Opera has just launched Opera 10.1 Beta, the popular browser for smartphones, for Android.

Opera 10.1 Beta for Android brings several improvements to the browser such as pinch zoom, visual tabs, SVG support and Opera Turbo which compresses web data on Opera’s servers, speeding up browsing and saving you bandwidth.

You can grab Opera 10.1 Beta for Android from the Android Market or at http://m.opera.com/next

The browser wars are really starting to heat up, with Internet Explorer 9 beta to go live within a few weeks, Google just releasing Chrome 6, and now Mozilla that released Firefox 4 beta, one can’t but wonder who will take the crown of these next generation browsers.

As Google has done with Chrome, Mozilla has also gone and altered the look of Firefox 4 by moving tabs right to the top of the screen giving it top visual priority and modifying the default navigation icons a bit.

Apart from the changes in looks, Firefox 4 also features synchronization, allowing you to sync all your browser setting, passwords, bookmarks and open tabs across multiple devices. Managing tabs also got allot easier now that Firefox 4 allows you to drag and drop tabs in a manageable group that you can organize, name and arrange.

Under the hood is where it matter most for Firefox 4, the browser now allows you take advantage of your graphical hardware by rendering pages making use of Direct2D by default and with support for DirectX 10. Mozilla also introduced a new Audio API that exposes the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in HTML5 making it easy for developers to use JS to read and write audio data.

HTML 5 support has also been souped up with a brand new HTML 5 parser giving full support for web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling in Firefox 4. Also support for CSS3 features like Transitions and Transformations makes it easy to add elegant animations to Web pages.

All in all Firefox 4 beta looks set to become a great browser, lets just hope Mozilla has sorted out the high memory usage that made usage of previous versions of their browser unbearable for me. You can grab yourself a copy of Firefox 4 beta here.

Just now when I logged into my Twitter account via the web I was greeted with the following screen.

I am now part of the Twitter Retweet beta group. This means I will now start to see retweets in a new way on the web. Retweets will no longer contain the RT prefix but will contain a new special icon as displayed in the screen above and a Retweeted by description below the tweet.

My tweets now also contain a new retweet link next to current reply link.

If you are on twitter why not follow me here

In my previous post I discovered that Amatomu was in the process of upgrading to beta version, so here is the official statement of what is happening and what happened.

It’s bad news, good news and better news for Amatomu users. Let’s start with the bad news first.

We dropped a lot of hits over the past two weeks due to some hefty fiddling on the back end of the site. These hits will not be coming back, and they have affected rankings. If you’re missing hits, we sincerely apologise.

The good news is that hits are once again being accurately recorded – more accurately than ever before – and the rankings have restored to normal.

The better news for our bloggers is the reason behind the fiddling. We’ve been hard at work, rebuilding Amatomu from the ground up. You may have noticed in the past that Amatomu wasn’t the fastest site on the Internet, even with 60 minute cache times and a dedicated server.

So we’ve rebuilt it on CodeIgniter (which is what we use for mg.co.za), and spent sleepless nights pouring over every technical aspect of Amatomu. No Sql query went unoptimised. We’ve moved servers and Amatomu is now spread between Afrihost’s dedicated box and shared space with a new M&G virtual server sitting on IS architecture.

The performance differences are staggering. Before, we had to cache for up to an hour to keep Amatomu up at all. We’ve now dropped caching, and are serving live data. If you refresh your page you’ll see things change.

We also used to process the stats in batches. That meant you could only see stats that were at best three hours old, and some that were a day or more old. Now, all stats tracking is live. If you’re on your stats page, click refresh to watch your hit counters go up.

We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the stats are more accurate than before. You’ll see a closer correlation between Amatomu and server-side stats.

We’re also much more aggressive at fetching your RSS feeds. We used to only be able to get to each feed once a day. Now, we’re fetching them all in just over an hour. That means you won’t have to sit around waiting for your post to pop up on Amatomu.

We’ve also given you the ability to tell Amatomu to go fetch your RSS feed, and we’ll tell you if we’re having a problem getting your feed.

There are a few other subtle improvements – you can retrieve lost passwords (finally), and we’ve changed the tagging system so that you can drill down to people or companies. Logging a hit is down to around 300ms – that means there’s very little speed impact on your blog. And we’ve officially changed from “Alpha” to “Beta” phase.

We’ve also aggressively culled some blogs from the site. Sorry if one of them was yours, but please have a look at the T&C’s as we’re going to be a lot stricter about these.

The best thing about the new platform is that it gives us a lot more freedom to innovate and add new features going forward. Let us know what you’d like to see in the future, and any bugs you find on the Beta.

Kind regards
The Amatomu Team

This from Amatomu

Amatomu one of South Africa’s blog aggregators has just been taken out of Alpha phase to Beta.

I spotted this just a few minutes ago after checking some stats and suddenly getting a error page. Maybe this can contribute to the fact that my blogs have been losing some ranking due to the fact that the rss feeds haven’t been updating, some even behind with as much as 4 days.

Amatomu is not my favourite blog aggregator due to the fact that it has allot of issues with the site and at times speed is slow making pages load forever. Afrigator on the other hand has a more better algorithm for sorting blog ranks.

I must still investigate whats new in the Beta version of Amatomu, but now again the site has almost no response and giving database errors, this could be due to the fact that they are upgrading the system. Lets just hope for a better ranking algorithm to match that Afrigator has.