I’ve also found a new interest in social media where at the moment still finding it too much to swallow. There’s always something new in social media industry - be it social networking or social bookmarking. Almost every other day a brand new product or services is born that make me harder to tell whether it is good or just craps. Just subscribe to Mashable blog and you will know what I mean. This blog has an extensive reviews of everything new in social media. Some services like Twitter and Hulu had successfully stirred the industry and hit the mainstream while others like Blogrush has gone to the drain.

I don’t have any resolution to make for 2009, just have some wishes. Here’s my wishlist for next year:

• Our Own Social Media Player. It’s time to have our very own version of Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Digg, BlogCatalog, Last.fm and whatever that is, you name it. With Malaysian Facebook users are on the rise, our local developer or netpreneur should create something similar with local/Asian flavor. Even though some services like Facebook has gone global by supporting different languages, including Malay, I still personally think we should have our own version. Yes it’s tough to compete with the giants, but we should start somewhere. Just look at how Baidu beat Yahoo or Google as the search engine portal of choice of internet users in China. We could do the same here. We had a couple of local social media players that had started doing this like Nuffnang and recently kakiis.com. Give your support to them, will you?

• A Cheaper & More Stable Broadband Access. Hopefully Digi will roll out it’s 3G plan next year to bring more competition in our local 3G market which was dominated by Celcom and Maxis. Digi’s entry into the market will hopefully lower the tariffs. Cheaper tariffs may well encourage more people to subscribe to 3G service. According to MCMC, total local 3G users only number 200,000 as at end-September 2008. A very small number of 3G penetrations for a very ambitious country. And hopefully we can enjoy a more stable broadband connection in 2009. We’ve heard enough rants and raves of broadband users of slow and intermittent connections, even in high-profile residencies in Kuala Lumpur.

• A cheaper food and daily household item prices. You’ve heard it everyday. It’s no use the price of petrol went down seven times since the controversial price hike months ago if the price of daily household needs still do not change. The lower petrol price comes a little too late. Hopefully we will see the price of petrol will not going up again and household items will go down to help consumers.

• Air Asia & Malaysia Airlines.. More Low Fare Promotions, Please! We’ve seen in 2008 both Air Asia and Malaysia Airlines fight each other to give us the best ever low fare promotions. I’ve covered them in my Show Me The Real Fare series. The real winner in this fare price war is the consumer - you and me. With Air Asia already scrapped their fuel surcharge, Malaysia Airlines will think of a creative ways to attract customers. Expect a crazier deals being offered by both airlines in 2009. Can’t wait to book my ticket to my dream destination!

• More and Wider Free Wi-Fi Hot-spots. Ever since I used an iPhone, I need the wi-fi connection more than ever. There’s a whole lot of applications, music and videos need to download from AppStore and iTunes and it need wi-fi connection to super-fast downloading. Some food outlets like KFC, McDonalds and Starbucks in Kuala Lumpur had already offered free wi-fi. And thanks to KL City Hall, with partner Green Packet Corp Bhd, for providing at least 850 free wi-fi hot-spots as-known-as Wireless@KL to date to various areas in KL. Now you can enjoy surfing the net even at the less-popular mamak restaurant in KL. I just hope they will expand the service to the un-covered areas as well next year. And hopefully other city halls and municipal councils in other states could the same.

That’s all my wishes for next year. To conclude, may we have a happy and prosperous internet life next year. Good bye 2008 and Hello 2009.

What are you wishes?

So please view the calendar below and start planning for your holidays in 2009 now. To download this calendar, move your mouse over the ‘iPaper’ button, then select ‘Save Document’.

- special thanks to vwvr9 for this calendar -

Malaysia Public Holiday Calender 2009

Wikipedia has officially launched a mobile version of it’s popular encyclopedia web service. Just type http://mobile.wikipedia.org in your mobile device browser and you’ll be presented with a very clean interface. The mobile version currently only available in 14 languages. Nothing else on the search page except the search box, and link to Settings and About Wikipedia. The design is very minimal, which is what mobile users with small screen needed.

