At last, someone has come up with a decent report on how insecure Facebook apps really are.  In this BBC report you'll see why I don't generally use Facebook apps.

Identity 'at risk' on Facebook

Interesting new product going into limited beta from Microsoft.  Its called Live Mesh, and it is apparently going to form the basis of their new internet-based file system.

Playing with Live Mesh: First Experiences | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

Its very interesting to me how our obsessions with technology become so all encompassing.  I should probably re-phrase that: I sometimes wonder just how obsessive I need to be to keep up with things that are happening on the Internet.  I find the rate of development and change sometimes to be too much to keep up with.  Let me share with you a case in point, and the trigger for this post.

I use Twitter, which is a very popular micro-blogging service.  It allows me to write concise blog entries in a very short format (like text messaging on phones).  Twitter limits you to posting no more than 140 characters, so you sometimes have to be creative to limit ideas to such a concise format.  You also get to see the entries (tweets) of people you have chosen to follow, and these networks of followers can rapidly get pretty big.  Keeping on top of it all sometimes is harder to do than you would think. There's a lot of noise on Twitter, and not much decent signal.  However, there are some excellent sources of information on there if you search hard enough. 

Twitter has an open API which allows developers to build programs that interface with Twitter. I use a couple of those to keep track of what is going on : WittyTwitter, and Twhirl.  WittyTwitter is a program I have done some development with, and have submitted a couple of bug fixes to the code.  I'm not all that active in developing it, but I use it a lot and follow its development closely.  For the last two days I have been getting errors with Witty.  It can't log in to Twitter, probably because of a bug in the Twitter API endpoints.  I also haven't been in front of my PC as much as usual.

This means I have actually missed some information that has been disseminated over Twitter for the last couple of days.  It wasn't much, but there was one product announcement that interested me, and it is something that I need to be aware of from a development perspective.  Here's the catch.  At the end of the second paragraph I went to grab some lunch.  I have returned now and I can't even remember what the product was that prompted me to write this post.  The concept remain the same though.

The interesting thing is that tools like Twitter can exert such an unconscious draw on you (me actually). I wonder what would happen if I were to stop using Twitter for a while?  Someone I follow (a gifted and popular cartoon artist called Hugh MacLeod) decided to stop using Twitter recently, and discovered that too many of his customers actually RELY on Twitter for their business communication. It doesn't say much for the state of a business that relies on something as ephemeral as Twitter.  I'm also not sure about the wisdom either of using such a public forum for business, and certainly not one like Twitter where you have no oversight of the content nor control over its maintenance etc.  However, I could see tools like Twitter becoming more and more used by business as time goes on. After all, many businesses now have a presence in Second Life; the trendy virtual world operated by Linden Labs.

Wow.  After eleven years as Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern is to resign next month. He said that it has nothing to do with the ongoing investigation of his finances to see if he took backhanders hen he was in office. "I know in my heart of hearts I have done no wrong and wronged no-one." said Ahern today.  All I know so far is from the BBC, but I wonder what the real reason is?

I just came across a great post from Paul Vick (the guy in charge of Visual Basic development at Microsoft) about the popularity of VB.  Linkage

In this blog I have I have previously detailed our trip to Paris. We have also stayed in Hilton hotels, and I have used the words "fucking" and "download".  And now, I am being listed on a web page with links to download a video.  You know the one.  Paris Hilton certainly does.  And now apparently you can download it here.  Yay.

My Sunday morning treat came this morning, in the form of the stats report mailed from my website.  I saw something I hadn't noticed before - some site called "Technorati.com" had referrals to me, and was climbing up the list.  So I went to take a look, and discovered that it is a "conversation engine", that tells you what's being said right now on every site that has something to say.  So, its a search engine for blogs?  It does present some interesting data, but calling it a "conversation engine" is interesting.
Oh, and the prevalence of blogging software is incredible.  I can't believe you can now get so many pre-packaged blog engines, for many different platforms and configurations.

I read an interesting post earlier, linked from some blog I was reading, linked from somewhere.  My company is guilty of that.  We have such a culture of keeping people categorised, and failing to understand that a lot of us simply don't want to fit inside a neat little box.  Thing is, I don't know what to do about it.  I can't change the whole company, can I?

So, I had a spam email this morning from PayPal informing me that I may have recieved potentially fraudulent funds.  I was just about to delete it when I noticed that the amount it referenced was the same as the payment I had just received for a sale on ebay.  It also didn't look much like your typical scam.  There were no links in it, and it told me to log on to the PayPal site (again, without a link) and check.  Sure enough, the transaction was marked as "Pending Reversed".  So now I've lost the £10 postage I used on the package, and may have a shit name with PayPal.  Welcome to Saturday.

Brilliant! I just learned more about the constitution of my own country than I had known before.