Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

As I followed the “Magical Feature Tour”, I continuously asked myself, “Why on Earth are all my photos in Facebook?!”

Ok, so that really is a rhetorical question. The power of social networking is huge, and to get anyone to check out another site it would have to be a pretty amazing photo of me exposing Hannah Montana’s real identity. (Sorry folks, I’m not that lucky!) So we have to live with Facebook’s flaws, including the lack of automatic tagging and low resolution images. The real problem though isn’t the photos I upload, but other people’s photos of me.

Back in the olden days, when someone took a photo of me on their Sony Mavica camera, they’d just whip out the floppy and I’d take a copy. As technology advanced and you could take more than 10 photos a night, we progressed to sharing the weekend’s snaps on a compact disk. It worked great, and means I still have those photos of me dressed up as Elvis from when I was 16. (Yes, this is full resolution!)

So what are my options today? I could email all of my friends and ask them to email the photos back to me one by one. That’d take waaaayyy too long, and I don’t necessarily want to have that level of contact with some of my Facebook friends. I could go through every photo, right click, Save Image As…, etc, but that doesn’t sound like my idea of a fun evening!

Well I’ve discovered FacePAD, a Firefox Add-on which is a Facebook album downloader. Once you install it (making sure you have default download location configured for Firefox), you just right click on a link to an album and choose “Download Album with FacePAD”.

The extension will whiz into action, and download each of the photos in the album. UPDATE: So it turns out it only downloads the photos on the first page of the album, and you have to repeat the right click action for each subsequent page. The files will be in your preconfigured download directory, helpfully named with random numbers, and placed in the middle of the rest of your files.

Mmm yeah, it’s pretty rough. Instead of asking for donations, perhaps the developer could spend some of his time cleaning things up a bit. However it does what I need, and I now have a simpler way of getting a copy of my embarrassing memories. I’m not sure that it’s going to be enough to motivate me to do it regularly, but is there anything else I can do?

What is Google Buzz?

Well I’m glad you asked, otherwise it’d be pointless explaining it!

Built right into Gmail, Google Buzz is a social networking slash near-realtime aggregator. Or for my mother is reading, it’s like a Facebook from Google. Basically, whenever you log into your email account, there’ll be a page that shows you all the recent updates from people you follow. These updates can be in the form of status updates, links, photos or other rich media.

Instead of yet another social network hub that nobody can be bothered using because it’s deserted, Buzz pulls the updates from a number of existing sites. This solves the classic chicken and egg problem, making the service instantly useful. While the concept itself isn’t new (with services like friendfeed on the scene), Buzz has the advantage of building on the existing Gmail user base. According to the Official Gmail Blog, tens of millions of people have tried out the service in the first 48 hours alone!

I’ve heard there’s privacy issues?

When you first sign in, you’ll be prompted to choose a list of people to follow based on your most commonly emailed contacts. Only a few days after the release, this prompt replaces the original behaviour of automatically following these contacts. The problem was that the people you follow can be publicly visible, and this was seen as a privacy risk that exposes the people you most commonly email. Google said “Oops!” and have since changed the behaviour, but not before receiving criticism from a number of sources.

Well what can it connect to?

As of today, Buzz is integrated with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Google Reader shared items, and Google Chat status updates. Or if you like pictures:

You can even add the RSS feed of any content you publish, with updates being posted straight to your feed! Of course there’s also the typical “Share what you’re thinking” box that you can post Buzz specific statuses, links, or media.

As you may have noticed, there’s no Facebook support. In fact, only 6 of the 206,741,990 websites in the world are connected! But fear not young reader, our hero Google is coming to the rescue with this quote:

Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API.

Ding ding ding! That’s the “open” bell ringing, which is what we developers love to hear.

What can’t it do?

Buzz is great at aggregating your content in one convenient place, creating a conversation of comments and likes between followers. Just like other aggregators (such as Google Reader), this conversation doesn’t get back to the publishers, effectively breaking the feedback loop. This deprives publishers of useful feedback or motivation (in the case of small time bloggers like me). It’s a core problem with web 2.0.x, and Matt Haughey’s blog is an excellent discussion on the topic.

