Microsoft glitch offers up Vista SP1 early

I noticed something interesting the other day - Microsoft released the new Vista service pack early to everybody when they only intended to release it to a small group for testing.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft released the service pack to manufacturing (RTM) back on 4th Feb, yet this seemed to happen on 21st Feb. This means that even post RTM, Microsoft is working on (and making changes to?) SP1 - I didn’t think changes were made to RTM - looks like I was wrong.

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Bubblegeneration wrote a post criticizing techcrunch which may or may not be true - I’ll leave that for others to figure out for themselves. At the end of the day we will all know when techcrunch is going downhill - we’ll all stop visiting

Anyhow, the interesting comment bubblegeneration made was that he thought Etsy could be the next Google. I just dont understand why he thinks this- yes it’s a great site - it allows individuals to buy and sell items they have made. So I see yes it possibly could be the next ebay (though I think they might be more likely to buy etsy). But the next Google? Why?

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I love the idea behind PageOnce - to use their phrase: the first Personal Internet Assistant web site.

In more words, the idea is to bring together your various online data points in one place - so far it covers social networks, email, banking, utilities, mobile phones, entertainment and even how many airmiles you have collected. So on one dashboard you can get an update of whats happening in all these places.

It is nicely laid out according to type of information but I’m not using it.

There are 2 major problems as I see it:

1. I’m already using Netvibes as my portal - it shows me the social networks and email and the news sites I follow - ie the information I need continuous updates on. PageOnce doesn’t allow me to add RSS feeds or track my stocks so it cant replace Netvibes.

2. I access PageOnce through a single username and password. With all that personal information on me stored in one dashboard, I just want more comfort. I haven’t added most of the accounts possible for this reason. It just feels like too much of a security risk despite the Hackersafe, Verisign and TRUSTe logos at the bottom of the page and the https protocol. Besides, I know from when Egg launched their central money manager here in the UK, that banks refused to protect customers who used such systems.

All this has meant I have logged in sporadically which is a shame. I still love the idea. Hopefully these two issues will be overcome.

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Some of you will have noticed that I rolled out Intense Debate as the commenting system on this blog. It replaced Disqus, another centralised commenting system, - mainly because it gave me the option to import and export comments with ease and seemed to give me more control over spam. It just felt more rounded. Disqus on the other hand definitely increased discussion on blogs - I browsed more blogs as a result of being on Disqus than I have in all the time I have been on Intense Debate. It is much too difficult to interact with others on Intense Debate.

Unfortunately we have hit a few snags. Straight after I installed Intense Debate, there was a noticable slowdown on my site when compared to Disqus. Thankfully they fixed it soon enough though Ive noticed it happening again. A sign of their gaining popularity I’m sure. But a much more serious issue is that Hrafn at Think Artificial emailed me saying he got a “Error! Connection has timed out” when trying to comment. I’ve messaged Intense Debate to get some feedback on it but I’m wondering whether I just go back to using my own blog’s commenting system.

It is the wordpress.com vs wordpress.org question - is it better to host your own or let someone else provide the service.

[update] Rather illustrating my point, Intense Debate is down at the time of posting this post. sighs.

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