Facebook Apps – if you are like me than you have no idea how you got into even playing with these apps… I normally only use Facebook for keeping in touch with college friends. However, I see these as a new way to stagger through my work day.  Some of these apps are meant to just take your mind off of what you were currently doing and waste a little bit of time.  Others are so addictive that you just find yourself now checking your Facebook for updates with these apps and freak out because your co-worker or some friend you haven’t seen in 3 years just beat your Chain Rxn score by 32 million…and you need to sit in an imaginary bubble for just 10 minutes while you try and beat this gloriously high score…I’ve been there already.

1) Farm Town and Farmville (they are both basically the same): Pretty self explanatory, you plant seeds and trees and watch them grow. Then you harvest and sell them for money. The more you plant and harvest, the more experience you receive and then higher your level will be. You can also get animals and fences, buildings, the list goes on. You can also send plants and animals to your friends for their farms. The only down side I have yet to see is you either check your farm too late and have to delete the withered left overs or wait 3 days for your corn/wheat to grow, some plants take 4 hours and some take 3 days.

2) Chain Rxn: This is a super-massive addictive game, no lie. The object of the game is to click anywhere on the screen to start a chain reaction of balls as they bump into the other balls that have explodedfrom the initial ball. The longer the chain goes, the higher the score for each ball that bumps into another exploded ball. I have nothing bad to say about this except that it is the new crack, it’s that addictive.

3) Mafia Wars: I cannot really review this only because I have never played it, though I am going to review it now because it was the first app that made me cringe at using any other app. I used to have about 40+ new updates about my friends’ Mafia and always got invites to join the crew. I am sure that within the next few months, I will probably give up and join. I am a lemming…

4) Bejeweled Blitz: Come on, my generation and even those who may be a little bit older certainly remember the game Bejeweled. I would play that game like it was then end of the world, if I even turned my head away, the Earth would face certain horrifying death. Yeah, I know, I had issues. Either way, Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook is basically Bejeweled 2 with a 1 minute time frame, thats pretty much it. I adamantly tried to burst all of your bubbles there to save you the annoyance, because that is what happened to me.

Hopefully, this little tidbit of highly important information will either have you interested in playing with some of these Facebook apps (there are a TON more out there.)  If you do happen to get into most of the apps I mentioned…send me something for my farm…please…

Microsoft Office 2010

By now, most of us have heard bits and pieces about what Microsoft is planning to do with their next iteration of Office, 2010, including extending the ribbon interface to Outlook and any other program that were without and the collaboration enhancements allowing multiple users to not only edit a document together, but even display PowerPoint presentations in a remote web browse.

However, some interesting news came out earlier about a completely new method of access and use of (most of) the software suite – nearly full featured online versions accessible on any of the major web browsers.  This isn’t a particularly revolutionary move, which is not uncommon when it comes to Microsoft, with Google Docs being so well developed for the past few years, but there is the potential for Microsoft to make a major splash with this release… and did I mention it will be free?

Microsoft has launched an Office 2010 introduction site with videos demonstrating some of the key features, changes and improvements that will be coming with Office 2010, including a video specifically dedicated to the upcoming web based features.

With the Office online services, Microsoft is putting collaboration first.  Documents will be both accessible and sharable through their SharePoint service which will allow groups to share access to a single document, each users’ changed being clearly identified in the sidebar.  The current plan for the Office online lineup is to provide Word, PowerPoint, Excel and One Note with nearly all of the functionality that you would have access to on a normal Office install.  Of course, Microsoft is sure to make the point that you “would never want to lose the full feature set” of a purchased install, but the online versions maintain the ribbon interface and seem powerful enough.

In the video detailing the web interfaces, Microsoft provided a demo of Excel 2010’s web interface.  The dev was able to sort and filter her content as well as use the full formula functionality of the full product.  It seems to me that only the most extreme users would be able to find a major functionality of the online version of these application that was left out.

This announcement would seem to be a direct challenge to the already popular Google Docs which has been providing an almost identical service for the past few year at the same cost.  Anyone who has used Google Docs, though, knows that while it is fully capable of getting the job done, it’s not always the easiest or most efficient.  Google’s recent announcement of their Chrome Operating System (Google Chrome OS) relied heavily on their idea of creating an operating system that was able to integrate web applications as a replacement for actually installing programs in order to be light-weight and netbook friendly.

