I accidentally noticed a neat feature in Gmail the other day.
If you hover over the sender of an email, you get a little pop-up. For example, hovering over the Netflix Receiving sender give me this pop-up.
Then if you select More -> Recent Conversations:
It will show all of the emails that you have sent to or received from that person/company.
Pretty cool. As you can see from the screenshot, it is simply prefilling in a search query with the email address you were hovering over as both the sender and receiver. I’m not really sure if this is a new feature or just a new for me because I never noticed it feature. Either way, I’ll be using it pretty frequently.
Did you know that you can watch a bunch of NBCs programs on your computer? I used it after watching the first season of Heroes on DVD a couple weeks ago to watch the first couple episodes of season 2 so I could start watching the shows live.
There are a ton of things that I love about watching the shows on their website instead of TV or waiting for the DVD.
Better picture quality. We have old school analog cable. The picture seems to get worse by the week. Maybe I need a new cable cord. The picture in the browser is crystal clear.
Fewer commercials. An episode of 30 Rock has 3 commercial breaks. Each commercial break has exactly one commercial. Sweet. I can sit through commercial breaks that short without even really noticing them.
Works on Firefox. Without any warning or complaints or hiccups. Good job NBC.
Can watch whenever I want during the week. I’m not sure how long shows stick around but at least a few weeks. So instead of trying to decide whether to rush the kids bedtime so I can watch the beginning of Heroes, I can put them to bed and then watch the episode anytime during the week. And I don’t even need to remember to record it.
Free. Unlike the DVDs.
One thing that is not really a complaint but kind of bizarre is that each show is sponsored by someone. Lipitor in the case of the episode of 30 Rock that I watched the other day. Each and every one of the commercials was the exact same commercial. It seems like advertisers would do better to have a different ad for each break. A little variety to keep people from glossing over. 3 Lipitor commercials instead of just 1 that we ignore at least 2 times.
Mahalo started up recently. If you haven’t heard about it, it is Jason Calacanis’ most recent way to make a fortune on the internet.
It is a human-powered search engine. Mahalo has real people decide what should show up when somebody searches for a term like Playstation 3.
If they haven’t built a search results page for that search phrase, they give some suggested search results pages they have created that might be similar and then list results from Google for the actual phrase you were looking for. You can see it for the phrase “be a good dad“.
It is a pretty interesting concept and could be a pretty interesting resource if they can get enough good people to build the results sets.
It is interesting and fun. I don’t expect it to change the search world but who knows.
It is in alpha right now. That’s not even beta yet. Calacanis posted a couple Tweets asking for somebody to create a Mahalo.com Wikipedia page since his kept getting deleted.
Apparently, somebody was able to get it done.
Since when did Wikipedia become a press release site for alpha websites. Silly. Sad.
I love the Twitter Maintenance picture. It’s very cute:
But seriously. Could somebody take the screwdriver away from the cat so we could all get back to being social. I see more of that cat these days than the site itself. On the plus side, this must mean Twitter is either doing some stuff or is about to need to do some stuff to increase capacity. I would go look for their blog but unless it was related to the bit of sloppiness a few days back, they don’t mention anything else.
After my recent post about being frustrated with the ads at StatCounter and their prompt handling of the situation, I though I should write a post about why I have stuck with them for over 1 1/2 years.
I love the front page of the stats. I love seeing all of my sites and the stats for the current day, previous day, current month and life time total. I haven’t seen that global network stats snapshot on any other package.
I know that might be a pretty strange reason to prefer a stat program, but between that and the very intuitive (for me anyway) navigation between the various reports, everything just feels very easy to use.
I also like how easy it is to set a cookie with one click that will make StatCounter count your own pageloads.
And now I have another reason. They care about their customers. For a company as popular as StatCounter to not only see my post complaining about something but also to care enough to ask for more information and then take action based off of that makes me feel very good as a StatCounter user.
