How Korea, a onetime digital trendsetter, became a laggard in an era of smartphones—and amazing apps.

I was browsing around Daring Fireball again, and saw John’s post entitled “Facebook Login”. He goes on to show an excellent example of technological ignorance.

Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google’s search results for “Facebook login”. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think that this is the new Facebook login page.

It’s funny, yes, but it’s a fascinating glimpse at just how confused many people are about how web sites and browsers work. They don’t use bookmarks, they don’t type “facebook.com” in the location field. They just Google for whatever they’re looking for and assume the first result is correct. All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple — if anything it’s probably still too complex.

For myself, I have to pick my jaw up off of the floor after having read some of the comments on the ReadWriteWeb article in question. Here are a few goodies:

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.

Posted by: John Blair | February 10, 2010 9:47 AM

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!

Posted by: Nicole Gray | February 10, 2010 9:54 AM

I was just learning,why would you mess it up?

Posted by: Richard Gordon | February 10, 2010 10:13 AM

wtf is this bullshttttttttttt all about. can i get n plzzzzzzzzz

Posted by: M arvin Scott | February 10, 2010 10:17 AM

And just to change it up, a voice of common sense:

This is what happens when people use Google to enter sites instead of typing it on their address bar…

Damn you all Farmville users…

Posted by: Rodrigo | February 10, 2010 11:57 AM

Now, I try to avoid belittling the intelligence of others — karma and such — but sometimes it needs to be mentioned. It’s also moments like this that I come to understand certain things about the world, like how Bush got elected not once, but twice, or the Tea Party movement. But that’s starting to go on a political tangent.

Let’s just leave it at this: the collective unintelligence of humanity does nobody any favours.

True to what I said in my previous blog post, I’m rolling out some updates. The first of these is adding the Disqus commenting system! Now, any article you go to will allow you to comment as a guest or by using one of many different formats: Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID.

If anyone is jumping on the “read the Torablog!” bandwagon already (AKA myself and my mother… maybe?), feel free to use the system to let me know what you think.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball grabbed a quote from the folks over at the Official Google Blog:

Google:

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

The Google blog post itself is titled “Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network” and is Google’s first foray into the wide world of network infrastructure. The claimed goal is “to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone.”

I just finished a post jabbing at Google’s recent “hand in every pie” mentality, but this is one experiment I think is really great. Why? Because Google’s entire business is reliant on a fast and open internet. Youtube, for example. Increasing download speeds means people can view video faster, which improves the experience of watching video on the web. That translates to additional page views, which in turn translates to increased AdWords revenue.

This is one of those scenarios where “what’s good for Google is good for us.”

Well, as you may or may not know, Google has recently announced its latest creation: Google Buzz.

There’s plenty of buzz about it on social media sites like Twitter, but I’m stuck here wondering, as though I’ve seen something like this somewhere before. Oh, of course! Google Wave. You know, Google’s attempt to re-invent email, which hasn’t exactly taken off like some people expected.

How is Buzz similar to Wave? Well, Buzz is essentially transforming Gmail into a Wave-like platform, minus what seems to be the widget flexibility and real-time document collaboration that Wave has. In that regard, Wave is more powerful and Buzz is more similar to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Which, to me, pretty well describes Buzz: an addition to transform Gmail from a powerful web-based email application to a Wave/Facebook/Twitter hybrid. It’s Wave-like in regards to focusing around — and adding on to — an email-esque application, Facebook-like in regards to keeping in touch with friends and posting content such as photos and video, and Twitter-like in regards to pushing out status messages and updates to everyone. Yet it doesn’t do any of these particular things as well as each individual service, in my view.

With services like this and Wave, both of which are restricted to an enclosed environment (either requiring Gmail or Wave’s proprietary messaging format, respectively), and random ventures like the Google phone (which has had its own problems), I’m starting to wonder what they’re thinking over at Google HQ. It’s almost as if they’re trying to get a piece of every pie available and making it proprietary to them, instead of focusing on just a couple of pies and doing great there. The last thing I want to see is Google going the way of Microsoft. *shudder*