hackbash

This is almost as bad as the London mayoral results:

It’s like when you walk past your favourite shop or restaurant and see that sign in the window “closed for refurbishment”, except you can’t cross the street and peer in to find the reassuring sight of men with paint on ladders.
In a recent unscientific survey conducted [...]

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Hi, it’s 2008.
Just wanted to remind you, because BBC News thinks it’s discovered a security flaw in Facebook applications. Yes, apparently they can gain access to your and your friends’ profile information, so a malicious application could pose as a legitimate one and harvest profile details, even if they’re not public.
I had to double-check the [...]

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I’ve been writing a How it Works on OpenID. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a decentralised ID system that stops the user having to remember and provide separate login credentials for every online service. Instead, you assert ownership of a URI which becomes your OpenID login.
Eyes glazing over? Therein lies the problem.
I’m [...]

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I’m used to celebrity endorsements, or even celebrity beauty journalist endorsements, but I’d normally expect recommendations from my friends to come up in conversation. Tooling around on Facebook, then, I had a bit of a double-take at this advert, which recommends a range of health supplements on a friend’s behalf.
Anyone else had one of these [...]

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Facebook has rolled out its integrated chat client, which is nice if you like that sort of thing.
Adam quickly spotted that it tells the people you’re chatting to what else you’re up to, which provides almost as much scope for hilarity as the default ‘reply all’ behaviour on group messages.
Fortunately, it turns out you can [...]

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Thanks to Adam for this. It comes from Facebook Lexicon, a new trend-tracking tool for the social network that can tell you how often certain terms appear in wall posts.
The blue line is “party tonight”, the beige is “hungover”. The big fat spike is New Year’s eve. Click on the pic to see it full-size.

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This is sort of the second half to the earlier Microsoft post, where I was rambling on about people running lightweight operating systems on lightweight computers, and only requiring lightweight applications delivered through a browser.
I’m reminded of the Network Computer, or NC, something that a consortium of manufacturers and the database company Oracle tried to [...]

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A TechCrunch post yesterday helped focus my mind on something that’s been dawning of me of late: Microsoft is in deep shit.
XP refuses to be killed off and Vista is flat-lining, while people are increasingly inclined to dabble with Linux-based OS like Ubuntu. Meanwhile, Office is bloated, expensive and hideous to use. Open Office is [...]

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Apologies for being so last year on this one, but thanks to the Guardian’s viral video chart I’ve finally got around to watching something that our own Chloe flagged up months ago.

Web 2.0 believers, bask in your post-coital glow.

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