I have been searching high and low for a small application that would allow me to get Twitter status updates of my contacts on my desktop. Simply put, I would like to be notified of my friends’ tweets on my desktop without having to log in to Twitter to check. It’s something like TwitterFox, which I would gladly try out, except that I read the list of user reviews and apparently, the Firefox add-on is now full of bugs after a change of name to EchoFon.

I don’t really need a Twitter client on my desktop that allows me to tweet and get my Twitter status updated on the web, but if it does the trick I would be willing to try. Someone told me that TweetDeck will give me what I want I’ve checked out the screenshots and it looks too complicated. I just want to be updated on my friends’ tweets on my desktop, with the ability to filter out the people that I don’t want to get an instant tweet update on.

If anyone knows of something like that, please drop me a comment. or better still, if you know programming, I am sure this is something many people would want!

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….

As a semi-professional blogger running a slew of blogs with various niches, I try to keep track of my keywords and their rankings on major search engines, backlinks, traffic, Google Page Rank, Technorati Rank and other statistics. I have to admit though, that sometimes laziness creeps in and I slack in my attention towards this end of blogging which affects traffic to my blogs, hence affecting revenue from my blogging activities.

If you are a professional blogger or in the business of search engine optimization, SEOintelligence offers SEO Tools that are very helpful in tracking the above-mentioned statistics and data intelligently and without hassle because you can set up to have reports sent to you according to an interval that you are comfortable with; daily, weekly or monthly. This way, you could go through the reports at your convenience and wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with data.

SEOintelligence is offering a no-obligation two week free trial to try out their features and functions. You could use this service to improve on your search engine rankings in a simple and cost-effective manner. If you are satisfied with the service and would like to continue using it, SEOintelligence charges US$39.95 per month for tracking of up to five domains but you can request for custom pricing if you manage more than five.

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.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the blogging world is abuzz with the changes that Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will impose come 1st December, 2009. Since the bombshell finally dropped earlier this month, I have read many bloggers’ opinions on this issue.

These changes will only affect bloggers in America and it is certainly understandable why they are jittery even though they are not doing anything wrong. After all, a US$11,000 fine per violation is not a joke and it is not going to be easy to prove that one did not receive compensation in any form for writing a blog post.

Anyway, I read that some bloggers have chosen the drastic move to migrate their blogs to web servers outside of the United States just to be on the safe side. Don’t get them wrong, they will still be writing reviews as honestly as they have been doing but they are just not taking any chances with the FTC. Moreover, the United States is a champion of free speech and to disclose or not is really up to the blogger.

Web Hosting Choice has compiled a list of top ten web hosting companies with more information on each hosting company in one page than you could find going from one individual website to another. You can also find a hosting review for each of these top ten companies.

A friend informed me that Google PageRank seemed to be missing from her Google Webmaster Central account already. Curious, I did a search online and quite a few people have blogged about it already.

Apparently, Google says that they are removing Google PageRank because too many webmasters are obsessed with it already. Moreover, it is no longer as important or relevant when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google PageRank used to be a pretty good yardstick to measure the importance of a website but due to “statistical imbalances” it is removed.

I personally think that while we are no longer able to see this data, it is still available somewhere in Googleville. We just can’t see it, hence there’s no chance for us to be obsessed with it any longer.

You know, since Google bombed the PageRank of all my blogs and websites, some even became victims by association I no longer cared what PageRank my blogs and websites have. I do admit that I was pretty obsessed at first, especially when I first started to understand the importance of it and but that Google PageRank bomb was an excellent cold turkey cure. Frankly, at this point, whether Google PageRank is still here or not no longer makes a difference.