FriendFeed just made it on my browser’s link toolbar. Why is this important? Because, it delivers on the promise that Facebook seemed to offer to me, but was not able to deliver (like many social networks). Easy interaction with friends with the ability to simply share relevant information.
I can give you a laundry list of what’s wrong with Facebook from my point of view, but I’ll instead share the big secret of FriendFeed for me. Feeds. There’s more – it’s the way you use the feeds. It’s not another feed aggregator, it’s a tool that lets you bring feeds from your various online profiles and share them with friends. Yeah, sure, sounds like a “lifestream” right, and yes, you can do that with Plaxo Plus.
However, FriendFeed is different in that, like Twitter, you can view a combined stream of your feeds and your friend’s feeds. Within this feed, you can comment on anything – it’s fantastic as a conversation starter. You can see what other people have said about a post, a link, a picture, a news item, etc… whatever someone has happened to share in a feed.
I can’t describe it much better, like Twitter, FriendFeed rocks. Kudos to Louis Gray for really bringing attention to it. You can find my FriendFeed here.
Anyway, it’s made it’s way to my toolbar – which means it’s just one click away and not buried in a bookmark menu (like others). It’s that addicting useful.
Here’s an idea, and one I should have talked about sooner. As a cloud computing device, the Eee PC is the perfect example of a device that should take advantage of online storage.
Not only should mini-laptop, or Internet access devices be leveraging online software suites like Google Docs, Zoho Office, or ThinkFree, but also online storage as well. Services like Box.net, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and AOL’s XDrive (thanks to Kevin Tofel for reminding me of it) all offer up free storage with options for additional storage as a premium service.
AOL’s XDrive is really exciting to any Eee PC device loaded with Windows XP as AOL offers a utility to map a drive directly to your storage account. All three of these options (I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of) will work with either IE or Firefox and with Windows or Linux, so even if you don’t try to have a mapped drive, you can easily upload/download files as needed to any of these services.
Just one more way to solve the data storage concerns for potential Eee PC users.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only one feature in Outlook that is holding me to it at the moment. Can you help convince me that it’s time to drop Outlook?
See, I’ve been a longtime user and proponent of Microsoft software. It’s actually really good software, and a decent value… for the enterprise. For personal use, it’s long been questionable whether one needs such overblown feature laden software.
Also, Microsoft’s software is what I’d built my technical career on – and still rely on. It solves business needs, and integrates together very nicely. I’m not claming it’s the best-of-breed, or that it’s the most intuitive. It’s simply been the best value proposition for most businesses when compared to other shipping options, personal opinions aside.
Anyway, want to know what that one feature is? The ability to sync the contact list to a Windows Mobile phone. In nearly a decade, it has simply worked time and time and time again. It’s only failed me on one occasion, which was a user-instigated problem (I goofed up). In all these years, my phonebook has always been up to date and consistently backed up with changes replicated back and forth with no effort or thought about it on my part.
All my mail is online, I’ve moved my calendar to Google calendar, and all the rest – but the one thing left is that sync of my trusty T-Mobile MDA’s phonebook. With the MDA at 2 years old, I’m soon to replace it too – and it’s likely not to be a Windows Mobile phone… so is it time? Should my friends perform an intervention? Can I do it? Will I have get the shakes? I’ll keep you posted.
Not sure what’s going on this time either. I’ve tried the web, Twhirl, and via IM (Google Talk). Nothing is connecting, though oddly, IM is showing that Twitter is “online”.
Moving on… reading feeds instead. Will try to get more writing out of the way tonight.
See anything? Start decreasing that number until you find your first post.
Or, if you’ve been especially productive, you may need to try higher page numbers! 😉
Mine just happens to be on March 4th, 2007 at 1:13pm (found here) where I tweeted the very informative “Reading RSS feeds” to the world.
So, thank you Dave for that tip, and congratulations on crossing 5,000 tweets. I had been curious about that first tweet lately because I know I was starting to get close to a full year on Twitter. Just over a month to go!
@MAC_Arms Pay taxes when you make your money, pay taxes when you spend your money, pay taxes when you successfully invest your money, pay taxes when you save enough taxed money to afford a house, pay taxes to live in your house, pay taxes when you sell the house that you paid taxes on to
Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
