From a reliable source I have heard that facebook will soon be changing its mainstream design.  The designer is Barton Smith from We Are Tol and you can see some pictures below of the redesigned facebook with new features.

You will also probably notice that some of the interface and features would look like something from google calendar, flicker, picasa, wordpress, old facebook and a bit of a myspace/multiply. All of these will be part of the new face of the mainstream facebook.

Weather current facebook users will like this or not, this will possibly be implemented anytime soon.

What can you say about the new face of facebook then?

When Imeem got owned, where do you get your music now? You wish facebook had a good music application. Well, your wish just came true. Introducing Muziic, music application in facebook which allows you to add  some radio stations, to search and listen to specific tunes. And most importantly, you have the ability to create playlists and share them with your friends just like Imeem.

Is this imeem’s reincarnation? Apparently not, its from facebook, the non-stop innovation social network. What more can you expect from such a social network giant?

In contrast to many other music-related apps on Facebook, as soon as you install it, you’ll be able to listen to music – and lots of it. Besides the featured songs, and the ability to search for albums, artists and songs (the actual music is pulled from YouTubeYouTube), the most welcome part of the app is a list of online radio stations, organized by category, similar to the one found in iTunes.

Though you are listening to free music and radio stations, you won’t be hearing many advertisements.  Here are a few words about Muziic from the application’s creator, David J. Nelson:

“With Muziic, the goal was to create an application that actually gives Facebook users what they want in a music app. As someone who is not a big fan of most Facebook apps, I wanted to keep the experience clean, functional and user friendly. No incentivized garbage, forced friend invites, etc… Just a music app that delivers.”

Muziic also enables you to easily create, save and share playlists, and comes with a quite useful Facebook tab that displays your listening habits, similar to the way it’s done in Last.fm. On it, you can find user’s playlists, recently played songs, favorite radio stations, top artists and top tracks.

Though, you cannot download music from this facebook music application yet. We can expect that in the future and I am quite optimistic soon that will come. This application is rock solid as it is constantly gaining fans and users right now. You can now go to facebook and start enjoying this application. Let me know if you have anything bad to say about this app.

Twitter was founded on 2006. With headquarters in San Francisco, California and USA, twitter is one of the biggest and fastest growing companies is the US. Not many of us here in Cebu, Philippines would appreciate twitter because we don’t understand how useful it is. We tend to appreciate more on social networking websites like friendster and facebook because we want to connect with friends, share our pictures, update our status and let people know of what we are doing.

Twitter works in a similar way but most of us did not know it. Our first impression of twitter was “Oh, just another social networking website. Major functionof this new site is we can share our status(facebook/friendster terms we got used to). Nah, this is nothing new, we can do also do this in friendster and facebook. We can only have 1 picture, and the picture does not show as big as our primary/profile picture in facebook/friendster, this website sucks!”. So, Why join tweeter? Why do you need a twitter account?

You were wrong. Twitter may seem limited to us when we first saw it, and nobody seem to appreciate it when it was new. Now and ever since it was launched, twitter has more users and everyday more and more have learned to appreciate it.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.  Tweets are 140 characters long, text based post. These post are broad casted to your followers(friends and fans) as soon as you update/post it.

In friendster/facebook we add people to become their friends and our friends. In tweeter, if you add someone who did not accept you yet, you are following that person. You are the follower/fan of that person you are trying to add/follow. If he/she follows you back, then you are called friends.

What makes twitter very useful is the sharing of tweets. Its like news, real-time news. If you did not know this, information you find in google is not really uptodate/real-time. Websites have to be submitted to google, then indexed for them to show up on google’s results. This whole indexing process can take upto 7days to 1 month at most. Why does it take this long? websites have lots and lots of information, not very specific and probably broad topics. Are you seeing my point now?

My point is, twitter has more uptodate information. Brief and straight to the point information. Its short and light, that means searching for information is much faster on twitter. Data/results are more uptodate, more to say “real-time”.

