Earlier today, FaceBook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that FaceBook will be launching a new version of their messaging system, intended to unify the different ways that users communicate with people.

FaceBook’s new messaging system, which was code-named Project Titan, is intended to unify the different ways that people communicate with each other, including IM, messages, as well as e-mail. All of these different forms of communication will be sharing the same inbox, and users will also be able to keep track of their conversation history with other users.

Also, FaceBook users will be able to create their own “@FaceBook.com” e-mail address, with IMAP support coming in the future. However, users are not required to have a FaceBook e-mail address and have the option to use any e-mail address.

In addition to updating the messaging system on the FaceBook website, FaceBook also plans to work on their mobile applications, with an updated iPhone application coming in the near future.

The new FaceBook Messages system will be gradually rolling out over the next few months. However, users can learn more about it, as well as request an invite by going to the FaceBook Messages About page.

Also, if you would like more information about FaceBook’s new messaging system, you should check out this post and this post from TechCrunch.com, which I used as a source for this post, as well as this article from MercuryNews.com and the FaceBook Messages post from the FaceBook blog.

If you’re looking for a way to show people the various things that you do around the Internet, as well as provide them with some basic information about you, all in one place, perhaps you should try using a relatively new website, About.me.

About.me is a website that allows you to create a “splash page”, where you can post links to your various profiles and accounts on websites, as well as a personalized message, all in the same place.

About.me also enables you to view statistics about your profile, such as how many visitors have been to your page, where they came from, as well as what they do on your page.

When you first go to About.me, you will see the website’s homepage, where you can reserve your URL, which is in the format of About.me/yourusername. You will also see screenshots of the website, as well as a list of some of the users of the site. If you have already registered, you can also log into your account by clicking on the “Sign In” link on the top right of the page. On the bottom of the website, you will see links to the “About Us”, “Contact”, and other pages.

Once you have logged into your account, you will be taken to the About.me dashboard, where you can see a variety of things, such as your profile statistics, which include how many views and clicks your profile has received and how many links there are to your profile. You can also view “Historical Stats”, such as the average time spent on your profile, the total amount of views your profile has received, and the percentage of new visitors.

If you click on the “DataStack” button, which is located toward the top of the Dashboard, you will be able to see statistics about your activity on the profiles and websites that you have linked to from your About.me page.

Some of statistics include how many combined status updates you have posted, how many updates you have posted from some individual services, such as Twitter and FaceBook, as well as how many updates you post weekly. In addition, you can view a bar graph of how many status messages you have posted over time, as well as your “reach”, which includes information, such as your combined followers and friends, as well as how many mentions you have received.

From the “Promote” section of the website, you can learn a variety of ways to promote your About.me profile, with instructions on how to add a link to your profile to your e-mail signature, as well as the option to share a link on Twitter or FaceBook. You can also copy and paste an embed code to your website, in order to embed a link to your website.

If you would like to view or edit your profile, you can do so by simply clicking on the “Profile” button, which is located on the top of the page, next to the “Dashboard” button.

From there, you should be able to see what your profile currently looks like, as well as edit your profile, with the option to choose different backgrounds, colors, and fonts. You can also edit your biography, which users will see when they visit your profile page. In addition, you can add, edit, and remove services that you link to from your profile, including Twitter, FaceBook, WordPress, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Flickr, as well as others.

If you would like to learn more about or try using About.me, you do so by going to the About.me website. However, since the service is currently in beta, you can only reserve a URL and will be notified when you are able to create your own profile page.

Since Halloween is tomorrow, I figured I’d write a post that contains links to some fun or interesting things that are related to Halloween. I hope you enjoy the following websites, games, and activities!

Halloween History

If are wondering about how Halloween came to be what it is today, the websites below have some great information about the history of Halloween, as well as other things.

History.com – Halloween

History.com – History of Jack-O-Lanterns

History.com – Halloween Around the World

Halloween Graphics

If you are looking for Halloween graphics, such as pumpkins, candy, and other things to decorate your computer’s desktop, your website, or anything else, these websites have a bunch of images that you can use to do so.

