search results were fading in using Ajax. Ajax, for a major search engine? Are you kidding me? Using the Fade effect, no less; Google uses Ajax extensively in its non-search results products in things such as Google Reader and Gmail, but they have successfully implemented it in such a way that it’s not in-your-face obvious.

Ask really needs to continue tweaking their search results. The framed look makes it feel too constrained for me, or maybe Google has simply been pampering me all this time. There are so many things vying for my attention on the Ask search results page that I won’t be returning any time soon.

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

To most people, this sounds like a glowing success story of a web startup, but to be honest, there are certain levels of web startups. There’s the kind where you need to launch it with several partnerships with major corporations before you can even get off the ground (a la Joost) and then there’s the kind where all you really need is a credit card in order to get something up and going. In the case of Truemors, we’re in the latter category.

The way I see it, someone like Guy could spend $12,000 on a web startup such as this because he can afford it more than most other people who are still in their college dorms and want to birth a startup of their own soon (like me!). Also, he’s gotten more flak for making this post than other people would get obviously because of his popularity.

There are many more posts out there that are just like this, which make claims that seem amazing to the blog author but which are unspectacular to those who are more savvy, which is precisely why we need to continue spreading the word on the wonders of open source software!

I checked the blog’s FeedBurner stats, and it only has 681 subscribers. This alerted my sensors immediately, and so I look around for a minute and found out that the blog released its theme for public consumption a few weeks ago. Since they included a link leading back to their own site, they garnered thousands of links in only a few weeks. You can see those links here.

Their Technorati Authority is currently 9,247; they trail the much more popular celebrity news website, TMZ.com, by a mere 400 in Authority.

I personally think that this is the best change I’ve made to this site since I started blogging here, and I hope that you’ll agree, too. I’m pretty sure that the old theme didn’t have many fans, so I couldn’t wait to release this new theme for public viewing.

For posterity’s sake, I have saved the old theme. It can still be viewed here if you choose to do so, but I doubt many will take that option. For everyone else, bathe in the warm glow of a new design, and rejoice in the fact that my new design looks much nicer now! If you’ve got any questions, comments, or concerns, then as always, feel free to post a comment to let me know what’s on your mind

It’s currently in use at Jeremy’s blog, over at Ensight. Feel free to comment away on either this post over here or his post over there to send us some feedback.

They really should learn that simplicity is the way to go.