Google and other search engines appreciated this idea, and they have made their move in integrating twitter to their search engine systems. Google and Bing currently the largest search engines have now been working with twitter to generate more accurate/real-time search results. This project had already started months ago and you will soon be seeing real-time results in these search engines in the next few weeks.

Another thing about twitter is that more and more tools/websites that are compatible with it. See the few examples that I have below.

Twitpic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service.

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace application. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles.

Tweetie is a client for Twitter, the social networking website. Its mobile version runs on iPhone and iPod Touch, while its desktop version runs on Mac OS X.

Twittermail allows you to tweet using an emails.

Twitter Counter is a counter to show your twitter followers.

 Twitter Vision shows a visual map of Twitter posts.

Above are just a few of the twitter tools you can find in the internet. There are a thousands more that are currently active, and there are thousands more tools still being developed. You can imagine twitter’s future, 2 search engine titans google and bing are trying to get a hold of them and their technology.

If you think you are in because you have a facebook account, you might as well setup a twitter account. Create a twitter account now and make sure to follow us. 

Facebook will soon have a new face. New facebook design is on the way and its going to take effect anytime soon, based from our sources.

This new design is being tested with a select group of users that I am not a part of. I sure would want to be part of a testing team for facebook’s projects. You can see why facebook is on the top of the social media ladder, they innovate always. ALWAYS.

Why is facebook so popular? Because almost evertbody is using facebook. It is the fastest growing company and it is as big as twitter. I myself would always want to write something new about facebook once a week. If you want to get the latest from facebook, you will always find it in this blog. You can subscribe to our RSS feed to get the latest updates. Or you can follow us on twitter to get the latest trends online(including social media and gadgets).

The screenshots display the key changes we’re highlighted:

- notifications move from bottom right to top left

- huge search bar to make search a core part of Facebook

- preview your inbox on your homepage (same as notifications)

- numerous design tweaks

Can’t wait to try their new design. The new face of facebook is coming and I want to be the first to experience it. How about you? What do you think of this new design?

You may think this is an article about falling inlove, but no you got it wrong. This is an article about how we are falling for the internet. This is about how we spend our normal lives today without noticing what we are embracing. The internet.

Have you tried asking yourself  “How much time do I spend on the internet?” ? We may have not noticed this, but as the years pass by we fell in love with the internet more and more. Since the internet was available to the public, more and more users are falling in love with it. As we grow, we are spending more and more time on the internet. Young and old generations are even being exposed to the internet and they are loving it too. We don’t notice it, but we are growing to be much more dependent to the internet.

I work as a technical support representative in 1&1 internet. All the time when I am at work, I face my work pc for atleast 8 hours. I spend atleast 8 hours on the internet, helping customers with their website problems. Even after work, I still find time face the computer and spend extended time on the internet for atleast an average of 2-3 hours a day. How about you? How much time do you spend on the internet?

We access the internet mainly for the very common reason of looking for information. I myself spend most of my time in the internet updating my websites, including profiles/accounts in social networking websites and membership sites. Part of my daily checklist everyday, I check my email and RSS reader to read feeds from websites I subscribe to. Almost everyday I check my website to check statistics, reply to comments, or update it.

What I could imagine most of the internet users around my age would spend most of their time on facebook, youtube, myspace or twitter. They play games, listen to music, watch videos or simply chat and update there profiles on social websites. This is what I see on my generation and the generations near mine. Geographically this happens on Cebu, Philippines.

What I notice is that, as much as we here in Cebu, Philippines rely on the internet, the western and developed countries are much more dependent on the internet. This is just an observation based on what I read and what I hear from the British and Americans that I speak too everyday.

In the developed countries like UK and US, they have websites that has a specific purpose. Say, a website for restaurant reservations. (like www.opentable.com). We don’t have this type of website’s here in Cebu, Philippines.

Another example is californiacoastline.org, in which this website shows 10,000 up-close-and-personal aerial shots of the entire 1,000-mile-long coast. We don’t have these type of websites here in Cebu, Philippines. Why do they have this weird website ideas? I think this is because most of the good ideas on websites and online businesses have already been implemented and the owners are already monetizing the idea. They make a lot of money because of this crazy ideas. Amazing isn’t it?

