Easter 2010
Hey folks. For those of you that stop by from time to time, thank you. I do have things to say, but life has taken the spotlight recently. I am very focused on my first, and most beloved project, The Speedzine. At the TheSpeedzine.com, I am blogging and reporting on various motorsports topics and headlines. Doing this, and reporting on the races each week, has taken up a lot of the time I would normally have devoted to this blog.
TweetDeck Icon
With all the social networks on the web today, it is very easy to become overwhelmed by them all. I have accounts with most of them, and I am most active with the same top three that most of my readers are: Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. All these services have a feature called status, to which you constantly update to tell the world what you doing, reading, thinking, seeing, feeling, promoting, wishing for, etc. Since so many of us have so many accounts, various developers have created a barrage of service updater applications to aggregate and push out information. Up until recently, I have been very big on Tweet Deck, but I now find myself using the web more and more instead.
Tweet Deck is one of the largest updaters on the market. With this Adobe Air based application, I can keep track of multiple accounts in Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. I can even stay up to date with my seldom used LinkedIn profile. I can do most everything on Tweet Deck that I can do in each respective service too. However, there are problems. The Adobe Air platform is sluggish. I don’t get the updates in true real time, I don’t view aspects of each post the same way that the source developers had intended, and overall I feel a tad alienated from the experience. I can see how useful a service like Tweet Deck, or HootSuite, or Seesmic can be for someone that is using social networking as a business model, but for me, I find that the only thing I use them for is to update all my profiles at one time.
For that, I am turning to Ping.fm. That’s exactly what it is for. Updating. That is all I care about. For the rest of my social networking experience, I turn to the host service itself.
What do you think? What services do you use? What do you think about the third party applications vs. the service’s main website? Tell me what you think and post bellow.
Clean up your Twitter Lists
Here is a Twitter tool which can be a little slow to use but is quite a good idea. As Twitter has grown, so has the amount of people we follow and it can become time consuming reading everything. Sometimes it’s difficult to decide who to keep and who to ditch to keep your account fresh.
The site explains:
After logging in (with your Twitter account), enter the number of days in the past you want to check. If you enter 30, then anyone who hasn’t updated their Twitter status (tweeted) in the past 30 days will be shown on a list.
Now some relationships may be offline as well as online, so you can white list your friends, so you don’t ditch them each time you use this. This really is quite an interesting tool because you get to see people and when they last updated their status, I actually found it pretty useful – so I would recommend you give it a try just for the novelty factor.
What do you think of this? How could it be made better?
@DrewFromTV
I know this is not a new topic, but I feel like everyone needs to be reminded. Drew Carey, popular from his 90s hit sitcom “The Drew Carey Show”, and as the current host of “The Price is Right” is spear heading an initiative to raise money for Lance Armstrong’s L I V E S T R O N G Foundation. The way that Carey is going about doing this is pretty interesting. He has committed to donate 1 dollar for every Twitter follower he has up to 1 million dollars/followers.
As of October 25th, Carey has 114+ thousand followers. That is just a drop in the hat compared to the millions that other users, like new American Idol judge Ellen Degeneres have. We, the geek community at large, can do a lot to help this cause reach it’s goal. Let us be the grass roots Twitter effort to encourage others to pledge to this cause.
Being a part of this cause if free. Drew has committed the dollars for you, so all you have to do is take action, and follow him on Twitter. Follow http://www.twitter.com/drewfromtv and spread the word by adding him to one of your lists (if you have that feature) and mentioning the cause to your friends, co-workers, fellow bloggers, and of course, Follow Friday.
Sure, 1 million dollars is just a small drop in the bucket, but 100,000 dollars barely makes a ripple. We have until the end of the year to get this done, so let’s do it!
Follow Friday #2, September 11, 2009 @danielvining
What if you didn’t know who to follow on Twitter
? Would you randomly start following people? Would you follow people you see mentioned by those you already follow? Most likely you would ask your friends for recommendations since you can trust that your friends will suggest people who are worth following. Which is exactly how FollowFriday began. Full Story on MASHABLE >>
I will follow anyone that is interesting, has intellegent things to say, and doesn’t revolve around SPAMing me (there is a difference between promotion and SPAMing). This week’s Follow Friday picks are a mix of new followers, new twitters I am following and old tweople that have peaked my interest this week.
Enjoy and follow me too! @danielvining
Follow Friday #FF @SwtVibr4nt@koalamattress @sarayeong @rosenz@portcitybeer @xavlur @NavalMuseum@brizzly @EverywhereTrip@virgiliocorrado
