One of the many reasons Facebook is better than MySpace

I hate MySpace.  Absolutely hate it.  It’s nothing but a spam-invested, pre-teen, time vacuum of a website.  Facebook is much more mature, in my opinion.  A nice, clean interface that isn’t hideous, but is informative.  I have never had a spam message or friend request on Facebook.  Never!  With MySpace, I get about 4 bogus friend requests and/or messages a day.  It’s ridiculous.  That’s why I almost never go on MySpace.  Here’s a screen capture of my friend requests.  Ridiculous!

It never ceases to amaze me how many scantily-clad women want to be friends with me.

Technorati Tags: facebook, myspace

WordPress Facebook App

Thanks to Robert Scoble, I just discovered that there is now a WordPress Facebook app.  That means I can show all my blog posts on my Facebook page as well.  Previously I had been using the Notes app to pull my blog’s RSS feed into Facebook, but this is a bit nicer.  Sweetness!

Sorry for the lack of posting…

I haven’t been posting on here much lately, and I think there’s a reason why.  It is very uncommon for me to have a full and cohesive thought that is worthy to post here.  That was in the past many of my posts have been short pieces of drivel that no one is really interested in.  Many times I just enjoy posting a funny clip that I know my friends will appreciate when no one else does.  Actually, why don’t we just get that out of the way right now:

Ok, I’m glad I got that out of my system.

Lately I have found Twitter pretty engrossing.  Blogging is awesome, but Twitter allows me to quickly throw up silly little thoughts I have, or things that are happening to me right now.  For example, I just bought concert tickets online and got raked over the coals by TicketMaster.  That sort of pissed me off, but it wasn’t worth writing an entire post about on the blog.  Instead, I posted my quick gripe on Twitter.  Twitter is quick and easy, and I can do it right from my Firefox side bar using the TwitBin extension instead of having to go the actual site every time I want to post.  Additionally, thanks to the Twitter Facebook app, all my friends on Facebook can see what I’m up to automatically.  Their mobile site is very usable from my Motorola Q as well.  I can check it out and send updates from there, or just use my old phone and send an update via a text message.

So if you ever decide to check it out, check me out.

Technorati Tags: twitter, blogging

Remember the Milk

I wanted to let everyone know about a great website that I think could be useful to a lot of people.  It’s called Remember the Milk.  Remember the Milk is a task management site that utilizes some pretty nifty Web 2.0 features and reminder applications.  It has a whole slew of uses, for example:

- Let’s say you’re married but normally one person does the grocery shopping.  If you’re like me, as you go through the week you think of things you need to pick up at the store, but you aren’t near the notepad on the fridge at home to write it down.  Enter Remember the Milk.  It’s great for grocery or other shopping lists because you can add things wherever you are, and you can share lists with another user (e.g., your spouse).  That way you have one master list that is accessible from wherever you are (more on that in a moment).

- Let’s say you’re a person and you have a crap load of bills to pay.  Some are due at the beginning of the month, some are due at the end, and some in between.  Remember the Milk makes it easy to create a list of your bills and their due dates so you never forget when you have to pay something.  If you do forget, Remember the Milk will send you incessant reminders until you get it taken care of.  Also, all tasks are able to be set to recurring so they’ll all pop up again next month for you.

- Let’s say you’re married and have household chores that need to be done every week.  Remember the Milk lets you make a list for that too so you won’t forget to vacuum and have your wife pissed at you.

- Let’s say you’re a mid-20’s white guy with very little rhythm who enjoys playing the guitar sometimes.  You’re driving to work in the morning and hear “Meet Virginia” on the radio and think to yourself, “Hey, that’s kind of a catchy tune…I should learn how to play that.”  You can quick grab your phone, make a list called “Guitar”, and add “Meet Virginia” as a task so you remember to learn that song at some point.

In terms of interaction, Remember the Milk offers you a whole variety of options.  Obviously you can get at via the web, but they also have a mobile site that is fairly slick.  You can add tasks via email, via a Firefox bookmark that opens in your sidebar, or the latest addition, via Twitter.  You can also set yourself up to receive reminders via all of those services.

Obviously there is a crap load of other stuff that you can do with Remember the Milk, so you should just check it out.  I’ve only been using it about a week, and it’s already making me more organized.  This morning I got a text message on my phone telling me that I had to buy Toby Keith tickets for the wife today.  Done and done!  Now when I go home tonight, everyone will be all smiles.

Technorati Tags: remember the milk

Another (more useful) use for Twitter

Today I just noticed that Newark International Airport is a Twitter user.  That means you can get up to the second info on delays and such via Twitter.  Genius!  Check it out here.

