First off, I’d like to apologise for the two-week hiatus of no posts on my blog — I’ve got some fresh content coming that I hope you will enjoy in the coming weeks. 

I know this is now considered “old news”, but I’d like to talk about Cuil (pronounced “Cool”) because of their claims of being “better than Google”. So I tried entering the ultimate query into Cuil: My name. The result? My LinkedIn profile came first, followed by some other social networks with my name — but there was no link to my own website. Google, on the other hand, lists my website first; then my articles on Appletell, and the social networks follow.

The second test was an easy one for Cuil, I typed the word “London” and the results looked much more promising. I was given an Ajaxy drop-down menu on the right, which gave me more information about the city. But, I was still happier with Google’s results. I got a map, and all the relevant results I wanted — such as the government site and Wikipedia.

To be fair, Cuil is new and probably hasn’t had anywhere near as much time as Google has to index all of the Internet’s pages. Many publishers will optimise their sites for Google, which again might help Google receive better results. I’m happy to see some competition coming in for Google — because, one day, something will be better than Google.

There’s a recent phenomenon of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services appearing across Europe, the USA and some other parts of the world. IPTV is intended to be the next-generation of television — delivering content to a user whenever they want it, rather than traditional schedule-based TV that we’re used to today. It sounds great — but there is one major dilemma: Internet.

As I have posted before, the world needs faster broadband. Delivering short, low-quality video clips that are compressed is no problem at the moment — but when it comes into larger, even high-definition video, most users’ internet connections will struggle.

In the UK, the current leaders appear to be ISPs: BT’s BT Vision, and Virgin’s Virgin Media — both of which are terrible services. They claim to give entirely “on demand” services; as it turns out, this isn’t the case. Both services come free or discounted when you purchase the ISP’s internet service, which is appealing to the consumer. However, both services do not work at all.

BT and Virgin have tried to combine traditional over-the-air digital TV with IPTV, and it doesn’t work. For a start, the actual set-top boxes are ugly: No thought has been put into the design, and good design is key to a good product. It’s the same story with the interfaces — BT are using Microsoft (not a good choice), and Virgin appear to be using a proprietary OS for set-top boxes. The interfaces are hard to use, and rarely do what you want them to do. Also, the quality of the streams aren’t worth watching on a TV bigger than 26 inches, in my opinion. HD streams is what the next generation of TV needs, not to go back a step in quality.

TV over the internet can work, but none of the big ISPs seem to get it. I think IPTV should be left to companies who are dedicated to changing the way we watch TV, rather than ISPs who are in the game purely for the money.

At the time of writing this, Twitter is down. With over 1 million users registered, Twitter is the largest micro-blogging website, and one of the most popular social networks on the internet.

Created back in July 2006, Twitter was built without the idea of so many users for the service. Its infrastructure isn’t designed for this many people sending status updates every second.

For me at least, it appears Twitter goes down a lot. It may just be the fact that I’m in a different time zone to most Twitter users (GMT/UK Time); however, Twitter have created a global community, and need to keep that in mind when performing maintenance on their site.

Whether Twitter needs more processing power added to its service, or just a complete re-code of the way it processes updates - it needs to be done. Twitter: Your service is awesome, but nothing will stop you losing your powerful user base if this frequent downtime continues - please, fix it.

More and more people are becoming regular users of the internet today; sending e-mails, making VOIP calls, chatting through video, watching YouTube, sharing photos, downloading music; the list is endless. Most of these activities require a lot of bandwidth, and most current infrastructures can only deliver between 8 and 16mbps. I’m on an “8mbps” plan from BT right now - but it’s more like 6mbps. 

However, not all of the world is lagging behind in internet speeds. Japan has an average of 60mbps, Korea has an average of 45mbps and Finland has an average of 25mbps. These are average speeds, not the highest speeds. The UK has less than 4mbps average, and about the same for the USA. 