HolidayGraphics.com – Halloween

Hersheys.com – Halloween ClipArt

TheHolidaySpot.com – Halloween Wallpapers

Iconator.com – Halloween Buddy Icons and Avatars

Halloween Music and Sounds

Wouldn’t it be pretty cool if you had some fun Halloween music and sound effects to play at a Halloween party or when trick-or-treaters are coming to your house? The websites below allow you to do that, as they contain free Halloween themed music or sound effects.

Free-Loops.com – Halloween Sound Effects

All-About-Halloween.com – Scary Halloween Sounds

TheHolidaySpot.com – Spooky Halloween Music

YouTube.com

Halloween Games and Activities

If you’re looking for some fun Halloween games or activities, perhaps you should check out some of the websites or games below. Please note that the first four links are mainly children’s activities.

BenJerry.com – Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Halloween Activities

Holidays.Kaboose.com – Halloween Games

Holidays.Kaboose.com – Halloween Activities

Coloring-Page.com – Halloween Coloring Pages

Angry Birds – Halloween (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad application. Review here.)

I hope everyone has a happy, fun, and safe Halloween! If you have any other link suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment below or use the Contact page to send me an e-mail!

As you may already know, Apple recently hosted it’s “Back to the Mac” event, where Apple announced some new updates to a variety of products and services.

Mac OS X 10.7

One thing that Apple announced was the latest version of the Mac OS, which is version 10.7 and is known as “Lion”. According to Steve Jobs, this update to the Mac OS will integrate Apple’s iOS into their Mac OS. However, this update isn’t expected to be released until next summer.

App Store

If you own an iPod Touch or an iPhone, you are probably already familiar with Apple’s App Store.  However, users can expect to see the App Store on their laptops and desktops in around three months. With the Apple App Store on computers, users will be able to download applications, such as utilities, games, and more without having to visit a website, download the actual file, and then install it.

Once you have downloaded applications from the App Store, you will be able to launch them from a launcher that contains all of your applications, which is similar to the Mac Dashboard. If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you may enjoy the similarities between your iPod or iPhone and your computer.

If you would like more information about the latest version of the Mac OS and the App Store, you should check out this article from CrunchGear.

FaceTime

Also announced at the “Back to the Mac” event was the ability to use Apple’s FaceTime service on your computer, in addition to already being able to use it on your iPod Touch or iPhone. You can even chat with users who are using FaceTime from their iPod Touches and iPhones, right from your computer. This feature is actually available for download from the Apple website. However, the FaceTime for Mac version is still in the beta stage.

If you’d like to see a hands on review of FaceTime for the Mac, you should view this article and video by John Biggs from CrunchGear.

New MacBook Air

Apple also announced the newest version of the MacBook Air, which is smaller and lighter than the previous version. The new MacBook air weighs just 2.9 pounds and has a new glass trackpad. The new version of the MacBook Air also has two different screen sizes, which are 13 inches and 11 inches. The new MacBook air can be purchased for $999, which is also cheaper than previous versions of the product.

If you would like more information about or if you would like to pucrhase the new MacBook Air, you should check out the MacBook Air section of Apple’s website.

iLife

Apple also announced the latest version of iLife, which is iLife ’11. While there weren’t any significant additions to Apple’s iLife package, there were some updates, including making the software suite more social with a better FaceBook integration.

Even though users were able to publish their photos and such to FaceBook in the previous version of iLife, there is now improved sharing capabilities, which includes allowing users to tag their family and friends right in iLife, as well as being able to see FaceBook comments and such in the iLife program itself, without having to launch your browser to view them. The new version of iLife also allows users to change their FaceBook profile picture directly from the program.

In addition, iMovie users can now upload videos straight to FaceBook from iMovie, which prevents users from having to open up a browser, log into their FaceBook account, and then upload the videos.

If you would like more information about the latest version of Apple’s iLife software suite, you should check out this article from TechCrunch.

For more information about any of Apple’s “Back to the Mac” announcements, I would suggest that you check out TechCrunch.com’s “Guide to Apple’s ‘Back to the Mac’ Event”, which is where I obtained a variety of the information posted above, as well as from more specific posts, such as this article from CrunchGear.

