Archive for January, 2009:
Random Connect Observations
It’s been a slow news week. Usually, I have a few topics on deck that I can fall back on, but the well is really dry for me this week. Anyway, I’m waiting to blog about Clayton’s Oracle People iPhone app, which is ever-so close to getting approved for mass distribution. Drop a comment with [...]
Things about Me Meme Comes to Facebook
My wife and several of my Facebook compadres have engaged in the latest version of the “things about me” meme. Only this time, it’s 25 things and 25 people. You may recall about a year ago, I started up a version of this meme, a.k.a. blog tag, with the eight things/eight people format. If you [...]
Now We’re on FriendFeed
Disqus announced an integration with FriendFeed today. We’ve used Disqus for a while here and were early FriendFeed adopters. I like both services but have struggled to keep up with comments on FriendFeed that apply to posts made here. The FriendFeed plugin was great, but that stopped working a few months ago. So, the news [...]
Posting to Twitter, Take 2
Last week, I started posting tweets to theappslab Twitter account. That didn’t last very long. The plugin I used stopped working shortly thereafter; initially, I thought it might be a conflict with TweetSuite, which I’ve found to be disappointing so far (and have turned off, for now anyway). But even with TweetSuite out of the [...]
Connect’s Third Version Launches
On Friday, Rich and Anthony updated Connect to what we’re calling 3.0, or that’s what I’m calling it. The UI has changed from blue back to white, and the main navigation is now on the left, versus on the top. Maybe you recognize the UI; remember when we showed off some mockups back in August? [...]
Welcome to White House 2.0
The shelf-life of this post is rapidly fading. I would have blogged it sooner, but Paul wanted real work out of me this week. So, hey we have a new president here in the US of A. I loathe politics. So for the most part, I’ve tried to stay clear of all that ruckus since, [...]
Social Hacking is Primetime
No sooner had the ink dried on my post about tweeting with care, than my feeds yielded this post from TechCrunch. The short version is that a phisher hacked into some poor dude’s Facebook account, then whipped up a friend-in-need story and tried to sucker one of his friends into sending money using FB chat. [...]
Tweet with Care
This post features 95% more obvious than your average post, and as usual, insert Twitter disclaimer here. Obvious Point 1: Twitter is growing fast. According to Mashable (data from Compete), Twitter grew 752% in 2008 in terms of daily unique visitors, rising from about 500,000 uniques in January 2008 to 4.43 million in December. And [...]
Volunteering Geeky Skills
Yesterday was “a day on, not a day off” for many of us; then, President-elect (today, President) Obama called on Americans to serve their communities on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. A friend of mine here in Portland, Nate Angell, organized a geeky volunteer day, called Day On about a week ago. The twist, this [...]
Posting to Twitter Now
Twitter isn’t for everyone. So, if it’s not for you, stop reading now. Recently, I created an account for this blog; if you want to follow, it’s theappslab, natch. Not sure why it took me so long to do that, but it’s there now. So, the obvious follow up question was what should we do [...]
More Ubuntu Adventures
I’ve been following a story that came out of WKOW 27 the ABC affiliate in Madison, WI. The headline WKOW uses, “Woman blames Dell for missing online classes”, doesn’t accurately reflect the crux of the issue. Slashdot boiled it down as “Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes“, and story is called “Ubuntu Causes [...]
Washing Machine Hack!
As mentioned recently, I love geeking out and have a list of projects I’d like to work on, given the time. In comments, Matt threw out a bunch of his own to-do projects, and professed his affinity for “mating the physical world with the interwebs”. You’ve probably heard about the plants that tweet by now. [...]
Use SMS to Set Your TiVo with Kwiry
But I’m a bit scared to try it out just yet, since I’ve no idea how many text messages my iPhone plan has. I’ll back up; I read (and shared) this post from my pal Rick Turoczy (@turoczy if you’re into Twitter), about Kwiry, an SMS service that allows you to program your TiVo using [...]
Add TweetSuite to Your Blog
By way of Mashable, comes a nifty Twitter+blog integration widget from Dan Zaralla for WordPress blogs, TweetSuite. You should stop reading at this point if you’re sick of hearing about Twitter. OK then. TweetSuite allows you to track tweets about your blog posts. How you ask, since most links on Twitter use a shortening service [...]
Connect API Goodness
As you probably know already, Connect is our internal social network. It’s been around a while, and we’ll soon be launching a UI redesign, as teased late last Summer. In the 18 months since we launched Connect, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of social data about people: their profiles, avatars, work experience, personal interests, and [...]
My Favorite Reply-All Storm Yet
Not much content here, but I had to share this story because it’s one I’ve discussed in the past. The headline from the AP: “Reply-all e-mail storm hits State Department“ If you don’t feel like clicking through, this is one you’ve probably experienced. Someone sends an email (in this case, a blank one) to a [...]
Which Operating System Would You Have Your Child Use?
Herewith a post about parenting… This morning’s NYTimes has an article about Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. For those of you who follow Ubuntu and Shuttleworth, the article is nothing new… just talks about Shuttleworth’s desire to displace Microsoft in the OS war. However, it did get me thinking about my history with OSes. When I [...]
What’s Your Next Project?
Initially, the title was “What’s Your Next Geeky Project?”, but I’m interested to know other projects too. I’m a DIY guy. I like messing around with stuff, figuring out how to do things and learning new (ahem) skills. Most of my projects involve computers because that’s where most of my skills are. I tinker around [...]
Mix Adds Account Merge
Just saw a post from Tim over at the Mix blog, and it looks like they’ve rolled out some new stuff to Mix. Nothing terribly noteworthy, except for the long-anticipated ability to merge accounts. In the past, we had several requests to merge the accounts of people who had left jobs and wanted to bring [...]
kthxbai, I just deleted 99 of your twitter friends
No really, I just did it. 99 of your closest friends, if you have that many, are gone. Go ahead and check…I can wait. Well, not really, if you are logged in to your twitter account through your browser right now I could have. Ajaxian had an interesting article on everyone’s favorite microblogging site today. [...]
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