In the latter days of the Web 2.0 the new trend is to make new web sites invite only, for what’s called a private beta. Like many out there i fancy a invite only thing, it makes me feel special and unique.

So when i read about invites to a new thing called Blippr i didn’t think twice, and believe me, I’ve received invites to services that I’ll never use. It was in that mind set that I’ve arrived at blippr website, knowing absolutely nothing about it.

After the registration, i start tinkering with it, trying to understand what the site was all about, and I was in for a surprise.

A good surprise at that, Blippr takes the 160 characters rule that exist in Twitter and Jaiku to a new height, by limiting most interactions to that amount of text. At it’s heart it’s a social network devoted to comments on movies, books, music and more.

It takes a bit of Wikipedia, by allowing the user to create a new blip for a movie that isn’t already listed on the website. It then searches for information on the web about the movie title you’ve just entered filling in automatically most information about the movie. I’m referring to movies, but the same can be done for books, music, etc.

It also takes a bit of inspiration on Digg, by allowing the user not only to comment on your blip, but to agree or disagree with it, much in the way of a thumbs up, thumbs down thing.

The site is slick and clean, the potential is huge, the approach is simple. I think we have a winner here. I’ll be using blippr from now on, if you care to get in touch just visit my profile at http://www.blippr.com/profiles/438.

As i said in the beginning Blippr is still in private beta, but you can ask for an invitation at their website, and you’ll probably get one in a couple of hours, so go ahead and try for yourself.

Since yesterday hi5 has been experiencing all kinds of problems, that peaked late last night with a total failure to respond.

Most of the times it just displays a sign acknowledging the problem but stating that they are improving their services. Could this be the a tighter integration to Google’s OpenSocial?

With 70 million users hi5 has been raising some money to expand and gain leverage in Asia. Despite being San Francisco based, Hi5 doesn’t figure in the top 10 major Social Networks in the US, which may explain why this downtime hasn’t been reported in any major US news feed.

I’m not a big Social Network user, but I do have an account in hi5, and I was unable to login yesterday. This morning I’m able to login but I’m experiencing weird behavior, like all links pointing to non existing pages and other oddities.

Maybe it’s time to check out Bebo or some other network.

Update: I was able to get a screenshot of hi5’s error message.

I have to be honest here, I’ve never heard of Scribd before reading this article at GigaOM, and it go my attention.

All started with good old paper, you could write on it or use a typewrite, you could print or draw, it’s versatile and cheap, and has been the standard medium for document sharing and distribution.

But since the dawn of computing people have been storing electronic documents in hundreds of different formats. Either text, audio and pictures you’ll find different applications to create such files, and most of these applications created their own closed file format.

Microsoft has been playing a key role in the format standardization with it’s Office package creating some of the most popular file formats like DOC and XLS files. Acrobat created PDF files to put and end to the file format issue, it helped, but didn’t resolve the problem.

Scribd emerged last year with that same idea, but with a different approach. Instead of creating yet another file format, they created a web service for text files. The key stone of the service is that each text file can be shared, viewed and downloaded without any special plugin or tool. That’s what Scribd call iPaper, and it looks quite nice.

A few days ago they’ve upgraded their document viewer to enable it to be faster and lighter and to even include ads on your documents.

Personally I’ll still be using Google Documents for online collaboration and document sharing, but it’s nice to see some innovative ideas in this area.

Like many millions Internet users all over the world, I’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail address for quite some time now. I’ve gotten used to the simple interface and even managed to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

But the main thing that made me fell head over heels about Gmail was it’s spam filter. It simply worked, keeping thousands of viagra, penis enlargement and cialis e-mail spam at bay.

I made no effort to keep my Gmail address hidden, I used it all over the web, even in some shady websites, in trust of the mighty spam filter would keep my inbox clean of Nigerian pyramid schemes or fake university degrees.

From some time now, I’ve been getting some weird e-mails about some business propositions, mainly in the domain name market. I have a couple of domain names laying around that I will develop someday, but that doesn’t make me the type of guy to approach about some "buy hundred domain names for 99$" deal.

To be honest I didn’t even noticed, my faith remained strong that the good old spam filter was working around the clock for me, but the number of weird e-mails have been increasing. I was thinking that I’ve shouldn’t have registered at that free porn website while reading this post at Mashable about others noticing exactly the same behavior in Gmail. I was pretty confident that those e-mails were all my fault, I can feel my faith slowly fading away as more and more spam gets in.

Are the spammers getting smarter? Is this a sign that what used to be the most reliable e-mail service I’ve used, is having some internal issues? Is this only the beginning or is this just a small hiccup?

I’m worried, because I’ve gotten so used to Gmail that I’m afraid that I couldn’t revert back to good old [Insert your favorite desktop e-mail client here].

As I type these words lots and lots of websites are experiencing all kinds of problems and difficulties. This is simply due to a problem at Amazon S3 cluster.

Skype has crashed and stopped responding, Twitter, Tumblr and other major websites are barely working, most aren’t displaying images, widgets or static material that was outsourced to Amazon S3 services.

