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The Digital Hotlist 2009

Jason Bean — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:29:00 +0000

2009 will go down in history as the year everything at least seemed to change if it didn’t really change completely. It’s become a new world for many people with lots of change in a variety of areas. Perhaps the one thing that still remained the same is that the web is still almost central to much of what we do.

MediaWeek has released their 2009 Digital Hotlist that covers just what has been happening in the world of the web and technology.

Facebook – up from #2 on the list in 2008. This site is larger in population than most of the other countries in the world. I used to think Facebook would be replaced sometime by something cooler, not so sure now.
Hulu – I’ve been using this more to get some free entertainment. I’ve spoken with a number of people who are debating getting rid of cable/satellite and just relying on sites like Hulu and others for their entertainment fix.
Twitter – I think maybe I liked it more when there were less celebrities involved in twitter, but I’m still addicted to this 140-character micro-blogging tool.
Google – it’s Google, what else needs to be said?
iPhone – I still don’t have one, trying to figure out if I’m upset about it. Is there an app for that?
Huffington Post – lots of left-leaning news is getting more popular these days and they’re expanding their topic base to more than just politics.
Bing – it’s not a search engine, it’s a decision engine and lots of people have decided to really give it a try and have liked it.
Wall Street Journal web (www.wsj.com) – do what? a newspaper that’s still making money online and off? What are they doing right? It appears everything.
Federated Media – keeping advertising interactive and relevant, all those eyes watching the other 9 sites are worth a lot of money.
Addicting Games – I’m not playing many games these days other than Bubble Breaker and Farm Town. Maybe I should join the millions of other users having fun here.

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John Hodgman a.k.a Mr. PC’s Blog

Jason Bean — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:14:39 +0000

If I say "Mr. PC" most people would know who I’m talking about immediately. If you don’t know who I’m talking about then you probably don’t watch TV or keep in touch with the Apple vs. PC. commercials.

Mr. John Hodgman is more than just the PC guy in the commercials. He’s actually quite the intellectual and comedy writer. If you visit his site you can read lots of his opinions on everything you can imagine.

Before he went on television, JOHN HODGMAN was a humble writer, expert, and Former Professional Literary Agent living in New York City. In this capacity, he has served as the Humor Editor for the New York Times Magazine, Occasional Flight vs. Invisibility Consultant on “This American Life,” Advice Columnist for McSweeney’s, Comic Book Reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and a Freelance Journalist specializing in Food, Non-Wine Alcohol, “Battlestar Galactica,” and most other subjects.

John shares interesting videos, thoughts on various technology news and developments and general current event thoughts and ideas.

If you’re on twitter, you can also follow John at twitter.com/Hodgman.

So, quite your stereotypical thinking and listen up to someone who’s interesting, funny and down right famous!

Visit Mr. Hodgman and read the areas of his expertise today.

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ReadTwit – RSS Feeds From Your Twitter Feed

Jason Bean — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:40:00 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about RSS Bankruptcy and how I didn’t think I would ever keep up with all of my RSS subscriptions. I’ve spoken to a number of people that have started to rely on twitter to get their notifications of what’s happening on the web and what they should be reading.

The ReadTwit website taps into your twitter updates and posts and grabs all the links from your updates and puts them into an RSS feed. You subscribe to the feed and now you can catch all of those interesting websites and links in your preferred feed reader.

The ReadTwit service pulls in all the links shared from anyone you follow and updates the feed. It removes duplicates, which can be helpful as we all know when something gets popular on twitter. ReadTwit also resolves all the URL shortening services that are used as well.

If you’ve got some people you follow that you don’t seem to ever enjoy the links from, you can filter out any of those people you want from the feed. You can also decide to filter out links using hashtags or collections of hashtags if you desire.

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Twimailer – Finding Out More About New Followers

Jason Bean — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:15:08 +0000

I’ve been using a new twitter service application called Twimailer now for a little while. It’s one of the most useful services related to twitter that I’ve come across in quite awhile. There are other nice applications for getting stats and analyzing your twitter use, but for regular information, Twimailer exceeded my expectations.

Normally when you get a new follower on twitter, you’re just given the person’s name with an announcement that they’re now following you. Twimailer gives you a history of the person’s last handful of tweets, their bio and following/follower count.

I’ve been using the service now for a few weeks and am continuing to enjoy it.

If there were one thing I’d like to see them do is to allow me to follow them by clicking on the "Follow" link from within the email. Right now clicking that link just opens the user’s profile in your browser and then you have to click the "Follow" button on the twitter site itself. Normally I just use the "follow username" syntax in twhirl to get the results I want.

Continue reading to view a video explanation of how Twimailer works in your Inbox.

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IMO.IM – Bringing IM Clients Together Online

Jason Bean — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:33:00 +0000

There seems to be quite a bit of development going on in the Instant Messaging arenas on a variety of different fronts. You’ve got your individual clients that are always releasing updates. Third party clients that aggregate the individual platforms to a single interface and buddy list. Then you have the website applications that aggregate the individuals to a web page interface with no software to download.

imo.im is the latter and have provided a very simple interface to combine your IM clients onto the web. I tried it out and it does a good job of quickly connecting to your accounts and displaying your buddy lists.

imo.im brings together all the major platforms and has just released the ability to pull in Skype contacts as well, which is a big plus in my opinion.

April 20, 2009 – Palo Alto — imo.im is a free online service that aims to make online communication more intuitive and accessible. It couples voice, video, and text chat capabilities with the most popular instant messaging protocols. Currently in alpha stage development, the startup has released an update that introduces major new features and makes imo.im one of the only multi-protocol instant messaging services to offer Skype support.

