Beta
JamLegend is Free Online Guitar Hero!
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | Beta, Games, Music, WebApps | 1 Comment
Like Guitar Hero but wish you could play it at work without your boss catching you air-guitaring in the break room? Now you can with the recently opened beta online game JamLegend.com!
Pretty much it’s guitar hero meets the keyboard….even allowing you to change up which keys are assigned to which strings, enable or disable having to strum & it even gives you the option to disable 3+ note chords (for the weaksauce soft-rockers). They’ve come up with a way where you can use your keyboard (this is where a wireless keyboard is strongly suggested) similar to how you’d hold the console-version plastic guitars….though if you’re at work I would recommend you not playing in this fashion as it may draw unneeded attention from coworkers.
You can play against the computer, be auto-matched against another online player or even challenge other users and friends to duels/showdowns (A duel lets you take a high score and challenge a user to match or beat it, a showdown allows for real-time multiplayer matches). In addition to achievements there are levels, XP earned/lost as well as a rapidly growing list of songs. Want to hear the song you and your drunk friends recorded on the site? Not a problem – they’re actively seeking new material, all the artist has to do is fill out a short form agreeing to allow their material to appear on the site.
Already have a guitar controller and want to use it with JamLegend.com? No Problem! They’ve got a wiki with instructions for how to use your Wii, PS2/PS3 and even Xbox260 controllers with your computer….so if nosy bosses aren’t a problem feel free to rock away on your fake plastic guitars against other online players in a fight to top the charts as the JamLegend superstar!
Anyhow, there you go – the latest site to take up all the time I should be spending on writing new posts…Enjoy!
Send out your business card via SMS with Contxts.com
Monday, March 30th, 2009 | Beta, Business, SMS, Unusual, Utilities | No Comments
Here’s something cool a came across the other day, it’s a service that will send out your business card via SMS message on demand. That’s right, for any time when you’ve either been caught without a business card or just want sure your number got entered correctly into their phone, this is for you. It’s still in beta so features like having your own user profile are not yet enabled, but the good news is that it’s free while they’re still working out the kinks.
Here’s how it works, you setup whatever information you’d like to be part of your digital ‘business card” and then you’re done. Really, that’s it to participate in this program. And it’s free.
To send someone your business card via SMS, you either tell them to send a txt with your username to 50500 or you can do it yourself by texting “send 3034759204” to 50500 with the 3034759204 being the your new friend.
I can’t imagine sending a potential client or business partner this as a way of contacting me after our initial meeting, but as far as getting your phone number and a brief self-written bio into someone’s phone, this could be great for any after-hours networking.
go check it out for yourself while it’s still free – http://contxts.com
Send Free SMS Messages Through Gmail
Thursday, December 11th, 2008 | Beta, News, SMS, Software Update, google | 1 Comment
Here’s a new (err..somewhat new) feature for Gmail that has just been released via Google Labs, Free SMS messaging to any phone in the United States through it’s integrated chat feature.
To send a SMS message to one of your friends (or enemies, whichever you feel like reaching out to), just enter a phone number in the search box at the top of the chat window found in the bottom left hand corner of your Gmail interface and select “Send SMS.” Once you’ve entered in a phone number for a contact name, it is automatically saved, meaning you’ll only have to update phone numbers once.
Currently it’s only being tested on US-based cell phone carriers, but hopefully this will be expanded as the ‘kinks’ are worked out of the system.
They’re not the first online chat service to offer this type of free messaging, but hey, one more feature for those of us who use Gmail/Gchat regularly is always an added bonus!
Once you’ve added the SMS number, chats through the service appear in the same interface anyone familiar with the current Gmail chat service will recognize:
Top 15 Twitter Power User Tools
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | AIR, Beta, Hack, RSS, Tools, Twitter, Utilities, WebApps | 2 Comments
With the hundreds of Twitter applications, websites, bots and scripts out there designed to do just about everything under the sun for you and your Twitter account, I decided to compile my own list of the top 15 Power User Twitter Tools that really provide the most value. Speaking of which, if you like this list or feel that something is missing from it, follow me on twitter – @brentter and let me know.
This is my latest addiction. It’s a free service that sends you an email update whenever someone un-follows your twitter account. I don’t know why, but I figure they send you an email when someone starts to follow you, they might as well send one when they leave.