If you’re looking for a fun game to play on your iPhone or iPod Touch, perhaps you should try playing Cut the Rope, by Chillingo Ltd.

Cut the Rope is a puzzle game where you have to try to get a piece of candy that is suspended from one or more ropes to a little green creature who will then eat it. However, in order to get the maximum number of points, you also have to collect up to three stars which are in the level.

In order to collect the stars, there are a variety of tools that you can use, including air pumps, which will blow the candy in one direction, bubbles, which make the piece of candy float upwards, as well hidden ropes, which can be used to suspend the candy in a different place.

There are also obstacles, such as spikes and spiders that you have to try to avoid, as the spikes will cause your candy to break into pieces if it comes into contact with them and the spider will take the piece of candy, both of which will cause you to fail that particular level.

If you’re interested in trying Cut the Rope, there is a Lite version available, which you can download from the iTunes App Store.

If you would like to purchase the full version of Cut the Rope, you can do so from the iTunes App Store for $0.99.

If you’re a GMail user, you’re probably familiar with how e-mail messages with the same topic are grouped together in a thread-like “conversation view”, which enables you to quickly see previous e-mails that you have sent and received.

However, if you are just switching to GMail or have been a GMail user for a while, but don’t really like the conversation view, you can now disable it and go back to having messages displayed individually, rather than grouped together.

If you would like to disable “conversation view” in GMail, you can do so by logging into your GMail account and then clicking on the “Settings” button, which is located in the top right corner of the GMail interface.

From there, you should click on the “General” tab, which may be the first tab that is selected when you go to the “Settings” page, and then choose the “Conversation view off” option, which should be the sixth option in the “General” tab.

In order to reenable “conversation view”, you can do so by simply going back to the “Settings” menu and then to the “General” tab. From there, you should choose the “Conversation view on” option.

If you would like more information about the option to disable GMail’s “conversation view”, you should check out this post from the Official GMail Blog.

As you may have already heard, Apple recently released a new version of it’s Apple TV device, which retails for $99 is now 80 percent smaller than the previous version.

The new Apple TV also includes a built in power supply, which may be useful if you’re trying to fit it into tight spaces. Another new feature is that the device does not have a fan, as it stays cool without it, which reduces the amount of noise that it makes. Also, according to Apple, when the new version of the Apple TV is not in use, it uses less power than a night-light.

In addition to the above features, the Apple TV can wirelessly stream content, right to the device, with HD movie rentals and TV shows being streamed right to the Apple TV from the Internet and photos and music being streamed from your computer. This means that you don’t have to go through your iTunes library and sync the content that you would like to watch or listen to.

Like other Apple devices, such as the iPhone 4, iPad, and iPod Touch, the new Apple TV features an Apple A4 processor, which enables content to be streamed to the device without any freezing or stuttering.

The Apple TV also has controls similar to those of a DVD player, with users being able to pause, rewind, and fast-forward through whatever they happen to be watching.

In order to set up the Apple TV, all a user needs to do is plug the device in and connect it to a TV using an HDMI cable, which can be purchased separately. The Apple TV also features an optical audio port, as well as an Ethernet  port, even though the device can connect to the Internet wirelessly.

In addition to watching and renting content, such as movies and TV shows from iTunes, users can also stream and view content from services, such as Netflix, YouTube, MobileMe, and Flickr.

Another feature of the new Apple TV is that it can now be controlled using an iPhone or iPod Touch, provided that the user has downloaded the Remote application from the iTunes App Store. With this feature, users can browse through content, use the iPhone’s or iPod Touch’s keyboard to search for things, as well as play, pause, rewind, and fast-forward content, similar to using a regular remote control.

There is also a new feature, which is coming soon, called “AirPlay”, which enables users to stream content, such as music, TV shows, and movies from their iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad right to their Apple TV, without having to purchase it again.

If you would like more information about the new version of the Apple TV, you should check out the Apple TV page of the Apple website.

As you may have already heard, the popular technology blog, TechCrunch, was recently acquired by AOL, which was announced on Tuesday by AOL’s CEO  Tim Armstrong, as well as the website’s founder, Michael Arrington on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

They even signed the acquisition agreement on stage, in front of the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt. According to Armstrong, AOL has been interested in TechCrunch “for a while”.