Another reason why they are having these ideas is because of innovation. They don’t want to go to malls to shop, that is why they created e-commerce websites like ebay. They don’t want to call the restaurant every time they want to reserve for a sear for dinner, so they created opentable.com.

Well, back to the topic at hand. We are not yet as dependent on the internet but we are going there. Philippines will soon be there. I even see optimist predicting the same as what I foresee. Some domainers, mostly Filipinos, are registering .ph domains anticipating that Philippines will soon value online presence. They anticipate that soon, in the coming years there will be websites as monetized as websites in the developed countries. E-commerce websites, service websites and small merchant websites will soon be popping out everywhere in the Philippines.

As the years pass by, we are still growing more and more dependent to the internet. For now we are just enjoying facebook, youtube, twitter, online games and whatever we can reap from the internet.

It would be inevitable, we will soon be so dependent on the internet that we will find our own ways to innovate and simplify things. We in Cebu, Philippines will soon be having more and more e-commerce websites so we don’t have to go to the mall. Its inevitable with the rate of how we are falling in love with the internet right now.

Back at early 2000’s we were just using cellphones that support call and text. Now we have phones that have wifi and that can connect to the internet. We are also embracing the love for gadgets like iPhone, PSP, smart phones and netbooks. We are embracing the internet more and more everyday. The inevitable is coming and it is fast approaching. Be ready for the future, we may see a big leap toward this future I am predicting. This may come around this coming year of 2010.

R.I.P imeem.com

Yeah, no more Imeem. buhu! weep*

If you go to imeem.com now, it redirects you to Myspace music. Myspace acquire imeem mid-november which is not yet long ago, it was just last month. Yet here it is, Myspace already shut it down. It is definitely rest in peace for imeem, and hello to Myspace music.

Where is my imeem profile? Can I still get it back?

Most likely yes. My space provided this message on the home page of Myspace music.

MySpace is working to migrate your imeem playlist to MySpace Music. We’ll email you about that once we have more details.

So, Myspace is keeping all your profiles, playlist, friends and pictures. But I don’t know how they will be implementing this on Myspace music. You just have to wait for their email.

If you are managing an artist page on imeem, you should sign up for Myspace music. Its like they are forcing you to be with Myspace music now, because imeem is history.

Well, if Myspace is going to get all/most of the imeem members, they have to do a better service than imeem and meet the expectations of the users. They also have to be innovative like facebook or twitter, so that they can survive the new social media and social networking era.

Myspace Music Logo

Google giant logo

Everybody who has been a while with the internet would know that google is the best way to find information.

But there is a question, are the page results we see in google enough for what we are searching? Is it up to date?

I have tried searching for many solution of problems like, how to download music videos? Google provides very helpful pages in the results, but not all of them are upto date. So you may end up reading an aticle that has not been updated for years and may not be usefull/applicable today.

Another example would be if you search, what is happening in Cebu right now? What are the latest concerts in Cebu? You may find results of events that happened a month or week ago, but not real-time.

So the idea is to search for information that is upto date in the very few mili seconds that you just did the search. Where will you find this type of search results? Of course there is twitter search, facebook search, myspace search. These websites provide accurate and up to the min/mili secs results of what you need. Thus the brilliant idea of google come to play.

Google partnered with twitter on october to pull out real-time data from the partnered site. This means google results in the future will include results from live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles, facebook updates and myspace updates. You can imagine how real-time that is.

real-time search of google(not yet available to everyone)

Google says the features aren’t available to everyone yet, but will be within the next few days. However, all users can see it now via a “Hot Topics” feature that’s been added to Google Trends. Click on any trend, then click a “Hot Topic,” and you’ll see the new “Latest Results” area of Google search results. For example, you can currently see real-time updates for the Tiger Woods story.

