BlogTraffic has finally changed over their site to www.BlogXChange.us and are back up and running.  If you are not a member you can click on the link to join.  At this time, the site appears a bit rushed together, but should is functional, I imagine there will be a number of changes over the coming months.

This site is much like www.BlogExplosion.com,  www.Blogazoo.com and www.BlogClicker.com where you earn visitors to your site by browsing other people's sites.  It is another site to be listed on to promote you Blog/Column/Website!

Yahoo! 360º is a new service that is in testing at the moment, which combines Yahoo!'s view of various services you can already find around the Internet into a single service.  Not only to the duplicate the work of others, they have picked up on Goggle's idea of invitations where you cannot become a member in the "test" phase unless someone invites you.  It worked well for Google when they launched there supposed beta of GMail, and it will probably also work well for Yahoo!.

Yahoo!'s new server appears to be picking many features from:

• Friendster
• LiveJournal
• Flickr

Roughly their features are:

• Blogging
• Music sharing
• Discussion groups
• Local reviews
• Shared lists
• Photo gallery
• Detailed person profile

There is already a parody of the new service you might get a laugh from at:

SixFoo! 660º - http://660.sixfoot6.com/

Do not expect your normal blogging features you would find on many sites allowing you to customize how your blog looks with templates or anything of that nature, all blogs look the same, boring!  I was a bit surprised by this as I figured they would offer at least some templates to choose from.

This new service appears to be more a personal information center where you share information about yourself and link to others.  For my needs, this new service is not too important, but for beginners, it might be a start.  It is free though and could be worth your time checking out!

If you would like an invitation to try out and kick the tires of Yahoo 360º, leave a comment here with your email address or email me at the "contact" option on the site.

New multimedia GUIs (Graphic User Interfaces) are on the way.  Microsoft's next version of Windows, currently named Longhorn, will be a major move in that direction as it will make integrating video, audio and slick graphics quite easy.  I am sure that Apple will get heavier into that realm to get one up on Microsoft and from the looks of it, Linux fans will try to get up on these new multimedia interfaces also (more below).

Some computer users and a number of software developers are not so excited about all this "Eye Candy", I am not sure why though, it seems all this will just make computing even easier.  Many may say that it is performance loss, but with some of these systems, the performance loss is not that great, even if it were, the new systems coming down the road will easily handle all this multimedia GUI without blinking an eye.  Yes, it may mean yet another upgrade in a few years, but I think it will be worth it for the simplicity and user friendliness.

I found this link at Kevin Rose's site..

http://www.kevinrose.com/index.php/weblog/comments/216/

about an example of the power of graphics of wobbly windows currently being explored on Linux:

http://plasticbugs.com/wp-trackback.php/239

While all my current development is on MS Windows (2000 and beyond only), it is interesting to see some Linux people playing with advanced GUI techniques.   This demo rather reminds me what is coming in Microsoft's Longhorn (next version of Windows) shortly. 

The wiggly windows in this demo I think would get old fast, but it is impressive in the ability to handle all this graphic power without bogging down the system. The clip of the video playing with transparency in a wiggly window moved around on the screen all without affecting the play of the clip is pretty cool stuff.

For more information on Microsoft's Longhorn, you can browse:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/

You might be interested in browsing the Longhorn concept videos at the above link for a few examples of how Microsoft expects Longhorn to fit into computer solutions for large corporations.

I for one have always been excited by new graphics advancements and enjoy seeing new GUIs, although many of them currently still leaving you wanting.  We heard for years about multimedia this and multimedia that, but by large are daily uses of a computer is far from multimedia anything.  It looks like the world is moving fast to a true multimedia computing experience. 

Although some developers will curse these new GUIs and say the world should stay with a text UI :), the majority of the world (myself included) will enjoy this new brave world. I think there is new world coming down the road and Apple once again gets a nod for helping raise the bar to push the technology beyond them.