All uploads on Facebook.com will support the new photo size, but uploads made from some external applications may continue to use the previous size. The larger photo size is launching gradually over the next few days, so you may not notice a difference right away.

Nathaniel, a Facebook engineer, is living 116 pixels larger.”

(Via Facebook Blog.)

We all know that Facebook has become a major photo sharing hub, even bigger than Flickr and PhotoBucket.  Here are some interesting stats about photos being uploaded to Facebook today.

2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day

We have just over one petabyte of photo storage

We serve over 15 billion photo images per day

Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

So what makes Facebook such a popular photo sharing platform?

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Since September 2006, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address (and not residing in one of the countries where it is banned) can become a Facebook user. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and school or college. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include (potentially) any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide.

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos. Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album. As of May 2009, this limit has been increased to 200 photos per album. Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user’s friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to “tag”, or label users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user’s friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.

I’m not currently sure the total number of Photos uploaded to Facebook, however I do know, that in October of 2008, Facebook hit a milestone with 10 Billion photos uploaded to the site. So where can Facebook go from here? Well in order to completely beat out more of the popular image hosting services, they would need to integrate some sort of comercial printing services and continue to up the maximum resolution on there photos.  This would eventually knock out all competition.

What I am not a fan of however, are all of the mindless applications that some people seem to love. It is easier for me to just ignore all of those stupid “gift” and “buy me a drink” requests.

My friends have all got into Farmville and all have begged me to join and become her “neighbor” to help them out. The problem is that I now get even more requests from other people who are also playing Farmville.

I have heard it is addictive, but there doesn’t seem to be much skill at all to the game. The stream of my friends’ updates in Facebook used to be interesting, comments, links and photos, but that has just been replaced with irrelevant Farmville messages, like “someone just lost a cow on their farm”.

How much do you like FarmVille/Farmtown? Love it? Ok? Hate it? Well I for one don’t like it very much. I trashed it, and I’m proud to say that I will never again go back to it. And for the record, if you are like me and get tired of all the stupid requests from your friends applications coming in, join me in the quest to block every single application that post on your profile.

So what do I do when I’m not feeling well? I listen to music. The particular song I’ve been listening to – again among others – is called ‘Over the Hill is Home’. Its the simplest song in terms of lyrics and length, but it certainly helps me out.

As well as sharing this song, I’d like to share some ideas for people that might be struggling right now. Doing exercise, spending half-an-hour every day for outdoor activities, eating healthy food, relaxing, keeping away from strenuous activities and negative people, trying to keep your life simple; all of these could help you cope. I hope one does for you.

Here is a list of articles I have converted over to the shorter links:

http://jwgeorge.com/2010/02/facebook-chat-available-everywhere/ > http://jwge.org/fbchat/

http://jwgeorge.com/2010/02/history-of-the-domain-name/ > http://jwge.org/tweetshare/

http://jwgeorge.com/2010/02/-m--m/ > http://jwge.org/macvswin/

http://jwgeorge.com/2010/02/tweetshare/ > http://go.jwgeorge.com/tweetshare/

As you can see, the new shorter links are much easier to remember, and also fit on Twitter quite nicely!

Also, you may now reach the different services on my domains via this URL.

Facebook Version of jwgeorge.com: http://jwge.org/facebook/

Chat: http://jwge.org/chat/

Vent: http://jwge.org/vent/

New articles will be posted with there shorlinks at the bottom.

In my opinion, Microsoft should have stuck to what they know best. They make a killing every month on XBL users, plus they do, as much as i don’t want to say it, build a very solid operating system. Granted Vista was a piece. Instead they feel that apple has beat them out so much, that they have to go develop their own phone. I say bad move. They are going to get major crap, as I have done here ( ), from many bloggers, and news sources.

On the same note, has Apple become Microsoft? Now people who know me, know that I am, in face quite the Fanboy. But I do realize that an Apple computer is not for everyone. For those of you who put Apple up on a pedestal there is an article by PC World that you should read. Mike Elgan, the author of the article, lists off reasons he believes Apple is turning into Microsoft…despite being an Apple supporter himself.

For those of you not wanting to read the full article, I will summarize some of the more interesting facts.

–Apple as a Monopolist–

Microsoft was criticized for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, yet Apple can bundle iTunes with the iPods and iPhone? Heck, you can’t even make a call on the iPhone without activating it through iTunes first. Not only that but Mac OS X, the iPhone, and the new iPod Touch all come pre-installed with Safari.

–Apple as a Copycat–

Microsoft has always been criticized for copying ideas from other companies, but Apple might not be as innocent as you think:

* For more than a decade multitouch interfaces, similar to the iPhone’s, have been demonstrated.

* Apple’s new iPod Touch now has built-in WiFi, yet both Microsoft’s Zune and SanDisk’s Sansa Connect MP3 players have had that feature for quite some time.

Of course Apple’s implementation of the features are much better than anything we’ve seen prior, but the fact of the matter is that many Apple fanboys shower praise on ideas that Apple didn’t even pioneer.

–Apple as a Bully–

Yes, Apple does its fair share of pushing people around. Recently NBC wanted to charge more for their television shows being offered on iTunes, and when Apple declined NBC announced that they were pulling out. The author of the article says that NBC will come crawling back to Apple after they realize that the only way to succeed in digital downloads is to have your content on iTunes.

It probably sounds like I’m anti-Microsoft/Apple, but that’s not the case at all. As I previously said, in some cases, an Microsoft machine would be much better for someone, for multiple reasons. And I do realize that not only Microsoft copies ideas. But I do also recognize that Apple, in my opinion, better adapts these ideas into products. I just thought that the PC World article was a real eye-opener by showing that the two companies may not be as different as you think.

Cool huh?

Today, consumers are able to purchase all sorts of domains including: .com, .info, .net, .org, .me, .mobi, .us, .biz, .ws, .asia, and many more. You can purchase your own domain too, by visiting popular registrars such as GoDaddy or Yahoo.

Here is what’s amazing to me. The world wide web has only been around a little over 25 years people. Is astonishing that in such a short amount of time, modern browsers can pick up and translate text, images, and audio and reproduce them on your screen. Not to mention the countless programing and scripting languages there are today, and the platforms that allow people to publish their mind. We’ve even gone so far as social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. My how time flies when you having fun.

So lets reflect shall we on a little bit more history of the domain. The oldest domain to date is SYMBOLICS.COM (registered on15-Mar-1985). A current WHOIS check reveals that its currently registered to ‘UNKNOWN’ until 2016. Thats a long time for a domain. I wouldn’t expect to see that other than sites such as Yahoo or Google. And on top of that, all the domains listed below, were registered BEFORE the invention of the World Wide Web (www).

1. SYMBOLICS.COM (registered on15-Mar-1985)

2. BBN.COM (registered on 24-Apr-1985)

3. THINK.COM (registered on 24-May-1985)

4. MCC.COM (registered on 11-Jul-1985)

5. DEC.COM (registered on 30-Sep-1985)

6. NORTHROP.COM (registered on 07-Nov-1985)

7. XEROX.COM (registered on 09-Jan-1986)

8. SRI.COM (registered on 17-Jan-1986)

9. HP.COM (registered on 03-Mar-1986)

10. BELLCORE.COM (registered on 05-Mar-1986)

So congratulations Worlds Oldest Domains.. You have taught us something today. If your interested in obtaining your own domain, or even running your own website, you can either contac me, or view this awesome tutorial. Who knows, maybe one day you will own one of the worlds oldest domains.