This morning, I accessed my Gmail as I do daily and was a little shocked when I received a note on my screen saying that my Gmail was temporarily unavailable. I hardly ever encounter this before but I cannot say never, though. This time was a little different with the server error code of 500. Even the display page was a little different.

Anyway, even though I do not have anything important in my email, when I couldn’t access my account when I wanted to and it doesn’t work as it should, I get pissed off and then my heart sinks thinking that may be a problem with my account and that my email has been wiped out.

You know, we have so many email stored in various folders, I am sure we wouldn’t even notice anything different if one or two mails went missing until we want certain information and go digging for it in our archived mail.

Luckily, this happened for just a short while and I was able to access my account upon pressing F5. And then I was able to breathe again. LOL

The Fan Check application on Facebook has caused tremendous concern among all my Facebook buddies over the past couple of days when suddenly, everyone is tagged in one photo or another. On the surface, it is quite a fun application to use as it scans the user’s Facebook profile to see which friends interact the most on the profile by posting on the wall, etc, and ranks these friends accordingly.

Fan Check was at first named Stalker Check but was forced to change its name by Facebook but the following day after the sludge of Fan Check photos on my newsfeed, Facebook apparently announced that it is a virus like Koobface. I don’t know how far true this is because I didn’t get any notification from Facebook. Some of my friends say they did, some, like me, did not.

However, I could say that at first, I thought I would want to use Fan Check to see which “joke” visits my profile the most to post on my wall but since I knew the answer already, I didn’t need an application to tell me. I could say that Fan Check was installed on my Facebook account even though I did not install it myself, merely just checking out the photo that I was tagged. I untagged it after receiving the warning about the virus and deleted Fan Check from my profile.

Even with Fan Check cleared from my newsfeed, I guess Facebook was doing a clean up in the background, along came something eerily similar called All My Friends. I wasn’t tagged in any of these All My Friends photos; I guess my 1000+ friends in Facebook are smarter or more cautious this time around, and you can bet that if I was tagged, this time I would not be clicking on the photo to have a look just to be on the safe side, virus or not!

Forget about Gmail outage a few days ago. You know technology fails us sometimes! I was informed that Gmail was down by a friend via Facebook but I was not that concerned because I wasn’t using it at that time. If I was, that would be a different story and I would be venting already.

Someone asked what happens if Gmail was down and so was Twitter, since so many people utilized Twitter to spread the word about Gmail’s outage and to vent and rant. Well, there’s still Facebook, right?

Anyway, like I said, Gmail is back up already and what does the Gmail team has for us? New Gmail themes, of course! The new themes are called Orcas, Turf and High Score. There’s also one called Random, which is not a theme but it rotates the theme collection that Gmail has so you don’t really know what theme you will be getting when you log in to Gmail, hence the name Random.

While these three themes are new and fresh, I have to say that I am not particularly impressed. I still like Candy the most. I have been using it since the introduction of Gmail themes and I know it is high time I change it but I really do need something better than the current selection of themes!

What about you? What do you think of the new Gmail themes?