My, has it been “only” 13 years? In internet speak, that is a loooong time, though. Many dotcoms have already come and gone within this time frame. I still sort of remember the early days when Google was just starting to make its name on the web. There’s no denying, though, that the company has grown tremendously over this relatively short period of time.

To celebrate the occasion, Google has this doodle logo on their homepage. HHmmm not nice. Dull colours and the word Google is half hidden. Wasted.

Facebook rolled out a new layout and it looks way too cluttered than most of us like our newsfeed to be. The thumbnail images of photo albums are larger, no doubt but then when people upload spam photos to Facebook, you’d just be getting more spam on your newsfeed!

Do you know, even before this new layout, I already have not even visited my newsfeed for months aolready. I do go to Facebook but only visit my own profile, wall and play the occasional Facebook games. I find that I don’t even care what my friends are posting on their statuses anymore. It’s usually something mundane about their life, their grouses and rants. I have enough problems of my own…

So anyway, I don’t care one way or the other how Facebook has changed the way newsfeed is presented to us!

Google Street View is working with Tourism Malaysia to document and highlight interesting landmarks, but that are less popular, on Google Street View. Malaysians have been asked to vote for their favourite places that they would like to see on Google Street Views.

Ideally, we would like those that are interesting but lesser know to be tabulated and documented, alongside the already photographed millions of times landmarks like KL Twin Towers and A’Famosa, for example.

To participate in the Malaysia Street View Trike Poll, click on this link: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/streetviewmalaysia/

Beginning 25th Aug, Facebook will roll out new privacy options that are more open and easily accessible, and hopefully, easier to understand and use. According to Facebook, during this transition period, our existing Privacy settings will still remain the same, until we make changes when the new controls are available to us.

Some of the changes include the ability to approve photo tagging before it appears on our profile. On the other hand, Universal tagging allows Facebookers to tag anyone to photos, not just fellow Facebook users. I wonder how these outsiders can remove their tag since if they are not Facebook users, how are they going to know they have been tagged?

Will have to see how these new privacy options work once they re rolled out.

RIM, the maker of BlackBerry smart phones and tablets, will soon announce a music service for their smart phone users, and will call it BBM Music. According to reports, this music service will work with RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger system. This means that users can share their favourite music over the messenger system with their friends.

Obviously, this move is to capture the younger smart phone users who have yet to try out BlackBerry, which is primarily a business phone. In addition, their tablet didn’t really catch on too. I don’t know if we need yet another music service. I never use it anyway because I simply have no time.

My friend, a photojournalist, sent me a text message the other day, telling me that his photos of a luxurious retreat were not retrievable from his camera’s memory card. He said that he’s lucky he took some photos using his mobile phone camera, though it’s a pity that the quality is not great. I offered to email him some of my photos but photojournalists derive satisfaction from seeing the beautiful photos that they have shot themselves. I certainly understand his disappointment.

I just came across this Photo Recovery Software which I think he should try. His memory card was somehow corrupted and he was forced to format it. According to the website of Hetman Recovery, this is not a big deal.

I like it that this photo recovery software will scan and recover images from hard, external, USB drives, memory cards for free. If you are satisfied with the images that the software managed to recover, you have to buy it in order to save the images. This means that you only pay if you are happy with the software.

If you take a lot of photos, this is the software that you should have. You wouldn’t want to lose your images that have been accidentally deleted. Come to think of it, it’s high time I try restoring photos of my two dogs.

*** This post has been sponsored.

An American man who was charged for spamming Facebook social network, using robots to bypass spam filters and posting messages on the wall of users and harvesting log in credentials of approximately 500,000 users between November 2008 and March 2009, has turned himself in. During this time, about 27 million spam messages were spent out.

Sanford Wallace is known as the “Spam King” but he has denied the charges against him brought by Facebook. One should note that he lost a civil suit against MySpace in 2008 also for sending out junk messages to members of MySpace.