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.

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

Soon after the release of Google Reader’s public share feature there was a huge outcry by the user base against the lack of privacy tools and permission granularity.

Google was quick to explain on how to use properly the new set of features, allowing for the users of Reader to share only the stuff they want with whom they see fit.

Of course some minds got working on how to use this public filtered stream of data. And sure enough some services launched that tap in to Google Reader’s public feeds.

ReadBurner is a nice example that I actually find attractive not only from the design stand point but also by the way news are sorted.

Alexander Marktl the creator of ReadBurner, made two excellent choices in the conception of this app. The first and most important option at least for me is that all the feeds that ReadBurner indexes were made available by the users.

The second choice Alexander took that makes me real comfortable by using this service is that it sorts news items by their popularity, much in the way Digg works but without any voting.

News items are simply ordered by the number of times users have shared such items, which means that the important stuff will quickly rise to the top of the heap.

Unlike Digg there is no concept of front page, all news are sorted in the same page. This raises some scalability problems for the future, but they’ll probably only paginate the list.

Items are also divided by their language, which is a nice idea, despite the language choice being a bit limited and some major languages are missing, like German or Portuguese.

And obviously a service that indexes feeds being filtered by users using a online feed reader has their own feed, which can be easily customized on site.

All in all this is a great idea. Right now there aren’t that many users which means that there aren’t that many feeds being uhm… fed into the system. But ReadBurner has a lot of potential and will surely be a major player by the end of 2008.

It went under the radar of most people and tech bloggers, but this ground breaking stuff from the micro-blogging giant Twitter.

A few days ago Starling the messaging queue platform used by Twitter has been released to the open source community to tinker with.
According to Alex Payne in the brand new Twitter Technology Blog:

Starling is at the core of what we do at Twitter; it moves small messages around to daemons that work on jobs like processing updates, delivering messages, archiving user accounts, and so forth.

Until now, Starling has lived a sheltered life in the Twitter code base. We’re happy to announce that Starling is now open source and freely available for anyone to use, modify, and improve. We’re eager to see patches and to start a proper open source community around Starling.

This is a bold move, and I agree with Jesse Stay when he compares Twitter to an early Google.

Any developer can now improve on Twitter’s work, possibly making for a better and faster service. I don’t believe that with this release there will be a swarm of Twitter clones popping all over the web, mainly because the costs of supporting tens of thousands of SMS are pretty steep and also because it’s not a simple service to monetize.

Twitter has the micro blogging and virtual presence market cornered, and while it isn’t a monopoly there isn’t much in the way of competition. Jaiku is still light years away and Google hasn’t yet done anything to cover the ground gained by Twitter.

A few days ago it made the rounds in the intertubes, and I’ve even made a post about it here, that there was a website enabling non-US residents to use music streaming service Pandora.com.

Somehow I wished that Pandora would pretend nothing was happening and leave globalpandora.com alone.

Pandora is restricted to only broadcast music to the United States, due to the DMCA.

But Pandora is abiding by the rules, and has deniability of the whole globalpandora thing.

By ignoring the middle man Pandora would be able to once again reach the entire planet without breaking any laws.

But unfortunately for me, Pandora has blocked globlapandora’s access to their service yesterday. I went to the site to take a screenshot for this post and lo and behold, it’s working again.

This will probably drag for a few weeks in a cat and mice game. Pandora block’s the ip’s, globalpandora gets new ip’s and is back up.

But sooner or later Pandora will probably take legal action in the form of a cease and desist and that will be the final nail on globalpandora’s coffin.

I need to start by saying that I’m a Dreamhost client. This blog is hosted with them. And to be perfectly honest I really like them.

They are are renowned for their sense of humor which I do enjoy, specially the monthly newsletter. Now and again there’s a bit of downtime, but that’s to be expected. Their support works great and folks are very helpful even when I accidentally borked one of my websites by accident.

But this Monday they’ve fumbled the ball big time, by triple charging almost all of their thousands of clients. Apparently I wasn’t affected, at least no money went missing from my credit card. I’ve only received an e-mail stating that I was all paid up until 2009 which left me scratching my head but I didn’t bother to check what was happening.

But hundreds of others clients weren’t so fortunate as me and flocked to the support phone lines and e-mail. Not a very good day to work at support I’m sure.

After some time, Josh Jones offered an explanation to what had happened on Dreamhost’s official blog. Which only made matters worse, because the tone of the post was light and jovial, using The Simpsons pictures to illustrate their mistake.

I surely understand the frustration of some clients who sites were down, and some whose bills/rent/mortgage bounced. I would be pissed too. I would be more pissed to find that the explanation of the error apparently makes fun of the whole situation.

Despite their immediate action to return all the money and even cover the charges that some clients have incurred due to this error it’s obviously a mess, and the end result is lots and lots of cancellations, threats of legal action and probably some guys showing up at the Dreamhost offices with baseball bats.

I’m not much of a music fan. I enjoy listening to it while driving or whenever I’m doing boring and repetitive tasks. I enjoy silence.

But I’m not that happy when the silence is imposed on me. I’m talking about Pandora.com which is a music service that launched a couple of years ago. The launch caused some raised eyebrows in the music industry at the time. So it came as no surprise when Pandora closed down it’s service to the whole world except the US and the UK in May 2007.

Internet music broadcasting in the US is regulated by the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which streamlines the process of acquiring all the licenses needed to keep such a service running. But outside of the US deals have to be negotiated with record labels in each country, which is a legal nightmare that Pandora (much like Hulu.com) choose to live without.

According to Podcasting News website:

Founder Tim Westergren said this week that the company cannot reach an agreement with music industry trade bodies over music licensing fees, adding that the licensing bodies’ rates “are far too high to allow ad-supported radio to operate” in the UK.

This would be sad news for music fans, but the community as risen to the occasion and launched a new website called globalPandora.
The site wraps around Pandora.com allowing this way everyone around the world to once more enjoy high quality music for free on the web. There are several other music services similar to Pandora link MeeMix.com. But I really like the minimalist interface, the quality of the audio and the way music genres or artists are cataloged and served.

Now if someone just did the same for Hulu.com I’d be a happy camper.

Via I Blog All

Following a scheduled maintenance the popular photography site Flickr.com went down and stayed down for the better part of the weekend.

It all started when George Oates posted this entry to Flickr’s dev blog on Saturday.

2:30pm PST: We started on a database upgrade and a few alters to the database structure last night. Given our scale, work like this takes a long time, and makes a definite impact on site performance.

You may have noticed today that the site is having lots of hiccups and that behavior is generally pretty erratic. So, we’ve decided to take the site offline help things settle down. We’re anticipating a couple of hours is all we need at this point, so, we’re hoping to be back online around 4:30 PST.

The downtime expectations were a bit off and flickr was down all night and some hours on Sunday which I truly understand. Time estimates are usually made in a conservative way, always allocating some spare time to tackle some last minute problem. Apparently this last minute problem was serious.

But the main thing that struck me as quite hilarious was the reactions to the downtime either on twitter or blogs. People literally panicked. All those photos gone without publishing. All those groups without a constant stream of photos to their pools. Quite sad.

All this commotion got me thinking what would happen if Facebook went down for a couple of days. Or even the worse if Gmail went down.

In this day and age how can we survive without these little tools that enable us to communicate?
What would you do if Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook were down for two days? Leave a comment, I want to hear about your doomsday scenarios.