Wow, how time flies that I totally forgot that Geocities would close on 26th October, 2009 until a friend told me that he is rushing to retrieve his files. I actually wrote about Yahoo’s announcement on 11th July, 2009 HERE but since I do not have content on my Geocities account, I didn’t bother keeping the date in my head.

My friend used to own a rather popular Geocities website many years ago until he decided to host his own website for better control and management, moving some of his old content to his new website. He still had some important information on his Geocities website which he intended to migrate but kept procrastinating until the final day when he was forced to do so or may never be able to retrieve them again.

According to my friend, Yahoo! charges for usage of FTP to retrieve files hosted on Geocities but he found a FireFox plug-in that grabbed everything quickly. It was convenient except that he had to edit the files manually which are all littered with Yahoo! ad codes. Bleh….

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Don’t you just hate it when something that has been working perfectly becomes broken because people made changes to it? This is what happened to Facebook.

You know, this past week, using Facebook has been totally frustrating for me. There are times when my account is “temporarily unavailable” and I cannot even log into it, or my profile is offline, my status could not be updated, there would be no new posts on my wall when I just updated it, I would have ZERO friends, my newsfeed isn’t updated and I would be shown newsfeed from a day ago FOREVER.

And if that’s not enough, I cannot confirm new friend requests, requests from applications that I have accepted, rejected or ignored come back to haunt me over and over again, or sometimes totally not shown. The same goes for Private Messages and Notifications, which I also depend heavily on.

Logging into games or other applications on Facebook is also another pain in the neck and when I get a blank page, I try to access it via http://apps.new.facebook.com/APPLICATION (replace APPLICATION with name of the application you are trying to access). It does help SOMETIMES but it is not a solution.

I hope that the developers of Facebook would roll back and only release these changes when they are bug-free!

Four major music recording companies, Warner Music, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, have licensed their music catalogues to Google in support of its new online music “store” that will try to challenge Apple’s iTunes.

Google’s new initiative to be launched next week, which partners with iLike and LaLa, allows web users to search for music, preview them and buy via download all without leaving Google’s website.

Music lovers have moved from buying CDs to individual tracks from the web because frankly, most of us just like a track or two from an album and so we do not see why we should pay for a full album when we will only loop a couple of songs per CD. I do this and I know this is what a lot of my friends do as well.

Now, I’ve been thinking that with Google’s new music portal which basically allows us to search for and buy music but will also have links to music news, artiste news, album artwork and probably concert information, we will have to pay for our purchase using Google Checkout.