Vine, one of my many web projects, has been a project I’ve been fond of using myself to gather news on certain topics. After a few months of closely looking at how users use the site, I’ve discovered some interesting things, such as which topics gets read the most, how they navigate from topic to topic and other useful tidbits.

The most recent update to Vine was the updated vine theatre for YouTube (obviously beta), where you can watch videos directly on Vine without having to navigate to YouTube.com. The only problem with some of the updates, visual or technical, is that I’ve been neglecting adding more topics, which is essential to the growth of Vine.

And this is where I come across a crossroad, how do I split up topics? Do I go into the niche and drill down, or do I keep to the surface? How many levels of categories should I support? These are some questions that I’ve been mulling over the past few days and have come to a conclusion: Add as many as I possibly can!

To do this, I will have to rework some of the back-end to support larger quantities of information, improvements such as caching data, fluid layout to support larger monitors and a way for me to add topics in a fast and easy way.

During these updates, Vine will be getting a refresh in design but still keep it’s simplicity! If you have suggestions for topics, let me know.

Orgoo is a brand new startup trying to combine a ton of IM, Web and SMS services into a single service. Though it succeeds in bringing them all together, it’s currently limited to what you can actually use. I know it’s still in beta so I’ll let it pass, but they currently only support the bigger IM services, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk and ICQ. They also seem to have neglected social services, such as Twitter and Facebook’s new chat system.

Orgoo’s mail services supports IMAP and POP, so you’ll definitely be able to connect your email. It also allows importing of contacts from Yahoo Mail, GMail and AOL Mail. Though I don’t yet trust them enough to upload all my contacts to their server.

A few problems I have with Orgoo though, is that it’s not an encrypted connection. So the information you’re entering can be accessed by a malicious 3rd party (damn ‘em), so it’s up to you to trust the site or not. My other problem is the somewhat clunky interface, at times I need to click at least three times until I hit the correct spot (you’ll see in the video.) And just the general interface needs to be cleaned up a little and tightened.

I’ve recorded a short video of me going through Orgoo a little. If you want an invite, just comment on this page.

[ Watch Orgoo Beta Preview (.mov)]

So this blog has been running on Wordpress 2.1 for a long while and I haven’t actually upgraded it to the latest Wordpress 2.5. Well, today I did an entire backup of the database running this blog as well as the files, crossed fingers and upgraded.

Everything seems to be normal so far, if you find any bugs please let me know.