It seems to be the week for new changes in online services to be rolled out.  It wasn't more than a few days ago Facebook was bringing out the change to users' Home layout.

Now Google is about to unveil a new module in Gmail.

As this technology article in the Wall Street Journal points out, we can look forward to social media style updates without having to move from our Gmail screen.

This should be quite interesting when you think of all the Google properties which roughly correspond to say, yFrog or Twitvid.   Google already have Google FriendConnect, Picasa, Youtube, just to name a few.  Throw in Google Maps natively there...

According to Techcrunch, what's going to be announced should also make it easier to view media in Gmail.

So will this new form of Google social updates be mainly for all the friends you have in the Googleverse?  Or will it tie into your existing social update sites?

We'll know by 10am U.S. Pacific Time on the 9th of February.  As Mashable points out, tech media have been invited to an event at Google HQ at that time for a big announcement or two.

Now if we could only get Google to announce they've sped up Wave considerably...

My partner was furious that I and her brother had the new Facebook Home layout before she did.  That's how impressed she was with it.  She liked seeing it on my page so much she wanted it too.

It's a good layout choice.  It's cleaner and less busier than it was prior to this. 

Friend request, messages and notifications become icons over on the top left, everything is organised down the left side for your various types of updates, then your applications and finally your online friends.

Over on the top right are the Home, Profile and settings links.

Search is now more prominently featured in the top middle, then underneath are the updates from Facebook friends.  There are two categories of news feed now, Recent and Top Stories.  Nice and effective.

Generally this new layout is a long-overdue feature and makes the home page a better experience.  One would presume that the acquisition of Friendfeed has gone a long way to helping such improvements along, especially the Friendfeed founders' expertise with real-time updating.

Perhaps Facebook should acquire Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington next.

Last week wasn't my favorite time in social media.

Twitter had momentarily lost its gloss, what with DDoS problems, spammers and the usual problems of scaling.  Friendfeed, one of the best social media services, had been sold to Facebook.

It ended up being my quietest week, not just for Twitter, but also for any of my blogging.

On the other hand, like a few Friendfeed users, I spent the time looking at replacements for FF in the eventuality it was one day shuttered.

What I discovered were a batch of new tools which have made for a productive couple of days, even if they don't quite fulfil Friendfeed's esteemed role.

Google Reader is providing a whole heap of news items I can post to Twitter or Friendfeed.  Storytlr gives me a way to aggregate my whole social media lifestream. Streamy gives me some extra news items and a small amount of aggregation.  Finally, the up-and-coming Tumbler brings up a whole new set of options.  It's all got me doing something different from my tweets on Identica. And blogging is back on track with this being my second post in as many days.

So what seemed a bad week became a new opportunity to explore and find something of benefit.

I've noted that a few friends over on Friendfeed have been making similar discoveries.  Google Reader is attracting a few fans amongst the Friendfeeders.

Most of us are still hoping Friendfeed remains in some form or another, because it's still light-years ahead in a lot of ways.  We're prepared if it's not, but it's not like many are suddenly giving up on FF.  It's that good a service that it still provides some great features we're loathe to give up on.

However, only time will tell.

Image courtesy of Ed Wheeler

A lot more is known after Thursday's DDoS attack on Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal.

It is now confirmed that the attack was directed against Georgian blogger Cyxymu.  He himself blames the Kremlin for the attack.  Russian officials were unavailable for comment on this.

Cyxmu himself apologized for what happened, even though he was a victim of all this.

Meantime, Twitter is still experiencing problems.  Attacks still continued into Friday, with the intensity and nature of attacks shifting.

In an LA Times interview, Twitter's service provider explained why Twitter was so vulnerable to the DDoS attacks.

Interestingly, the non-tweeting world thought it hilarious that Twitter users had nothing to do while the DDoS attack occcurred.

• Previous posts on this topic:  DDoS Attack Hits Various Social Media Services

Thursday US time, around midnight to 1:30am Australian Eastern Standard Time, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and a few other services were hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack.

It's now 1:35pm on a Melbourne Friday and Twitter is still showing some signs of being affected.  Facebook, Blogger and a few others have running without as much trouble, but it's making social media difficult today.

It seems the attacks have been targetting one person, a pro-Georgian blogger, across every service he uses.

It's also led to a new symbol of Twitter downtime, the Dead Twitter Bluebird, instead of a Fail Whale (courtesy of iStockPhoto.com)

At the same time, there's also a wave of scam/spam adding to the confusion.

UPDATE 4:40pm AEST:  Some conflicting reports on whether to do with pro-Georgian or pro-Abkhazia activist, also some conflicting theories on what exactly the attack was from a technical point-of-view.

UPDATE 6:00pm AEST:  It is now confirmed that the attack was indeed targetting one man.  Facebook security chief explains.