Why facebook won't add a dislike button.

Because the like button isn't a button to say I like this post. It is a button to say email me any comments on this post, and push this post up in the news feed. The like button first appeared in FriendFeed which facebook recently bought.

They probably should rename it to something like ping. Instead of liking posts you could ping them. This wouldn't suggest either a positive reaction.

Google to stop censorship in China #GoogleCN

I saw #GoogleCN trending this morning, and found out why; Google are stopping censorship in China! This is big news, as China is perceived to be the an important developing market.

First, let me say I am not at all rasist against China. I have huge respect for the challenges faced by the Chinese people and mean the following remarks only as a critisism of the government. COMMUNISM DOESN'T WORK! For any form of government to work, people need to be free. They need to be able to express their religion, sexuality and opinions without fear of reprisal from government. This clearly doesn't happen in China.

More recently a British citizen was executed without the chance to present information about his mental health. The reason is that the defendant has to present this information. This is disgraceful, as if someone has a mental health issue they may not be able to defend themselves clearly.

But back to today. Google are claiming it was a security breach aimed at Chinese activists Gmail accounts. From the blog post you get the impression they are accusing the government of being behind the attacks.

I have huge respect for google for doing this, it's a major step forward for human rights!

Check out the BBC and Guardian stories as well

[Funniest Video Ever] Office 2010, the movie + a rant

Next in my series of the funniest videos ever, Boing Boing posted a funny video of a movie trailer for Office 2010 The Movie!

Now for the rant! Why the hell are they releasing another version of office? As if the previous one wasn't bad enough with the stupid menu toolbar mutant style of navigation and messing up everyone, and terrible backwards comparability. How can it get any worse! Bring back office 2003!

FlashForward

Just watched the first two episodes of FlashForward on the RTE player. From the summery:

The series opens on a seemingly ordinary day, which soon becomes extraordinary as everyone in Los Angeles blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. The blackouts were worldwide, and were accompanied by a flash-forward where each person saw what might be his or her life roughly six months into the future.

I LOVE this show, it's really good, it's got drama, suspense, romance, but more importantly big explosions. It's like a less intense version of 24, like lost but it makes sense. With this and Glee, TV is starting to look good this year.

Interestingly this is the first drama series which I am interested in and can legally watch online. Thus the RTE player doesn't have a lot of adds, but sometimes it has a pre-role one. Maybe when it looses the beta tag it will start addign more.

Anyway, check it out here. Hurry as they take the episode offline a month after it airs. Will probably edit this later, but I'm tired so I'll just post it now.

Shiny new Twitter profile background

Just started to follow @Dublins98Dave, and noticed his nice background from Twilk.com so I tried it out for myself on my Twitter Page. It is made up of people I follow who follow me.

[Funniest Video Ever] I Gotta Feeling Parody from CollegeHumor

I've decided to do a new series of the webs funniest videos. The first is a CollegeHumor parody of the Black Eyed Peas song I've Tot A Feeling.

Unfortunately they've disabled embedding, so check it out here!

If you have any suggestions for more funny videos, post them in the comments or tweet me.

The day I found Google Gravity

Was looking at google trends when I foundd this! Google Gravity. I checked it out and it crashed my browser on the first attempt, but I think that's due to some crazy firefox extension. The second time around it did this:



It looks like he's a designer. When you go to mrdoob.com you see a page with moving blobs. It's quite confusing, but then you go to his blog and it says he's a freelanser. well done Mr Doob, well done. I'll look through his blog later, no doubt I'll find something interesting.

If anyone has any more info, leave it in a comment, or @reply me on twitter.

Edit: It would help if I gave the post a title!

Lady GaGa Mashup

Read about this on Mashable a while ago, it's a really good mashup and the guy has loads of good videos.



Lady GaGa Remixed by Latest YouTube Sensations [VIDEO] from Mashable

Google Nexus One = Incremental improvement on the iPhone but nothing game changing

Faster phone, shiny apps and voice to text input. A few smaller things, but mainly it's nothing special. Google are calling the Nexus One a super phone. When asked they said this meant a smart phone which was faster and more open.

Some features I was slightly impressed with were 5 home screens instead of 3, widget development open to 3rd party developers and moving and interactive backgrounds.

They had some fancy photo album, and started talking about 3d, then they showed a port of Google earth to the android.

The thing I was most excited about were a voice to text feature. It composed an entire email, and they said the conversion was done on the Google servers. So the feature goes out the window when the phone is disconnected?

Cian from ViewFromTheQuad.com has this to say:

"@dagda I was left almost totally bored by the announcement of the Google phone. The only "new" thing it does is the voice text field thing."

In summery, I think the phone is better than an iPhone but not by much. Nothing game changing.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that Google are opening an online store to sell the phone, $529 unlocked and $179 on a contract in the US, also shipping to the UK and coming to the rest of Europe, maybe to Vodafoen, soon. They said this store would be open to other devices from other manufacturers too, but it told me today the Nexus was unavailable in my country.

Thanks to @Scobleizer for streaming over youstream.

Will you be buying the Nexus? Let me know what you think in the comments?

Musings on the X-Factor

Currently, Olly and Stacy are trending, could be bad news for Joe, since he isn't?

Also "x-factor" and "X Factor" are trending, not #xfactor. Looks like all the normal people are on twitter. I think on average about half the trends are hash tags.

And Joe FTW!