Little things like that go a long way.
Update: There has been a very prompt resolution to the problem below. When I originally made the complaint I expected StatCounter to have been aware of all the ads that they serve. Apparently that isn’t the case. But Aodhan from StatCounter managed to find this post and ask for some screen prints and source code when I sent it to him, they agreed that the ads were bad and apologized about it on their blog and removed the ad. Very impressive quick reaction to something I posted on such a small blog. I also happened to see a different, non-expanding ad for SuperPages that must have replaced the one I show the screen shot of below.
Thanks StatCounter.
I’ll start using their forum if I see something like that again now that I know that it might make a difference.
I’ll leave the original so that everybody can see what happened and how quickly they responded.
[Here is the start of the original]
I am so sick of the little expanding ads that expand right over the stats on the report screens of StatCounter. When I click the close button for the ad I am way up in the upper right hand corner and when I move back toward the stats section to click on a link to a different report, the ad expands again.
I’m all for big ads, annoying ads, flashing ads, whatever on a site providing a free service. Ads don’t really ever bother me. But when the ads start to physically inhibit my ability to use the site, I will start getting annoyed and looking for other services. I’m actually already getting similar stats from a few other places (FeedBurner, MyBlogLog, Performancing (testing and just never got rid of it) ). I also hated the ads StatCounter had that started talking to me loudly when the page loaded.
I already quit using ESPN because I do not like their ads.
Update: Here is a screenshot of the ad that is annoying me. Aodhan, I’ll send this and the source code to your email:
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 tried Twitter a little bit. I still don’t get it. It reminds me a bit of when I tried MySpace and eventually realized it just was not worth my time.
Twitter only really seems to have four functions and none of them seems worthwhile to me.
- Tell random snippets about what is going on in your life. - I have email. I have a blog or five. I have a phone. There are plenty of ways for me to tell people about what is going on in my life.
- Promote your blog. I read this post over at Mashable poking fun at Twitter being the evolution of the cat blog. That’s pretty funny and probably true for a lot of people. Then there was an update with a link to the Mashable Twitter account. I clicked over to read about how the Mashable cat was doing. Instead I found a whole bunch of links. Most of them are TinyURL links. I clicked a handful and they all redirected back to the Mashable blog. If I want to read Mashable, I’ll just subscribe to the blog, thanks.
- Link repository - Some people use it as a place to dump links to things they find interesting. This is probably the most compelling reason to follow somebody Twittering. Some people find some pretty interesting stuff on the internet.
- Mix of all of the above - I did find some people that were Twitting about their personal life, providing links to their own posts, and providing links to other stuff.
In the end, I decided it was not for me. I wonder what the next Web 2.0 craze will be.
After getting some semi-bad directions from MapQuest and after a few bad experiences getting directions from Google Maps, I had an idea for a little Web 2.0 mashup type thing.
I would like one or both of those sites to let users tag spots with information like where construction begins and ends, where directions are wrong or awkward, suggestions for better routes, and major landmarks. They could indicate the user notes with a special flag that could be clicked on the view the notes.
I don’t get into a lot of social features on website because most of them do not provide a value to me but I would really get into letting users tag maps.
Does anything like this exist yet? If not, please consider it an open request.
I signed up for Twitter just to see what it is all about. It didn’t really sound that interesting to me at the time and after looking at it for a week or so, I still don’t really get it.
It’s kind of like chat. It’s kind of like blogging with a very severe character count restriction.
It doesn’t really feel that social.
It seems more like a spot to stand up and shout short vague comments to the internet. There doesn’t seem to be a good way for people to respond to those comments which is where the real magic could happen.
It might be interesting if I had more friends and they were all pretty active but the thought of just letting me shout 140 characters at a time and listen to other shouts without a good way to reply to them just seems a little under whelming to me.
If you want to be my friend and show me how to make it more interesting, my Twitter ID is BeAGoodDad.