An article on Techcrunch (The Age Of Facebook) sparked a range of thoughts on the future of Facebook and the web. According to Techcrunch Facebook will be the most trafficed website within a few years. Facebooks monetization model seems to work, as they are now actually earning money, but what would be the featyre trajectory for Facebook in the years to come?

Looking at the massive amount of users that Facebook has, and considering the general convergence of web services, I would suggest Facebook to go Google on a range of features. By going Google I mean developing a matching office suite that’s integrated in Facebook, and also an email client that’s open to email communication with the outer world. By doing that, Facebook would eliminate 2 more reasons to ever leave Facebook. Keep that development in mind and Facebook might become the next internet…

If you blog on a regular basis you have probably experienced the dilemma of wanting to qoute a sentence or passage from another blog or website, but worked your way around it because of the numerous steps you need to go through in order to make a solid quotation with blockquotes and a reference back to the blog you are quoting. By installing and tweaking a Firefox extension you can actually make a niecely formatted quote with a hyperlinked reference to the original source in just one fell swoop.
Here’s how to do it:

1. Go get and install QuoteURLText
2. Go to the advanced formatting options in the add ons overview and change the format as shown below
3. Start blockquoting…
4. Tell me how your’re doing!

Haave you ever felt the need to be able to post tweets that get published later? If you have – you have probably also tried out the various Twitter-specific sercvices around (fx tweetlater.com that has a gazillion features). But If you only need to do manage future tweets – why not just use your WordPress installation?

Easiest way to do it is to assign a category for tweets (you can exclude the category from showing up on your  blog) and then pull the feed from your twitter category through ping.fm, hellotxt.org og hootsuite.com to publish the tweet on twitter. You then just need to write a new post, assign it to your twitter category,  set the publish date and off you go.

Of course that would quickly get pretty basic so I thought – what if you could track @replies to the individual tweets and pull them in as comments in your WordPress installation?  - and replying to those replies would then create new posts/tweets on your blog. All of a sudden your WordPress installation will have turned in to a Twitter-app…

So… any crazy input from you?

What to do when your toddler utters her first word? Tweet it, of course! …but if you want to engage in a closer documentation of your child’s speech development, please read the following steps.

Step 1 – create a dedicated account for your child
As you don’t want your documentation of your childs utterances to disappear among all your other tweets, you should create a dedicated account for your child where you tweet the words as they come.

Step 2 – get your tools ready
As you probably (hopefully) won’t sit with your laptop every time your child produces a new word, you should sort out your applications. The easiest way is of course to just update by texting in new words – but as Twitter doesn’t allow you to maintain multiple accounts via texting, you should consider using HelloTxt or Ping.fm to have text access to several accounts.  If you want to update via pc, mac or smartphones there’s a plethora of applications and services you can use. Currently my favourites for managing multiple accounts are Seesmic (air application), Twhirl (air application), and Hootsuite (web).

Step 3 – analyze the data
After some time, you can run the tweets via TweetStats and get some nice graphs of how your childs vocabulary expands. …In order to get your expectations right you should be aware that typically developing children has a of vocabulary size for 0 to 67 different words at around twelve month, and 13 to 471 different words at eighteen months (source).

(…no that’s not one of my children’s speech development curves – merely the stats for @pcheick)

Step 4 – hand over account at proper age
… and get credit for being the considerate parent you are. You can also count in the great favour you are doing your child by securing her  digital identity on Twitter from the early start on. This will probably save her from the grief of having to use handles as ‘thereal_[child name]‘ or ‘Melissa2009′.

That’s it I hope to do this with my youngest son – expecting first updates in a years time from now.

Please let me know if you think this concept could be improved or developed in any way.

I’ve been waiting to test out WordPress 2.7 for a long time now – and have decided that beta 3 was stable enough for me… I was exited to see the much discussed rearrangements of the interface. And, I must admit, I’m pretty impressed- The working area on the post page has a remarkably less cluttered feel than any previous versions.

Now, I’ll let the rest of the gang praising this release to the skies and instead bring a little heart burn of mine instead. The write page is again back to it’s customizable old self with a few extra features that let users strip away unwanted elements form the interface. That’s all good and fine, but I am really sad to se that the excerpt field is still locked to it’s position below the main writing panel. Why can’t I move the exerpt up between the title and post input areas. To brag flexibility of the write post interface but maintaining some of the rigidness makes me wonder. I want the exerpt field to be below the title field because that suits my way of writing. 

I use the exerpts to control the meta descriptions and, the snipppets in archive pages, and also the single post page, where I like to have the exerpt in bold to guide users to quickly get the gist of the current article.

SVN upgrade went flawlessly. Remember to run ‘/wp-admin/upgrade.php’ though.

… looking forward to testing all these new features