Not to long ago, I think in Dec. 09 – Facebook has been requesting that you review thier new privacy terms, as well as a few other changes. But if you didn’t agree, or waited to long, you wern’t able to move onto your page until you completed the new update. With the new rules in place you we’re giving a little more tweaking of your privacy. I wonder if these changes we’re related to last weekends problems, not able to log on to your page. It seems that Facebook is always making funny changes, mostly not very good ones. Maybe their getting ready to take the comapany to the next level, becoming a public traded company. I really don’t know their plans, I don’t think anyone does. I do wish they would stop making so many changes, it’s driving me nuts.

Not to long ago a test done by Time Warner Cable Inc. went very well, according to them. The test was charging more to their customers that went over their limit of data traffic. This test was done in one market to make sure their system can charge the right rate and monitor customer usage. I was reading that if you where a customer paying $30 a month you had 5 gigabytes of transfer data. And if you went over that limit you would be charge $1 for every gigabyte over the 5. If you ask me the 5 gigabyte limit is way to low. I would burn through that amount in the first week. I would consider switching to a new ISP if this comes to my area. Time Warner Cable is taking advantage of hard working people, this is wrong. Since they think everything went so well they have choose to role this out to 4 more major U.S. markets. And if your wondering if other ISP are doing the same thing, that would be a yes. But no where’s near the lows of transfer data that Time Warner Cable is giving. The other ISP’s are offering limits starting at 60 gigabyte all the way up to 250 gigabytes. So you can see why I think Time Warner Cable is taken advantage of people. If they try this with me I will leave them and switch to DLS or find another Cable provider. However, with all that being said, not all ISP’s are going to be doing this, so this just might keep the other ISP’s in check.

Going High Speed!

Are you sick and tired of your DSL Internet provided? Or if you’re using dial yet, you must be sick and tired of the slow speed. I know if I was using DSL or dial up for my Internet services I couldn’t handle the slow connection speeds. At times I get tired of watching the load bar with my cable high speed connection. However, for the most part I don’t have any problems with connection speeds, but faster would be better. That’s just the world we live in, we’re always looking for something better. Until we update our cable wiring system we’re going to be stuck at the speed we’re at now, which works pretty good for most of us. But for the one’s of you using DSL or dial up stop waiting and get going with the high speed connection. Sitting around waiting for your downloads isn’t worth it. Or if you’re watching a video or show it sucks when your stops to load. I recommend, if you can afford it, call Charter, which you could follow on Facebook, here’s Charter’s Facebook page. If Charter isn’t available in your area call your local cable company and get signed up for cable high speed internet. Once you make the switch you’ll never go back.

One of the most asked questions I receive is – Is getting free hosting really a good deal?  We’ll, I really don’t know, I’ll leave it up to you (readers) to answer that after you read what I have to say.  Ok, if you like having those annoying banners or pop-ups on your site?  Or if you found a free hosting provider that doesn’t have the banners or pop-ups but has given you next to nothing in space and bandwidth.  Which if you use up all your space your site stands the chance of going out.  Now, on the other hand you can purchase a hosting account from some really good providers out there.  I have found some hosting providers that charge between $1.99 to $8.99 a month for services.  All of these provider offer different packages you would need to research.  Remember, your website is yours, take control on how you want it to be viewed by the rest of the world.  If you don’t really care about the banners or pop-ups, go with the free hosting.  If you hate the banners and pop-ups and you think your viewers will as well, purchase yourself a good hosting account.  That’s all I have to say on this subject!

For most of you I’m sure you’ve had problem with your hosting provider, I know I have.  When the time was right I made the move, to another provider, left the other one behind.  And if you’re seriously looking for a new web site hosting provider as well you need to do a simple search via your choice of search engine.  I would recommend doing a search for “website hosting.”  Once you find someone you like check to see what other’s are saying about them.  They may have a good rating in some areas, and a bad rating in others.  There are people out there that love to rate everything they buy and use, so you will find something.  I base all my purchases based on customer service, then price.  Something may look good and cheap, but could cost you more down the road.  Another thing you can do is find a site that based their findings on customer satisfaction, affordability, reliability, uptime and technical support.  Anyway, you should have no problem finding a new provider, hey, some will even more your site over for free.

