Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

5 RPG Products You Can Fit Into A 63,206-Character Facebook Status

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

The recent Mashable article on Facebook’s new status limit included everything from Bambi to the Bible. Here’s my version, using RPG products. (more…)

Gamerati User Accounts

Monday, December 19th, 2011

Four years ago, I sat down and scrawled out some thoughts about what I would like to do to help the hobby game community. Over the last couple years, I’ve been able to support my family promoting games, and now it’s time to tackle some of the more ambitious ideas I had. (more…)

The wrong question: Which is better?

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Someone asked me which is better, Google+ or Facebook? (more…)

Vanity URLs for Facebook Pages

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Over the past few months, I’ve walked dozens of publishers through the process of setting up vanity URLs for their Facebook pages. If you don’t have one yet, here’s how to make one. (more…)

Dynamic URL Suffixes

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

I have a problem I can’t solve, and I’m hoping someone reading this can help. I’d like to dynamically tack a set suffix on to blog URLs before feeding them out into various channels. (more…)

Maximizing Facebook’s Live Feed

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

For some reason, Facebook has decided to limit the number of people who can see your updates to 250. For those of us with more than 250 Facebook friends, this is not good. If Facebook allows 5,000 friends, wouldn’t it be nice if 5,000 people could view your updates? (more…)

Google Wave and Microblogging

Friday, June 12th, 2009

wavetwitterWhen Google announced Wave, my impression was that it was a glorified messaging protocol. Based on their preview videos, it appeared that Wave would allow you to hook into various services, such as YouTube and Flickr, pulling in content to share in a conversation. The live updating and thread branching features looked interesting, but I left without being firmly impressed. (more…)

If social media services want me as a user…

Friday, June 6th, 2008

I usually experiment with new technologies and services as they come out. I don’t like to tinker, for the sake of tinkering, though. I like to see what’s out there in case the new hotness will make my life easier. Because of this, even as I experiment, new products and services have a high barrier to overcome if they want me to patronize them in the end – the inertia of the current services I use.

I set up a MySpace account in a fit of boredom. The service had already been out for some time – long enough to become notorious of the immaturity of the content. But it was also known for being a place for artists to self-promote. That interested me. MySpace was good, allowing me to reconnect with some people I would never have been able to keep track of. It was my at-arms-length social network, though. I’d fire off a friendly message now and again, or post on someone’s page, but I wasn’t too engaged.

When facebook came along, it held no appeal to me. What did I need another MySpace for? I had my answer soon enough as MySpace suffered from security breaches that resulted in tons of annoying spam. It got so bad for me that I signed up at facebook and told all my friends at MySpace that I was shutting down my account. I’ve never gone back, and don’t plan to.

A similar tale can be said for Plaxo and LinedIN, except in this case LinkedIN has proven to be such a valuable service that I have no incentive to migrate to Plaxo. And I’m loathe to maintain multiple account and profiles on networks with duplicate scopes. I’m sorry Plaxo, but LinkedIN is where I’m at, and you’re going to have to work really hard to convince me to give you the time of day.

And so we come to micro-blogging and Twitter. Twitter had me – hook, line and sinker. Like others, though, I’m getting frustrated by the little whale that couldn’t (stay off my screen). I don’t think it’s the outages, though, that are driving people to seriously consider other services. While I have a sizeable cloud of contacts on Twitter, and I like simplicity of the service and the “personal news ticker” feel, it’s just text. Other services, like Jaiku and Pownce, use MMS instead of SMS – making them a little more attractive because of the added functionality. The only things saving Twitter right now are the entrenched user numbers and the fact that the other services don’t (yet) have interfaces that are easy to use.

Take Pownce, for instance. If I had a twhirl for Pownce, I’d be in heaven. Pownce Monkey is OK, but there are many things that need to be tweaked before it’s a truly useful application. If Pownce would implement geo-tracking elements a la BrightKite… Well, let’s just say that I wouldn’t shed a tear for Twitter.

Bye Bye MySpace

Friday, December 14th, 2007

I started a MySpace page when I got to Iraq in ’06. It was partly an experiment – partly a way to stave off boredom. Lately, I’ve had too much trouble with spam, and I’ve seen a few friends’ accounts get hacked. So, I’m killing my MySpace account and moving it over to Facebook.