Hey, folks. I know my writing here has been a bit sporadic lately, but it’s mostly because I’ve been writing posts like these for Mashable. It’s so long that one might convert it to PDF and proclaim it an e-book *cough* Seth Godin *cough*, but I’ve refrained myself from it - this time.

Together with the secret to life, universe and everything, I’ve discovered that Twitter outages have been starting points for the most interesting discussions in the last couple of months. Perhaps we should pray for more?

I’m checking out Time’s list of 50 best websites of 2008 and I don’t get it. Sure, these are all nice sites, but I fail to find any criteria upon which this list is based.

A quick skim through the list reveals very different types of sites and services. Hulu is there, which means that the list isn’t global, since Hulu doesn’t work outside of the US. TinyURL isn’t really a destination site which you’re going to visit often; it’s a service you’re going to use through a bookmarklet. I’m glad that PixelGirl Presents, a long-time favorite of mine, got a mention, but that site hasn’t changed in years; why is 2008 the year when PixelGirl Presents deserves to be in the top 50?

In short, the list is a totally random assortment of interesting websites. Which is not that bad in itself, but I think that Time should try harder to establish some criteria for lists such as this, if it wants to stay more relevant than the next “I’m gonna make a big list, hit Digg, and go away rich” blog.

If the standard way of watching Google Maps is boring you to death, a game in which you can drive several different vehicles all around the map might be a welcome refreshment.

The game, developed by Geoquake, is based on Google Maps API for Flash, which enables it to run at smooth 40 FPS (as always, it didn’t run smooth for me at all, but that’s probably just my bad luck).

Don’t expect hours of gameplay with this one, though: it’s just a simple display of what can be done with an API. You can choose between 4 vehicles and control them with the mouse or the arrow keys, but the fact that you don’t have to stick to the road and can drive over buildings somewhat kills the joy.

Usually, mashups and innovative, alternative GUIs for popular websites are slow and mostly unusable, but Tag Galaxy breaks that habit with being really functional, as well as being really, really cool.

Type in a tag - any word, really - into Tag Galaxy, and you’ll get a small solar system of related tags, with more relevant tags being the inner planets, their orbit decreasing with relevance. It’s a cute little 3D tag world, but what makes it so cool is how responsive and fast it is; for example, you can click and drag for rotation, or use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Click a tag, then click another tag, and you’ll get results for both tags combined.

Half of the fun is in discovering what this tool can do, so I’ll leave the rest of the exploration to you. Be warned, though: it’s addictive.

I did not expect Microsoft to withdraw the offer, but that’s what they did. I’m relieved that the first season of this soap opera is at an end, as I was getting bored out of my mind with all the speculations regarding the issue. But, I’m afraid that the story simply cannot end now.

Microsoft gave up, but they have another business (actually, a multitude of them) to run. They will probably try to buy themselves a different big entrance into the online ad business, although their options aren’t that great.

It will be interesting, however, to see what Yahoo does next. Having been drawn into this mess against their will, they were forced to do a lot of decisions they normally wouldn’t have done. They also explored almost all viable merger/acquisition/partnership options they have. Will they just go back to business as usual, or will they act on any of it? For example, what happens with the Google ad deal, which was - according to both companies - going so well in its testing phase? Will they just pretend it never happened?

Oh no, this cannot end now. Microsoft has ruffled too many feathers with this one, and now both companies need to do something about it, unless they want to sit at the same table in two years, negotiating the same deal under even worse circumstances for both of them. Interesting times are ahead.

The answer: this. Marc Andreessen is not in it for the money; he’s not trying to be a journalist, and he certainly doesn’t care about posting frequency too much. But, he knows a lot about certain topics (in this case, he gives a very thorough MSFT-YHOO analysis, a must-read if you’re interested in the subject) and he writes about them with ease and authority that very few journalists can hope to achieve.

What’s the secret? It’s simple: a good blog is a guy/girl writing about a topic he/she knows a lot about. The value of such a blog is in the fact that no general-purpose (or even specialized) journalist can come close to the level of knowledge, depth and passion a blogger can reach. Of course, not all bloggers are that good; in fact, most aren’t. But if you want an example of a really, really good blog, in the purest sense of the word, you’ve got one right here.

In a sense, a good blog relates to a bigger media publication in a similar way as a small, specialized IT magazine relates to a daily - it doesn’t cover everything, but it focuses on a specific audience and goes much more in-depth. Good blogs usually deal with their topics with fanatical attention to detail, and that’s what makes them interesting. Pick a topic - any topic, however narrow - and there’s a blogger out there covering all aspects of it.

There’s also the question of what category a blog should fall into - is it a commercial site which earns money from ad revenue, just like any magazine, or must it stay a non-profit affair, with the blogger offering his/her content freely and forgetting about making any money off it? I say: if the blog is great, who cares? I remember a recent article by Louis Gray who says that most bloggers don’t deserve any ad revenue. I agree with some of his points, but some of his economic logic is flawed. If I were an advertiser with a $10.000 budget, I’d rather have my ad shown on 100 small blogs than once on NYTimes. In this sense, bloggers - good ones - deserve not only respect for going deeper than anyone else, but they also deserve some ad revenue.

