Isn't The Internet Brilliant?

Google continue to chuck-out things that impress me, and even better, they're free. Take the recent addition of 'Street Views' on Google Maps, for example. You can now become a virtual tourist of several cities in the US, and it is done really well. I'm not sure how they've done it, but the objects (people, cars and so on) all look normal and not stretched and stitched, as you'd imagine. I spent a few minutes looking at exactly the same views I had poking around San Francisco and Las Vegas last year - it's almost spooky.

Also on the Google front, Checkout is brilliant. I buy quite a lot of stuff from eBuyer as they're very cheap for computery bits and pieces, and for orders over thirty quid you get ten pounds off simply buy paying with Google Checkout! Can't argue with that - I've saved quite a lot already. Well... 'saved' in a sense, since I probably didn't exactly need some of the things I bought, but you know what I mean.

We're now into June, so I'm looking forward to the WWDC on the 11th. Not that I'm going myself of course, but we'll finally learn the 'super top secret' Leopard features, plus I'm sure there will be some product announcements. I'm hoping for a boost in Mac Mini specs, but there is a rumour it is being dropped! I guess I'll find out soon enough, but if it is dropped then I'll just have to pick-up one of the remaining ones. The current Core2Duo would do the job, but hopefully I'll be able to pay the same for a better machine.

There's iPhone promotion going on at the 'All Things Digital' conference at the moment, but that's far enough from its UK release that I'm not really thinking about it. At the same conference, Microsoft showed-off a whizzy table that is a bit like a giant iPhone. I guess it was kind of cool, but they're talking about around ten thousand quid for it, so it's not exactly a consumer device. Looking at the demo video, it's pretty similar to the iPhone Multitouch interface too, so not that innovative.

Facebook continues to gather steam. Every day it seems more people I know join it... I think it has reached that critical mass now where a social networking site actually becomes useful. The new applications that can be added to your profile page are also pretty cool, and as long as they don't allow people to change their page layout/fonts/colours then it's all good. If people start being able to mess with their pages then it will just become another MySpace, with people getting 'creative' and making horrendous, unreadable pages. Urgh.