For some time, it’s been clear to us that search has been moving to real-time, but until now, Google was seemingly falling behind TwitterTwitterTwitter, and even perhaps BingBingBing (who inked its own search deals with Twitter and Facebook earlier this year).

Now, with one sweeping stroke, Google has grabbed the lead in the real-time search space, and it appears that Facebook and Twitter have both conceded that they aren’t going to outbuild Google when it comes to search. These are significant strategic decisions for all of those involved that will dictate much of where these companies head in the years to come.

Is Friendster really that left behind? I find this move a desperate one, since they did a major update on the looks and design of the website, but a tad feature wise. They mostly made changes on the looks, but not on features that most would expect. Of course I would appreciate that friendster now loads faster, new applications, new games and shop. But who cares about these? They have to do better, people are with facebook now and enjoying it.

New friendster log-in page

Friendster is the past, sure they opened up the future for Facebook and mySpace but they are already out of the competition. Friendster is not as popular as it is before, but still has millions of users. Most of these users are probably just for spamming.

Public demand today is never ending innovation.  People want to socialize in these social networks not because of the features that were supported a year ago, they also want to share what is new within the social website as well. Like in facebook right now, we can share to our friends what are the latest games and applications  released on facebook. We spend so much time sharing these games and endlessly playing them.

Profile page, new look of friendster.com

Right now, in the socializing networks facebook and twitter is the king and queen. Friendster is not new to the social networking kingdom and he is looking for a comeback. Sad to say that after knowing this new’s I just heard of rumors that friendster will be sold to an Asian company for over $100 million. We this is still rumors though, we will soon hear more of this.

Just a couple of weeks ago, popular Facebook games maker Zynga trademarked the name PetVille, hinting at the theme for their next wildly popular casual game on the social network and other platforms (Myspace, iPhone, etc.). Today, Games.com reports that PetVille has launched.

Zynga is also the maker of FarmVille, which just yesterday was touted by a Facebook (Facebook) spokesperson as being bigger than Twitter in terms of an active userbase. The company followed up on the formula early last month with an aquatic-themed title dubbed FishVille, and now PetVille joins the ranks of of other popular pet simulation games like PlayFish’s Pet Society, which borrow mechanics from popular casual Nintendo titles like Nintendogs and Animal Crossing.

In PetVille, you create and customize your own sugary cute animals, feed and care for them, and earn through gameplay (or buy) the resources to decorate your home, buy better food, give gifts to other players and so on. In the tradition of other Zynga titles and other casual social games on Facebook, MySpace (MySpace) and elsewhere, the game mechanics are relatively simple to learn and the titles are easy to pick up and play for short stretches of time — leading to that addictive quality of reinforcement and reward that characterizes frequent revisitation of your virtual domain.

Check out a demo video of PetVille below and let us know your thoughts. Are you hopelessly drawn to any of these casual titles? It’s okay to admit it: You’re among friends here. Friends who may help you on your FarmVille farm.

I have come across this video of yet another epic fail dubbing or minus one music video. This video is so funny even that I’ve saw this a couple of times already, I still laugh every time I see it my ass out.  I saw this video on one of my friends in facebook. I can’t just let it pass, sharing it was not enough. I have to secured my own copy of this epic fail video. I downloaded the video from facebook using DownloadHelper.

I have posted a guide on how to download videos from any website, make sure you read it if you want to download some videos too.

The video is from an Asian dubbing/minus one idol, I don’t know his name, he looks like a young petite version of Chow Yun Fat. So we are going to call him Lil Chow from now on. Its funny how he kinda looks like my younger brother Arvin Ian Castañares and my friend Bombie Ledesma too. Below is the comparison of them, see if they look the same.

Bombie Ledesma and Arvin Ian Castañares looks like Lil Chow

Here is one of Lil Chow’s  epic fail dubbing or minus one music videos. This one is from the Black Eyed Peas called “boom boom pow”. I tried searching youtube for his video’s and came across his channel. The user is hitmanbreakeroftheye and he has about more or less 100 funny videos like this. Enjoy the video and have a good laugh.