What Louis aims at, though, although he’s not quite clear about it, are the blogs written by people who don’t have anything to say. I agree: there’s a lot of those, and they all suck. But keep an eye on the ones that are good; they’re definitely worth your time, if you’re a reader, and money, if you’re an advertiser.

Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop’s brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It’s an extremely valuable option if you’re working for the web, where you usually need a photo in a certain size (on this site, I usually want photos that are 490 pixel wide).

A friend just told me that one of the best photo editors out there, Picnik, has added a lot of new features. I went to take a look, and lo and behold, Picnik now has the aforementioned option! Now, it definitely gets my recommendation as an online photo editor; if you haven’t, try it out.

Here’s a new, painfully simple way to create mixtapes - well, not real mixtapes, but lists of MP3s which can be played directly in a web browser. Which is pretty much the next best thing. The service is called Muxtape and it has literally no options, which is sometimes a good thing.

Here’s an example of a Muxtape. I don’t have one near, but I bet it’s optimized for the iPhone.

And for all you kids who never knew cassettes and don’t know what the big deal with mixtapes is, Wikipedia offers a very thorough explanation.

There’s a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends’ activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual item. For some reason, several prominent bloggers decided that FriendFeed is the next Twitter; while I agree that connecting and organizing all of your web activity in one place might be the next big thing, I don’t see FriendFeed being exceptionally good at it.

You can see the latest batch of (some unnecessarily harsh) blogger comments in the discussion over at Techmeme.

I’ve tried out FriendFeed briefly before, and let’s just say I wasn’t overwhelmed with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as examples.

All of these services do more or less the same thing. Louis Gray seems to think that the big difference between FriendFeed and everything else is the fact that you can comment on items or “love” them, but I don’t see what, exactly, are the benefits of these options. I can barely find time to comment on blog posts; why the hell would I comment on bits and pieces of my (or someone else’s) online activity? The fact that the option is there doesn’t exactly hurt, but at best I consider it a very minor advantage.

To be honest, I’m a little bit biased about the entire concept of lifestreaming. I have on my hard drive the outline of a project that would - in my opinion - do much more with this idea, but I haven’t had the time or the manpower to start it. In brief, I think that all the apps I’ve mentioned above, as well as others like them, don’t really help you organize your online life well enough; they’re just spewing it all out in a long, hard-to-follow string of events which are only interesting as a “what’s this guy up to right now” kind of thing, but quite pointless in the long run. Thus, no, I don’t think that FriendFeed is in any way revolutionary: it’s a nice application and it’s popular because it’s a little bit better than most of its competition, but I don’t see any disruptive capacity in it just yet.

Yeah, many web startups get a lot of attention with initial coverage, and then fall into oblivion after a couple months. But, it ain’t over till it’s over, right?

Still, the folks over at TechCrunch have the habit of taking some random company they don’t particularly like and pronounce it dead, even when there’s no other indication (except an Alexa graph, and we all know how reliable those are) that the company is actually doing bad. Case in point: Pownce.

I’ve invented a new word for this practice: deadpoolbaiting! So, which company should we deadpoolbait next? I’m open to suggestions. Please form an orderly line with your declining Alexa graphs.

Sometime in 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, which was a collection of links to various stuff on the web that he somehow found interesting. Now, he gives to Wired 10 tips he thinks all bloggers should know.

Here’s the first one.

“A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)”

Erm, this is 2008. and we’re not doing it like that anymore, Jorn. Not that there’s anything wrong with a linkblog, but blogs are something else. Sometimes, when you coin a term, it takes a meaning of its own over the years.

Needless to say, all his other points are completely irrelevant to bloggers, but are quite cool if you have a linkblog.

I guess I’ve been out of the loop lately, or I’m simply getting old, but I had no idea that the Facebook situation has gotten so bad.

What you see on the left side of this post is taken from my girlfriend’s actual profile. Now, it may not look as ugly as your standard MySpace profile, but content-wise it’s probably much worse. I mean, hot damn, there must be a hundred applications in there (this is just a fraction of it, you should see the full profile)!

Being my old stubborn self I’ve refused most of those zombie/vampire/sandwich/etc useless apps and thus my profile still looks quite clean. But, your average Facebook user will take anything thrown at him/her. Thus, my girlfriend can use her Facebook profile to learn how sexy she is, how sexy Santa Claus is; she can have her name analyzed, she can send and receive gifts, food and other shenanigans, she has a graveyard, she can hug, poke, kick, bump, kiss, greet, twist and snowball fight her friends…and absolutely none of this is in any way useful.

Luckily for us, in Facebook you don’t see most of this unless you yourself are subscribed to it. But still, my hopes that somehow Facebook will be a better, more serious social network than MySpace have vanished the second I saw that profile. You may laugh at MySpace’s ugliness, Facebookers, but your own social network ain’t much better. In fact, my girlfriend has mostly switched to MySpace because “it makes more sense.” Go figure.

The question remains: is there such a thing as a useful social network? I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. If you guys and girls reading this, please don’t let your upcoming API turn LinkedIn into something like this, ok?

All this said, has someone tried subscribing to all possible applications on Facebook just to see what’ll happen? If anyone has such aspirations (and the required patience), I’d like to know.