Data Circle

I’m sure a lot of people by now have heard of The Million Dollar home page. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a simple idea from a university student, Alex Tew, which involves selling advertising space on his web site. “Hang on”, you say, “that doesn’t sound awfully original!”. This advertising is different though, instead of paying for a given slot on a rotating banner, which is how most online advertising still works, the advertisters instead get a given number of pixels on the screen to show off their wares. Space costs $1 per pixel, but must be purchased in 100 pixel blocks so effectively the minimum investment is actually $100.

When Chris first told me about the site, I laughed it off as another gimmick that might get five minutes of fame if it was lucky and then fade away into the distance. How wrong I was. Not only have papers as esteemed as the Guardian picked up the story, but Mr Tew is also being invited to appear on US television to talk about his idea. Already he has made over half a million dollars, and is no doubt raking in further cash from selling the story to the media. That’s a pretty serious amount of money for someone who is still at university, especially from such a simple idea that costs Tew virtually no time or effort now that he has three staff handling the site for him.

Damn I wish I’d thought of this first, but hats off to Alex for coming up with the idea.

Due to a dispute with London-based Independent International Investment Research, who claim to have been using the Gmail name before Google launched their service on April 1st, 2004, the Google email service has now been rebranded as Google Mail for the foreseeable future. Users signing up as of this Wednesday 19th October will be offered a @googlemail.com address, although Google has said that existing @gmail.com addresses will continue to work for the time being. This only affects users in the UK, which presumably Google determines by IP address blocks.

A lot of Google fans have been raving about how unfair this is and how IIIR are pulling a fast one by trying to register Gmail as a trademark everywhere, but in this case I have no sympathy for either side. Google’s lawyers should have done a proper search for the trademark before launching the service, and they only have themselves to blame if they failed to notice that someone else had already applied for a trademark on the name. As for IIIR, it does look as if they’re trying to capitalise somewhat on the success of Gmail and one wonders whether or not they would have made the same amount of fuss had a smaller company infringed their intellectual property.

I’m not too bothered myself about this, because I don’t really use my Gmail account and it’s still working for the moment anyway, but I can see how it would really annoy all the people in the UK who have switched to using their Gmail account from other free email providers because of the huge mailbox capacity and the lack of intrusive advertising.

Update: We’ve been picked up by CNET as part of the blog community response to the Gmail name change. Unfortunately they’ve gone through our quote and replaced the words with American spellings.

More information

• BBC News
• Beta News

Adium, the popular multi-protocol instant messaging software for OS X, has been updated to version 0.85. You can view the full version history if you are interested, but here are two things that I’m glad to see:

• Support for Google Talk as its own service rather than as just a generic Jabber protocol – this isn’t a big deal but I think it will be less confusing for people who aren’t IM experts.
• File transfer stability has been improved – this was always a bugbear for me as there’s nothing more annoying that having Adium crash part way through a transfer for no apparent reason.

Development on Adium seems to be fairly steady, with a new release roughly every two months, so hopefully the team behind it will continue to make improvements to what is already an excellent instant messaging program. I only wish I had enough time to contribute something to the project in terms of code.

Mozilla Firefox has now reached beta 2 status, and amongst the release notes is an item about “improvements to Web site rendering and performance”. I hope this means that they’ve finally got Firefox working properly on OS X, because at the moment I often get the spinning colour wheel (meaning that work is being done, a bit like the hourglass cursor in Windows) and have to wait whilst the browser finishes whatever it’s doing. Problem is, once this has happened I usually have to close the browser because it happens more and more often from then on.

So far I haven’t experienced any problems with beta 2, and as such I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that the developers have actually made some improvements rather than just releasing rather vague statements about rendering performance. If you’re running beta 1 you should definitely consider upgrading sometime soon, as the unofficial changelog lists a number of bug fixes, but if you’re not keen on using beta products then make sure you’re using 1.0.7 if you haven’t already upgraded.