Murdered Fail Whale – Twitter Unleashed
Monday, July 28th, 2008 | Twitter, computer graphics | No Comments
For all the Twitter fans…. a murdered Fail Whale.
Courtesy of Nick Bilton.
Identi.ca ‘dents’ vs. Twitter ‘tweets’ – Twitter Wins Again
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | AIR, Beta, News, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | 2 Comments
Many different services have been touted as the “Twitter replacement” recently, including FriendFeed, Pownce, Plurk and even the Google-owned Jaiku. All enter the scene with much fan-fare, typically gaining temporary popularity as Twitter users migrate over to check out the new service, ultimately returning to Twitter after giving up on having to build a new community/following. So far FriendFeed has been the closest in becoming a viable alternative to the ever-growing Twitter community in that it allows for users to comment and track posts to a variety of different social media services (including Twitter). It’s basically a way to combine all your social-media/blogging habits into one stationary form for easy cataloguing of conversations. Conversations? If you’re like most people, upon reading that word you are either scrathing your head or are skipping the rest of the post to hit the “Post Comment” button – Twitter doesn’t allow for traditional “conversations!” Well, I hate to admit this, but FriendFeed enables you to not only hold a conversation by pinning all related comments to a post, but also export them in a variety of ways including a custom RSS feed. Because of features like this, bloggers have been continually talking about the merits behind FriendFeed vs. Twitter. When Twitter goes down, people scamper over to FriendFeed…when they succumb to information overload, they scamper back to Twitter. Now there’s a new dog on the circuit – Identi.ca.
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AT&T Allowing Home Activation For New iPhone 3G!
Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Apple, Business, News, Twitter | 2 Comments
Contrary to what AT&T and Apple have both been telling everyone, some stores are quietly selling iPhone 3G’s to customers and telling them to activate it at home via iTunes. A massive server overload this morning has rendered Apple’s Activation Servers useless at this moment, however representatives from Apple have already acknowledged this and are working to get them back online.
Until the activation servers go back online, anyone trying to purchase a new iPhone will find out that they have a “bricked” version – only allowing for Emergency calls as it will not have been synched with the wireless account.
Users trying to upgrade their 1st generation iPhones or iPod Touches will also “brick” their device, making it useless until Apple fixes their servers.
News of this, along with updates from stores all across the country, has been widely talked about on Twitter.com. A quick and easy way to search through ‘the noise’ on Twitter is to use a free service called Summize.com. Summize enables you to easily search for specific topics and arranges them based on the time/date that they were ‘tweeted.’ For example, to see all the messages posted to Twitter regarding the iphone activation servers, search on Summize for “iphone + activation.”
Apple should have been able to predict that there would have been a heavy strain on the servers with thousands of users trying to register, synch, and activate their Apple products simultaneously. This makes you think twice about using Apple’s server hardware in any production environment….bad move on their part.
Flash Files (.swf) Now Searchable!
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | Adobe, Business, News, SEM, Yahoo, google | No Comments
Adobe has just announced that they have teamed up with Google and Yahoo! to help improve the way in which search engines catalogue .swf files.
According to their press release:
Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what’s inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.
Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are possible only with Adobe Flash technology without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community, which will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.
This is BIG news to put it lightly. Flash files have always been partially searchable via Google, but now there is no doubt as to what content is picked up by the spider. This was a great move on Adobe’s part, most likely fueled by growing competition in the form of Microsoft’s Silverlight. See, working in an open-market does have it’s benefits!
Get Your Very Own Personalized Firefox 3 Certificate
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 | Marketing, News, Promotion, Random | No Comments
Firefox 3 was released with much fan-fare last week, including a marketing campaign from Mozilla to set a new record for “most software downloads in 24 hours” in the Guinness Book of World Records. According to their “World Record FAQ,” they hoped to beat the number of downloads that version 2 of Firefox saw, which was 1.6 million. Well they’ve recently updated their “Download Day” site, indicating that in the 24-hour time period after publicly releasing the new version, the software was downloaded over 8 million times. Since then they’ve counted over 20 million downloads and that’s just from their official site (due to server lags, the release was quickly put up on private mirrors, so the real download number will never be known).
Want to celebrate your participation in this event? Why not (other than for the obvious reasons)? Mozilla now lets you print out your very own “personalized” Firefox 3 Download Day certificate by entering your name on their “Flaunt It” portion of the website. Click on the image posted above for an example of what it looks like (it will open in a new window). Now you can be the envy of your IT staff… this will surely show them you’re hip to the latest software releases and maybe they’ll show you how to install that cool screensaver you’ve been having trouble with!
Sooooo corny… but i couldn’t resist.
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