The new site works by omitting data like photos that would be deemed “data intensive” by phone networks.

Techcrunch was able to get hold of the image to the right which shows the potential for a premium version of the service. There are suggestions that networks could introduce the free version as a base app on mobile devices (even though many newer handsets already support the likes of touch.facebook.com straight out the box or as a quick download from their respective application stores. This would then allow carriers to potentially monetise the premium version themselves – restricting access to only those who pay.

Techcrunch also go on to post a PR piece from Facebook:

“Zero” is a light-weight version of m.facebook.com that omits data intensive applications like Photos. It will launch in coming weeks and we are discussing it at MWC as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile Internet usage.

Google have been tracking Unicode usage through its index for quite some time now and I’m sure other major search engines will be refreshing their search algorithms to the new standard if they haven’t already.

Swankymaison.com

Full XHTML & CSS Build from supplied Photoshop files and then built on a custom PHP framework. Integration of a WordPress blog into the “thoughts” section of the site.

Many news outlets have noted that Microsoft’s Sky Drive – which Google is going into direct competition with – offers 25gb straight off the bat. Also, many other services, such as DropBox already offer large scale data redundancy and synchronised backup.

However, this is Google. It’s not like they’re pushed for space. GMail started off at this kind of mark and increased to 2.5gb fairly quickly (although we’re talking emails… not “large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and much more” that Google themselves are pushing).

Of course, this begs the obvious question… why? My best bet would be on ChromeOS. The whole idea being based around Google Gears, Google Docs and Google’s Cloud. And there you have it. Google aren’t going to tell it’s customers to go and use Dropbox or Sky Drive, are they?

What everyone fails to notice is Google Mail & Picasa online storage pricing options that scale all the way up to 16TB. Who needs that much space?

More news in the press release here : Google Blog

Facebook – somewhat of an arch rival of Google – have been rolling out a URL shortner for a short while on their mobile system. Any link in the m.facebook.com stream is auto-shortened using using fb.me. For example – fb.me/chickenland would take you to my page on Facebook.

That list of course could be tiny, or very extensive.

Whilst trying to find out why Hotmail wanted to fill my email with lots of margins breaking the layout, I Googled to find an answer and came across http://www.viget.com/inspire/hotmail-image-problems-in-html-emails/

From here, I visited the Email Standards Project which gives a good overview of mail clients and their current ability to ignore all the code you’ve been slaving over.

And I’ll leave you with a Flickr group depicting the hatred of GoogleMail’s current rendering:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/project-gmail-grimace/pool/

You’ll need to go grab the beta of Chrome from http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/ as it’s not in the release version yet, but once you do, you can play to your heart’s content.

I have a feeling that innovation may be a little few and far between since Firefox has been out for so long, there is such a base of extensions there. It reminds me slightly of a conversation Gina Trapani and Matt Cutts were having on Twitter regarding the lack of truely original apps on Android. Almost everything has already been covered by Apple’s iPhone.

Chrome may also struggle as Android’s market-place has with getting the volume of content on the site in the first place as adoption by programmers may take some time.

However, I’m sure that won’t put developers or users off using Google Chrome extensions- as its still (for the time being) lightning quick. There are already some great extensions to get started, like:

Speed Tracer
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ognampngfcbddbfemdapefohjiobgbdl

Chromed Bird
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic

Google Wave Notifier
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aphncaagnlabkeipnbbicmcahnamibgb

Suppose it’s only a matter of time :)

https://chrome.google.com/extensions

This throws up many questions like whos going to define how quick “quick” is? – what happens if Google indexes your site which is on a shared host when another site is taking a pounding? Alot of Google’s recent announcements have all involved “speed” as a central issue, and as such, Google have released a series of tools over at http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Anyone wanting to know more about the algorithm hanges can check out http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/page-load-speed-may-be-in-google-2010-algorithm/

I think we can all expect this to become a big selling point for server providers – such as UKFast who already make great play of the fact in their documentation. Remember though, this isn’t an official announcement of intention as such – they ould still implement this in a different way if they wanted to.

I assume we’ll all hve to go back to text heavy sites with ascii art now.

Great thing is, this is from YOUR machine and location – not just usage statistics and speed improvements you SHOULD see by switching.