There are networks that connect classmates from past education, long lost friends, or even those who have similar interests. Then there are those networks that connect people based on their activities. Twitter and other micro blogging sites allow you to write about any activity you perform throughout the day on their website for anyone to view and follow.

Anyone who has access to your diary (or timeline) of activities can see what you do with your. I guess it is better than having people hounding you and following you around physically all day long. But isn’t there a privacy concern? Who really wants to give or know all this information about a person’s daily life?

You have complete control over what you chronicle. You have control over how much time you spend chronicling your life. You also have the enjoyment or embarrassment of seeing how many people (some you know and some you don’t) are interested in what you do everyday.

Once you log an activity on the Internet, though, it’s up for grabs by anyone, human or machine. Parents can search and read what a child has reported. It may be misleading or harmful to others. Employers can use this information to further evaluate a candidate’s worthiness.

Already have a job? Beware. Wasting company time tweeting or chronicling something that should be kept private within the company could have you facing disclosure issues.

If you have a lot of free time that you want to share a potentially boring and mundane life with the world or read about events in other people’s boring live, it’s jam packed with information to read and people to interact with. It’s an endless mountain of activities that never ends.

Watching television at home is a tradition in American homes. We watch enough television and waste enough time that we take away from other more important activities.

Watching television on the go is an interesting method. Instead of watching a half-hour or hour long show with commercials on the couch, you can download the episode to your mobile device for viewing later.

Depending on the source of the video, you can watch a few minutes at a time, with or without commercials. Without commercials, an hour long episode is just over forty minutes long. Eating lunch? Turn on the iTouch or video iPod and start watching. Waiting at the doctors office? There’s another couple of minutes to watch.

It is amazing how much time we waste when waiting for things throughout the day. Forty minutes is just a slice of the waiting time we waste.

This isn’t an excuse to watch television while driving during commute hours (there’s a lot of wasted time there). Your eyes should be on the road, not on activities inside the car.

There are issues with watching episodes on the go. Unless you download the video at home, you probably need a data plan for your mobile device. If it doesn’t have unlimited data, you could be looking at an expensive first-time luxury.

If data isn’t a problem, there’s the tolerance and patience that is required to watch a two inch screen for long periods of time. It isn’t like the 42 inch television at home. If there are words at the bottom of the video, good luck trying to read them.

After watching television on the mobile all day, go home and read a book instead. Increasing the number of hours you watch television won’t help much.

JavaScript provides so much more functionality than a basic webpage can ever hope to accomplish with a server behind it. With JavaScript, there can be a clock that ticks seconds, you can move objects around a page, or even sift through a group of pictures with cool visual effects.

Once you learn JavaScript and understand the power it has to offer, there is a mentality to use JavaScript all over the place, but never be concerned with the situation of when JavaScript is disabled. There used to be browsers without JavaScript support and it was important to take them into account. Today, most browsers support JavaScript, but mobile devices are in the same situation its older siblings were in.

Even if there is JavaScript support, it’s important to make sure that the web application still functions with some feedback should some external force (such as AJAX never receiving a response) fail. Too often these applications are left hanging with no feedback that anything is happening. This annoyance can cause a user to lose interest and abandon such an application.

Recovery from these issues does take some time to develop, but the application becomes stronger and more robust. If a user is notified to restart the application, the user is given something to do. They know the application isn’t working on something big behind the scenes. Something went wrong and their action is required.

One of the important things to remember is that if a button calls JavaScript, you should dynamically add it with JavaScript to the interface. If JavaScript isn’t enabled, the button will never display, and therefore never call JavaScript that never runs. A user who doesn’t see the functionality will never miss it.

The new Open Social standard was created to help share data among social networks. There are a number of networks today and more growing by the day that track every possible detail of a user. From what a user is doing at a precise moment to what their friends are doing or who their friends are.

It’s a good name for network standard: Open Social. Users of the social networks understand the information they provide is public, and that there is a potential for misuse or other types of abuse. Basically, don’t post anything you don’t want everyone to know about.

Open social opens all this social information to any person or machine that is interested in this information. If you can identify the user (by an id or name), you can gain any information available from the host in a format that is easily parseable. Instead of scraping the host, a request is made and the data is returned in a standard format. No need to pattern match for the text desired.

The thing is that users don’t have knowledge of who is scraping this information. Some websites let users know how many views their information receives, but automated retrieval doesn’t get included in this statistic.

Like all information posted on the web, once it’s published, it is very difficult to retract it. The automated services that scrap this information will be long gone and will assume this information is still public knowledge to be displayed for eternity. A user has no control of outside uses.

When automated retrieval is possible, this consumption of information can be speeded up. The information of thousands of people (through the connections each person has) is possible with a very limited number of links from the first person.

Google was one of the first companies to provide useful maps.  Their click and drag map that seemed to provide an endless map made navigating around an area easy.  No waiting for the page to reload with the map slightly adjusted to the direction you clicked toward.  It must be so successful that many of the mapping companies are using this technique today.

The next challenge was getting directions to a point of interest, but via another point.  This additional point doesn’t necessarily have to be a place.  It could be a road or any location accessible by road.  Google provides a breakdown on the distance, time, and directions from each point to the next, as well as a total of all the legs combined.

Don’t like a particular road?  Drag the line to another road and the directions will adjust and recalculate to a new route including that new point you selected.

Lastly, you can save your map with the points of interest and share it with friends.  Mapping has come a long ways from the old days.

Google also provides a decent mapping application for the mobile.  Using the position of cellular towers nearest your location, Google can determine your location with close accuracy in many locations.  No need for a GPS navigation system when you have your mobile device with you.  As with most Google products, the map application is free of charge (not including carrier charges).

Now you should never be lost unless you don’t have a cellular signal or don’t know the destination you heading toward.  Some things just can’t be solved.