FriendFeed has released a real-time page that auto-scrolls all updates from your subscriptions.  There’s a mini window option that allows you to see it in a separate window, but I’ve found the best way to view it is as a sidebar in Firefox.

To get this you need to bookmark the mini-window page, so open the mini window, right click on the page and select ‘Bookmark this page’.  Then right-click on the bookmark, select ‘Properties’ and check the ‘Load this bookmark in the sidebar’ check box & click ‘Save Changes’.

Now when you select this bookmark, the real time view will open in your sidebar - awesome!.

UPDATE: And it’s back up again, on http://www1.propertyportalwatch.com/ www1.propertyportalwatch.com is on IP 74.124.211.14 where as www.propertyportalwatch.com is on 74.124.210.232.  Looks like there was an issue with the server they were sitting on.  Apache on www.propertyportalwatch.com is giving a 302 Moved Temporarily over to www1, so looks like it’s  a technical failure after all.

Today, in the small business section of the SMH, there’s an article about the ex-CEO of http://realestate.com.au Simon Baker’s new venture called PropertyPortalWatch.  Since being kicked from REA, Simon Baker has been working on this site which is meant to “congregate news, opinion and gossip about other property portals and companies around the world, in a one-stop shop for people within the [online real-estate] industry.”

However as of this morning the http://propertyportalwatch.com site has been down, with the site redirecting to an account suspended page on their hosting company’s servers.  I can’t imagine that the SMH article got them *that* much traffic, especially seeing as in that article it said that Simon has been pouring a fair bit of cash into it, plus he said they have some “anonymous investors on board” too.  As Scott on Twitter said “Never host your new startup on some cheap ‘n’ nasty cpanel hosting companies!”. 

They’re hosting with a US based hosting company called InMotion. I can only assume that there’s been some accounting stuff up (as noted in the comments below, InMotion’s business plans all come with unlimited disk space & transfers), and it’s kind of embarrassing that it would happen on the day they get some free press from the SMH.  If you still want to check it out, the Google Cache is still available.  Simon Baker is still blogging at MyCEOLife.  There, he posted about the new site last month, and linked to it from there as recently as last Saturday.

IntenseDebate, a centralised commenting service similar to the Disqus service used on this site, has been acquired by WordPress parent company Automattic.

From the announcement on the IntenseDebate site:

So what does this mean for you, our valued users? A couple of things:
1.) We will be temporarily going back into private beta. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2.) You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3.) You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.

But don’t worry!
You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come! We will continue to improve our comment system and your commenters’ experience. IntenseDebate will continue to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog and build your reader community.

This isn’t a surprising acquisition.  There have been rumours about Automattic buying a commenting service for a while now, with some suggesting that Disqus was also a possible target.  Matt Mullenweg said on his post about the purchase that they’re going to keep the service platform agnostic (for now at least) but they’ll also roll a lot of the features into the hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress.

Seeing as they already own Akismet, which processes a large chunk of the blogosphere’s comments, ID will give them access to even more of the comments posted on the web. On the upside this will mean that they will be able to improve Akismet even more by processing the additional data, but it also means the one company has an extraordinary amount of information on what is posted on the internet.  The potential for this to be a privacy risk or for them to sell this to marketers is a little bit disturbing, but so far Automattic haven’t given us a reason to be concerned.

However, similar to Google, they are getting by on a lot of community good will. And also similar to Google, they’re now in a position to really abuse that good will if they saw fit.  Lets hope that doesn’t happen

Update: Here’s the response to the announcement from Disqus

Today, Automattic (the team behind the WordPress platform) announced their acquisition of IntenseDebate, a competing and similarly-focused comment service. From all of us at Disqus: congrats to the ID team on joining the Automattic family. We’re fans of WordPress here (this blog uses it), so I think it’s good that they’re beginning to pay more attention to the comments.

So what does this mean for us? The Disqus comment system is still the largest third-party comment system on WordPress, yet those blogs represent under 5% of all websites using Disqus. We pride ourselves on being an independent cross-platform service. Disqus will continue to innovate and provide the best discussion experience on blogs. Our company’s entire focus is on increasing the number and quality of your comments and that will never change.

As a true third-party system, Disqus can be open and extensible to other services and platforms, as well as offer unique functionality not limited by a single platform. I’m looking forward to the future of discussion and I hope you’ll experience it with Disqus.

Maths Fail, originally uploaded by glennslaven.

Apparently I can remove 1023687353 GB of unneeded files from my 10GB drive

Google has released its experimental browser called Chrome, a new type of browser built on the Webkit rendering engine.

Google have said that this is designed to be a whole new type of browser, built around the concept of web ‘applications’ as opposed to web ’sites’.  The idea is that the new breed of sites are now applications that you spend a lot of time in, as opposed to simply sites that you visit briefly.

The major change is that each tab in now running in its own CPU process, which means that there shouldn’t be the issue of one site’s processor-intensive Javascript or some plugin (Adobe I’m looking at you) locking up or bringing down the whole browser.

From the Google Blog announcement

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

My first impressions are very positive.  It’s fast, very fast.  They’ve optimised the heck out of the Javascript engine.  You can see the comparison between Firefox 3 & Chrome’s Dromaeo test results: Firefox’s 1983.40ms compared to Chrome’s 574.60ms.  That’s almost 1 & 1/2 second’s difference. Sure that was a fairly unscientific test, I wasn’t controlling for other processes, but the massive difference is indicative of a major improvement in JS performance.

So here’s what I’ve found so far:

Read the rest of this entry »

Reddit has gone down, & they’re blaming it on CERN.  Hopefully Alexis got the crowbar sent off in time for the world to be saved! In other news, I want a pack of these.