Pretty much this is Twitter for those of you with too many ‘groups’ or followers. It lets you break down your ‘tweets’ into separate feeds that you determine. These can be based on a specific topic, affiliation, location or any other attribute you manage to dream up. It’s also an Adobe Air desktop application that’s still in beta, so there are a few bugs from time-to-time.
Here’s a service that tracks all the links posted on Twitter and ranks them based on the number of recent appearances. There are then many different filter options you can run on the list to narrow it down and even an export function to grab it as an RSS feed.
Twitterfeed takes any RSS feed and posts it to your twitter account. Made specifically for auto-updating your twitter account every time you post a new entry on your blog, Twitterfeed can easily be used to post new entries from in just about any RSS feed (i.e. baseball scores from espn.com).
Now here’s a unique new service that’s still in beta and aimed at those trying to utilize Twitter as a marketing tool. With EasyTweets you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule future tweets (i.e. special announcements), post items from your RSS feed and more. It’s still pretty new but is shaping up to be a great utility for managing your brand identity on Twitter.
#Hashtags are a way to automatically add your tweet to a specific category, for instance lets say I wanted to create a single location for anyone to be able to add to and see what’s being said about NYE09 on Twitter. I would just go and create the hashtag #NYE09 and anytime that a tweet contained #NYE09, it would automatically be added to the hashtag.org website. The beauty of this service is each hashtag has its own RSS feed and usage statistics. To start using hashtags all you have to do is follow @hashtags and anything with a # in front of it will be added to that specific group.
These aren’t really a ‘must use’ but they are pretty neat. They’re icons that twitter accepts as valid characters in tweets. To use them, just copy and paste the desired icon into your message box and voila!
A free collection of unique background patterns for twitter. Pretty cool designs to choose from created by the folks from olivemanna.
Here’s a service that lets you email twitter updates to your account as well as gives you the option to have all your twitter replies emailed back to you.
Here’s a cool new service that monitors keyword density on twitter to show us what the ‘Hot Trends’ might be, or at least what is the most popular topic. It’s updated every 20 seconds and also has a widget & RSS feed for your own personal use.
Here’s a brand-spanking-new service that lets your monitor/track twitter for up to three separate terms in real-time. It also lets you narrow the results based on the users location. RSS feeds available as well.
It’s a URL shortening service that also lets you track how many times people click on your link. Works with both Twitter and FriendFeed.
This is a cool little tool that lets you compare trends in Twitter through a variety of different graphical methods. It also has the latest “Hot Before” and “Hot Now” terms sweeping across the Twittsphere. This may look familiar because it was used a lot to show the difference in social media mentions that Barack Obama received compared to McCain in the last few weeks of the election.
Graph your Twitter stats including tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and your reply statistics.
Twitter Search (formerly Summize)
Real-time searching of what’s being said on Twitter. Each search provides it’s own RSS feed along with the ability to search for specific users (i.e. @brentter). Formerly known as Summize, it was purchased by Twitter earlier this year. One more thing to note, it auto-updates with each new addition your search.
So, what do you use to manage your Twitter account? Tell me on here or by following me at @brentter on Twitter.
Just Released: Google AdSense for Online Gaming
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | Beta, Business, Games, Marketing, News, google | No Comments
Google just announced the release of Google AdSense for Online Gaming. It works pretty much the same as your pre-existing AdSense program, where you place video, image or text ads within your application/game and it displays contextually targeted advertising based on the surrounding content.
From the official Google AdSense blog:
You’ll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over. Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you’ll also see contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information.
Now if you’re a budding flash developer, don’t go getting your hopes up just yet – in order to be eligible for this beta program your games must have a minimum of 500,000 “game plays” with at least 80% of the traffic originating from the US or UK. If you fit the mold, here’s a direct link to the application.
So far there are only three marketers listed as partners on the info page: Sprint, Sony Pictures and esurance. I’m sure it won’t be long before that list starts to grow, the publisher round-up is already full of major players in the online game realm: ArcadeTown, Konami, Armor Games, Boonty, Demand Media, Heavy Games, Grab.com, Mochimedia and cafe.com.
This move was inevitable for Google seeing how they recently acquired Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising startup based out of the San Francisco, CA area.
Surprisingly, they already have a “Success Story” listed on the about page for social networking game developer Playfish. These guys primarily produce games that you can add to your Facebook or MySpace profile, so it’s a ‘little’ deceiving in nature.
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