Latest News

Apple have introduced a social element to the latest version of iTunes called Ping, now the idea sounds fine see what your friends are downloading or listening to all in one place but that has upset a few people at Facebook.

After introducing Ping on Wednesday 1^st September 2010. Apple’s CEO  Steven P. Jobs was asked why Apple built its own social network? Apple admitted to reporters that and they held discussions with Facebook, but that the social networking company’s terms were “onerous.”

Yet Apple started using Facebook’s API to allow users to find their Facebook friends on Ping. But that stopped working on Thursday. Remember the 6 hour outage I reported in the previous post? Ironically that was on Thursday too. Facebook blocked Apple because Ping had the potential to send so much traffic to Facebook which could  cause site instability.

According to the NYT: Facebook said: “We’re working with Apple to resolve this issue. We’ve worked together successfully in the past, and we look forward to doing so in the future.” Facebook did not specify what the “issue” was. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

We can only guess why Facebook have stopped allowing Apple Ping access to their site. I personally hope they realize their common ground one is great a creating computers and phones the other is great at social. Working together would end up with a win-win situation.

Twitter can now shorten and check the link before you click it!

In the coming weeks, Twitter will start to see the rollout of our Twitters new link wrapping service t.co which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and Twitter will then forward you on to the destination URL if everything looks good. All of that should happen in an instant.

You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; Twitter expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

What does this mean for you?

• A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. (Which has better scope for usability and SEO)
• You will start seeing links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened links and lets you know where each link will take you.
• When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. There hope is to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to users over time.

So no more bit.ly or strange hidden URL’s that can take you off to a site that is unknown and worst of all unchecked!
Thanks to Twitter for implanting this and utilizing the new .co TLD extension in a way that works well for everyone.

In the last couple of hours, Facebook has been unstable, for many users including myself. I only noticed this when viewing an Activity Feed on a blog and noticed a blank box, so I tried to login to Facebook and got the Sorry page could not be found.

While downtime happens far more rarely. It is the world’s largest social network has occasionally had stability issues. It’s a big deal: with 500 million active users, complaints about downtime mount up pretty quickly.

I did a quick search on Twitter to see if it was just the United Kingdom but it is global with Tweets coming in from Singapore and America.

Unfortunately this is the screen greeting most people today on Facebook

I have just tried to access Facebook direct via their IP address incase it was a Name Server issue and is not. No doubt the technicans at Facebookare running around frantic trying to roll the site back as I imagine it will be an internal upgrade that has caused the entire site to crash.

6 hours later at 15:10 (GMT) Facebook had resolved the problems and was back up and running again, It will be interesting to see what the news websites say about this outage in particular Facebook.

Well today I have a meeting with graphic designer Adele Tolladay from Gablelake. We are going through re design issues for a clients website the website is The Mohair Sock Company site.

We are wanting to bring the branding up to date and in line with the current brochure that has just gone to print, so the style of the website matches the exact design of the current brochure. Whilst these changes are slight they can have a big impact on the design of the website.

So when a customer visits the site they feel at home when going there after seeing an advert or receiving a brochure. We feel this is important to keep the design balance correct across both print and web.

It is an amazing and very powerful site called Posterous.

The site works by posting one simple post via email and that is converted into a blog post, a news update on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter. A simple idea that allows users to post to many places from one place.

You can decide which accounts you want to post to just by sending an email to Posterous. So now you can keep everything in one place. If you do not have a Posterous account it is easy to set up and get started. Plus if you like the posts on a person’s Posterous you can subscribe so you can see them in a news feed format,

Here is what people are saying…..

Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun Times says: “Makes blogging easier than ever.”

The Huffington Post says: “Quickest and easiest setup I’ve ever seen”

Chris Anderson, curator of TED says: “For someone as time-jammed as I am, Posterous rocks. It took less than 15 minutes to figure out how to use it.”

So check it out for yourself and make a test post, you will be amazed!
Plus please subscribe to my Posterous and say hello.