When Buzz was launched a few weeks back, it came as a bit of a surprise and with a pile of issues, the biggest of which was relating to the privacy, or lack there of. This was quickly addressed by Google, but it left a sour taste in people's mouths about a product that appeared to have been rushed out without much thought to it.

Buzz appears to have been built to compete against Twitter for the micro blogging service, however, it also has Facebook to content with with that more Twitter like updates. One rather odd decision then is why does it need you to use a Gmail account to do the work? Surely it would be more beneficial to have it accessible to everyone, sure, tie it into Gmail, but don't make that the sole point of access. Also, linking onto your email means you have to give people your email address to follow them? I'd rather keep my email and my online 'handles' seperate if you don't mind.

I looked at it myself, but am struggling to find a use, very much like the recent Wave system. Is it another system that Google have pushed out to try and get in on an act, to build on once they've got some momentum. Would it have been better for them to wait a little and get a more complete, and tested product ready first?

Web statistics are a very important part of web site development and
marketing.  Every day you collect statistics for, you are gathering
valuable information to use in your marketing strategy. There is
nothing better than looking at a document full of graphs showing
increases in users or traffic; however, reading them and understanding
how to use them effectively are two very different things.

To read the full article, please go to http://blog.jellymedia.com/2010/02/05/understanding-web-stats/

Yesterday Facebook answered rumors and announced their HipHop "compiler" for PHP project. http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=358

Facebook describe it as a source code transformer and has allowed Facebook to massively increase the operational speed of the PHP elements of the site. HipHop gains its performance by taking the PHP and converting it into C++, this C++ can then be compiled into more efficient machine code.

Interpreted scripting languages, like PHP, are brilliant for developing because they are simple to learn and easy to debug but being interpreted they have the major disadvantage of poor performance. Every time a script is run, it is first compiled into 'opcode', a half step between the raw PHP and a form of machine code. This is then interpreted by the PHP runtime. Currently, there are a few opcode caching systems in existance, APC, eAccelerator and xCache all cache the opcode each time the PHP scripts change to speed up the process of executing the scripts.

HipHop goes one step further, and converts the PHP into C++ that can be compiled into machine code itself, but to do this the Facebook developers have decided to sacrifice "some rarely used features -- such as eval()". A very important question here is what have they decided are rarely used features and what have they dropped support for.

Dropping features changes the language itself and to use this new "language", you'd have to be well aware of what is missing and work around it, it isn't just as simple as looking at the PHP documentation and knowing you've got access to everything there.

Currently, Facebook haven't actually released the source code, however I am still interested to see how it works but currently I know I cannot use it due to various requirements for eval() in, for example, my plugin system and the vBulletin forums.