OMG LET’S ALL BOW TO THE ALMIGHTY GOOGLE+!

Not so fast, excited Google+ user. This is what using the service feels like for most people:

It’s only great if you’re a geek who knows a ton of other geeks – all of whom hate Facebook. Otherwise, it’s a freakin’ ghost town where you talk to yourself in public. And with Facebook constantly introducing features emulating those of G+, the list of reasons to use G+ instead of Facebook gets thinner every day.

“Oh but you’re supposed to use, like, both of them.” Get out of here . . .

via news.ycombinator

In two weeks from today Facebook will officially launch a major rework of the user profile page. They’re calling it Facebook Timeline, and it’s one of the best updates they’ve rolled out in a quite a while.

As its name implies, the update adds a timeline feature that organizes your Facebook life in reverse chronological order based on the content you’ve shared. A most welcome addition since the social network doesn’t offer a search function for that stuff. Another other cool feature added by Timeline is the fact that you can now see who has unfriended you over time. Lots of people have been waiting for something like that and it’s finally here.

Anyway, Timeline is currently in a limited beta and only developers have access to it, but becoming a Facebook developer takes only 2 minutes and no special skills! The video below explains how to create a Facebook app and activate your Timeline right now.  If you’re not sure whether you should get it or not, do it, because it’s pretty awesome!

In case you’re not living in the US and don’t know what OnStar is, it’s a GM (General Motors) subsidiary that provides subscription-based services like automatic crash response, navigation, roadside assistance and hands-free calling. The service collects data ranging from contact & billing information to tire pressure and seat belt status which it uses to offer the services mentioned earlier.

Now everyone knows that using the service means they’re going to be tracked by OnStar (otherwise the service cannot work), but some are suspicious the company is “spying” on them.

Imagine that, OnStar is making you use a navigation/emergency service that knows where your vehicle is! THERE’S NO PRIVACY LEFT IN THIS WORLD!

Why you think the net was born? Porn, porn, porn!

Seriously though, despite the fact that web filtering companies and religious conservatives have preached for the longest time that the internet is brimful of porn, the real number of porn sites in existence is actually quite underwhelming. According to neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, who collected porn statistics as research for his book A Billion Wicked Thoughts,  “In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That’s about 4% of sites.“ 

The reason why the myth of an internet full of porn became so widespread is probably due to the fact that in its early days the majority of people online were dudes, who, when suddenly faced with an unlimited supply of porn, did what every guy would have done – they searched for it, all day, all night. And thanks to their united efforts, 5 out of the top 10 web searches ended up being sex related. But things have changed since, and “From July 2009 to July 2010, [only] about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.”

As for how many petabytes of porn are there on the internet compared to other kinds of content… well, that’s probably an entirely different story.

According to figures published by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the microblogging platform has reached 200 million registered users, but only 100 million of them are considered active (they log in at least once a month).

Now out of the 100 million active users, only 60 million are logging onto the service to actually saying something, the rest being content with lurking. No mention was made about how many of the “active” actives are spambots trying to give you free iPads and cheap Viagra, but that’s probably for the best because disclosing that information would make their evolution seem a lot less spectacular.

Other figures reveal that over 50 million people log in each day, and that the daily average number of tweets is somewhere around 230 million.

Overall, the stats aren’t too shabby, although for some reason I was expecting them to be a lot higher.

After being left with a slightly sour taste following Microsoft’s reveal of the new ribbon system in Windows 8, the tech giant has restored my faith in their next OS by proving just how fast it is when it comes to booting up.

In the demonstration video posted on their page the test system boots up in under 10 seconds! Granted, it’s probably using an SSD for storage and UEFI instead of BIOS, but looking at the graph above the boot times seem to be relatively consistent on all test systems, which means boot performance should be similar regardless of the hardware used – so everyone will boot faster.

I love the progress they’ve made with Windows 7, and it looks like Windows 8 will continue that trend. Its release day can’t come soon enough!