In addition to the main TechCrunch.com blog, the acquisition also includes other TechCrunch sites, including CrunchGear, CrunchBase, and MobileCrunch.

Michael Arrington also posted the reasons why TechCrunch was sold to AOL in a blog post from the TechCrunch website, stating:

“The truth is I was tired. But I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy. Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It’s certainly not an engineering driven company.

AOL of course fixes that problem perfectly. They run the largest blogging network in the world and if we sold to them we’d never have to worry about tech issues again. We could focus our engineering resources on higher end things and I, for one, could spend more of my day writing and a lot less time dealing with other stuff.”

If you would like more information about TechCrunch being acquired by AOL, you should check out this post by Michael Arrington, as well as this post by Tim Armstrong, both of which are from the TechCrunch website.

If you’re a FaceBook user, chances are you’ve probably already heard about the two and a half hour downtime that the site faced yesterday, during which people were not able to access FaceBook’s website. Also affected were FaceBook’s “Like” buttons, which are used on a variety of different pages throughout the Internet. Yesterday’s downtime was the worst outage that FaceBook has experienced in over four years.

FaceBook’s Director of Engineering, Robert Johnson, has posted a note on his FaceBook profile, which explains what caused the website’s outage, which you can view at this link.

Basically, what happened was that an automated system, which checks for invalid configuration value’s in the cache and replaces them with updated values from the persistent store. According to Johnson, this process works well for transient problems in FaceBook’s cache, but does not work when the persistent store is invalid, as well.

When FaceBook made a change to a persistent copy of a configuration value, it was was interpreted as being invalid. Because of this, every client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it, which involves making a query to a cluster of databases. All of the queries caused the databases to become overwhelmed, as there were hundreds of thousands of requests being made a second.

Also, each time the client made a query and received an error, it interpreted it as an invalid value and then deleted the corresponding cache key. Because of this, even after the original problem had been fixed, the queries still continued. As long as the databases were failing to service some of the requests that were being received, they were causing more requests themselves, thus causing a feedback loop, which did not allow for FaceBook’s databases to recover.

In order to rectify this problem, all traffic to the database cluster had to be stopped, which meant that FaceBook had to essentially be “turned off”, which is why users were unable to access the website. After the databases had recovered from this error, FaceBook allowed more people to access the website again.

In addition, the system that checks for and attempts to correct invalid configuration values has been turned off and other options for this system are being explored.

If you would like more information about FaceBook’s recent downtime, you may want to check out this note from FaceBook’s Director of Engineering, Robert Johnson’s, profile, as well as this post from TechCrunch.

As you may have already heard, Twitter has announced some new updates to their popular social networking service, including a new design, as well as making the service work better with various forms of media, such as pictures and videos.

Twitter’s new design will feature links to your @replies, mentions, retweets, lists, and searches above your timeline, instead of on the right sidebar, like it was before this update. Instead, the right sidebar will feature users who recently followed you and vice versa, as well as your favorites and the list of trending topics.

Also, Twitter’s new design is more “media friendly”, as users can now view pictures, videos, and other media right in their timeline, rather than having to click on a link and go to a third-party website. Some of Twitter’s partners, which enable this feature are DailyBooth, DevianArt, Etsy, Flickr, TwitPic, TwitVid, YouTube, Vimeo, yFrog, UStream, as well as other partners.

The new redesign of Twitter also enables users to discover related content, which they can do by clicking on a tweet, which will provide users with a “details” pane that displays more information about the author or subject of the tweet. Some examples of what you may see in the “details” pane include @replies, other tweets by the user, a map where a geotagged tweet was sent from, as well as other things.

Another new feature would be Mini Profiles, which enable a user to find out more information about another user by clicking on someone’s @username. Doing this will display account information, the user’s bio, as well as their recent tweets.

According to Twitter, these new features will be rolling out over the next few weeks as a preview. During this time, users will be able to switch back and forth between both the new and previous version of Twitter.

If you’d like to learn more about the new version of Twitter, you can do so by going to Twitter.com/newtwitter.