How do I get started?

This is as easy as a nice slice of cherry pie!

1. Log into your Gmail account, and click the Buzz logo on the left (under the inbox link).
2. Next choose the people you want to follow.
3. Connect to the sites you want to access.
4. Start Buzzing! (I think I’ve just coined a new verb!)

For those inclined, there’s plenty to read over at the Buzz homepage, and don’t forget to check out Buzz on your phone. Time will be the ultimate test, but I expect Buzz to common place in conversations of the future. What do you think about all the Buzz?

This morning, I woke up to hell that’s worse than the blue screen of death: a hung system. You know the type: mouse frozen, unresponsive keyboard… Today, the situation got worse because now, the system won’t boot either. It booted fine yesterday.  I get to the Windows splash screen, but after that, something goes terribly wrong and the hard drive, which sounds normal up until a point, starts to make a rythmic grinding noise as though it’s trying to get at something it just can’t get at.

I’ve had a hard drive or two fail in my time (stupid good for nothing lightning!), so I am aware of the situation. Every year or so I have copied some or my important files around to other computers on my home network. Also I’ve recently bought a portable hard drive that lives on top of my server, and I store another copy of my files on there. All in all, it’s pretty inadequate. I’m left completely unprotected, losing all of my precious files in the event of fire, meteorite, or theft.

So as my blog starts to take shape, I thought it was about time I looked into implementing some sort of real backup system. I don’t need anything fancy, and I’ve come up with this list of requirements:

• Cheap -  I don’t like wasting money.
• Simple – If I have to constantly manage the backup then I’m not going to do it.
• Automatic – Same as above. I’m too lazy to think about backing up, let alone click a button to do it.
• Offsite – If the next asteroid near Earth takes out my house, my photos will still be safe.
• Versioned – Sure I can restore a deleted file, but what happens if I delete the contents and save it? (rhetorical)

I’ve been an avid listener of TWIT for a while now, and if you’ve ever heard Leo Laporte open his mouth you’d know about Carbonite. It’s an offsite backup service that automatically uploads your selected files and folders to their servers distributed across multiple data centres. I thought that I should give it a go, so I signed up for the 30 day free trial.

Yeah mmm it was ok. I did everything that I wanted it to I guess. There was just some little things that annoyed me, and for about $6 a month it didn’t seem worth it. One of the things that bugged me was the user interface. Mainly based around shell integration, the look and feel seemed almost hacked together and unfriendly. Also, Carbonite has a “feature” (probably designed to save storage space on the server) that stops videos as well as system style files from being backed up by default. To a developer like me, system and configuration files are really important, and it was too much effort manually selecting them all. Goodbye Carbonite!

I generally liked the idea behind Carbonite, just not the implementation. Using the Google comparison trick I checked out the competition.

Hello Mozy! And welcome to the family! Mozy was exactly what I was looking for, and has none of the things I complained about with Carbonite. These are the things that I like:

• The interface is clean and simple, which makes it easy to select the folders you want backed up.
• Every file type is backed up automatically, with no exceptions.
• It evens backs up open and locked files like Outlook PST files!
• Every fixed disk in your computer can be backed up.
• 30 days of version history.
• Backups are scheduled incrementally, and only when the computer is in low use.
• Multiple restore options, including ordering your data on a DVD!

So for approximately the same price (US$4.95 a month), I get unlimited storage space with all of these features! In comparison it seems much cheaper. For those of you who think they don’t really have enough data to warrant the cost, Mozy offers a free version with 2GB storage. If you need a little more space, then every 2 friends you refer gives you another gigabyte of space.

I’m sleeping much better at night knowing my precious 1’s and 0’s are floating around safe in the cloud. It doesn’t complete my system as only my server is backed up, but that’s where most of my data lives. The next step is to use another third party tool to backup my other machines onto a network share (yes that’s supported!), but all in good time. So next time you hear the click of death, will you be crying, or sighing with relief that you signed up with Mozy?