There are three main options for upgrading broadband speeds:

Fiber Optic Cable

Verizon in the USA is already offering a service they call “FiOS” - but it only delivers speeds of up to 25mbps, mainly in densely populated areas. In theory, fiber optic cable can bring speeds between 50mbps and 100mbps - but it’s going to be hard to lay an entirely new infrastructure across countries.

VDSL

VDSL stands for Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line. It uses existing copper lines, with fiber optic lines to bring speeds of up to 100mbps. It’s still pretty hard to deploy, but costs a lot less than fiber.

WiMAX

WiMAX, as you may have guessed (or not), is a wide area form of Wi-Fi. You wouldn’t need a Wi-Fi router in your home, instead you would just connect to a WiMAX transmitter which is nearby. WiMAX can deliver speeds of up to 70mbps, and can travel up to 50km (31 miles).

Sources: [BBC News], [Digg]

According to TechCrunch, Facebook is to launch an IM service of its own, possibly as soon as next week. I’ve thought up three reasons why Facebook’s IM won’t work:

Not innovative

I can’t go ahead and say it’s not innovative without seeing or using it, but given from what Facebook has done in the past, I can see this just being a plain old web-based IM, branded with the Facebook logo.

Jabber

Jabber is a great thing for users, but what about Facebook themselves? Surely advertising revenue is lost through people using other IM clients than their own.

Web-based IM hasn’t taken off

And it probably never will - not until the semantic web (a.k.a. “Web 3.0″). It’s just something about desktop applications that makes them feel more responsive, reliable and generally better than web-based ones. I like to be signed on to MSN, AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk for all the time I’m using my computer. I don’t think anyone wants to be logged on to a website all day. Saying that, you do have the option to use something like Adium through the Jabber platform.

Another point about the whole web-based thing - you won’t get rich, visual experiences on a website. Webcam conversations, audio conversations can be done through websites - but not that well - nothing like Skype.

I know a lot of people are now excited about Facebook’s IM, but I still think the big guys (MSN and AIM) are there to stay for quite some time. Just because it’s branded “Facebook” doesn’t mean it’s good.

A lot of readers from the USA may be thinking: “What’s Bebo?”. Well, apparently, Bebo wasn’t ever that successful in the USA - instead, MySpace and Facebook took the lead. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s a social network just like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and all the rest. It’s been a huge hit in the UK, and most people I know have used it before and have an account.

I personally found Bebo a much better experience than MySpace; however, when I came across Facebook, it became my new favourite social network. At the time I found Facebook, it didn’t even support UK networks. But it was Facebook’s simple and intuitive interface that kept me coming back to the site.

If I were to guess, I’d say Bebo is about even with Facebook for UK users at the moment. According to the Telegraph, they are actually the UK’s second most popular social-networking website.

I think it’s a smart move for AOL to buy Bebo for $850 million, from both Bebo and AOL’s perspective. Bebo has been starting to struggle in the past few months, because of Facebook’s domination of the market - although Bebo is still a strong presence in the social-networking world. AOL is an internet giant that is now struggling to compete against new Web 2.0 start-ups. Bebo could be the key to getting AOL back on track; and AOL could be the key to bringing new, exciting features to Bebo.

Twitter, in my opinion, is an amazing social network; a place where you can connect with people in short 140-character messages. Its community is mostly made up of bloggers and those who spend their lives on every social network known to man.

I signed up for Twitter over a year ago, but didn’t start fully using it until late 2007. When I first joined I was following practically no one, and I only had one or two followers. Once I started following hundreds (over 500) of people, I gained followers in the hundreds. I thank these people for taking the time to follow me back; because it’s these people that motivated me to start using Twitter on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.

Once I started Tweeting more, I realised what a valuable social network this was - it has the potential to be so much more, but I’m happy with Twitter the way it is. Twitter has recently become a communication tool for me - almost replacing IM in some cases. Some people hate it, some love it. Those that hate it are either baffled by the fact that you publish what you’re doing to the rest of the world, or just see Twitter as a time-waster.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter, and I’ll follow you too.