The mobile version for Wikipedia is not new as there are number of applications out there created for various mobile devices such as Wiki2touch for iPhone and SnapAsk et al.  However, these are third party applications and not official from Wikipedia. So when Wikipedia finally released it’s mobile version, people are very excited, even though it’s not a native app. The new mobile version also has one mysterious Spoken Wikipedia feature that is currently disabled. It is suspected that this is a feature that enable users to search by voice. Let’s wait for this feature to be available in the near future.

Wikipedia has gained a popularity and became a de facto standard reference today for everyone who wants to do a research and writing reports/journals. For students, it has become the most important tool and good friend in their assignment preparation. For myself, I used it extensively in my project paper and most of my friends did. And now with it’s official mobile version, it’s like carrying a whole 2.5 million+ wikipedia articles in our pocket. People can now look for the articles and answers from anywhere. It just gives schools and colleges one more reason to ban mobile phones during exam!

If you had a chance to test the mobile version of Wikipedia with different type/model of mobile devices, please share it with me by leaving your comment below.

I’m incredibly excited to finally be able to release this to the world. For months, the entire WordPress core development team has been obsessing over this release. We’ve agonized over the smallest of details. We’ve spent long nights refining and tweaking when we should have long ago given up and gone to bed. The people-hours that have gone into this are tremendous, but more than that, we’ve poured our hearts and our souls into this release.

I didn’t have a chance to do the upgrade to version 2.7 today because of my busy schedule. I will do it however to test a bunch of new features and will write about it in my next post .

For the time being, check out this video for a visual introduction to Wordpress 2.7, provided by Wordpress 2.7 development team.

• Why won’t Google be touched by the crisis
• Why does Microsoft fear Google?
• How Google want to compete with Facebook?
• Why does Google buy satellites?
• Why doesn’t Google monetize all of its services?
• Why isn’t YouTube a portal?

This presentation is a good reference for internet marketers to get an insight of why Google is so dominant in the world of internet today, especially when most of its services are free. Google are now at it’s peak but still climbing. With such dominant, can anybody imagine the day where this giant will collapse or fall to another small revolution? Just like nobody can imagine when Yahoo! was loosing to Google not so long ago.

Only time will tell. At least what you can do now is to read the presentation below (sigh):

Sunday newspaper tomorrow will surely be flooded by the event tragedy coverage and the ‘when, what, why and how’ questions. As usual, expect finger pointing in the coming days as when the probe started and some experts start giving their views and analysis. Oh, and expect some unconvincing words by politicians whose keywords will likely be “We Will Review..”, “Take Stern Action..”, “Stop development on high-rise land…”, bla..bla..bla. Sounds familiar?

I wish to send my condolences to all victim’s family and thousands of residents who have to evacuate their house.

And for Datuk Shah Rukh Khan, you deserved the low key publicity in Malaysia for your Datukship investiture ceremony because it’s you who want to delay the ceremony date until today. Our reporters are too busy covering the more important event that hit all Malaysian’s hearts. Wasn’t it ironic? Poor you.

Watch the Bukit Antarabangsa massive landslide video (source: The Star)
Watch the new Datuk received his Datukship (source: The Star)

Not long after I complained about Twitter’s Find People problem, the feature has been removed, instead of being fixed,  from Twitter site. I guess they will discontinue the problematic service. Anyway, I have found a workaround to the problem by using Twitter Search tool. This tool is actually for finding tweets in Twitter based on keywords. So basically I just type the name of whoever I want to find and hit ’search’, anything that matched the name, including tweet messages that contain the name will appear in the result.

Fine. One problem tackled. However, there’s another ’small’ problem surfaced recently with Twitter. I don’t know since when the problem existed but it was 7 days at least since I found it.  The problem is whenever I want to update/upload my profile picture, the message below appeared:

The message clearly said that Twitter is over capacity. Over capacity? A web service with such a reputation is having this problem? I wonder how big or how small their server capacity is? Or maybe they have too many users to handle and waiting for some millionaires to donate servers?

