After a comment from Maria asking me not to give up on Twitter, I decided to add a couple more friends and try using TwitBin which I learned about from Kent Newsome when he said:
This is the application I’ve been looking for to make Twitter use more integrated with my browser.
I like the plugin quite a bit. It lets you view all of the little (what would they be called, twits?) twits from the public pool or just your friends.
My only complaint is that when you click on the links from those individual twits, they always open in the current window and the current tab. I’m not really sure why a Firefox plugin would not interact more friendly with the Firefox tabs.
But there is good news. The feature will be added soon.
I did notice something about Twitter itself that seems like it has changed recently, too. I love that. People can still post links to there own stuff, but it should prevent a little bit of spam.
Maybe Twitter can be the place to post life fluff like I thought MySpace would end up being.
I am actually shocked at how much I dislike myFeeds, the new “Social Newspaper” from Adobe. It apparently is supposed to use some magic voodoo to sort through feeds and then you tell it what kinds of things you like and it will present them for you.
The interface is bad. The site design is bad. The OPML import just doesn’t work for me on Firefox or IE 6.0.
I do not see myFeedz becoming a regular stopping spot for me. I don’t really need or even want something like this that recommends posts to read based on tags. That might be because if I am going to search for something specific, I will use Google. If I want to find new blogs to read, I almost always do that because I read about them in somebody else’s blog post. For example I found out about myFeedz through Robert Scoble.
So, myFeedz solves none of my wants or needs. Let me know if you find a use for it that I am missing.
I use Gmail for all of my personal email accounts. I also started using Google Docs for all of my word processing and spreadsheet needs and Google’s Calendar for keeping track of where I need to be.
Everything is going pretty well with that so far with a couple minor concerns that I will talk about at the end of my experiment at the end of January.
I read on Techcrunch about a problem a few people had with all of their Gmail emails getting deleted and there being very little possibility of retrieving the lost files.
This is one of my big concerns about storing my data online and using these types of services.
I have Thunderbird installed on my laptop and a copy of every email gets sent there, but if my Gmail account got purged, I don’t know of anyway that I could upload the emails from my laptop other than resending them to myself which would make me the sender of all of the emails. I also don’t know of anyway to setup Gmail to backup files to a independent location.
Google Docs lets you save each file to your local computer and if anything bad happened you could import those files but it appears that all of that happens on a file by file basis. I don’t see anyway to do a mass backup, mass import.
I am much more concerned with data redundancy right now than making sure that the Google Spreadsheet is 100% compatible with Excel. This is my data that I want to use with their service. I know the service is free, but that really isn’t an excuse for providing decent ways of letting me store my data locally and restore those files if something happens to the data on the Google servers.
Tags: Gmail, Google, Google Docs, data cloud
I have an idea for a social networking site. It is pretty niche oriented and would be fun for me to participate in if it existed. Based on another blog that I write, I can assume that I could get around 20 people to test it without any problem.
Unfortunately, despite working as a programmer in my day job, I don’t do any web development. Most of the actual programming that I do is Unix scripting.
I always mean to get around to learning some of the neat web stuff. I always hear about Ruby on Rails, AJAX, etc, but have never even done a “Hello World” with anything more complex than JavaScript.
I thought about seeing if anybody would be interested in working on it as a portfolio builder type of project. I doubt it would be very difficult for somebody that knows what they are doing.
In the end, I decided that I should force myself to write it. But, with the amount of free time that I have to spend on the project, that means it might be finished by 2010 and by then we will probably all be done with the social networking thing and have moved on to something else.
I’ll have to take the kids to the library someday soon and see if there are any good books on web development there to inspire me.
I am not 100% committed to moving everything off of my hard drive and into the magic data cloud. I am much closer to making the move, however.
Earlier today, I was thinking about looking at the online todo/calendar options when I realized that all I really need and want is a spreadsheet that I can use wherever I am connected to the internet. I’m perfectly happy organizing it and tweaking it to fit my wants and desires.
Then, I remember that Google has a perfectly fine online spreadsheet. I have even used them for a couple of quick little projects. They also have a nice little word processor that does everything that I currently need a nice little word processor to do.
So, while I am not committing to moving everything to the data cloud, I am going to start spending a lot more time there.