On the way to work this morning, I was actually thinking Twitter could be useful for traffic updates.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be driving to work in the morning and get a message from a fellow commuter saying there’s an accident up ahead and to take a different route?  Now, I know that radio stations have traffic updates every 10 minutes or so in the morning, but I still think it’d be cool to have up to the minute updates generated by other users.

Technorati Tags: twitter, ewr, airport, traffic

Twitter Followup

In a follow-up to my post on Twitter the other day, check out Robert Scoble’s rundown of Twitter and a few other Twitter-like services.  I think it might make more sense than what I wrote.

Technorati Tags: twitter, scoble

What exactly is Twitter?

You may notice the right side of my blog now sports my Twitter RSS feed, but you may be wondering, what exactly is Twitter?  Some have called Twitter a “micro-blogging” service.  Basically it allows users to go on and update their status for other users to see.  Think of it as a more encompassing IM away message.  Once you update your status, your friends are notified (if they choose to be) of what you’re up to via an IM message, text message to their cell phone, or simply by viewing your page on the web.

Instead of having to go to the Twitter website every time you want to update your status, there are several easy ways to do it, both from the computer and on the go:

- You can send updates to Twitter via a cell phone text message
- You can send updates via an instant message from all manner of IM clients
- Twitter now has a Facebook application, allowing you to update your status from within Facebook
- You can get a Firefox extension such as TwitBin to update from within your browser

I think it’s a really ingenious way of keeping you connected with people.  Say you go to see Transformers and think it’s freaking sweet.  You can send a quick text to Twitter like, “Transformers is freaking sweet”, your message will get sent to your friends via their medium of choice (web, IM, or text message), and they will then know that Transformers is freaking sweet from an authoritative source.

Twitter is also fairly customizable in that you can send Twitter messages to single individuals, decide how and when you want to receive messages, and put Twitter into “sleep” mode to stop receiving messages for a certain period of time.

Twitter is quick and easy, and it helps to keep people in touch.  If this post has persuaded you to try it out, feel free to add me as a friend by visiting my Twitter page.

Technorati Tags: twitter, twitbin, facebook, micro blogging, firefox

Some Friday Entertainment

This one is dedicated to Looe Baker.  Here’s a YouTube clip I found from the 2005 Keenan Revue.  For those of you non-Domers out there, the Keenan Revue is an annual variety show put on by Keenan Hall at ND.  It’s usually pretty funny.

The video itself is pretty funny, but you had to go to ND to get the punchline at the end.  If you watch it and have no idea of the allusion that the sketch is making, see the second video (a music video) and then it should make more sense.  For even more fun, try and synchronize the two together.  Play the top one until about the 3:05 mark, and then start the bottom one.  Pretty funny.

Enjoy!

Social Cameras

Dave Winer has a cool idea for a “social camera“.  It’s kind of a neat concept, really.  I wonder if anyone has made something like this.  One concern I would have is keeping people from passing off pictures I took as their own.  What would be really cool is if it could somehow be integrated with Flickr.  Your camera would store your Flickr info in the file’s EXIF metadata so that if you transferred a photo to someone else, the file would have your info embedded in it.  It would help prevent you from uploading the photo without proper attribution to its true owner/author.

I’d also want an easy way to choose which photos I wanted and which were trash.

Wouldn’t it be nice to go on vacation and get some pictures of yourself without having to ask some stranger to take a picture of you with your camera?  Someone smarter than me, invent this, please!

Technorati Tags: winer, social camera

Flock

Since I’m a big time lover of Firefox, yesterday I decided I would give Flock a try since I’ve heard so many good things about it.  Well, you know what?  There’s not really an easy way to get my Firefox bookmarks into Flock.  What’s the deal with that?  The two browsers are built on the same architecture and you can’t move bookmarks between them easily?  That’s ridiculous.

Flock has some cool features, including integration with WordPress (and other blogs), Flickr, and deli.ciou.us; but I’m going to stick with Firefox.  To me, the combination of extensions ScribeFire for blogging, Flickrfox for browsing Flickr in my sidebar, and Sage for RSS reading beat out anything Flock has to offer.

Technorati Tags: flock, firefox, flickr, scribefire, wordpress, bookmarks

Ballhype is a cool site

Attention sports fans: check out Ballhype.  It’s a Web 2.0 sports site that I’ve been playing around with this morning that is actually very cool (thanks as always to Techcrunch for linking to it).  You can join and set preferences for what you’re interested in.  Then you read through sports news stories and interesting links float to the top based on voting (think digg for sports). 

For example, I’ve set my favorite teams to “Notre Dame” and “Cleveland Indians“.  I also added “Charlie Weis” as one of my favorite coaches.  That way I can just view stories relating to those teams.  If you’re interested in a sports as a whole, you can view stories about the NFL, NHL, or whatever as well.

It’s a pretty cool site that I recommend checking out if you’re at all into sports.

Technorati Tags: ballhype, sports, news, site