Profy

As everyone is obviously aware of by now, last week the world finally witnessed the public debut of the latest operating system from Microsoft, the glorious Windows 7. The newest OS has received tons of positive reviews and everyone seems to love it and people keep comparing it to Vista that is now considered to be one of the hugest failures in the world.

What's more, even Microsoft now seems to be ashamed of Vista - ashamed enough to lose some part of its revenue by providing free upgrades to Windows 7 to many of those who have recently purchased a laptop with an OEM version of Vista, kind of to compensate for the fact that you have to buy the worst operating system that ever existed only because you need to buy a new laptop for some reason...

Today I've seen a rare piece of news in my feed reader: about one of the most popular online task management applications Remember The Milk graduating from beta 4 years after the team began its development. The example they quote is obvious: now that Gmail is finally out of beta (with so many people trusting Gmail for their personal and business lives), other web services are entitled to do the same - especially if they are mature enough...

We keep talking about how important it is for corporations to build social media presence everywhere they can and what advantages they should expect virtually immediately. But the problem is that sometimes the field of social media is simply beyond the control of people in the corporations - and the results can be unpredictable instead of positive.

Unfortunately sometimes even the most advanced and knowledgeable corporations make social media mistakes and demonstrate how miserable an action online can be if done wrong. The recent example is Nokia deciding to close its Russian-language community in LiveJournal...

What do you pay attention to when you visit a profile of some new Twitter follower? I am quite sure you do notice the Twitter background and this is what sends you a certain message in addition to that in the bio and the latest updates.

I myself have a few observations regarding what a background may mean on Twitter. For example, a default background or one of the standard themes is often an indication of a spammer or yet another faceless account that will try to sell me something...

Now it is not surprising that the entire blogosphere is abuzz over Microsoft's Bing deal with Twitter and Facebook about adding real-time search in public Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates. Of course real-time search is supposed to be a hit these days and everyone somehow tends to think this is exactly what is supposed to revolutionize the web - and it sure will revolutionize the web at least for those hard-core geeks that can't live a minute without knowing what's going on in the world (especially the tech world) at this very moment...

Today is the day marking the beginning of international expansion of Amazon Kindle e-book reader. Amazon sends products to various countries around the world but for some countries the list of available products is only limited to books and CDs or DVDs. Starting today Kindle is entered on the list of available gadgets for 100 countries globally, including Russia where I live and can witness the reaction myself.

This decision is obviously good at least because I personally don't like any limitations and opening yet another window to the huge Russian market is hopefully a wise decision for Amazon...

Earlier today I've read a very interesting post on a Russian-language geeky blog community that has drawn my attention to the notion of SuperNodes in Skype - something I never cared to investigate in Skype. And the most important question that I now have is how users are supposed to pay for their free applications and if they are willing to (of course there's no denying to the fact that we do pay in some manner because there's no such thing as free lunch, of course)...

Exactly how many notifications arrive daily to that special folder in your inbox intended for bacn messages? Facebook birthday reminders and invitations, LinkedIn groups news, new followers from Twitter, some subscriptions from Google alerts - the list can probably continue for too many paragraphs for anyone to continue reading this post at all. The number of the messages depends on how intensive your use of social media is and how many services you are actually involved with but I don't think there are many lucky web users who avoid bacn completely somehow...

Of course everyone seems to realize already that it is impossible to work on a Windows-based computer without having some antivirus and internet security solution installed and running - simply because the Microsoft's operating systems do not happen to be actually safe and the number of vulnerabilities is enough for no one to be able to work and feel security.

The constant patches that we get from Microsoft in Windows Update are told to improve the situation with time but of course they are no ultimate solution to the overall problem and even the software giant itself realizes this...