In addition to Skype, MySpace Chat support has been added in the latest release. Voice and Video capabilities are now also functional on all supported networks–AIM, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, MySpace, Skype, and Yahoo. No download or registration is required to use the service, and multiple accounts on different instant messaging networks can be linked together to one sign-in.

Language support has been expanded as well, through imo’s user-driven translation program launched in April 2008. With this system, imo now offers language support for Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Macedonian, French, Turkish, and more.

Finally, eight new features have been added giving users the ability to:

Star favorite buddies for easy reference

Upload and view buddy icons

Search for offline as well as online buddies

Change how a buddy’s display name appears in the contacts list

Move buddies between groups

Block and unblock buddies

Set yourself as invisible upon login

Voice and video chat with anyone

For a comprehensive list of imo.im features, please visit the imo.im website at http://imo.im/features.html

About:
imo.im (http://imo.im/about.html) is a web-based multi-network instant messaging service. It lets users IM chat with buddies on AIM, Google Talk, MSN, MySpace, Skype, and Yahoo simultaneously. The company was founded by Georges Harik (co-developer of Google’s AdSense technology), Ralph Harik, and Praveen Krishnamurthy in April 2007.

My personal preference is a separate application if I’m running on my own computer. I currently use Trillian Pro by Cerulean Studios, however sites like imo.im come in very handy when you need access to your IM Buddy Network, but aren’t on your own computer.

I’m still waiting for the application that will combine IM, Skype, Facebook, twitter and other social media sites into one interface. Now THAT would be nice.

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Uncovering Your Tracks

Jason Bean — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:39:29 +0000

Sometimes uncovering all the cool stuff on the web means you sign-up for a lot of sites to give them a try, only to realize later that you’re really not interested in maintaining your profile on those sites. The challenge can be trying to get rid of those profiles on sites you’re not interested in using anymore.

Photo from stock.xchng

There’s a very helpful article on the PC Magazine website on How to Delete Accounts from Any Website. The article runs through the process of getting rid of your profile on one of 23 different websites: Classmates, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, MyLife, Amazon, Audible, Blockbuster, eBay, iTunes, Netflix, PayPal, Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, AOL/AIM, Apple MobileMe, Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo.

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Digg Adds New DiggBar Functionality

Jason Bean — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:35:53 +0000

Digg.com has had its share of media exposure both good and bad. I’ve never been a huge Digg.com user, but will Digg pages that I find interesting and I think about it. I’ll regularly Digg stories from friends as well, but not blindly, only after I’ve read them and I think they’re worth Digging as well. That little process has been a bit clunky in my opinion, but Digg.com has made a change/addition that will make it a little easier.

Snagit of Digg.com New DiggBar

You can click on the image above to see the full-version and notice the new Digg bar that they released that makes it easier to Digg articles that you’re reading and spread them to other social networks as well.

My challenge is that when I see the article on Digg, I click on link to the article to read it outside of Digg before I decide to Digg it again. Now, with the Digg bar, it nicely appears at the top of the original page and let’s you see lots of details about it. I can Digg it, post it to my twitter or Facebook account, or email it to anyone else I may want to share it with. All very nice and useful. If you don’t like it appearing, you can just click the close “X” on the far right and be done.

Perfect implementation. Perhaps even better is it’s not a new toolbar or something else you need to install. It just appears when you click on an article that’s already been Dugg. Nice and clean. Almost self-explanatory. Perfect.

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What Sex Is Your Brain

Jason Bean — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:50:11 +0000

I had the pleasure of meeting a new person today and was checking out his Patio Genius blog and twitter feed. One of the links he shared was to this site to run a test and see what the sex is of your brain. We ran a poll awhile back and spotlighted a site that would let you know if you browsed the web like a boy or a girl. I love personality tests, so thought this was pretty interesting.

What Sex Is Your Brain?

Image: Snagit from website survey

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wasoverheard – I hear funny people

Jason Bean — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:04:23 +0000

It’s not much to look at, but it’s hilarious to read through the site and hear the statements taken out of context that people have overheard.

The site was developed by Mark Jaquith one late night at the b5ranch during SXSW 2008. There was an ongoing joke where various people would say things that were funny through the week and we’d keep repeating them. The best is when the statement had some additional meeting when you removed the contextual statements surrounding what was said.

The wasoverheard site works in conjunction with twitter. All you have to do is follow @wasoverheard on your twitter account. Then, when you hear someone say something funny, you just tweet it to @wasoverheard anonymously.

So, your twitter udpate would look something like:

d wasoverheard @bnpositive I hear funny people

If you don’t include the person’s twitter name the statement will be attributed to “someone”.

If you find someone really interesting that always seems to put their foot in their mouth you can see all of their statements by entering their twitter name as a sub-domain path:

These things are always more interesting when you’re with a bunch of friends that also twitter. You know, at things like conferences. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more action on the site during Blog World Expo next week.

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Who’s On Twitter

Jason Bean — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:25:09 +0000

If you’re new to twitter then I probably should direct you to another post about what the site is about and what you can achieve with using the site. It’s much more than just finding out what everyone is having for lunch or dinner.

If you’re not new to twitter then you’re probably interested in finding some other great people to follow.

Fluent Simplicity has put together the Twitter Brand Index, quite a nice listing of companies, organizations, executives and politicians that are on twitter.

If you need some more twitter fodder to follow, just check out the Twitter Brand Index.

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