Earlier this month Facebook added a new feature called “pages” amongst other announcements.

Pages let you do what you’d think: create specific pages on Facebook for all sorts of reasons: business, community, political, artists, schools etc.

The big difference, compared to your profile, is that anyone on Facebook can view complete Pages without having to be added to your network/friends. This then solves one of my Facebook frustrations: the very limited viewing of your profile.

In fact, I think pages are a much better solution, as you can create specific pages for separate needs: I just whipped one up for my Rotary Club.

Anyone can view this page: not just the 40-odd people in my friends list who can see my full profile. It makes a lot of sense!

You can become a Fan of the page, which means (with your permission) you get to keep up to date with what’s happening on that page and you can interact with the apps on the page.

As Ed Dale pointed out in his Facebook video series on his page, there’s no limit to the number of fans (unlike profile friends, which are limited) and they can be added automatically.

Used in the right way, this will make Facebook incredibly powerful: you can broadcast relevant messages to your “fans” — and they are in control if your messages start to get spammy. There’s plenty of viral opportunity here, used correctly, to really help build your network, your online legend/persona and keep in touch yourself with what interests you.

I found a nice little “tutorial” online to activate the Pages feature (not as obvious as you’d think!) — http://www.eironae.com/geekd/2007/facebook-pages-continued/. It only took a few minutes to get it up and running.

Based on this kind of addition to Facebook, I’m more and more convinced it’s a community that will be extremely valuable to all businesses in coming months and years.

According to this tech article I saw in theage.com.au, PayPal has unveiled Mobile Checkout — allowing users with a PayPal account to purchase goods on the fly.

Unfortunately I can’t find info yet on PayPal’s website.

PayPal is reported to have already signed up several partners including Hoyts, Warner Music, Deals Direct, Ready Flowers and Mobile Wine Club… some of which will start offering payments via mobiles today. And within a few months, the service is set to expand to include user-to-user PayPal transfers and payments and donations via SMS.

As the article also reports, combining eBay bidding and buying with mobile checkout means a user could be sitting in their local pub and fully complete an online purchase, without the need for a computer… that’s a great range of additions to online buying options and helps to even further expand the reach of media like eBay and websites for online commerce.

Having just driven around Noosa in Queensland late yesterday afternoon, admiring the beautiful Pacific ocean panoramas, our overnight flight to Perth has landed us just minutes from the Indian ocean (and some rather warm Spring weather!).

We forget sometimes the technology that allows us to spend just 4.5 hours traversing an entire continent, for less than $400 per seat, something of an impossibility (at any cost, let alone at a price affordable for just about everyone) even just 100 years ago.

I still wonder in another 100 years what experiences might be like that are just as “impossible” for us today!

Wired News has reported in recent days of the development of low-cost, low-power computer memory that could make a terabyte capacity thumb drive a reality.

Thanks to a new technique for manipulating charged copper particles at the molecular scale, researchers at Arizona State University say their memory is, bit-for-bit, one-tenth the cost of — and 1,000 times as energy-efficient as — flash memory, the predominant memory technology in iPhones and other mobile devices.

How different that would be — having basically 1,024 gigabytes, or a whopping 1,048,576 megabytes, in a tiny keyring size memory device — compared to say the entire memory of my first computer back in 1989, which came with a (then) “hefty” 20 megabytes of storage capacity (plus two floppy drives).

That’d mean my little usb key drive would be more than 52,400 times bigger than the hard disk on my first computer!

Michael Kozicki, director of Arizona State University’s Center for Applied Nanoionics, says:

the technology can be built from materials commonly used in the memory industry, which should help keep manufacturing costs down.

ASU predict the first product containing the memory, a simple chip, will be out in 18 months. I hope the product matches the “one-tenth” cost claim, along with being 1,000 times as energy efficient!