If any of you plane on watching any or all of the up coming Winter Olympic games online you’re going to need to have Silverlight from Microsoft on your computer. This new technology from Microsoft is going to take over Adobe’s Flash technology. Go to Microsoft’s site to see what I’m talking about. I also think that you can click on a link on NBC’s site as well. I was reading that the Summer Olympic’s had something like 40 million people from the U.S. viewed the almost 2,200 hours of the Olympics on NBC’s site, that’s a lot of people watching online. What that mean for Microsoft, it means 40 million new downloads of the Silverlight technology, and growing. Which in the end was Microsoft’s goal, new users. If you don’t have Silverlight on your computer you should go to their site and download it, I think it’s amazing, plus you’re going to need it.

I have a few questions for all of you. Are your fed up with your hosting provider? Does your site have a lot of down time? And do you feel that your hosting provider could deliver much better customer service? If you answered yes to any of these questions you need to seek out another provider, fast.

If you’re business website constantly goes down it will cost you money, and customers. If you’re a site owner, business or personal, you know how hard it is to find reliable web hosting, which is very critical to your business. As most of you know, when your site goes down you just want to pull your hair out. You purchase a plan, your promissed up site time, then out it goes, drives me nuts. So do what I did, research, research, and research your next provider. Call them, talk to someone on the phone. Most of these providers don’t offer toll free numbers, but that’s not a big problem. They just want to reduce the calls for low level questions. To avoid phone charges, call from your cell phone. I know I’m running on here, but I can’t stess enough, call your provider, and research them. Good luck on your searches.

A Newer Way To Search!

In the past I wrote about a newer way to search for information on the internet. The site was called LeapFish. When LeapFish lauched they used social media networks to get the word out. And now just this last week Google used social media to promote their release of Real-Time search. Here’s a video to prove that:

Seems like LeapFish was on to something…

Here’s a little information on LeapFish.

They have a pretty neat way of returning your search results back to you. Here’s how it works. At the top you will see a search box, type in what you’re looking for. Once you start your typing it starts to guess what you’re looking for. Once you have what you’re looking for you have the choice to do a regular search, or a real time search. The regular search will return you information that has been indexed by the top search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Now what I like is the real time search, which you get information from site’s like, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Digg. And this is information that is going on right now, what others are talking about live. And if you stay within your search you will see updates from the sites listed above, how cool is that.

I think leapfish is delivering just what people want, information delivered very quickly. To understand them more check out the video above, the video is pretty neat, you’ll like it. They talk about how social media sites are helping to change how we get information.

Most of you already know that I had problems with my web hosting services in the past. My sites would always go down for hours at a time. One time my sites went out for two days. I would send email after email and never got a response. As you can imagine this was very frustrating. And the thing that made me the maddest was I felt trapped. Because feeling trapped meant that I was going to need to start all over again. And I was also afraid of losing some of my site information. But I’m here to tell you not to be afraid and make the move if your hosting provider is failing you. The move wasn’t that bad at all, matter of fact it was pretty easy. So I did a little work and found a hosting provider where you can get reliable web hosting. The web hosting company I came across tonight can meet all your business needs. This web hosting site also offers some of the best ecommerce web hosting I’ve come across. And on top of providing all their great services, you can really depend on them. So don’t be affraid, do your research, and make the right choice.

Experience Power!

Do you own a an iPhone or iPod? Most people in the world today own at lease one of those devises. I don’t own an iPhone, but I do own an iPod. So, if you do own one or both of these devises you might want to consider a powerful speaker docking system called, Yamaha PDX-60. I don’t own one of these systems, but it sure looks pretty cool. I also did do some reading on it, and from what I read about it, it gets the wow factor from me. You can enjoy playing your games, music, and movies, all wireless, that’s what I like. Well, I also like that you can use the Yamaha PDX-60 to charge your iPhone or iPod, at the same time. The system also comes with the “Works with iPhone” logo, as well as the “Made for iPod” logo which means the system was designed to connect specifically to your iPhone and iPod, and certified by the developer to meet Apple performance standards. This system has a few other pretty cool features, just to many to list, you really need to visit the site of the Yamaha PDX-60 to learn more about it. I like it, and think most of you well too.