Until recently, Facebook went unrivalled.  From humble beginnings as a networking tool for uni students, it is now to the social networking world as the iPod is to the MP3 player.

Facebook has always had some use, it is not merely for posting on a friends profile, but for organisation.  You can organise events, be reminded of a friends birthday, categorise and tag friends in photos and videos and notes.  It has also added APIs for developers to add content and use to the site.  These organisational features are what make Facebook great to use, but many would argue that Facebook has become something of a monster…
Facebook is dominant, it hasn’t needed to care for users.  In the past couple of years we have heard story after story about Facebook reducing the amount of privacy users get.  External developers have turned malicious and targeting unwary users into clicking links that SPAM walls and streams or worse…Other people can’t get off Facebook, insistent that they must water their crops on the latest farming craze, or go into battle with the bloke from a different timezone.
Functionally, Facebook is very different to how it was.  A simple PHP page with refreshes when adding/removing content have been replaced with wizzy, and often buggy, dynamic ajax scripting leaving users with odd errors and half loaded pages.

Diaspora* is an open source social networking engine.  It aims to create social networking with privacy being one of the key features.
Currently in alpha, I was lucky enough to get an invite several months ago.  It has come on leaps and bounds since I joined back at the end of December, it also uses some wizzy ajax scripting, though it appears less buggy.
One of the best features is the aspects.  You can configure as many or as little aspects as you like and add friends into one or more of them.  You can then publish a post into just a selection of aspects, or make it public.  This approach has two major benefits, one is segregation of information with regards to interest (your vegetarian friends may not want to know how you’ve just gutted a deer after your hunting trip), and the second is privacy (you may not want family members to see those drunken, late night posts in freshers week).
The problem with Diaspora* is that it is being developed really slowly.  It allows all of the staple features, private messaging, stream, photos, etc. but it lacks the organisational features of Facebook, making it difficult to organise a party or tag people in photos.  It also lacks a rich developer community who can functionality and features to the site in the form of applications.

Google Plus is the latest social network on the scene (closed beta available for use at the end of June).
It bears a striking resemblance to Diaspora*, in fact if you have the same friends posting the same thing, you’d be forgiven for forgetting which site you were using!
The features are similar too, aspects are replaced by circles which do exactly the same thing.  Photos can be tagged in Google+, private messages can be sent, etc.
I’m hopeful that Google+ will become a valid rival to Facebook.  It is clean, fast, and very wizzy (lots of drag and drop type stuff), and it works!  Yes it’s a tad sparse at the moment, but it’s backed by Google who will hopefully run with it.

Ultimately it would be nice to have a single social networking engine upon which Facebook, Google+, Diaspora*, etc. could run on.  You’d have complete integration of services and you’d just have to choose the application you’d access it through, much how email works with the various service providers and applications, it all just works (well, most of the time).

If you navigate to Account > Account Settings then click on the “learn more” link next to “Download your information”, you’ll be able to request for Facebook to zip up all your data (well, most of it) and make it available for you as a download (I had to wait ~5 hours for my 66mb of data to be made available).

I can then simply upload all of this into Google+ at my convenience!

On the one hand, I like how they’ve picked up that I’m not using a specific version of Windows.  On the other hand I can still see the whole document where none of it is relevant, sp they haven’t disabled anything…

After seeing a Facebook post by Jonathan Roscoe, I have decided that Facebook must be tagging posts as adverts…By uninstalling my default AdBlock plug-in in Chrome and instead using AdBlock Plus which allows for more customisation, I was able to put Facebook on my whitelist.

Below is a video (sans sound) which walks through the steps of installing AdBlock Plus and customising it using Google Chrome 9 on OS X, but this should work on Windows and Linux too.  Other browsers should have similar plug-ins or customisations available.

UPDATE:
This doesn’t seem to cure all problems, though it does solve some.

I have been bitten by this oddity and decided to vent by filing a bug report.  After navigating to the Facebook Help Centre I had a quick glance at the “Common searches” box.  Here is what I found:How fantastic is that?  The most searched for articles are about people leaving Facebook, or trying to keep a hold of what privacy they have left!

Facebook is one of the most, if not the most, popular social networking sites on the web.  However, with the site increasingly opening up people’s data and it’s recent instability, it is getting more and more of a bad reputation.

The latest release of Adium (v1.4) was let loose on 31st October this year and touts the following changes:

• Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later
• Added Twitter
• Added IRC
• Greatly improved group chats and group chat bookmarks
• Updated to libpurple 2.6.6 with added fixes
• Mind-bogglingly large number of enhancements and bug fixes

The addition of IRC is one that I am really excited about.  For over a year I have used the OS X app called Colloquy and I really wish I could say it was good, but it really leaves a lot to be desired.  It’s a fine IRC client, just a terrible attempt at creating an Aquafied interface.

For long time users of Adium, IRC feels natural, it feels like a group chat and it really works.  Throw in tabbed conversations and you can switch between IRC channels, MSN chats and other features.  It’s a great addition to an already brilliant app.

Adium 4.1 chat window showing IRC channels

I spent Sunday in London too, walking around shops and generally seeing the London sites. I still marvel at the London Underground, I think it is an awesome service, I love it!
I’m also marvelling at the state of modern technology. I love that I can hook my phone up to my laptop for internet use, which is what I’m doing at the moment, whinging my way down some train tracks out of London Paddington while writing this blog post. I think its brilliant!

Anyhoo, off home to Melksham now. Will be seeing family and friends for the next week or so, as well as trying to tidy my dissertation code.

Dropbox offers both free and paid for storage online, the free storage has a limit of 2GB, whereas paid sotrage has a limits of 50GB and 100GB depending on how much you want to pay.

If you use the free option, you’ll start off with so much storage, and if you invite friends to join the sservice, Dropbox will add more storage to your account!

If you want to help me out, click here

Dropbox also integrates really nicely with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, it feels just like another folder on your computer.  Drag and drop stuff into the folder (or cp/mv on the command line ) and Dropbox will sync it to it’s online servers.  If you go to another computer that you’ve installed Dropbox onto, it’ll download any new content!  They also have a nice web interface incase you don’t have permission to install the software on your computer.  Lastly, Dropbox allows you to share files with other Dropbox users, which is really quite handy!

Anyhoo, I’ve found an answer, and I think it’s rather good.  It’s called Gruml.  It basically replicates Google Reader functionality using a local app.  It’s in beta at the moment and it does feel quite “beta-ish”, but I’m hoping for a Mail type solution where I can view my old feeds and entries offline if I want to.

Gruml has some nice features that should be really good when it matures:

• Tweeting articles
• Post articles to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and more
• With the help of another blogging app (like MarsEdit) post articles to your blog
• Post notes
• Organise articles into folders

Overall, I’m quite impressed, it’s won a place on my Dock and will open when I log in, it *should* place itself next to Mail too.

Over 1000 stories for me to look at…I’m never going to have the time!