Gravatars are globally recognised avatars (the original image kind), that follow you around the internet. You can sign up to the service for free, upload your chosen image, and it will automatically appear on a number of sites. The comments you make on all Wordpress powered blogs (such as this one) support Gravatars by default, thanks to Automattic’s acquisition in 2007. That’s just the start, with a growing awareness leading to an explosion of support, including:

• Wordpress.com
• Stack Overflow
• uhh…
• And more!

It’s pretty cool signing up to a site and seeing your face (even if it is cartoonised). As a user it’s a great, simple, no downsides service that makes surfing (is that word even used anymore) the world wide web cooler. As a web developer, you’ve got no excuse for not implementing it in your sites. It’s dead easy, and means you don’t need to mess around with your own profile pic system. You have a lot of control, including setting a rating to censor inappropriate images, change the size of the images, and the choice of default image categories for the users who haven’t woken up yet.

Identicons

MonsterIDs

Wavatars

The process basically involves creating an MD5 hash (helpful online tool) of the user’s email address. You then request the image from the Gravatar server with a simple HTTP get request. So for example, the following request retrieves my Gravatar with a size of 80 by 80 pixels, rated G, and users Wavatars as the default.

You can read all about it on the developer site, as well as reference implementations for a number of different languages. And don’t limit yourself to just the web, with Gravatar’s popping up on the desktop too!

So draw a crazy cartoon head of yourself, and create your Gravatar today!

Now to be honest, the mobile interface isn’t very strong. It’s not a genuine replacement for native bookmarks, but apparently there’s an iPhone application in the works.

Well until that iPhone application eventuates, I’ve come up with a quick fix. It’s not perfect, but it uses the native iPhone bookmark system which is a whole lot better.

Step 1: Download Xmarks for Internet Explorer

You can get the installation from here. Just do it. I know you don’t like Internet Explorer, and neither do I.

Step 2: Login and Setup

Make sure you choose to keep the server bookmarks and delete your local favourites! Otherwise you’ll end up with the useless default Microsoft links everywhere.

You could set up a separate mobile profile, but I’ve been using my home profile instead and it seems to work for me.

Step 3: Enable iTunes Bookmark Sync

Plug in your iPhone, open iTunes, and click on the Info tab. Select the option to “Sync bookmarks with Internet Explorer”, and click Sync!

Step 4: Comment

That’s it, you’re done. So comment on this post and tell me how it works for you, because as Jeff says, A Blog Without Comments Is Not a Blog. That’s all for today!

The main problem with bookmarks that has existed since they were born, is the issue of keeping them organised. These days I use multiple computers, with a number of different browsers, and my bookmarks get out of control. Why would anyone want to use bookmarks anymore? In his post titled “Do We Still Need Bookmarks?“, Jono answers this question with these insightful use cases:

The Todo List. “I want to look at this, but not right now.” Someone gave me a link to a cool video about robots, but I don’t want to watch it right now, because I’m in the middle of something. Or, there’s a web form I need to fill out, but I don’t have the information I need yet. I bookmark the page because there’s an action I want to take later.

Sharing. “Oh man, this is funny!” This time, I found the cool robot video, and I want to show it to someone. I found a hilarious picture, or a news article that proves I was right in that argument we had a week ago. Either way, the value is in the sharing. I bookmark it so that later on I can give the link to others.

Frequently Used. “I want to get back here fast.” The page where I view my bank account status, the central documentation page for the project I’m working on, or a hub from which I often start surfing. I bookmark it because I expect to return often and I want to get there fast.

The Research Collection. “This fits right in to something I’m working on.” I’m a history teacher, preparing a lesson plan, and I’m collecting resources about World War 1. Or, I’m a political blogger, and I’m collecting links about all the ways my Least Favorite Politician has screwed things up. I bookmark pages because I want to add them to my growing collection of data on a certain topic.

This is exactly how I use my bookmarks, as well as everyone I know. We’re all just stuck copying our bookmarks from one computer to another and importing into the various browsers we use. What else can we do? Call Captain Planet and the Planeteers? No, they’re too busy fighting Dr. Blight and Looten Plunder. What we need is Xmarks!

