May 1, 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-SGfxUDfqA

First, watch the video above. Don’t close it after 3 seconds! Actually watch it, it’s amusing and it has explosions towards the end.

Vat19 is a website that sells really humorous or quirky products.

For example, their remote control forklift in the video above is such a “what the heck” idea that it just.. works. Hehe. For the wannabe warehouse pickpacker in all of us.

The jumbo universal remote is another example. “Never lose your remote again” they say and you can see why:

Hehe. The guys who run this site must have a zany sense of humour. These are the sorts of gifts that make great conversation pieces or they might actually come in handy!

Another item on the site is a wine glass that can fit all the wine from an entire bottle:

The internet needs more websites like these! I know I’m gonna spend the next 30 minutes looking at this stuff, easy.

Anyone who regularly logs into Facebook will have noticed that they have recently added a “chat” function.

Initially the reaction was of excitement - every second status update was about it. However, is this translating into day to day usage?

MSN Messenger is currently the undisputed king pin of online instant messaging. They won this position simply by leveraging their enormous Hotmail base. A lot of FBers were speculating that this might be the end of MSN but I don’t think so.

Firstly, the novelty of FB chat wears off pretty quickly. It has many functionality issues associated with being connected into web browsing - every time you moved around Facebook, the chat has to reload and you need to find your friend on the list to resume conversation. The only way to avoid this is to just leave a dedicated FB window available for chat.

Second, the chat window is much smaller.

Third, while you can appear offline, I’ve had some people who qualify for friend status on FB but who I wouldn’t normally chat to online talk to me. This is ok I guess but it might get annoying pretty quickly.

Fourth, I don’t necessarily want people to know I’m online.

Fifth, little things like emoticons, user names, blocking/unblocking, using a busy status, the difficulty of instantly seeing your list of friends online (two clicks v one) and the fact that you don’t see when a friend has signed in means FB chat gets the thumbs down from me.