I am not surprised to read that Facebook has been found to be the most popular website in Malaysia in October, with an average of 8 million people accessing the website, according to a report by Malaysian Digital Association (MDA). Other top websites are Lowyat, Cari and Fooyoh blogs.

Besides social networks, forums and blogs, Malaysians spend a good number of hours a day on English media sites, where internet users are found to be older and have more spending power than those who frequent social networking sites and forums.

MDA also found that traffic from Malaysians to these new sites came from home connections but usually spiked during lunch hour on work days so this should come as good news to employers in the country!

Facebook has unveiled their new messaging system called “Facebook Mail”. While some people have touted it as the “Gmail Killer”, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, says that it isn’t email but a new way of messaging that incorporates conventional email, instant messaging, private messaging and text messaging.

There are 500,000 Facebook accounts and counting, and at any one time, there are millions of people on Facebook. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook Mail, which will be using @facebook.com where every user will eventually be assigned, it will be a lot faster than email.

I am thinking that those who use Facebook Mail are those who do not have any serious messages to exchange and even if these messages are lost, they won’t feel a great loss. Anyway, I sure am looking forward to “chat” using Facebook messaging since I don’t chat using its online chatting system. Too many “friends”! LOL

I found this rather amusing.

Late night talk show host, Jimmy Kemmel, has declared November 17th as National Unfriend Day and those of us who have more Facebook contacts than we care to count, maybe half of them are people we vaguely remember, or don’t even know, can take this opportunity to “unfriend” these contacts on our Facebook profile.

Admittedly, I have people on my friends list that I don’t recall knowing, and heck, there are people whom I don’t want to add in the first place, which I later found to be my Facebook friend. Ekkkk!!! What happened??

I guess I am not the only persona facing something like this and if a day needs to be declared to take the mass action of unfriending, this looks like a serious problem! How many people are participating in the National Unfriend Day? If you are, how many people will you “unfriend”?

It looks like Microsoft has finally allowed Hotmail users to add other email accounts to Hotmail, like Yahoo! and Gmail email addresses so that users can use Hotmail as their primary email account, and not just as a secondary email or worse, as a spam email account.

I guess the people in Hotmail finally understands that web users have more than one email address and we all need to manage our email better and most of us do this by streaming email into one account, so that we don’t have to log in an out of different email accounts throughout the day!

To use Hotmail as a primary email, we of course would need a Windows Live ID. If we are already using Hotmail, then we do have this ID already. With a Hotmail account, we can then add other email addresses to the account which have to be validated and then managed through POP mail.

Hotmail currently has more than 360 million users and is still one of the largest email providers, though they continue to face stiff competition from Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.

The other day, I had a fright when my Blogger blog was not able to load. Single posts were fine but the homepage couldn’t load except for the header and sidebar. All my posts (content) were missing from the homepage. I thought that it was because of a widget or some script that I have placed on the sidebar was not loading so I accessed another Blogger blog of mine that uses the same widgets, scripts and set up the same way as this blog. it worked fine.

When I have given it enough time and tried using different browsers, including from my smart phone, and it still wouldn’t load, I was desperate and decided to check Google discussion board to see if anyone else is facing the same problem.

Reading about other people’s problems with their Blogger blogs gave me a chill. Many say that their blogs have been marked as spam. That could be a false alert and the blogger has to submit an appeal. However, there are some who says that their entire blog is missing from their Blogger dashboard and they are not able to access the blog at all. It is so strange. And as a Blogger.com user, it is certainly very scary! Even if a blog is deleted by Blogger because of violation of terms of use or something, I believe the owner will be informed. But to have the entire blog missing…

YouTube was unblocked by authorities in Turkey over the weekend, after two long years that it has been blocked in the country. It should be good news to the youth of the country, who I am sure love the stuff that youth in other countries love as well, including YouTube.

But even as the 2009 court order to block it has been put aside, authorities once again blocked it without any reason. Funnily, the block was removed ONCE more, though authorities are still demanding that videos considered insulting to the Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk be removed. I wonder if they know that these videos are no longer live.

YouTube, on the other hand, is trying to restore those videos, as they would like other governments to see that this is not a company to be bullied and they cannot go around removing content from their website just because a government says so. However, they are willing to block access to certain videos from certain ranges of IPs.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this will all end up. I don’t know how those videos are but it’s not good to publish anything that offends others, right?

Google has sent out email announcement to Gmail users regarding the settlement of its recent Google Buzz lawsuit that was brought on by a group of Google Buzz users. they claimed that their privacy has been violated.

Apart from making changes to Google Buzz, as part of the settlement, Google will also create a US$8.5 million fund, where the majority of the money will go towards organisations focused on internet privacy education and policies. Google has also pledged to work harder towards educating users about the privacy aspects of Google Buzz.

I find it weird that although Google has sent out a mass email to Gmail users, I still haven’t receive the email yet, though my family members, who also use Gmail, already received it and have forwarded to me to read.