Formally known as Foxmarks, this service lives in the cloud and performs automatic synchronization of bookmarks between all of your computers and browsers. What evolved as a Firefox Add-on, Xmarks now supports the top 4 leading browsers today with a range of plugins and native applications. As it’s in the cloud you have the benefit of your bookmarks being backed up and available wherever you have internet access.

“It sounds ok, but I’m not convinced,” a random reader might say. Well that’s just the start, look at this impressive list of features:

• A simple web interface to access and organise your bookmarks.
• The ability to define different profiles for home, work, etc., to filter which bookmarks are available where.
• Secure synch of stored passwords between when you use Xmarks with Firefox.
• Mobile bookmarks are supported with a special mobile interface directly in your browser.
• The website has a cool blue colour scheme (I like blue).

Now to be honest, the mobile interface isn’t very strong. It’s not a genuine replacement for native bookmarks, but apparently there’s an iPhone application in the works.

Xmarks is my number 1 favourite browser plugin ever. The first thing I do when I use a new computer or browser is download the appropriate plugin, and pull down my bookmarks and passwords. The process usually takes less than a minute, and I have an exact copy of my toolbar links and all of my saved login information. Any changes I make will be synchronized immediately, which makes it perfect for the “Todo List” style of links. For the most important things I’ll place them on the toolbar so that I see them right away when I get home. Best of all, it works over HTTP so you can use Xmarks behind a proxy.

A year ago I would have agreed that bookmarks were dying off. With the power of the cloud, Xmarks brings back bookmarks, big time!

Not a good thing. What if someone jumped onto my computer when I forget to lock it? They’ll find out that my passwords are cooldude, password, and ilikepink, which will be really embarrassing. Luckily, there’s an easy fix. Go to Tools > Options… > Security, check the “Use a master password” box and set a (strong) password. Periodically, and whenever you startup the browser, you’ll be asked for this password. Without it, prying eyes won’t be able to see your password list or automatically login to Facebook and pretend to be you.

As I’m sure most wannabe bloggers do, I like to regularly check out how many people have subscribed. No surprise here, as it’s still stuck on 2 (and one of which is me). Next to it though, there was this little message: (Actually I forgot to write down exactly what it said, so I just paraphrased from my memory for you.)

Google Reader is unable to update your feed due to connection issues.

In my head I questioned:

No, my site’s not down, is it? I just checked it this morning and it was fine, so there’s no way it’s down. Google must have gotten it wrong!

I pulled out my trusty bookmarks, went to downforeveryoneorjustme.com and did a quick check. You wouldn’t know it from the title but it’s a simple, no nonsense site that checks if a given website is down for everyone or just me (or you in your case).

Oh. Now I’d like to say that I was on the Digg front page, or that I’d been virally retweeted overnight, but I’m not that lucky. I’d been reorganising my office, and changed the structure of my network in the process. I forgot to check the state of my server afterwards which is a big mistake as I try to increase my pagerank.

Moral of this story: When you think Google is wrong, you are wrong! (Unless your name happens to be Chuck Norris)

UPDATE: I’m in the process of finding a simple and free website monitoring service so I can be alerted next time something happens. I’ve tried a few but they all seem pretty appalling. Can anyone recommend one that they find useful?

Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (“computing”). In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.

Understand?.. No?.. Neither did I. I see the cloud as a magical room up in the sky, filled with an infinite number of computers that can store as much data as you like, and do a zillion calculations a second. The best part is you can access it from almost anywhere because it’s always up above you. It’s considered the future of computing, with Amazon, Google, and Mircrosoft, all competing in the race to become the cloud king.

So now that I’ve written an intro around the fluffy photo above, I’ll get onto the real post. What I love most about keeping my data in the cloud, is that it allows me to keep my data backed up in once place, and synchronized with all of my devices including my iPhone. Google have a number of services that help you do this, which I use to sync all of my email, contacts, and calendar entries “over the air” (another fancy term). If you’re nice, I’ll show you how to do it.

Doesn’t iTunes already do this for me?

Well kinda, but you have to plug your phone in for it to update your contacts, and it will only synchronize your calendar with Outlook (or the Mac equivalent)! If you follow these instructions, you’ll be constantly up to date without having to think about it.

