King  Gary 

As TechCrunch points out, the long tail is getting fatter. This basically means that the average internet user is beginning to adopt sites that we label ‘web 2.0‘ as a website that they commonly visit.

The article gives examples such as iLike’s Facebook application, with over 6 million registered users, and Safari, which has had over 1 million downloads since its launch a few days ago.

This basically makes a point that most internet users don’t care if something is web 2.0 or not; they will use it as long as it’s useful to them.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 12% [?]

I just finished watching Apple’s WWDC 2007 keynote. Below are my thoughts on what has been announced.

Safari

It looks like Apple really wants more than that measly 2% browser market share that it currently holds, with Safari. They’ve just released Safari for Windows as well, giving Windows users the opportunity to try out one of only a few Apple-created application available for the alternative operating system recently (iTunes was a great move for Apple since it was the iPod’s tipping point.)

People have already told me that is really IS a lot faster on Windows than Internet Explorer, so I’m happy about that. I rarely, if ever, use Safari on my Mac since I depend on my Firefox extensions, but as a web developer, this news is great for other developers on Windows because they can finally test their websites in Safari without a Mac.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 15% [?]

I’ve recently been receiving more spam comments on my blog that have bypassed WordPress‘ spam protection program, Akismet, more often than usual. I marked them as Spam, which aids Akismet in detecting these types of spam again and protects other bloggers using Akismet’s service from these comments which currently bypass the filters.

I also commonly receive email in Gmail that are spam and that bypass the filters. The Gmail spam protection system works similarly to Akismet’s, in that they both use a network filtration system by relaying any emails that one user considers spam to all the other users; the more times the same email or comment gets marked as spam, the more the system will believe that to be true and protect the other users from receiving the same item.

I’ve reached the point in both Gmail and WordPress where the number of spam/day that I get in my Gmail and the number of spam/day that I get in WordPress are about the same; I’ve currently got 12140 spam; divide that by 30 days, and that’s 405 spam per day. In WordPress, I’ve got 6130 spam comments, over 15 days; that’s 409 spam/day. They’re nearly the same by now.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 13% [?]

John C. Dvorak, a writer who is no stranger to writing about bad news, asks the question of whether it’s time to sell your Apple stocks. He bases a large part of why you should sell your Apple stocks on the fact that he received a phone call that stated the iPhone keyboard is going to play a key role in the failure of the iPhone.

A lot of people have talked about how a keyboard that has no tactile response will feel after long sessions of usage; it’s no secret that tactile keyboards have their clear advantages. You use a keyboard every day, and it has tactile feedback because you can feel when you’ve hit a key square in the middle or when you’ve hit two keys at the same time by accident (I still do that sometimes - and my fingers reach for the ‘delete’ key automatically.)

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 33% [?]

Yesterday, Ask.com made a major relaunch of its search engine. The primary theme among its changes seems to be that its aiming for a more simpler, sleeker look overall so that there’s not as many things fighting for your attention.

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.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 20% [?]

It turns out that Research in Motion, the company that makes the popular Blackberry handheld device, gives the cause of downtime that plagued its users this past Tuesday and Wednesday to be because of an “insufficiently tested software upgrade”. They give a list of excuses reasons of why this problem occurred, including:

• the failure was trigged by “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” designed to increase the system’s e-mail holding space.
• “the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient”.
• the service in the event of a failure “did not fully perform to its expectations”

There’s a good chance that the problem was caused due to oversight by someone from the school that I currently attend, the University of Waterloo, since RIM employs most of its employees from there due to it being headquartered just a few hundred feet from the university’s campus. So on behalf of my university and fellow students: Sorry!

Popularity: 22% [?]