I’ve tried to update at different times just to verify that the problem may only occur during peak hours. I tried in early morning, mid-morning (whatever), afternoon, evening, late evening, night, mid-night, but still got the same message.

For how long this problem will be rectified remained to be seen. Hopefully they will not just remove or disable Update Profile Picture function like they did with Find People problem mentioned above. For the time being I have to settle with the boring default profile picture below. Looks familiar?

p.s: Despite the problem, you can still follow me at http://twitter.com/ssroslan

YouTube Video Player Goes Wider

If you visited YouTube today and watch any of it’s video, you may have noticed that the video player is wider. Yesterday, YouTube had officially announced a new wide screen aspect ratio for it’s video player. The page width was expanded to 960 pixels. So what happened to your existing 4:3 aspect ratio videos hosted in YouTube? Don’t worry because it will play just fine in the new format.

We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience.

- The YouTube Team

The new video player standard size already received immediate mixed reactions from YouTube users worldwide. Those who were against the idea, especially power users with hundreds of videos said the new format makes their current 4:3 videos look sucks with that wide black sidebars around the original video display area. They claimed the move is unfair to the users. However, other users who lauded the idea said the new format was great for better viewing experience in their 16:9 aspect ratio wide screen.

While wider video player display is better to enjoy maximum video watching experience, I personally think it’s better to make it available as an option to the users. Provide the ON/OFF functions so that users are not forced to view only the wide screen format. Furthermore, how many of us have a wide computer or TV screen?

Go to YouTube now and tell me what you think.

Everybody know that AirAsia has scrapped fuel surcharge from their airfare. The fact that they are the first, and probably the only airline in the world who make this move during economic recession has raised many eyebrows and really make us proud.

Despite all this hype, there’s no indication that AirAsia will come out with a real fare, all-inclusive advertisement like what MAS did with their ALL-INCLUSIVE LOW-FARE campaign. The price shown in the latest low and zero fare promotion yesterday still exclude the airport tax and admin fee. However, I must admit that some trips in this promotion is really cheap. A one-way trip to Kota Baru and Singapore is just RM28.50 and RM48.50 per pax respectively! You can never get the fare at this price anywhere in the world today. No fuel surcharge has really cemented AirAsia as the champion of low-fare airline.

As usual, below are the quick comparison of the real fares compared with what is advertised yesterday for selected destinations. The real fare = airfare + airport tax + admin fee. The real fares below were obtained from Air Asia website with the following search criteria:

• Fly From LCC Terminal, Kuala Lumpur only
• 1 guest only
• One way trip only
• Promotional fares are for Economy class only

Bangkok, Jakarta, Singapore
Advertised: RM0; Actual: RM47.50

Kota Bharu, Langkawi, Penang
Advertised: RM0; Actual: RM28.50

Alor Setar, Johor Bahru, Kuantan, Terengganu
Advertised: RM25; Actual: RM53.50

Kota Kinabalu, Kuching, Labuan
Advertised: RM49; Actual: RM77.50

Banda Aceh, Krabi
Advertised: RM49; Actual: RM96.50

Bandung, Brunei, Chiang Mai, Clark, Hong Kong, Macau
Advertised: RM99; Actual: RM146.50

Go to AirAsia website now to book (wow, I’m doing a free advertising job here)!

As you can see, My iPhonize blog doesn’t look impressive at all. It looks dull and the blog post only shows limited number of characters only. And worst, it doesn’t link to the original blog post. However, I only tested the free version. There is a premium version where you can customize your iphoneized blog a little bit more for a mere USD2.99. Certainly, this service is not for me, at least for now. For me, this is not ‘iphoneize your blog’, but rather is a ‘iphoneize your RSS’ service because website with lots of content section will looks very small. And with iphone’s big screen, I had a doubt whether people want to see a smaller, less impressive version of your website/blog. However, due to it’s niche in the market, this service has the potential to be a favorite among bloggers and website owners in the future.

Give it a try! If you don’t have an iPhone to see how your iphoneized blog looks like, do leave a comment below and let me access it using my iPhone. I will print screen and email it to you. This offer is for limited time only.