By announcing a free version of Office that is able to run on any web browser somewhat distills my excitement for Chrome OS due to the fact that Windows 7 is already very “light-weight and netbook friendly” when configured properly, and the ability to run Office without needing to

a) install software to fill the generally small hard driveor tax the underpowered processor

or

b) forcing users to spend a few hundred dollars on basic productivity software (that may cost more than the netbook itself)

As it stands, we still don’t know the full story and there isn’t any version publicly available for the general public to use, so there will still be plenty more to come about what we can expect from Microsoft’s online adventures.  Personally, I can’t wait to see what Microsoft comes up with and how much impact it will actually make.  I’m always in support of heading toward “the cloud!”

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.”

It would seem that Google’s intentions are pretty clearly spelled out.  They want to put out an OS that users can boot into quickly and reach out to the internet/web/cloud near instantly to get done whatever work they need.  Personally, I am excited at the prospect of a new challenger in the old OS ring, especially a new one that isn’t set firmly into habits based around a pre-webcentric world and feel that coming from Google, it may actually have a chance.

Hopefully we’ll have an invite, if we do – expect an in depth feature run down to follow shortly.

ATTENTION WEB SURFER: WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!?!

Is basically the message I was greeted with after restoring a Firefox session following a version update for a few of my saved tabs on sites I visit regularly.  It seems that with its most recent version, Firefox has teamed up with Google in an effort to protect presumably unscrupulous users from accidentally stumbling upon sites that they seem to think will maliciously install software on your system (or, at least, try to).  Seeing a few of my tabs load with a “NO” icon instead of what I would normally expect was quite a shock as these sites it had flagged are not any that I’ve ever considered particularly malicious.  (I’ve been accessing them with no issues for some time now, though my continued use of Adblock Plus and No Script may be the reason for my lack of suspicious activity).

My initial thought was that a random addon would be the cause of this alert, but upon clicking the “Why was this site blocked?” button, I was surprised to see the real answer

It seems that Firefox has now teamed up with, or at least incorporated, Google’s web-safety team which maintains an up-to-date database of potentially harmful websites.  The brief bit of information provided on this screen alone spells out the basics of their operation.  The first line of information that is interesting indicates that as Google has been crawling the site, it has detected 4 pages (out of 202) that tried to install (known?) malicious software on the users machine without, in any way, asking permission.   It then continues to break down which software the site tried to install, where it was hosted and if the site had been propagating malware to other sites.

Since I have never encountered any issues with this site, and it was a relatively small percentage of the pages on the site which attempted to infect users, it would seem that a certain advertisement in a cycling group is the offender.  Again, my blocking of scripts and ads may be why I’ve never encountered any issues, but that is irrelevant to the larger picture at hand.  If, when presented with the initial warning page, you chose the option to “Ignore this warning” which they conveniently make hard to read and demeaningly worded, you are allowed to access the page… but not without one last reminder that you MIGHT be messing up, and if you get infected – it’s not their fault.

I can appreciate the intent behind what Firefox and Google are doing here, in fact, I find the information Google can collect about websites while crawling them to be fascinating!  However.. I’m not very fond of the fact that they implemented and activated this feature by default with no input from or notification to the user.  Also, when looking at the behavior at hand, one can’t help but begin to question what kind of activity may be going on behind the scenes between Firefox and Google.  It would seem that Firefox would have to scan the URL of each site we access and compare it against Google’s database of known dangerous sites to determine that the site has potential to be an “Attack Site.”  I’m sure we would all like to think that this is done anonymously, and that Google isn’t tracking our browsing habits to enhance their inline advertising or for some other purpose, but it is a hard pill to swallow that this is, in fact, the case.

If you consider yourself to be a relatively safe web surfer who has no fear of internet dangers (or if you are paranoid about data mining) they do allow it to be easily disabled.  From the Tools menu, select “Options” and on the “Security” tab, uncheck the box labeled “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected attack site.”

In the future, let’s hope Firefox will present changes like this is a more noticeable fashion, presenting a popup alert the fist time Firefox is loaded after the setting is enabled; or, better yet, allowing us to chose for ourselves whether we feel the need to have our hands held as we traverse the internet.