Brand loyalty doesn’t mean much for social networking sites, according to a study from Parks Associates, which found that many users alternate between the likes of MySpace and Facebook.

Half the users surveyed regularly use more than one social networking site, while one in six users have three or more accounts.

Fickle users and recent strides by Facebook to open its network, have cast doubt on the future importance of MySpace, which currently dominates a field in which rival Facebook has seen an explosion in registrations.

“MySpace is, by far, still the most popular social network,” Alex Burmaster of Nielsen told The Times. “However, if last month’s growth rates were to remain consistent, Facebook would catch MySpace in September.”

As the battle for social networking dominance heats up, both MySpace and Facebook are looking for ways to attract and, more importantly, keep users on their respective sites. Both firms have expanded relationships with developers to create user-pleasing applications.

Anti-Piracy Gang Launches their own Video Download Site to Trap People

Media Defender, a notorious anti piracy gang who have worked for the MPAA, RIAA and several independent media production companies, just launched their very own video upload service called “miivi.com”. The sole purpose of the site is to trap people into uploading copyrighted material, and bust them for doing so.

Read more | Digg story

Recently Google Maps has made it possible to drag the “blue line” to change your route. This is excellent news for all of us sending friends and family a nice little link that explains how to find our house/cottage/work etc.

Follow this Google Map link to see what I mean, and change the route to (drag the blue line) anywhere. Not only can you change the directions (avoid toll roads, known traffic jams, road work etc.) between two points you can also move the start and end point to the exact location (as Google Maps doesn’t always know where your house number is…) from where you want people to start and end their drive/walk/ride.

Probably the best map tool available on-line today. Very impressive!

Just a few hours ago I updated PHP from version 5.2.2 -> 5.2.3. Excluding the time it takes to download and unpack the latest build it took me less than half a minute to complete the update.

Note! These instructions are only applicable if you are running a local web server on Windows AND followed my instructions on how to install PHP5 on windows.

Full Page Test – How it works

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.

Simply type in the URI of the web page you want tested on Pingdom Tools full page test tools page.

You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to for example a CSS file.

Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

This Full Page Test was inspired by the OctaGate SiteTimer. We liked what they did and wanted to take the idea one step further.

Note: The current version doesn’t load objects included in JavaScripts. There’s also a limit on the number and size of the objects that are loaded (to prevent the tool from downloading movies, for example).