Specifically, I am going to use Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets to work with my previously mentioned todo list that I need to create and any other little spreadsheets that I want. I am also going to use it to write some short stories that I want to play with and other Word type documents.
We’ll call it an experiment. I’ll see how it goes between now and the end of January and then I’ll review what went right and what went wrong.
Tags: Google, word processor, spreadsheet, data cloud
I was planning on complaining that YouTube needs a little detachable player window that you can easily resize down to only show the video itself.
Before doing so, I decided that I should dig again and see if it existed already. It does.
That little button that I highlighted in red will open a new window that is pretty much just a video player.
So, I am pretty much happy now.
I just wish I understood the picture on the button. I don’t see how that would clue me in that it was going to open a new window that was only a video player. Ever a little message that showed up when I moused over the button would have been helpful.
Also, when I click on that little button, why does it open into a giant window taking up the entire screen. I always resize it down to something about 3 inches big since all of the videos on YouTube look like crap when the are any bigger than that.
Also, it appears that the little button just left of the one I circled will change the size of the video you are watching back to the original size, which always seems to be a little smaller than the default size that YouTube shows. It almost always makes the videos look clearer to play them in that smaller, original size.
Tags: YouTube
Everybody and their dog has AdSense on their websites. Everybody and their dog also has a website stats program that tracks pageviews.
Why is it that nobody seems to have a reliable way of tracking AdSense clicks? The stats programs do a good job of telling us what page a reader came from and what page they went to, but they are all silent if somebody clicks on an AdSense ad.
All I am really wishing to get is information about how many clicks and which page. All of my sites are blogs with quite a few pages. Each ad location on each blog is a separate AdSense channel. So, I end up with about 3 channels per blog. I have learned from this that nobody clicks on the ads on the main page, but the single page and archive pages convert pretty well. But, I have no idea WHICH pages and archives.
For me it would just be for curiosity sake, but with all the money being made through AdSense, you would think that stats companies would be all over providing this information. With all the money Google makes with AdSense, you would think they would be all over helping us publishers figure out which of our pages result in clicks. Is it the post about the crafts that my kids do or my opinion of the defense used in the last football game?
I have seen some hacks that can be installed on the server but they are not things that can easily be set up or they make you wonder if they are really allowed by Google. I tried using Performancing’s metrics for a while and had horrible accuracy with the AdSense stats.
Who does it benefit to not provide that information?
Tags: AdSense, Google, web stats, web analytics
I am getting frustrated with needing to create a new identity for every website I seem to visit these days. Reddit, Digg, Netscape. To participate, you have to create an account including at least a userid, password, and normally an email.
They give the option to include more personal information so that we can all interact on a little more personal of a level with each other.
It would be really nice to have one account that you could use everywhere; kind of like in real life. We do not have to get separate IDs everywhere we go in the real world. If you have a drivers license or ID card, you can use it pretty much everywhere.
This current implementation of the social internet is too much like those stupid cards you need to get the cheaper prices at the grocery stores.
I have made purchases through PayPal in the past without setting up an account. One thing I remember buying for sure was this book. I bought it using my credit card through PayPal without opening an account.
I have a relatively small paying side job where they like to use PayPal, so I finally opened an account. After all these years of knowing about PayPal and how it can be used to buy things on the internet, it took somebody wanting to send me money to convince me to open an account.
I have read some of the negative things about PayPal. It seems like there is a fairly large, vocal crowd that is annoyed by PayPal. You never know if something complaints like that are legitimate or just a factor of a small percentage of a large user base. The bigger the user base, the more people will have a negative view no matter how good or bad the product.
I do plan on using the account to let people send me money, but also plan on transferring that money regularly into a bank account. Banks still seem more reliable and secure no matter what the internet money handling companies try to tell me.
I have a MySpace account that I login to about once a week. I frequently encounter this message when trying to go to just about anywhere.
Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.
Is it really unexpected to the technical group at MySpace? It shouldn’t be. I expect to see it a few times everytime I login.
I’m thinking a more appropriate message might be:
Sorry! the usual error has occurred.
This error has not been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group because if we did that every time we got this error it would crash our email servers.
Cut us some slack. We are huge and cannot possibly have the capacity to handle all the requests that hit our servers.
Hit refresh and everything will probably be fine.