1. You must have a Google account

If you haven’t already, head over to mail.google.com and sign up for a new account. Please please please use a sensible username, and save fluffy_bunny_69 or imdahottest for your Hotmail account. Have a play around and get a feel of your new home, then check out calendar.google.com to activate the calendar. You use the same username and password for every Google application, but you have to log in at least once to activate them.

2. Turn off iTunes sync

Next, we want to completly disable iTunes controlling the synchronization of your data. If we leave this enabled, it will mess with the data you store in the cloud.

• Open iTunes
• Connect your iPhone
• Go to the “Info” tab
• Ensure that synching of contacts, calendar and mail are all disabled.

3. Connect to Gmail via IMAP

The IMAP protocol allows you to keep your email messages synchronized between all of your clients and the server. You can use the standard Gmail option in your iPhone settings, but Google recommend that you use the custom account configuration:

What if I tap ‘Gmail’ instead?
Archiving and deleting messages will work differently. Our instructions ensure Gmail works as designed.

In particular this deals with the way Gmail archives emails instead of deleting them directly. Although not completely necessary, it’s probably best to follow their instructions.

4. Setup Google as an Exchange account

The Microsoft Exchange system is the market leader in the enterprise communication market, and for good reason. The wise folks at Google realised this and have emulated an Exchange server, which your iPhone can connect to. Now Google suggests that you enable synchronization of all of your data this way, but I recommend that you do not enable Mail synchronization via Exchange. I find the iPhone has trouble receiving notifications of incoming mail, especially when you have a large number of emails.

With the above caveat, follow these instructions on configuring an Exchange account.

5. Choose which calendars to sync

Whenever I add a new Google calendar, I always forget this step and wonder why it’s not working. It’s such a simple step that I bet you’ll do the same. Just head on over to m.google.com/sync, log in with your Google account, and pick which calendars you want configured. Bookmark the page so you can update your options in the future.

6. Play in the clouds

Now you’re set up with your data in the cloud! When you put new people in your phone book they’ll instantly be transferred to your Google contacts, and events you add to your calendar will always stay in sync between devices. Fiddle with the options, and suss out how to make it best work for you. Just remember if you’re going to play in the clouds, don’t forget to bring your umbrella!

Bonus!

For those of you who’ve made it past the corny images, here’s a bonus Facebook tip. With the latest version of the Facebook iPhone app, you can enable automatic synchronization of your contact’s profile pictures. Enable this using the “sync” button at the top right of the “Friends” page (choose both options). If you followed the above instructions, the pictures will also float up into the cloud and be added to your Google contacts!

In the future I’ll show you how to add Facebook events to your calendar, and how to share calendars with family and friends, but are there any other ways that you synchronize your data and live in the cloud?

Now last time that I checked (which I did do about 2 minutes ago), there are a few people who live outside of the US. Check out this population graph from Google:

Yep, I was right! I’m not the only one who doesn’t live there. Phew!

Now here’s a tip for the other 6,387,970,276 of you. (Now before the perfectionists comment, I didn’t include myself in that number!) It can be convenient, for a number of technical reasons, to let websites think that you are in the United States. Luckily Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree can do it for you!

Once you download and install the free software, you can activate the “Privacy” mode. This will open a secure VPN tunnel connection to the Hotspot Shield servers, which luckily for us, are located in the aforementioned country. Once connected, all of your web requests are routed through their servers, appearing to the site as if you are a local.

Now I’ve tried a number of proxy or anonymizer services in the past, but most were expensive and flaky at best. Hotspot Shield is blazingly fast and seems only to be capped at the speed of my internet connection. Downloading large files or (cough) streaming flash videos is not a problem. Best of all, it’s free!

Readers should note that using this software should not be used for any illegal purposes. This software will not make you anonymous, no matter what they say. Please make sure you read the terms of service of the sites that you access to make sure you do not breach any laws.

This is the best service of its kind that I’ve come across. I love its simple interface, great performance, and especially the price tag. It meets my needs, but do you know of any better?