My computer was not nice to me in the last few days, so I have to sent it to the shop to get it repaired. Without her company, life is not that bad as I thought, instead it gives me a chance to let my eyes got some rest and did some other activities.
One of the thing I did was went to visit Nouvo City Hotel, a modern boutique style 4-star luxury hotel in the heart of Bangkok’s old city district and the center of shopping, dining, and entertainment. Only a 15-minute walk to the famous Khaosan Road and the Banglumphu market, and within easy reach of The Grand Palace, Wat Phra Kaew, Wat Pho, National Museum and other attractions.
The hotel is not that big, only 7 floors with 110 rooms, plus top roof Sala Spa, Gym and Swimming Pool, but it really nice. I have uploaded photos on my Google+ you can go there to check them out.
Beside that, here are few of other updates I like to share with you.
1. WordPress 3.2 Upgrade
WordPress 3.2 is now available to the world, both as an update in your dashboard and a download on WordPress.org. If you haven’t update, do it now. This is WordPress fifteenth major release that comes just four months after 3.1 (which coincidentally just passed the 15 million download mark). WordPress 3.2 will finally drop support for Internet Explorer 6.
The focus for this release was making WordPress
- Faster and lighter.
- Refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll also appreciate the fully HTML5 new Twenty Eleven theme. All of the widgets, menus, buttons, and interface elements fade away to allow you to compose and edit your thoughts in a completely clean environment conducive to writing.
- The new approve & reply feature speeds up your conversation management.
- As of 3.2, you’ll need to be running PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. So make sure your blog is running compatible version of it before upgrade to WP 3.2. Just log in to your hosting account, and check to make sure you have at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
2. Google+
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past week, then you would have heard what practically everyone (and I mean everyone!) is talking about, Google+.
Google+ is Google’s latest attempt in gaining some market share in the social network area. Here is how Google explains the new service:
“We realize that today people are increasingly connecting with one another on the web. But the ways in which we connect online are limited and don’t mimic our real-life relationships. The Google+ project is our attempt to make online sharing even better. We aren’t trying to replace what’s currently available; we just want to introduce a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.”
It sounds pretty cool,is it? There are 5 main features to Google+: Circles, Hangouts, Instant Upload, Sparks and Huddle.
Just over a week old, do you want to know how’s Google+ doing? Leading on from that, where can you find the most followed people on Google+, especially if you want to compare them to measure Google+ against other services?
Google+ Statistics (also called Social Statistics) seems the best place to check right now. It has a top 50 list of Google+ users (and you can go well beyond the top 50, too).
The list might be missing people. If Google+ Statistics hasn’t manually entered someone into its database, or if someone hasn’t registered themselves — then those statistics aren’t tracked. Still, the service probably has the most accurate counts you’re going to find right now.
This isn’t every single thing there is to know about Google+, it could probably be a book rather than an article, and the Google+ Project has only just begun. I have no idea whether it will succeed or not, and I’m still not quite sure how it’ll fit into the already saturated social media stage. But one thing for sure, We’ll no doubt learn plenty more about Google+ as time goes on.
Here are some quick nuggets to get you a little more acquainted with it.
Unlike on Twitter, where each post is the same uniform size and shape and structure, Google+ may have too much going on, with images, videos, links, reshares, hangouts, and plenty of long form content. Google+ wants you to know that these objects are different types. It’s all about leading with the differences, rather than creating a scannable, understandable whole. It’s function over form. Cognitively, I have to figure out what type of object it is before I can read it.
If you are already on Google+, let’s get connected there.
I have already sent out bunch of invitation to some of my FB connection, if you are the one that gave me your gmail address but haven’t got the invitation message, then be patient, it’s all about timing, Google+ only allow new users to sign up at randomly selected times. Normally this has been in the evening, so keep trying.
3. Facebook
Yes, I de-friended Facebook on last Sunday because I have lost trust on Fb. I had had an account for about three years. After seven months of observing my own account (both profile and page – I find my account became one of the victims for FB to testing out their new feature before rolling out to the public, they are not only massively delete my fans from time to time, they are also remove the members on a daily base to control the number grow, there over 10,810 members on board by the time I de-friended FB). Plus reading those report on Facebook scams and the privacy infringements its users who are facing daily, I came to a conclusion:
You should quit Facebook. And you should do it now.
As you might already know most of Facebook income is coming from advertising. Worldwide, Facebook’s 2010 ad revenue shoots to $1.86 billion, and is expected to reach nearly double that by 2012.
As in any online business, more advertisers means more money. And the more member data Facebook is willing to hand over to advertisers, the more they will want to buy ads. It’s an advertiser’s dream, and a security nightmare.
“The very nature of Facebook is premised on the sale of individual information,” said Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur.” Many of Facebook’s most popular third-party apps — FarmVille, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille — leak user’s personal data to advertisers.
That’s a privacy issue. Even more alarming are Facebook’s security problems: survey scams, bogus antivirus software, phishing attacks, shortened URLs leading to malicious websites and even flat-out malware like Trojans.
The company’s current approach to policing apps is reactive: Developers release their apps, and Facebook cleans up after them if and when users discover rogues. It treats apps as just another form of user-generated content, like photos or event postings.
Sophos’ 2011 Security Threat Report sums up the situation.
“Facebook founders and operators insist that keeping users safe from spam and scams is a top priority, and they use large teams of security experts to remove suspect applications as soon as they’re detected or pointed out by users,” the report says. “Yet, the problem continues to grow as the site’s growing user base makes it an ever richer target for the bad guys.”
“The scale of malicious activity on Facebook appears to be out of control,” it adds.
Facebook has grown so large in the social-networking sphere that it’s allowed to set its own rules — and force its users to live by them.
Jemima Kiss of The Guardian said more privacy infringement is what users have to look forward to as the company continues to shape the very meaning of the word “privacy.”
“Facebook’s incredibly rapid development and growth has much to do with this process, and these kinds of ‘adjustments’ are a sign of a company continually pushing its own business forward,” Kiss wrote in a Jan. 18 article. “The tension arises where that business overlaps with our sense of what is public and what is private — an area where Facebook is on the front line, redefining what privacy means to us.”
I got away from Facebook before anything bad happened to me. I went through the process of deactivating my account, and then not logging in – from any portal, be it a computer, smartphone or embedded “Like” buttons on other websites. At this point, there’s nothing that could persuade me to sign back up.
Till next time – Cheers!
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