OK - I love Amazon. It's arguably the best online store around - which is why I was very surprised to stumble across this.

Back in February, while regularly proceeding with a check-out on said website, I was asked if I want to join a free trial for something called Amazon Prime. They said that if I do join, they would give me unlimited one-day or first class delivery for free for 30 days. I went along with it. I instantly received a confirmation email about signing up to the trial, skimmed it and moved on. Here's the email in question.

Fast forward to today. I have made at least a couple of purchases in the meantime, and admittedly at some point I was wondering why that trial hadn't ended yet (I kept seeing notices like You're eligible for 'FREE Delivery with Amazon Prime)'. I don't remember receiving any notification emails about this trial period ending so I thought I'd check. All I found, of course, was that initial email - but this time I read the fine print at the very bottom of the email.

Ka-ching! "If you want to continue after your free trial, do nothing. Your membership will automatically continue and we will charge the payment method you used when you signed up £49.00 for the next year and after that."

And then checked my bank statement - and there it was.

All in all, I should've paid more attention to it and I doubt it's illegal in any way. But then again, I just wasn't expecting Amazon to pull off something this low by not being straightforward with what they charge you for (something they're usually really good at). I didn't even get an email receipt for that fee! 

It's just a genuine disappointment from one of the brands I actually used to believe in.

In Behind The Bytes, we peddle completely fictitious short documentaries, looking at the scandalous lives of video game characters, a la the sensationalist nonsense of VH1's Behind The Music. We offer a fresh, and potentially libellous take on the video game characters that we all love, or, in Tails’ case, barely notice.

Amazing project - looking forward to the next ones! They're also on Twitter here.

I got the 'messages' update this morning, here are some first thoughts about it:

• they give you an email address that matches your username - so I have the (quite awesome) mihnea at facebook dot com
• the single conversation thread is nice - but they should also provide an update for the mobile apps
• you can invite friends to upgrade - no idea on how long it takes before it becomes available to them, though

• 
  the best feature I've just noticed (I'm assuming it's activated along with the new messaging system) is a box that now lives in the upper right-hand corner of your profile and only shows updates from pages - needless to say this is great news for any page manager...

I must say I was quite excited to get my hands on RockMelt, the 'social media savvy browser' - here are some first impressions:

• essentially it's Chromium with some very good add-ons
• its best integration is clearly with Facebook - I especially like the shiny Facebook Chat API
• it's stable enough for a beta, although it does seem to slow up my machine quite a bit
• I am quite fond of this approach to a browser, however it needs serious touching up if it's ever going to compete with the big boys
• I am going to keep playing with it, just because it makes Facebook Chat so much better

Is it a winner? Who knows. But it is something slightly different and at least it's giving the other guys one of those "why didn't I think of that" looks on their faces.

At last, long gone is the reign of single-platform instant messaging apps (see BBM, the more recent FaceTime, etc) - or dodgy/late mobile versions of the most popular IM apps (see Yahoo Messenger, Skype, etc) - or even bulky third-party apps that aggregate all of your IM services. For some reason, no one had managed to produce a fully-functional cross-platform mobile IM app - until now.

If you've ever received some seemingly spammy message from one of your friends saying something along the lines of "I've started using WhatsApp and it's great" - you shouldn't have deleted it. Because WhatsApp is actually the first one to actually work (in a very BBM-esque manner).

• it works on every major mobile platform: Android, iOS, Symbian (for Nokia) and BlackBerry OS - I haven't heard of a Windows Phone 7 version yet but I'm sure it's bound to happen pretty soon
• it actually works between these platforms, whether you're exchanging text or photos, videos, sound clips or your location (Symbian doesn't do the last three yet, but that may be due to OS limitations)
• no need for another ID - your username is your phone number and it just cross-references with your phone book to put together your contact list (and thus only people who have your number can see you in their WhatsApp contact list)
• they're very well integrated with each platform
• the developers are very active (I use the Android version and there's an update at least every week)
• it's quite efficient in terms of data traffic - I've been using it heavily for about two months and it has only generated about 35mb of traffic (this includes file exchanges)

Give it a spin now, it's free (update: except for iOS, no surprise there)...

Twitter isn't the only network you should search through when you're tracking your brands, but then again Twitter does have the upper hand in making it all much easier by having scores of third-party apps to help you do just that.

Not anymore - check out Booshaka, a new Facebook search tool. "There's already Facebook search" you say? Well, I ran some comparative tests over the last few days and surprisingly enough, Booshaka did catch a few more posts. It needs more work but it's definitely worth checking out...

(via Noisy Decent Graphics)

Aside from the obvious instant-follower-base-growing factor, I think it's a good lesson on the fact that it's nice to somehow reward your existing followers every now and then...

Feedly, the web's (probably) most beloved not-built-by-Google-but-still-heavily-dependent-of-Google RSS reading web app, is getting a brand facelift - great logo designed by Graham Smith.