Google Buzz for Apps and Mobile
I was glad when I first read about Google Buzz, a few days old social service from Google. This should in opinion replace the need for Facebook as a separate application and the need for Twitter at all. Google integrated Buzz into Gmail, which is a very clever idea. This way they don’t need to ’steal’ users from other networks like Facebook, they want just to convert all their Gmail users to social app users – and by that eliminating the need for using separate social applications like Facebook. I’m sure that Buzz will grow and will allow to add plugins or new applications to it and become as popular and used as other networks are.
However… (there is always a however)
I use Gmail through my Google Apps account and guess what? Google Apps account are not (yet?) upgraded to include Google Buzz. I have read some answers from their Help page that they should get it in some months. Still, this means that I can’t use it through my personal mail nor my business mail. I could use it in my Gmail mail, but that’s not my primary mail and I don’t really use it.
Another way of using Google Buzz would be through my mobile phone. As I wrote before I have Samsung Galaxy i7500 Android phone that runs Android version 1.5. Guess what? Google Buzz supports only phones with Android version 1.6 with limited features and Android 2.0 or 2.1 with full features. Which means that I can’t use Google Buzz on my mobile, either. So if I enter mobile Buzz address all I get is a list of supported (and partly) supported phones. Mine not on the list, of course.
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Questions about PayPal
A large portion of my income from Miha’s utilities software is paid by Paypal. The service is easy to use, easy to understand and safe. I understand that many people use PayPal rather than giving my other service provider SWreg their credit card. That’s their choice, really, as long as that doesn’t stop them from purchasing a program or donation for the free programs and my work.
I am getting a lot of question about PayPal here in Slovenia. Our country is not for long on the supported list of countries and people aren’t used to use PayPal. Well, if I count the questions I get, there’s more people involving. And they should. As said before, paying is easy, and so’s the other side of that: getting paid. Getting paid by PayPal is a very interesting option: the same advantages go here. The (international) users are familiar with Paypal, are not afraid to use it and… it’s simple to use. All in favor of businesses who want to sell more.
But in Slovenia getting the money out of PayPal can still be hard. Here you can get the money only by paying it out on your card and only two card types are supported: one is Visa and the other is MasterCard debit card (or a ‘debit card with a MasterCard logo’). Visa is pretty common here, but MasterCard comes only as credit card as far as I know. So the only option to get the money out of PayPal is to get a Visa card from one of the banks and link it to your PayPal account. The money withdrawn from PayPal (minus 2 EUR fee, of course) gets to the account in three days. It can be withdrawn from the bank and the process is finished. One funny thing though: on the monthly statement from Visa all purchases have a positive number (and are subtracted from the account total), and the PayPal transaction has a negative number (because it is added to the account total).
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Google stops supporting IE6
In a mail to all Google Apps users (that are the users who use Google’s infrastructure and services like Google Docs on their own domain) today Google announced that with March 1st 2010 they will stop to support Internet Explorer 6 by Microsoft. They will however srill support IE7 and up as well as other modern browsers.
This change will start in March but will continue gradually throuh the year, when more and more services won’t support the old IE6.
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