Technology

Facebook Places or Foursquare – which is the most popular?

How does Facebook Places stack up against Foursquare? It's a question many have wondered since the world's largest social network jumped into the check-in game. We know Facebook has nearly 700 million users--but certainly nowhere near all of them are actually using the company's location-based service. Meanwhile, Foursquare has continued to goose growth, boasting recently that usership has doubled since the launch of Facebook Places. Today, however, we finally have some insight into the usage of check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare. Thanks to data released by Wildfire Interactive, we now know the top 10 most checked-into locations on Facebook Places. Like Foursquare, tourist and travel hubs dominate the chart--international airports, Disneyland, Times Square. But how do these world-famous designations stack up in terms of check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare? We took a handful of these destinations for our global comparison--from Boston and Las Vegas to London and Rome.

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Site amalgamation

I’m probably getting old, but I’ve reached the point where I feel that I have too many websites to manage!

As a result, I’m going to look at amalgamating some of them.  The first two that I’m merging is my TobyNet blog (this one) and PetersJokes.  All the existing URL’s will be set to point to petertoby.com which will now become the primary web address for my all my “stuff”.

I think that merging these sites will make things easier for me to manage and I’ll be more likely to update the info with news and jokes.

Chrome unseats Safari

And in third place... Chrome over takes Safari.

Google Chrome last week unseated Apple Safari for the first time as the third most used internet browser in the United States, according to new figures.

“This is quite a coup for Google as they have gone from zero to almost 10 per cent of the US market in under two years,” StatCounter chief executive Aodhan Cullen said.

Globally, Chrome remained in a solid third place with 9.44 per cent of the browser market and slowly closing the gaps with second-place Firefox, which had slightly more than 31 per cent, and IE with 52.78 per cent.

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Automated calls from Commonwealth Bank?

I received a call from a blocked phone number just a few minutes ago. The automated voice told me that it was from the Commonwealth Bank fraud department.

The voice on the phone mentioned my name on several occasions and asked me confirm if I was me by pressing 1. I did that and the voice progressed to asking me to confirm my birth month and year. I hung up at this point.

If the call was legit, surely in the current climate of banking scams the Commonwealth Bank wouldn’t have a robotic voice askingyou to confirm personal details? That would be totally moronic in my opinion.

Should my scam senses be correct however, be aware that this may happen to you!

UPDATE: It seems that the Commonwealth use this automated message. However, there was nothing on file and my daily limit wasn’t reduced which is normal practice. I told them that scammers would be onto their practice of automated calls to get personal info. Dumb arse bankers!!

FURTHER UPDATE: Received a call from a real live person at the Commonwealth .  It appears that I’ve had lots of online transactions on my Credit Card in the past 24 hours.  Having been paid yesterday means that I had a few bills to pay and also a couple of iTunes apps   I told her that the automated system doesn’t work for me as I will never give my personal details to it and I believe that those who try to scam bank customers would have a field day with this.  Why make it easy for these people to get their customers’ personal details.  Which bank??

Blogging, Twitter, and so forth

I think Ive sorted out how Im going to manage posting in multiple places.

At present, I post on Twitter which copies my post onto Facebook. If I place a #in tag in the tweet it also publishes that tweet to LinkedIn. Soon Ill only send certain Tweets to Facebook like I do with LinkedIn.

Thats alright for posts that are a maximum of 140 character however, when the post requires more than that, Ill post it here.

Together with my Twitter posts in the right column, this site becomes my total information site!

Here I am!

I’ve decided to make the blog at blogger.com my home – for now anyway!

I’ll post a little more regularly from now on as I have a little more time to do so.

My Blog dilemma

I know this is dragging on a little. I don’t for minute think that this is interesting to anyone other than me, but I’ll keep posting my thoughts on this as it’s serving to be therapeutic…. if you know what I mean

The aim of settling on a blog is to fulfil the following requirements:

• Somewhere to post things that interest me, and to post photos – some of which I want to be available only to certain people (i.e. family photos).
• Software that’s easy to use and looks nice (to me). I’m getting to the stage where I don’t want to tinker with code too much any more – been there, done that.
• Low cost or free.

That doesn’t sound too hard does it? In theory, you’d be right but in practice it’s a little more difficult!

I think I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of ideas now. I’ve dismissed sites like MySpace, Zoints, and Yahoo! 360 as they don’t have the nicest interfaces and aren’t very configurable.

What I’m realistically left with is 3 choices:

• Keep the blog on Blogspot as I currently have
• Use Blogger to post and publish it onto my private site and install Coppermine gallery
• Use a blogging software on my site that includes a gallery

The investigations continue!

What I'm doing with my blogs

I’m making my decision on one of the following 5 blogs at present:

• This one at Blogger
• My Space http://blog.myspace.com/petersweb
• My installation of Community Server at www.toby.net.au
• Yahoo! 360 at http://360.yahoo.com/yellowandblack58
• Zoints http://www.zoints.com

For the next week or two I’ll post everything on all 3 blogs while I get used to how they operate. After this “trial” period, I’ll make a decision on which one to keep.

New Web Host

My current Linux Web Host, Ausweb has let me down on 2 occasions in the past Month.

On both occasions, the sites I’ve hosted with them have been down (as well as their own website!) for a sizeable amount of time.

The first time, the site was down for around an hour. When I asked them about it, I wasn’t given a satisfactory response. The lastest outage caused my sites to be ‘off the air’ spasmodically during a 24 hour period. Once again, I was given an unsatisfactory explanation for this outage.

Not good enough Ausweb!

A Member of one of my sites, Yellow and Black suggested MD Web Hosting. I’ve opened a Reseller Account with them and am starting to move some of my personal sites to their servers. I’ve also moved one of my client sites (Melbourne Ultrasound for Women) to MD Web Hosting.

I’ll move the rest of my personal sites (except for Yellow and Black) to MD Web Hosting so I can determine their performance over the next 2 to 3 Months. Once I’m confident their service is better, I’ll move Yellow and Black to them and cancel Ausweb for good.

There is no change to my current Windows Hosts, Crystaltech and WebHost4Life. They’re both giving me great response times and very good uptime.