Everyone seems to be going mad about Pintrest at the moment so I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m not one for the most abundant content on there (flowers, arty photos, dresses and various haircare products) so I made one about something I am interested in (and do know something about) – F1 cars.

So far I have found numerous problems with their website:

• Popup modals are visually nasty, difficult to pick out from the background when they’re popped up and often get their events bound multiple times if you do it more than once on the same page
• Following links seems a bit weird, sometimes it follows redirects and sometimes I end up with feedproxy URLs on the “pins”
• There doesn’t seem to be a good way to get to one of your boards – you have to click just below its title?!
• Generally buggy picking images – several times I tried to pin the second or third image from a URL and it still rendered the first one
• Their CDN is sloooooow to propagate – first few page loads and the image isn’t there
• Have to log in with Twitter or Facebook (at least you can turn it off again later)

Let’s hope the experience improves a bit.

I’ve been using Google+ for a couple of days now, and I really like it. While I have not yet had a chance to give every feature a full run through it’s paces, I have very much liked what I have had a go with. Here’s why I think it has promise.

I am pleased to announce the free online release of my review of the impact of the social web for 2010.

This work was completed as part of a University module entitled “Social, legal and ethical aspects of engineering” (and known as SLEASE). Entitled “Social, Legal and Ethical Aspects of online Communities and Social Networks”, the report focussed on the main issues facing social networking online in the last quarter of 2010.

The report presents hundreds of reference sources, from Reddit conversation threads and TechCrunch articles through to research papers and Anonymous press releases. The report then gives a succinct summary of the activities of the Reddit Political Action Committee, Twitter’s community, the Yahoo/Delicious debacle and all of the important events of the end of the year.

A note on licensing: this report is free to download and share, but please do not extract parts from the main body of the document. A note to fellow students: this report is provided for information only – plagiarism will get you thrown out of University.

Download the report

I’m just going to say this – the point of me writing this review is that you go and download the Beluga app for your iPhone or Android device right now. Not because someone can give me some dollars (coz that would be nice) but because for the first time in many years I see an application that could possibly just change things on a scale bigger than Twitter and Facebook.

No light words, there. But Beluga is an application unlike any other that I have seen. While it seems simple on the outside, I think it has some kind of power to do something great and get rid of SMS, and Facebook for good. But it’s not just me – Louis Gray and MG Siegler have been waxing lyrical about it too.

So what does this app actually do that makes it so cool?

Last night Google Hotpot launched. It is a very early version of Google’s local ratings service, giving users the chance to rate local restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs – well pretty much any place really. Initially I thought (as I suppose many people did) that this is only the web interface, but I also noticed this morning that Google Maps automatically updated on my Android phone (don’t worry, I told it that it could do that) to include a fancy widget to help you rate places as you go to them.