With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

I first started using Firefox with version 0.7, then still called Firebird, but I’ve actually been using the Firefox Nightly builds for a long time (version 11.0 currently). Occasionally an update will break something, but they’ve been pretty stable for me. These would be the equivalent of Chrome’s “Canary” builds.

There’s always the “Aurora” builds (version 10.0) which aren’t updated quite as frequently, and should be stable, if you don’t want to be quite so bleeding edge. These builds contain features which may or may not make it into a future final version for testing. The equivalent of Chrome’s Dev channel.

Then there’s the beta builds (version 9.0), which will eventually become the next final version but will likely have a few minor bugs left to iron out or improve before the final release.

I know there’s now also a Firefox for Android available which I haven’t actually tried out yet. I don’t really use my phone for browsing the web but must get around to trying this out at some point.

• Latest stable Firefox (version 8 )
• Firefox Aurora & Beta (versions 9 and 10)
• Firefox Nightly (version 11)

• Google Chrome Release Channels – Stable, Beta, Dev, and Canary.

I arrived late to the Facebook party, but it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends, and hear how old ones are doing that I don’t get to see anymore. Indeed that’s why I finally signed up, to view and comment on some photos an old school friend had shared.

Twitter I was even later to get into. I just didn’t get it at first, why would people limit themselves to just 140 characters for “status updates”? Now however, I use it a lot, mainly to keep updated on Formula 1 news, some musicians, and a few other interesting people.

Which brings me to Google+. In contrast to the others, I signed up to Google+ as soon as I could get an invite. I’ve done so with every other new Google service (still waiting on Google Voice coming to the UK!), including the not so successful ones (Buzz, Wave). First impressions are very good, but it’s still early days of course. The web interface and Android mobile app are very slick, but there’s some notable features missing. Searching posts, for example, seems an odd omission for a search company, and it makes finding people with similar interests etc. on there difficult (I know there are third party search websites already but that’s not the point). Google also still hasn’t released an API yet, to allow other applications to integrate Google+ posting, which is much needed.

It seems I’m pretty typical of Google+ users right now; technically skilled early adopters. As such the people I’m following are mainly tech geeks or blogger types. Some of these I’m already following on Twitter, but who are posting more in-depth blog type articles or information (or animated cat gifs!) on Google+. There’s some really interesting insights, and it makes a nice change from the Farmville and inane drivel of Facebook.

So to sum up my usage…

Facebook : Keeping in touch with friends.
Twitter : Keeping up to date with motorsport news and people more famous than I.
Google+ : Keeping up to date with tech/news insight.

Will I keep using all three? Probably, although I can’t see me posting much on Google+ right now. Do I think that all three can survive separately? Yes.

I don’t see Google+ replacing Twitter, both have a place and serve different requirements in my opinion. For quick and timely updates Twitter’s 140 characters limit is advantageous, however they have been introducing some rather unpopular changes to the web interface to try and keep up with other social features. I find it interesting that these days breaking news seems to “break” first on Twitter, and its power to influence people is incredible.

Can Google+ replace Facebook? I don’t know. It provides a lot of the same features, improves on them, and leaves out the crud (yes I know games are coming but they shouldn’t be as obtrusive). Part of me wishes that everyone would just move from Facebook to Google+, but the rest of me thinks it will be better without all the unwashed masses joining and potentially spoiling it. Facebook has around 750 million users, how can anyone hope to compete with that kind of head start? If it were anyone else, I’d say it was doomed to fail, but the Google beast is huge.

This brings me to other social networks, is there still room for anyone else? I think so, if they cater for a niche market. MySpace seems to be hanging on in there for new bands and musicians, but I think this will ultimately die, it just doesn’t have the 750 million people potential audience of Facebook. LinkedIn I think is a great idea and lots of people have probably found it very useful. It’s supposed to be the social network for business contacts, but for me it hasn’t been of much use so far. I see too many people cross-posting from Facebook/Twitter what they had for breakfast etc. and it seems to be full of job agencies offering me completely unsuited jobs to what I do for a living. I think LinkedIn are missing a trick here, they are surely in a much better position to offer job agency services to businesses themselves.

So what about any others, Beebo, Diaspora, Identi.ca, Heelo, and a number of other small sites no doubt springing up every day? Doomed to fail I’d say, I can’t see anyone else coming along offering something suitably different to Facebook/Twitter/Google+ now, and even if they do I should imagine one of those three will just implement their own better version, or buy up the new start-up.

What about blogging? I’ve read reports of blogging decreasing in recent years, but again this isn’t really something I’d gotten into, or know much about the different services. I can see Google+ being used more as a blog for some people, but again in that regard it’s still missing some key features. It may perhaps in time become more popular than Posterous or Tumblr which, from what I’ve seen, seem to be a small simplified blogging platform? I’ve never used them so not really sure.

There will also always be a need for people to have the flexibility of a dedicated blogging platform that they can customise like WordPress, Blogger, and the like, or indeed their own website. Indeed this rambling gives me chance to try out a few things on my own site with WordPress and syndication out to social networks.

So there’s a few of my thoughts, now what do you think?

This year there seemed to be less “classic” (the 50′s-60′s stuff), and more “vintage” (pre-WWII stuff) which was a bit of a shame. I don’t know what the problem with the Lotus 51 was, but I really wanted to see that one run

I’ve added a selection of my photo’s from the day here, but I have a load more.

So, new version of WordPress installed, and now to figure out how to use these fancy CMS things…