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I have been testing the various betas of Firefox 3 and the release candidates as well but today at 10 AM Pacific time the Mozilla folks are going to try and open up the floodgates and release Firefox 3 with a strategy to try to make Firefox 3 the biggest 24 hour download of all time. I am not sure if I phrased that right but I think last I heard they were hoping that 60 million downloads would happen in the first 24 hours of release.

I remember back in 1999 or so when ICQ was so popular and they had 100 million downloads in a couple of years and that seemed amazing. 60 million downloads in a day would be fantastic and I would love to see how they count and scale the downloads in the background, perhpas someone smarter and more in the nknow then me could tell us.

So why would you want Firefox 3? Well the community is very active so there are a ton of extensions that make this more than just a browser and more like an active application that can collect and process content. Also with the latest release cnadidate I found it much quicker than the old version and many people say that it is much more stable as well.

Can’t wait until 10 o’clock to upgrade my machines. I expect the best link to watch for the upgrade release is the main Firefox page.

I am a packrat, I keep everythign or at least try to keep everything and that of course includes any computer stuff. I have a folder on my home computer called Bills Business and I dump anything to do with online marketing in there, it is sitting at 4.5 gigs Anyway at work I currently have 3371 read messaages in my inbox (not very GTD) and a ton more in my Outlook PST files. That backgrounder will kind of tell you why I care about indexing.

I have tried lots of apps to try to do quick searching of my Outlook because the built in search for Outlook is horribly slow. I have tried the built in Microsoft Search, Google Desktop Search and a couple of others but I always get performance issues. There never seems to ber a way to index stuff on my PC without it slowing down everything on my computer.

Xobni seems to have changed that. Xobni is a free plugin for Outlook that Microsoft is apparently trying to buy that will index all of your mail as well as data mining your people and conversations so that you can know more about your conversations and easily get a chance to have contact info related to your Outlook contacts / email.

Xobni is just in public beta right now but it seems to be really stable and is very unobtrusive, Xobni just sits as a compressed sidebar in the right side of your Outlook available by one mouse click. Xobni also has indexed all of my email really quickly and has not slowed down my computer at all and with a simple search window at the top of Xobni I am able to search quickly and instantly get results.

Well I thought that Twitter was back yesterday and I guess I am getting updates from a few more people then I was before. Apparnetly there is an issue where Twitter is trying to resync two databases as some people are saying that his may take a week. I guess we will find out live when it is back up for real.

During this long outage Micheal Arrington at Tech Crunch has posted how important Twitter has become to him over the last couple of months.

Dave Winer is always spinning something interesting and he is suggesting today that everyone link Friend feed to Twitter and having tweets pushed out in RSS feeds instead of just going straight to the Twitter servers.

Twitter has been growing rapidly over the last few months but as we have seen in tech for a long time there is always some kind of kludge or hack that can fix problems in technology. I am not sure how popular Dave Winers fix will become but the whole idea of Microblogging is very disruptive and very exciting.

Maybe Twitter is just an evolution from IRC and ICQ and more popular messenger products over the last few years but the concept is here to stay.

I have been having trouble with Twitter all weekend. There was a server upgrade that they were doing at Twitter on friday night and since then I have only been getting updates from about three of the people that i am following.

I have never been more productive

Anyway, checking the support - help at Twitter it seems that lots of people are having exactly this problem and they are working to get it fixed. I am looking forward to it.

Hey if you want to follow me on Twitter I am at http://www.twitter.com/billnad

If you have not jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and are wondering why you would bother then I can explain a bit. It took me a year to figure out what Twitter really is supposed to be for. Basically you signup and get you twitter page. Now you can follow others and they can follow you. Find people with the same interests and then you can see the updates that they send to you and you can reply directly to them. Update what you are doing, ask questions, offer commentary. Twitter it like a big party where you are one of a bunch of people and no one owns any one conversation.

To make things easier using Twitter you can you a Firefox plugin called Twitterfox or just the Thwirl Windows desktop app for Twitter

Well Yahoo decided that once wasn’t enough and this morning they sent another press release out saying that they still don’t want to join Microsoft.

I would like to see how Microsoft could embrace and extend all of these cool Yahoo products so I am hoping that this deal gets done and done soon.

Apparently the quarterly results for Yahoo will come out on April 17th, Yahoo will get the deal done before then if the results are going to be bad and will stall some more if the results are great, rumor is that the results are bad.

Well if you read this blog for any length of time, you probably recognize that I use Wordpress as the publishing platform. Wordpress is open source and very constantly developed and Matt, the guy that created and runs this platform is young enough not to be scared of big change.

