ajb{log}: learn something new each day

ABS-CBN, in a statement said that it will acquire 2.5 million shares (5 percent stake) at Multiply, a Florida-based social networking site. Multiply is the second largest social networking site in the Philippines after Friendster.com. Multiply.com maybe catching up slowly with Friendster.com in terms of unique visitors (see Compete estimates below).

Friendster on the other hand, the most popular social networking site in the Philippines may be losing its steam after more than 2 days of downtime due to a data center power outage in Santa Clara, California. You just can’t seem to wonder how did Friendster allowed itself to be offline? Was it because it had a single point of failure? Having one data center housing more than 85 million users? Could a data mirror in Asia have helped since most of their active users are there?

In any event, Multiply just got a strong partner in the Philippines - media giant ABS-CBN. But will Multiply be able to grow their user-base in the Philippines with the help of ABS-CBN and overtake pinoy-favorite Friendster? The answer to this question might be sooner than later.

What are your thoughts?

Sources: Business Mirror, ABS-CBN

Today is “Tad’s meme” day on Friendfeed.

Tad Donaghe started a simple spark posting a photo and a simple instruction “Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair - just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.” and guess what happened? It just spread like wildfire! Boy, it was a fun day at Friendfeed!

Here’s the photo that started it all:

And the rest followed…

(Click on the above image for the original size or you can visit the album here)

So, are you in this collage? I hope you are! Because we had a lot fun today at Friendfeed!

It was also a good day to push and leave the FriendFeed Beta!

UPDATE: Collage updated

How? All the video links have changed to http://youtube.com/v/FPd4yk0x-eg.swf now for you to watch it you’ll have to copy the video code (ex “FPd4yk0x-eg”) and paste it on a URL changing it to http://youtube.com/watch?v=FPd4yk0x-eg for it to work.

Youtube team must have forgotten this particular RSS feed when they updated something.

I also noticed a new button on the video player window. Not sure what it is though. See below. This must be the latest update that broke all things up at the RSS feed.

So how do you drop an “o” at Google? Just append “&num=100&start=990” without the quotes at the URL after any search.

Google will surely drop one “o”. I wonder why?

Credits

While the powerful Gustav Hurricane Category 3 leaves Cuba, New Orleans residents already started to evacuate. Except for some people and three guys with a webcam.

I don’t know who they are but they are streaming live right now from New Orleans.

So, if you want to know what is happening at that part of the world, logon to their stream now and join the stream.

Just be safe guys and the rest of you out there at the path of Gustav.

jQuery.com pulled the Javascript Rockstar graphic responding quickly to user feedback.

The jQuery team left an Easter egg on the website as a token of appreciation. Just enter the famous Konami code to view it.

Hint, it’s really cool!

Personally, I say it looks good. Not great, but good. Some jQuery users however don’t like the redesign. Get the scoop on jQuery’s blog.

Yes. ASCII email spam is here and we hate it. This is what I got today (below).

There were no links on the email which means people will never have to click on something. But still, it’s annoying.

Email providers, please do something!

Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit and the FriendFeed team broke the two month silence today launching the newly redesigned FriendFeed. VentureBeat spotted and reported this four days ago.

New features includes:

Friend List
Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups, get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Best of day and Best of week Summaries
A “best of” page for a friend lists shows you the most popular entries among people in the list for the day/week.

Enhanced Photo Posting
You can now upload photos with your posts. The photo uploader lets you select and upload multiple files at once with no additional downloads required.

New sidebar link, favorite friends, groups, rooms and a lot more.

Head to http://beta.friendfeed.com and see the cool new FriendFeed!

Related articles:

• Spotted: FriendFeed Beta - coming soon
• FriendFeed summaries coming soon

There are many ways you can refresh your feeds on FriendFeed. One of my favorite is Hao Chen’s “FriendFeed Refresh Feeds Button” userscript. However, if you are not a Greasemonkey fan or you simply do not use Firefox, there is a way to refresh a feed on FriendFeed.

I took Tumblr as an example for this post. So here goes… I just posted something at Tumblr and I can’t wait for FriendFeed to schedule the crawling of my feeds. Here are the quick steps to force FriendFeed to refresh it immediately:

1) Assuming you are already logged in, click on the “Share something” button (image)

2) Now, click on the “Import your stuff” link. No, you are not going to import your feed again.

3) Once you’ve done that, click on the feed that you want to be “refreshed”. In this case, I chose Tumblr. Click on it.

4) You will see something like this (below). Now click on the “Refresh feed” link.

5) You’re done! You should see the content now on your Friendfeed.

It should be noted that you shouldn’t abuse this functionality as it might put some stress on FriendFeed’s servers although I’m pretty sure they can handle it.

By the way, I am using the  “Cleaner FriendFeed” userstyle in case you were wondering why I have a different look and feel. You can also use Cleaner FriendFeed. All you have to do is install the Stylish Firefox plugin then install the Cleaner FriendFeed userstyle.

Anyway, hope this helps someone today.