Since a  few days ago it is now possible to apply for a new email account on Facebook. Social Networking Giant Facebook has announced that its new email service is called ‘Social Inbox’ and it is now available to everyone who applies for it.

This new email service may be a ‘Gmail killer’ as some have said, though of course Gmail is much more interlinked with many Google services (federated services with one login).

You can keep track of all messages sent to a person, whether they are actual emails, facebook messages or facebook chats. You can email everyone whether they use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or another email, and they will not need Facebook to receive your emails

Priority will be given to your Facebook friends’ emails, similar to Gmail’s Priority Inbox. All other emails will be placed in a seperate folder.

You can apply for it by following this link:

http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/

A website today is essential to market your business and ideas. Practically everyone has Internet access these days so you can reach many many people. If you have a message, you can send it out through your website.

There is a lot of competition however and people can easily leave your site (especially if it’s overbloated with slow loading Flash) and go elsewhere. Slow loading sites are now being penalized by Google, so now this is even more crucial.
Web usability is essential and interoperation with Web Standards cannot be ignored. Your website must be tested with different operating systems and browsers.

Nowadays practically everyone uses Facebook and other social networks, so it is important to connect your site to these networks as they are quickly becoming the way people find your site. This has become an important part of optimizing your site besides the classical search engine optimization process. Who better can optimize your site but someone who has written their own search engine, after all?

I like to call RSS the “Glue” of Web 2.0.

The origins of RSS take us back in time when both Microsoft and Netscape looked at the web as a static entity that could be catalogued, defined and fixed in “channels” (eg Microsoft’s Channel Definition Format – CDF). Traces of the “channel” terminology can still be found in the RSS protocol.
Similarly Netscape devised RDF Site Summary, later renamed as “Rich Site Summary” (RSS), picking up elements from Winer’s ScriptingNews format.

After Netscape dropped RSS support, Dave Winer renamed it into Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a method to be informed of changes.
This made it the ideal way to be informed when a site publishes an update. All modern websites these days incorporate an orange RSS button, which allows subscription to a feed (the dynamic equivalent of the old “channel”). There are many ways to subscribe, such as using special software, or simply using Google’s igoogle service in your own browser. Then, when an update is posted on a site you are following, you can easily be aware of it, and can easily get to it.

UK tech expert and journalist Guy Kewney has passed away. I recall reading his regular column in Personal Computer World magazine for a long time.

My condolences to his family and friends.