Twitter WTF of the day

Here is my WTF moment of the day.  I directed my browser (Google Chrome, if you must know) to open Twitter.com.  What did I see?  Not a Twitter page.  Not even a famour Twitter fail whale.  I saw an empty page with this error message.

Can someone throw an idea or two as to what that might mean?  I’m just curious, you know…

More Picasa Web Albums space for Google+ users

Google Operating System blog tells:

Picasa Web Albums offers more free storage if you are a Google+ user. According to Picasa Web’s help center, “photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage”. If you upload photos from Google+, they’re automatically resized to 2048 pixels on their longest edge, so they don’t use the 1 GB of free storage that’s available in Picasa Web Albums.

For those of you not on Google+ yet, only pictures up to 800×800 pixels won’t count up on your storage.  You really should let me know your email address and I’ll send you an invite.

Google+ – yet another social network

The rumors of a new social network from Google were confirmed yesterday with the announcement of Google+.  There are quite a few interesting ideas there.

Firstly, I’d been waiting for a proper social network from Google for ages.  Google Wave was more of a collaboration tool, which failed.  Google Buzz, even though useful, is not enough.  I am using Google for plenty of other things – search, email, news reading, instant messaging, collaboration and sharing of documents, etc – it only makes more sense to wrap it all around with a social network.

Secondly, I’m glad to see that Google is trying to solve the major problem that I have with each and every other social network in use today – sharing with specific groups of people.  I was born in one country, but currently live in another.  I speak two languages, which are not shared by most of my connections.  I have a number of different interests.  I’ve worked with many people in a few companies across several industries.  I desperately need a way to share with only specific groups of people.  I know that some social networks tried to provide the functionality – Facebook and Flickr, for example – but it’s not trivial.  I need more automation and control for that process.   Google+ has something called Circles, which looks and sounds like what I need.

Thirdly, video conferencing.  It’s been long overdue.  And the only real option there is now is Skype, which I’d rather stop using altogether.

Fourthly, group chats. Especially on the mobile.  There are a few alternatives that were developed in the last couple of years, but it’s hard to migrate all your contacts to yet another protocol.  Enough of my contacts are using Google, so this sounds promising.

Too bad, Google+ is still not available to everyone – it’s invitation only.  Hopefully, Google won’t repeat the mistake of the Google Wave, when they delayed the masses for so long that most people left before their friends joined.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, have a look this TechCrunch article and this GigaOm post.

Every 60 seconds on the Web

We’ve all seen a gadzillion of statistics on how many videos are uploaded to YouTube every day or how many Google searches are performed every month.  While those are all interesting on their own, combined into a single overview they provide a really good perspective on how active and diverse the Web is.

Via ma.tt.