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Oh guess what? The folks at Gmail have actually done something useful rather than building some random (retarded) features such as the mail goggles. So, they’re rolling out themes on Gmail. Sweet, huh?

I’m pretty impressed actually. They’ve made 30 themes and some of them are just amazing. My fav one has to be the one called Ninja. Well you’ll get to see all of the themes as the slowly become available to us. When? They’re saying within a few days. I guess they’re just waiting till it gets all hyped up and everything. Good strategy.

Now I was also wondering if they did this to bitch slap Hotmail. I would say yes. Hotmail got a redesign and it was just fubar. And look at Gmail. Damn! This is something I like about Google. When they do something, they do it right (or at least take things seriously). Microsoft, dude what happened? You’re nothing but a failure right now.

I’ll probably start using Gmail more. But, their privacy policy freaks me out. I’ll have to do my research and see if they’ve made any changes to their policies. I hope they did.

Update (40 mins later): Holy shit! They just rolled out the themes to all of us. That was fast. Well go play them.

Update #2 (2 hours later): Okay not all of us can see the themes yet. So, don’t freak out if you can’t see the “Themes” tab under “Settings”.

Excited? Can’t wait to use them?

What do you think of the whole theme idea? Any fav themes? And do you think they rolled this out to show the finger to Hotmail? Oh and anyone switching over to Gmail? Or going to use Gmail bit more than usual because of the hot new looks?

I wake up at around 10:47, I turn on my laptop, I open Firefox and the first thing I notice is that MSN’s homepage is gone. I was like WTF? Well it went back to normal after a few minutes though.

What happened? I don’t know. I sent an email to MSN. Let’s see what they say. But, I’m pretty sure they’re gonna feed us some technical difficulty bullshit. I wonder what really happened.

Oh and you guys wanna see a screenshot? “Picture or didn’t happen.” Well good thing I took one. Here it is:

MSN was apparently like this for about 2 hours. Thanks for this info, @kellyvbrown.

Over to you

I wanna hear what YOU think happened? Someone screwing with MSN? Or just a simple technical difficulty? Any crazy theories out there? And participate on my poll, okay?

I always wondered if Twitter would make it to the mainstream. I wasn’t sure if it would. Most people were too busy “poking” each other on Facebook or stalking lil’ kids on MySpace. But, it made it…and I’m a bit surprised to be honest.

Twitter just hit the one-billion tweets milestone today. Its not official or anything. The number of tweets were being counted by a 3rd party site called GigaTweet. Twitter might have hit this milestone long time ago since we don’t know when GigaTweet started counting. But, at least we know that we have more than a billion tweets.

You know Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Well anyone with a TV knows them. So, they were talking about Twitter on Indecision 2008. That probably got the whole “Twittosphere” twittering. Colbert and Stewart? They like took Twitter to the next level that day. Now the average Joe knows about Twitter and probably even started using it (or at least gave it a shot).

What really convinced me that Twitter got into the mainstream was when I was seeing this presentation by a few folks from a local tech company at my school. They were talking about Facebook, MySpace, Xbox Live, etc. And then they mentioned something that really surprised. Guess what it was? Yeah, it was Twitter.

I was like “Woah! WTF! They know about Twitter? They don’t look like the type of people who would use Twitter. WOAH! Holy shit! That means little birdie made it to the mainstream.” I was really happy for Twitter actually. Its a great, unique idea and its pretty useful too. It deserves to be more popular than Facebook (not kidding).

Well Twitter just took its first step into the mainstream. I’m not sure if it will be as popular as Facebook. It might. It might not. Who knows. But, it sure is on the right path and its getting more popular everyday. Until then follow my tweets!

Yep that’s right folks, Twitter got a shiny new design and its lookin’ good.

Its funny how moving a few things here and there can it more user-friendly. Twitter now has that little at home, warm and welcome feeling. Makes you wanna use it more and go on a tweet-rampage. Just go check it out and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Here’s the changes I’ve noticed:

1. Moved the tabs from the top to the sidebar.
2. Displays the number of followers, followings and updates under your name.
3. Got that whole round corner thing going on.
4. Displays your latest tweet at the top.
5. Got a colour wheel on the custom profile design’s page.
6. Put a tab for favourites on your public profile.

Apparently they added some AJAX magic on the Home and @Replies tabs, but I don’t see them. I checked both in IE and Firefox. Weird. Maybe they’re still working on it.

Well anyways, here’s the official post from Twitter about the redesign. Check it out since its got everything detailed. So, how do you like the new design? I love it.

BTW, this is like the get-a-new-design-day since FriendFeed also rolled out theirs today. I didn’t post about it because I don’t really use it since I don’t see what’s the point of it. Like… oh whatever. And yo, follow my sweet lil’ tweets (please).

Update (Sept 19): There’s a little bug when you go to someone’s profile and click on “Follow” it doesn’t change to “Following” right away, you need to refresh the page.

Disclaimer: No, this is not some horrible joke. I’m serious and I wasn’t paid by Microsoft to post this.

Last week I tried out IE8 (Beta 2) and I freakin’ loved it. I’m just really surprised to see how things improved. Like IE8 is pretty much taken to the next level. And you know what? I’m thinking about switching to it (not joking).

Isolated tabs

You may have already heard of this feature. Like the tabs run individually and they’re isolated. So, if something goes wrong only that tab will crash rather than the whole browser. And then IE8 will automatically recover the tab later on. Now that’s pretty smart shit.

Chrome has this and everyone was like going “wow” and everything. But, guess what? IE8 had it first. And one thing I know for sure is that a lot of people are now going to say “well its not that cool”. (IE haters!)

Privacy mode (aka pr0n-mode)

Pr0n mode, that’s what most people call it. I gotta say that its a funny name and describes it properly too. The official name is “InPrivate” but you can just call it pr0n mode if you want. Anyways, I’m not really sure what else you could use this feature for, but it might come in handy. Like when you’re at a public computer for example.

It is fast!

This is the part that really shocked me. I was like “WTF?”. Sites load pretty much in a snap. IE8 beats FF3 at speed. I never tried Chrome (and I don’t plan on), so I can’t compare them. But, still this is like a huge improvement. Good job IE team!

They care about web developers, finally

Oh yeah, that’s right! They care about web developers. Well its about time. IE8 has this built-in feature called “developer tools” that lets you mess with a site’s HTML, CSS, script, disable stuff, outline DIVs and the cookies. There are tons of other features too. These are just the one’s that I felt was important and to give you basic idea of what they have.

Compatibility mode

You’re going to a lot find sites that were designed for old browsers. And those sites probably won’t work well with the newer ones. So, IE8 got this feature to fix that problem. There’s a button near the refresh button which just fixes everything for you. Just click on it and it works like charm. Everything just works fine.

Oh and you can also browse in IE7, IE8 or the IE8 compatibility style. Like the site would work like it would if you were using IE7, for example. You can do this straight from the developer tools.

My own suggestion for a feature

I really like IE8 and there’s a little feature that I would love to see. I wish IE8 was able to run FF plugins since most of IE’s plugins are a piece of shit. FF plugins are simply awesome and they make your life a lot easier. I hope they consider doing this.

Well there are tons of other features in IE8. I didn’t talk about all of them. Check this out for some more info. And one more thing, take IE8 for test-drive! Takes a few minutes to install it. And after you’ve done that let me know if you like it (or hate it), and if you’re thinking about switching over to it.