It’s kinda funny how this goes against the very nature of the web, in each networks are interconnected in several ways to ensure that a major breakdown won’t happen.

One of the first lessons you’ll learn on most basic business management courses or books is that centralization is a bad thing, specially when the tasks being centralized are business critical.

But that goes against human nature. Humans tend to like stuff piled up and organized in large containers, that’s why IKEA furniture is such a success. Even tetris was such a smashing hit due to this very basic need in every person to organize stuff that is scattered around.

Amazon S3 services exist just for that, to accommodate huge amounts of data in a big, out of sight container that it’s easy to manage and cheap. But when that container is locked, and our stuff is locked inside things don’t look so bright anymore.

At this point there’s no explanation to what or why this is happening, but the tech web is bubbling about it’s new found dependency on Amazon and it’s dangers.

At this time the only bit of news from Amazon is that they are aware of the problem and are investigating the issue.

404 is the dreaded http error code that plagues the Internet from it’s birth. If you just came online today for the first time, a 404 is a very simple way to let you know that you’ve made a mistake. All webservers implement this and will most likely display an error message saying that the page you’re trying to reach doesn’t exist.

In the early days of the Internet, web browsers where very basic and simple, and would display http error codes directly to the user. Most recent web browsers have fancy ways to let you know that you have fat fingers and will display a nice dialog offering you choices in what to do to get to the page you wanted.

Most recent webservers will let it’s admin configure a custom error page, that’s supposed to be more user friendly and informative, and this was the pinnacle of development in error pages.

This is the point at where Google enters the scene of the odd world of http error codes. Some Google labs engineer must have thought of using such dumb pages in a way to increase big G’s stream of cash, by slapping a custom page of their own onto users of Google toolbar.

Such custom page offers help to guide the lost web user by using Google web search, and thus showing some more ads.

There’s a big commotion about this all over the tech blogsphere. Users are fond of their error pages and become restless whenever someone tries to show them another version of the sad true, you’ve mad a typo.

According to The Wall Street Journal Yahoo’s board will reject the bid made by Microsoft earlier this week in an attempt to buy some time and get a better deal out of the whole process.

Most analysts like this stalling move, but I think it will just make Microsoft more committed to the acquisition. The ball is now on Microsoft’s court.

We should expect some kind of formal statement from Yahoo tomorrow and I don’t see MS waiting too long to strike back.

Google and Twitter joined forces to create a geographical based mashup using certain keywords related to Super Tuesday voting.
The app itself is nothing new or fancy, it just used the location field from the twitter user that happens to make some comment about politics and places it on Google Map on the appropriate spot in the world.

Twittervision has the same functionality for twitter’s public timeline and is a popular twitter app for quite some time now.
Politweets has been around for a while and deals exclusively with political chatter on twitter.

What strikes me as odd is why hasn’t Google used it’s recent acquisition Jaiku for this? It definitely would be a small push to revive the dying microblogging platform.

Jaiku users are fleeing in droves to Twitter, mostly due to the lack of activity but some are just seeing their hopes in Google turning Jaiku into a viable Twitter competitor fading to dust.

Is this the final nail in Jaiku’s coffin? Leave your comments

The biggest thing since Youtube’s acquisition by Google last year has just hit the intertubes like a storm. The hostile move by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo.

Everybody is talking about the consequences that this 44.6 billion dollar deal will have on the web. The obvious concerned party by this bid is Google who already made a very aggressive statement about the monopolistic nature of Microsoft and how they would potentially use Yahoo web assets to threaten Google’s in several business niches that Google leads undisputed, like the web advertising market.

But Google went beyond issuing a public statement, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.

Google can’t contemplate the idea of fighting a bidding war for Yahoo against Microsoft, not only because Microsoft would probably outbid them in the end, but also because anti-monopoly laws would make Google’s bid a legal mess.

But a corporation as large as Google has a few cards in the sleeves, and according to the New York Times:

Google’s lobbyists in Washington have also begun plotting how it might present a case against the transaction to lawmakers, people briefed on the company’s plans said. Google could benefit by simply prolonging a regulatory review until after the next president takes office.

In addition, several Google executives made “back-channel” calls over the weekend to allies at companies like Time Warner, which owns AOL, to inquire whether they planned to pursue a rival offer and how they could assist, these people said. Google owns 5 percent of AOL.

It seems that this will be a long and hard war to be No. 2 on the web. Yahoo employees seem to be worried about losing their corporate identity and be engulfed by Redmond’s money making machine.

The timing for the bid seems to be perfect, just when everyone had their eyes set on the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday election for the President of the United States.

As a user of web services from both companies (Hotmail and Flickr) I find all this quite amusing and concerning at the same time. Anyway this seems to be a Borg takeover where resistance is indeed futile.

As you might have noticed I’ve been offline for a bit more than a week.

Which meant that this blog was stopped for the duration, but you can expect me to be back tomorrow with new material.

I know this post is kind of useless after I’ve been away, but that’s the way life goes. Thanks for sticking around.