The times they are a changin'. From here on out, personal thoughts, ideas, and posts will land here at me.raddevon.com. My former blog is now devoted to tech, the Internet, and gaming. Check that out at raddevon.com.
Google Reader is a fantastic app. It is the perfect way to wrangle all those cool web sites your following into one easy location. I am able to take in far more information much more quickly and efficiently than I could by visiting each individual site. Google Reader also offers a sharing feature that allows user to easily broadcast their favorite items to other Reader users in their Gmail contacts list. Recently, Google added the ability to provide notes making the sharing even more robust. However, I now find myself re-sharing friends items with replies to their notes or my own notes or even e-mailing them a story they originally shared to give my two cents. As is the way of the web, there is a better way to carry on a conversation surrounding web content… and you don’t even have to ditch Google Reader to get there!
I have only recently noticed this although my experience with Twitter has been fairly limited until the last couple of weeks. It appears some devious spammers have learned of sites that track the number of times a given link is posted on Twitter (see Twitturly among others) and are taking full advantage of this by spamming their own links on the service. The Twitturly feed, which has mostly served as a fast-track for links that will soon appear on Digg and Reddit, has recently been hit with a number of links to a site that asks for your e-mail address in exchange for secret hints on how to last longer in sex. Personally, I find the Konami code has been the only secret I have ever needed in any walk of life (up, up, down down, left, right, left, right…).
I want to like Twitterrific so badly because it is obviously a Mac-native app. It is gorgeous. It has cool notification sounds when someone tweets. There are also some problems. I can’t look at a single individual’s tweets within the interface. I can’t follow people from within the interface. I can’t easily switch between the public and my own timeline.
I want to like twhirl so badly because it has nearly every feature of twitter.com and then some. The aesthetics are not at all shabby. It has great notifications. I love the added picture and url shortening functionality. There are some problems. I can’t get to the public timeline at all. It stops responding at all from time to time. I would prefer it on the menubar, or, at the very least, the “Hide when minimized” option in the preferences should work!
I’m on something of a twitter kick today. This site takes your twitter username, looks at your location and current friends, and suggests new friends for you to add. It’s very cool and accurate!
