It may be unfair to look on Geocities so badly. After all, pre-facebook and social networks in general this was one of the only ways to easily make a website, or even to show your photographs to the world. Geocities along with many others of its ilk soon fell into disuse as “proper” hosting became available, but it is still fun to look back on the wild earlier days of the web.

See this site as it would look on Geocities

Yes, I did have a Geocities site at one point. And I did go through the entire roster of hand-coded HTML 1.0 and free advertising-supported hosting.

To see any other site in Comic Sans with dancing babies, simply append any web address to the end of the URL when you click that link above.

Note: There is a Geocities archive, lovingly saved by crawling the entire Geocities site as it was closed down. You might find more at Archive.org and the Wayback machine.

The Wand

Basically this remote allows you to control almost anything, with nifty Harry Potter style wand waving!

Left and Right to select tracks, for example, and circular swishing movements to adjust volume. It can learn up to 13 infra red commands. It even comes in a nifty magical presentation box.

If you want to control your MP3s from your iPod Dock or your TV channels or your Sky + there’s no better way than this!

See the video and get it from Firebox.Com (The example video shows you how it can even learn to control your Macbook).

Gadgets don’t get better than this! Is it the ultimate geeky Christmas present?

iPlayer: No Ads. Streaming and Expiring Downloads supported. Resume feature let’s you continue a program from where you left off. New Higher Quality setting if you have the bandwidth. Great selection of the weeks programs from across the BBC TV and Radio network.

4OD: Sometimes, a small ad break but nothing to worry about. Supports Streaming and Downloads (which expire). Excellent selection of the weeks programs and a massive archive of such classics as Shameless, Skins, Derren Brown, Documentaries, Peep Show, Black Books, etc. It also uses a propriatry interface, not a web page. 4OD also sells movies and certain programs, and you can pre-book downloads in advance.

ITV Online: This is the new baby on the block, seems rather more limited that the other two since it is Streaming only, and plenty of ad breaks. These ads will also show if you try to jump through a program, making it harder to continue where you left off. It also has some great archive content, such as Ruth Rendell mysteries, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Cracker etc.

Demand 5: This is Channel 5’s online offering. Here you can watch C5 programs, on demand, but Streaming only.  You can also buy or rent programs for download, which requires special software to be installed. This means there’s only usually a weeks worth of telly to watch for free. Don’t forget, Five is home to some great US imports such as CSI, NCIS and Numb3rs.

There’s also a Sky Player but unless you’re already a Sky TV subscriber you won’t get in without paying a £15 a month subscription!

You also have the choice of watching some TV from around the world, using Joost and Miro. Joost is full of everything from TV series, to Shorts, to Music Videos. It’s now web based, though I liked the original flash download version better. It’s full of channels you can watch and fully supports favourites, voting, queues and much more. Miro is more patchy, less premium content and more in the way of obscure niche programs but it is open source and continuously updated.

But, the granddaddy of all online TV sites is Hulu. You get to watch the latest Simpsons, Battlestar Galactica, etc at that site as well as full movies and entire series of some US gems. Unfortunately, Hulu is locked to the USA and won’t display content to anyone outside there.

In fact, a lot of US TV stations have their own online TV sections, allowing you to watch everything from Lost to Prison Break and beyond. Stations such as Fox (24, American Idol, Prison Break), ABC (Lost, Greys Anatomy), CBS (CSI) and many more, including some familiar to UK Cable and Sattelite users such as SciFi Channel, Discovery, History Channel, etc.

The only way these sites now that you are not from the USA is because of your IP Address. So if you can mask, or hide, your IP address you are good to go.

There are many solutions to this. One way is to use a proxy based in the US and altering your browser manually, though it can be slow and hard to find these proxies. Luckily there is an easy way…

Download and install Hotspot Shield. This is a security application designed to hide your IP by connecting your PC via a Virtual Private Network to the Hotspot network. You will see a speed hit, but it depends on your broadband connection whether or not it will affect you too much. And you do see ads on top of webpages (or should, they just seem to leave a blank space on mine!) but they can be closed.

But the best thing about Hotspot Shield is it’s easy to activate and deactivate whenever you wish, and if you want to browse all the great US TV content – you can! Simple

Google, a project first started in 1995, was incorporated on Sep 7th 1998. The company is a success story par excellence, generating massive profits and making it’s founders billionaires. Not bad for a company that has ridden the internet boom with aplomb. After all, “all” it does is provide a directory to the web and act as an advertising agency.

Google is the currently the #1 choice for searching the web. In fact, Google itself is anow a very: you don’t just search the web anymore, you “google” it!

Here’s some interesting links about Google and it’s history:

BBC News Videos and Report

Guardian Google Timeline

Google Facts

Official Google Blog

Google Youtube Channel

Chrome Web Comic

It makes sense for Google to make it’s own browser, they are after all primarily a web company, and even though they’ve stated the Firefox partnership will continue there will obviously be a clash somewhere down the line. Unless, of course, both projects somehow merge. After all – both are open source.

With Firefox at around 20% market share, and Explorer anywhere from 75%-80% there’s a lot of work for Chrome to catch up.

But… and it’s a big but… Google does happen to own some of the worlds most popular websites and the web’s biggest advertising channel!

What to expect in Chrome? We’ll see later. So far it seems they aim to reduce memory wastage, introduce multi-threading (so the browser won’t hang if one element stalls), and overall make the browser stronger, faster, and more secure.

This is also  designed  with the web’s more modern features in mind and perhaps see a realisation of the web-as-application-platform or even the web-as-desktop. Google’s own Maps, YouTube, Apps and Mail are obvious candidates for integration. In fact, web applications can be dragged to the desktop and run from there!

Google’s Chrome Page (and download)
BBC News Report on Chrome (includes vid)
Wired Magazine on Chrome vs Microsoft IE
PC World: 7 Reasons For and 7 Against Chrome 

First Thoughts

Ok, I’m now using Chrome. In fact, I’m editing this post from within it. 

It’s certainly seems fast. And the interface is very clean. Helpfuly, everything was imported from Firefox on installation so all bookmarks etc are there, and even usernames/passwords are imported. Shortcuts remain similar, so Ctrl+T opens a new tab, etc. In short, you can feel right at home.

The address bar doubles as a search bar, with suggestions as you type. But it also does much more, including showing sites you’ve visited before, and even generating special searches on the fly. For example, you visit IMDB and search for something. Now, whenever you want to run an IMDB search, just type IMDB in the address bar and press tab. You can enter a new search term for that particular site. Because of the autocomplete entries showing other sites you’ve used you can even do away with bookmarking temporary pages. Just re-search for it and your previous sites show up.

A new empty tab defaults to showing screenshots of your most-visited pages and recent bookmarks, and those tabs themselves can be dragged to make new windows. You can even create a desktop application from a web application, so for example go to Google Mail and select “Create Application Shortcut” from the page menu.

Downloads appear in a footer bar, with a simple progress bar and can be launched from there. You don’t need complicated download managers to handle them.

There are many more neat features, to see some please click here (includes videos).

I haven’t checked for compatibility but on this cursory examination it seems at least up there with Firefox. I’ve tried Gmail and Youtube, and Microsoft Live. They seem fine. I even tried NewGrounds, a flash portal, and that seems to run everything well so even Flash is included by default.

Now – if I could only get all those Firefox Plugins I love. That will come with time, but for now I’m impressed.

And did I say it’s fast?

Rating: 8.5/10 (only because of the plugins, but this is a beta. Still faster and cleaner than most.)

Verdict: Google is on to another winner and continues it’s takeover of the Web. But do you really want everything handled by one company? Do we need another Microsoft?