Well today there is another big change with the change of Wordpress to version 2.5 from 2.3. Usually we do not look at a point change in software as much more than a minor feature release and bug patches but in this case there is a lot more.

The interface for Wordpress has been completely rewritten by some of the best minds in Web Interface design. The interface has completely changed and the ease of use has been simplified as well. There are new features like a picture gallery within posts and easier posting interface but the change is a bit daunting for a casual user.

I am not too sure about plugin support yet as I have not moved any of my major blogs to the new Wordpress 2.5 but I will be moving this blog over to Wordpress 2.5 this morning. Wish me luck.

What are your impressions of these big changes? Do you like it? Do you have problems? I am interested in seeing before I have broken plugins or any other downsides. As we as tech guys always know, it is usually better to wait a couple of days or week before implementing a major release of software instead of regressing back to an earlier version.

I ran into problems a few months back with some blogs that I had running Movable Type and never recovered, I moved to Wordpress instead.

Apparently on March 22nd from 8 AM until noon eastern time Blackberry service across North  America will be going down.

Database upgrades are being blamed and of course on the Saturday of a long weekend is either the best time or the worst time for this but sometimes you have to have these outages to improve services.

The outage has been planned by RIM but of course it is not very easy to alert all users worldwide when this is going to happen. Hope my heads up puts you at a little more piece of mind.

I have struggled with Twitter for about a year now. I am not sure what it is for and I have no idea where it is going. Essentially Twitter is  just a box on a web page that will send out a max 140 character message out to the cosmos. If people are wollowing you then they will see that “Tweet” but otherwise it is just another random message along the Twitter timeline. Of course the simplicity of the Twitter service is something that gets geeks  crazy. There are all sorts of ways to expand Tweeting with Twitter.

I just ran across an article on Read/Write Web that shows their choice for the top 10 Twitter apps. A list like this is good as it will allow you to see the expandability. You can send others messages so why not send messages directly to a todo list? Send tweets to your calendar? What about syncing others links sent through Twitter to your Delicious?

Anyway I am on there too. If you want to follow me on Twitter I am at http://www.twitter.com/billnad

Wow I just saw on the Firefox download page that they have passed 500 million downloads today. That is a helluva lot of installs. The number is a bit warped becuase some people like me have downloaded it 10 times or so to different computers but still according to my stats around my different websites Firefox is being used by about 20% of average visitors (this is on non techy sites).

I have mentioned before how much and why I love Firefox but the extensions are great, the adaptability is great and the security to me is not really an issue but everyone raves about it anyway.

I do use Internet Explorer still to access out Sharepoint portal but other then that Internet Explorer on my machines tends to be only for the Microsoft Updates to XP

Exciting times, Friday morning on the way to work I heard the message on the radio that in fact Microsoft was going to buy Yahoo, this story was out last year but ended up as nothing until Friday, to me the rumors had all even disappeared.

Then  the rest of the stories all trickle out.

As we all know google owns the internet right now with something like 65% of the search volume and Yahoo and Microsoft through their properties own much of the rest with Facebook, My Space and the rest of the social media getting the rest. You can really break all of this down in two areas, advertising depth and online pageviews and influence.

Advertising Depth

Microsoft is a very powerful company when it comes to advertising and marketing but they have not been able to won the internet, very strange to me but I am sure there are people that have a  really good idea why being an only somewhat late entrant has costed them so much on the internet, I can not imagine how. Google and the Google AdWords and now Doubleclick networks are easily the number one company on the internet as far as control over advertising and marketing goes and Microsoft in buying Yahoo gets a network to ad to the MSN AdWords type network in Yahoo’s YPN network. This is a real chance for Microsoft to finally get in the game.

Online Pageviews and  Influence

Search is not everything but Google owns that market as I said. As far as content goes you could say that Microsoft and Yahoo own more content then Google but that could change very rapidly. Google at this point is giving us all the services inline that we need be it Google Reader for RSS Google News for getting individualized news, GMail for email and many more things. The big content that Google has of course is YouTube. What we will likely see in the nearer future though is a real push for an office suite that is bigger than Google docs and spreadsheet and of course Google has the datacenter to house all of the data that they need.

So now that  there is probably going to be a merger the fun part left is to watch what each of the companies does with the influence that they have and watching the spin that Google and Microsoft, and even Yahoo throws out there.

In the end the internet is not much different then any other medium that we have had be it books, newspapers, radio or TV in that there will eventually be some kind of consolidation and hopefully enough competition so that hte marketplace does not stagnate as we probably had with Microsoft and the OS and Office suites. We need this competition for innovation but at the same time too much fragmentation on the internet stops the industry from having a big gun or two to have the money to make big change for us. Both Microsoft and Google do have big money.