You will see there are two options on this page. One for “More Options” that allows you to change to a different payment option and another to use your “PayPal Credit Card” to do this payment. First, lets try to click the “More Options” to change the funding source for our payment. When you click this, the following PayPal screen comes up:

Of course, this page is totally useless, clicking on “Click Here to Retry” doesn’t help at all either. It jus brings up the same page over-and-over. You would think that E-bay would have tested this feature before they launched their new checkout process. Of course, they probably don’t care, and probably prefer to only get money direct from your banking account so they don’t have to pay any fees. Remember, this feature has been broken for several days now, and nothing has been done to correct it.

Now, lets revisit the original E-bay checkout screen and this time try to change to “PayPal Buyer Credit”. This should use my PayPal credit card which I received over a year ago and I’ve already used to make purchases in the past. This should work right? Just click the link that reads: “Switch Now to Use Your PayPal Plus Card”. So when I clicked this button (and I have tried this around 20 times so far already on different days with different browsers and different computers), I get:

Okay, great, it looks like this is working, should be smooth sailing now right? So, I click continue to finalize my payment and up comes:

Thanks a lot E-bay. Once again, you’ve proved your incompetence. I’ve always been dissatisfied with your service, because of your wreckless price gouging of your customers and endless fees and upsells. It turns out your service is not worth my time, and I have vowed never to use your services ever again. Your multi-billion corporate greed, has finally destroyed you and you will rapidly decline over the coming years just as Yahoo has fallen to Google.

I encourage everyone to flee from this sinking ship before it screws you over and steals all of your money like it did mine (that’s a topic for another day). I am developing a free auction site available at www.goswap.com which provides a free auction service for everyone. What E-bay has done is appalling and an insult to the world.

Social networking has been growing at an exponential rate. Initially made popular by teens in high school and students in college, it has grown to encompass all demographics. It has also been helped by the popularity of blogging, and to a lesser extend, Wikipedia. Many schools have configured their Internet filters to block these social networking sites because their systems are intended for educational purposes and not socializing.

Given the price paid by Microsoft, the total estimated worth of Facebook would be around $15 billion dollars. Not bad for a company started by a 23 year-old only 3 years ago. The application that Facebook has built is simple and easy-to-learn. It makes it easy for anyone to create a profile and connect with their friends. Although instant messaging and e-mails also accomplish the same goals, there is something special about putting yourself out there for the whole world to see.

Part of the deal that Microsoft made with Facebook allows them to partner on advertising displayed on the site. Microsoft will manage the ads and split the profits 50/50 with Facebook. This is a pretty sweet deal for Facebook, since the Microsoft advertising machine can get some high paying clients and allow Facebook to focus on serving their community. Only time will tell if Facebook can stay on top – if the history between Yahoo and Google is any indication, being the first to market is not the most important criteria for success.

The application installs as a plugin to the Mozilla Firefox browser. Once installed, it provides a link to your notebook in the status bar of your browser. Clicking on this will give you a veiw of your notebooks and notes. If you keep large size notes, you will need to maximize the window which will basically show the notebook in your browser window. You can add, edit or delete notes from your browser without having to load the Google Notebook web page. This is definitely useful for maintaining a contact list with addresses and phone numbers.

As a programmer and web developer, this is a handy tool to store commonly used code and algorithms. The systems allows you to setup multiple notebooks. Within each notebook, you can define multiple headings. Unfortunately, they do not let you define nested headings. I’m sure that Google will fix this shortcoming very soon.

The Ajax interface is pretty slick. “Edit” and “Delete” buttons appear over a note when you move your cursor over it. As you move out of the note, they disappear again. There is also a handle that appears to the left of the note which allows you to move the note to a different position within the notebook. The edit controls allow you to change font family, color and size. You can also do bold or italicized text. I’ve noticed they also allow you to indent text using the tab key (in a basic textarea input, the tab key moves you to the next input on the form).

One bug that I did manage to find was when I went to color a section of text within a note. It worked the first three times or so, but when I went to change the color again, the application notified me that I need to select a section before setting the color. This despite the fact that I had already selected the section. I tried reloading and repeated these steps a number of times before finally giving up.